Food & agriculture – Nov 2

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Bread Basket Case
What if the Midwest stopped trying to feed the world and started focusing on itself?
Tom Philpott, Grist
In Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a sailor contemplates the paradox of thirst amid a literal sea of water. “Water, water everywhere,” he famously laments, “nor any drop to drink.”

Rural Midwesterners can likely identify with that iconic seaman. Cornfields stretch to the horizon, but the harvest won’t end up on anyone’s plate — at least not directly. To provide useful calories for people, that corn is used to fatten animals on feedlots, or milled and processed into sweeteners, starches, and flours.

Like other U.S. citizens, Farm Belt residents increasingly turn to the supermarket, and thus the vast and far-flung industrial networks that supply it, for their sustenance. The region’s corn returns to its residents in the form of corn-syrup-sweetened Coca-Cola and corn-fed McDonald’s burgers.

If this odd arrangement actually generated wealth in the region, it might make some sense. But farming is such an economically disastrous endeavor in the Midwest that it’s a wonder anyone still does it.
(1 Nov 2006)

Forecast for Australian grain production cut again
Lateline, ABC (Australia)
MAXINE MCKEW: The latest report from a government forecasting body has described the nation’s key winter crops of being in the grip of a severe drought, one which will whip more than $6 billion off farm production, and the bureau of agricultural and resource economics has made another substantial cut in its estimates of production from the nation’s major crops of wheat, barley and canola, only one month after its last forecast. Helen Brown has the story.

HELEN BROWN: Just one month in spring without rain has significantly worsened the outlook for the nation’s grain growers. The Prime Minister was being told how farmers are now just hoping to save a few seeds from dying crops, so they have something to plant next year. See how the head’s shrivelled up and died. There will be no grain in it.

The government forecaster has slashed another 2.8 million tonnes off the harvest of wheat, barley and canola.

TERRY SHEALES: People are talking of this drought being comparable to what happened in World War II. The old-timers tell us that. The history books also suggest there was the federation drought at the turn of the 20th century – that was also extremely severe.
(27 Oct 2006)
Related at EB: Grain Drain: Get Ready for Peak Grain.

‘Virtually no progress’ in alleviating world hunger: FAO
Andrea Bambino, AFP via Yahoo! News
The world has made “virtually no progress” in eradicating hunger over the past decade despite greater wealth, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The latest figures, from 2001-03, show that 854 million people were undernourished. Most, some 820 million, were in developing countries.

The World Food Summit, held in Rome in 1996, set the ambitious target of halving world hunger by 2015 relative to 1990-92.

“Ten years later, we are confronted with the sad reality that virtually no progress has been made towards that objective,” said FAO chief Jacques Diouf in the report titled “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2006.”
(30 Oct 2006)