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Grain stockpiles at lowest for 25 years
Kevin Morrison, Financial Times
The world’s stockpiles of wheat are at their lowest level in more than a quarter century, according to the US Department of Agriculture, which on Thursday slashed its forecasts for global wheat and corn production.
The lower forecasts were largely attributable to the severe drought in Australia, where the forecast for this year’s wheat crop was cut by 8.5m tons to 11m. That is less than half of the 24m produced last year, of which about 17m went to exports.
… The USDA, which provides one of the most authoritative reports on global grain markets, said global wheat production would fall by 11m tons to 585.1m, causing global stockpiles to drop a further 7.1m from its previous forecast, to 119.3m. This represents a fall of 20 per cent from a year ago, putting stocks at their lowest level since 1981.
(12 Oct 2006)
Australia: Farming economy in ‘drought crisis’
AAP, The Age
The drought could drive Australia’s farm production into recession, Treasurer Peter Costello has warned.
The grim outlook came amid new predictions that the big dry, potentially Australia’s worst drought, could bring the smallest wheat harvest in more than decade.
Economists already predict the conditions, which could cut the nation’s valuable winter crop in half, will strip half a percentage point off economic growth this year.
(12 Oct 2006)
Water crisis demands attention
Scott Rothschild, Lawrence Journal-World
Beneath the soil of landlocked Kansas lies a vast, life-sustaining source of water called the High Plains aquifer.
Formed millions of years ago, the aquifer — also referred to as the Ogallala — underlies an area of 174,000 square miles in parts of eight states, including most of western Kansas.
Since the 1940s, farmers have ferociously pumped the aquifer to produce food for a hungry nation and world.
An estimated 15 million acre-feet of water per year are withdrawn for irrigation. One acre-foot of water is 325,851 gallons, or the amount it would take to cover an acre of land with one foot of water.
Now, in some areas of western Kansas, the aquifer has been sucked dry or is close to it, and farmers are shutting down wells.
The effect of draining the source of water that grows a major portion of the nation’s crops has seismic repercussions.
(15 Oct 2006)
The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
Michael Pollan, NY Times
Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 200 Americans in 26 states had been sickened by eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli, I received a rather coldblooded e-mail message from a friend in the food business. “I have instructed my broker to purchase a million shares of RadSafe,” he wrote, explaining that RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of food-irradiation technology. It turned out my friend was joking, but even so, his reasoning was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips.
…This sounds like an alarming lapse in governmental oversight until you realize there has never before been much reason to worry about food safety on farms. But these days, the way we farm and the way we process our food, both of which have been industrialized and centralized over the last few decades, are endangering our health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing 5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.)
…Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution – the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops – and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot.
…there’s nothing sentimental about local food — indeed, the reasons to support local food economies could not be any more hardheaded or pragmatic. Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental — and deliberate — contamination.
(15 Oct 2006)
Another side-effect of fossil fuel civilization, and yet another argument for food relocalization. -BA & AF
The Politics on Our Plates
Amy Bentley, Chronicle of Higher Education
…Indeed, marketers have learned that while emphasizing the new food culture may not appeal to all (in fact, it may not appeal to the majority), it does appeal to a sizable, influential minority. Supermarkets have become willing to stock their produce section with organic fruits and vegetables, and even if they don’t sell readily, they are attractive, powerful “loss leaders” that may draw customers into stores and bring them back again. Nonindustrial food (and industrial organic food, as Pollan terms it) is simply more readily available today – think of what’s changed in grocery stores over the last decade or so – and that availability is shaping Americans’ consumption and food habits. Though I may be completely off the mark, the current discourse over food may signal a modification of the traditional American emphasis on quantity over quality. Perhaps now the image of the overflowing cornucopia needs to have organic or artisanal labels attached to grapes, walnuts, and pineapples. Possibly we are modifying our utilitarian, Protestant outlook for one that is more thoughtful, more sensuous, and more flavorful and includes a more complex palate of tastes and flavors.
Weberian musings aside, what this spate of food-studies books represents is a new maturity in thinking, a genuine attempt to integrate complex issues linking aesthetics and ethics with health, the environment, family life, and social- and labor-justice issues, previously seen to have little in common. Further, the authors explicitly link issues of production with those of consumption, something not done as well since Sidney W. Mintz’s superb 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. The books also demonstrate the convergence of the environmental movement and the “delicious revolution” – the two are on the same page, after all. Aldo Leopold meets Alice Waters, Rachel Carson meets M.F.K. Fisher. If these books fall short in any area, it is in addressing the difficult but crucial issue of getting all this healthy, sustainable (more expensive, less widely distributed) food to people of little means. Finally, these authors see little difference between science and poetry, between applying rational thought and romantic sentiment, to food problems and issues. For them, all knowledge, all emotion leads to the same point: a refashioned food system incorporating sustainable practices, cultural sensitivity, good nutrition, and taste. Such a system in the long run is the most practical and economically viable.
Amy Bentley is an associate professor in the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of Eating For Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Illinois Press, 1998). She is working on a cultural history of baby food.
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)
Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, by Warren J. Belasco (University of California Press, 2006)
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan (The Penguin Press, 2006)
The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason (Rodale Press, 2006)
What to Eat, by Marion Nestle (North Point Press, 2006)
(13 Oct 2006)
Organic®
Steven Lagavulin, Deconsumption
Kevin at Crytogon.com recently reported this news (from MSNBC):
“Now companies from Wal-Mart to General Mills to Kellogg are wading into the organic game, attracted by fat margins that old-fashioned food purveyors can only dream of. What was once a cottage industry of family farms has become Big Business, with all that that implies, including pressure from Wall Street to scale up and boost profits.”
To which I would add this recent corporate announcement:
“Target Corp. said Thursday that it’s entering the growing market for organic foods by starting its own brand, Archer Farms.”
(15 Oct 2006)
Steven links to an interesting graphic on the organisation of the organic food industry in the US.
