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Food shortage looming if crop focus isn’t altered
Jim Goodman, Madison Capital Times (Wisconsin)
As a child I was told to clean my plate because there were people starving in China. It seemed silly. How would getting sick help hungry Chinese? That was in the 1950s, the heart of the green revolution.
After college I was ready to farm as one of the green revolutionaries. I was ready to feed the world and open the cornucopia to everyone. Now, 40 years later, I admit I was wrong — high-tech agriculture wasn’t the answer. There is still plenty of hunger in the world, and it looks like our daily bread could get a lot more expensive.
… I can see what’s gone wrong from my front door. Beyond my wheat, pasture and hayfields, I see two crops, genetically engineered corn and soy — two of the most widely grown crops in the world. Government subsidies encourage planting more corn and soy while companies like Monsanto deliver their package of GE seed and herbicides. Government works in partnership with industry to establish an agricultural system that places more value on commodity crops than food crops. It’s the neo-green revolution.
Too many acres growing corn and soy for animal feed and agrofuels, too few growing wheat, rice, millet and vegetables for people. With grain stocks low, record food prices and more people slipping into poverty daily, droughts, floods or water shortages could trigger faster and more devastating shifts in world food supplies. We could, in the near future, experience food shortages and increased hunger in this country as well.
Jacques Diouf, head of the FAO, has admitted that the best way to feed poor countries is to let them grow their own food locally — food sovereignty.
Jim Goodman is a farmer in Wonewoc and a policy fellow for the Food and Society Fellows Program.
(16 April 2008)
China agrees to pay triple for potash fertilizer
Roberta Rampton, Reuters
Chinese fertilizer importers agreed on Wednesday to pay more than triple what they did a year ago to reserve tight supplies of potash, sending the shares of global fertilizer makers to record levels.
China, the world’s biggest import market for the nutrient, used to boost crop yields, will pay $650 to $670 a tonne for product delivered to its ports, analysts estimated.
“With the intense pressure on global food production and continued growth in potash demand, this is the reality for our industry for the foreseeable future,” Bill Doyle, chief executive of Potash Corp , said in a statement.
Potash producers have found it hard to keep up with demand as farmers around the world, flush with returns from record grain prices, rush to produce more grain to feed people, livestock and the burgeoning biofuel sector.
(16 April 2008)
Unwelcome face of ag-inflation
Howard Walsh, Farmers Guardian
BY the autumn, farm costs will have increased by almost a quarter over 18 months.
The latest figures from the Anglia Farmers Agricultural Inflation Index already show an overall rise of 16.65 per cent since September 2007.
The calculations are based on consistent cost change information from the purchasing co-op’s buying office on 76 products ranging from a ton of Cocktail barley seed, the cost of haulage, to the price for 100 fence posts – not unlike the method used for the retail price index with products grouped and then weighted.
Not surprisingly, the rises in fertiliser, fuel and feed prices are now coming through to have a significant impact on agricultural cost inflation.
(16 April 2008)
Rednecks and peak oil: Valuing the farmer’s contribution
Alice Bagley, Whitman Collegh Pioneer
I really like food. Without it, I am nothing. Food is not only a life necessity, but also an important part of culture and tradition. If all this is true, why do we treat the people who bring us our food worse than the dirt that they work?
Rednecks, welfare farmers and all the unfortunate names we might call migrant workers from south of the border; all these people are the backbone of our civilization. More important than all the doctors, stockbrokers and lawyers in the world, we treat them all as the bottom rung of society.
Farmers are generally caricatured in popular culture as uneducated, but even beginning to think that takes a perverse sort of logic. Every day farmers do what the vast majority of us have no idea how to do, coax tiny seeds into plants that produce nourishment for us all. I don’t know how to drive a tractor, do you? Do you even know what a thresher does? This is essential knowledge that without farmers would be lost to our country forever.
(17 April 2008)
The Farmer is the Man
Traditional, Traditional Music
When the farmer comes to town
With his wagon broken down,
Oh the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
If you’ll only look and see,
I think you will agree
That the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
First Chorus:
The farmer is the man,
The farmer is the man,
Lives on credit till the fall;
Then they take him by the hand
And they lead him from the land,
And the middleman’s the man who gets it all.
…When the banker says he broke
And the merchant’s up in smoke,
They forget that it’s the farmer feeds them all.
It would put them to the test
If the farmer took a rest,
Then they’d know that it’s the farmer feeds them all.
(19th century)
Updated version
Background from Prairie Radio
Sung by Pete Seeger (Press “Play sample”)
P.S. It turns out that in many ways, “The Farmer is the Woman,” for example, women are the majority among new farmers in the U.S. Through gardens, women are prime food producers throughout the world. -BA
