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Wheat prices reach record level
BBC News
Wheat prices have hit record highs on global commodity markets, bringing the threat of rising bread prices.
Bad weather in key grain growing areas such as Canada and parts of Europe has limited supplies as demand has risen, sparking fears of a supply shortfall.
Surging prices are also expected to have widespread fallout for consumers.
While it will mean higher bread prices, it could also trigger an increase in meat and dairy prices as farmers battle to pass on rising feed costs.
Global wheat stockpiles will slip to their lowest levels in 26 years as a result, official US figures predicted earlier this month.
(24 Aug 2007)
Wheat, forever? Perennial wheat crops may end the era of monocrops, topsoil runoff, and aquatic dead zones
Kim Carlson, Culinate
Here’s an entwined pair of modern food-related problems: First, high-output annual monocrops — such as wheat — take nutrients from the soil but don’t restore them. Farmers then supplement the soil with fossil-fuel-based fertilizers. Some of the fertilizer, in turn, is rinsed away, sending nitrogen into streams and rivers. The runoff occurs because the soil, which lies bare for much of the winter, has little in the way of naturally occurring erosion control.
Second, hundreds of miles away from the Midwest’s vast monocrops, the nitrogen runoff is at least partly to blame for the giant algae bloom in the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River. When the algae die and sink to the ocean floor, the bacteria that help decompose them utilize all the oxygen in the water, making it impossible for other aquatic life to live. This phenomenon, called hypoxia, is the reason for the Gulf’s massive “dead zone.”
…What are the best ways for fertile farms and not-too-fertile fisheries to co-exist? One scenario is that farmers could plant perennial wheat that needs much less fertilization — if there were such a thing.
(7 Aug 2007)
More on the perennial wheat movement in this long article, Full Circle by Tim Steury or in my interview with Jerry Glover of the Land Institute. -AF
World hunger not an ideal spectator sport
Scott Smith, The Pueblo Chieftain
This makes my stomach hurt.
On the Fourth of July, competitive eater Joey Chestnut of San Jose, Calif., consumed 66 hot dogs (and buns) in 12 minutes, setting a world record for speed eating while winning the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest. The event drew a crowd of 50,000 at Coney Island and was telecast live on ESPN, complete with breathless play-by-play, inane color commentary and a hearty helping of patriotic pride. After all, Chestnut defeated former champion Takeru Kobayashi of Japan (boo, hiss) in the finals. U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
Also on the Fourth of July, more than 15,000 children around the world died of hunger-related causes, according to Bread for the World’s Web site ( www.bread.org ). That’s one child every five seconds, or 144 in the same 12 minutes it took Mr. Chestnut to make America proud with his gustatory feat.
(18 Aug 2007)
Check out the International Federation of Competitive Eating.
Dean robs Maya of livelihood: their trees
Mark Stevenson, Associated Press
Thousands of Mayan Indians lost homes as Hurricane Dean blew through the Yucatán Peninsula, but their real wealth was the trees, now scattered and broken in the storm’s wake. Village after village is carpeted with fallen mangoes, oranges, guanabanas and mameys that will never be harvested.
Mexico’s Mayan communities have survived centuries of oppression, expulsion from valuable land along the Caribbean coast and many damaging storms. But they say no other hurricane – not Gilbert in 1988, not Roxanne in 1995, not Wilma in 2005 – has hit the Maya so hard.
Dean ripped most of the roof off Israel Cruz Chan’s home in the village of Nohbec, not far from where the storm’s center tore through the jungle Tuesday. But Cruz Chan, 40, demonstrated the resilience of the Mayan villages of the Yucatán Peninsula.
He surveyed the destruction – all of his furniture, his few appliances, and bedding, soaked and tumbled into the front yard of his cinder-block home. Then he got to work, borrowing a ladder and busily nailing up new sheets of roofing.
“If I just sit and wait until they help me, I’ll die waiting,” he said. “If I wait, with my hand out, who’s going to give me food, and where am I going to cook it? I’d rather start working, first.”
…The biggest threat to the Maya may not be the damage to their homes, though their stick huts lay splintered, thatch roofs blown away. It’s the natural environment they so heavily depend on – innumerable felled trees from which the Maya extract everything from chewing gum to fruit to hardwood. The dead wood could also spark forest fires when the dry season comes.
(24 August 2007)
Most of the Dean coverage focussed on damage to the oil infrastructure or the tourist energy — the ephemera of our short-lived petroleum civilization. This article looks a little deeper. -BA
