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Brazil threatens to nationalize fertilizer mines
Reuters
Brazil may nationalize privately held mineral deposits used to make fertilizer to bring down farm production costs, Agriculture Minister Reinhold Stephanes said.
The threat from Latin America’s farming powerhouse, which is heavily dependent on fertilizer imports, is the latest in a regional trend to bring natural resources under greater state control as world oil and food prices push new highs.
Fertilizer prices have doubled over the past year.
(20 May 2008)
Below item is a comment on this story from Gristmill.
Fertile for problems
South America’s industrial-ag powerhouse eyes rainforest potash deposits
Tom Philpott, Gristmill
… Industrial ag looks increasingly set to become a flashpoint of what’s known in polite company as “geopolitical tension,” i.e., the naked competition among nations for control over key resources. But here’s the bit that really caught my eye [in a Reuters story]:
Part of the supply problem in Brazil’s fertilizer sector stems from the risks investors face. Increased output of potassium, for example, depends on the exploration of deep underground deposits in the Amazon, where environmental red tape deters development.
Wow … “environmental red tape.” You know, that whole impulse to protect the Amazon rainforest, the globe’s greatest natural carbon sink — at a time of rapid, human-created climate change. Some of that red tape also involves defending the rights of indigenous people who have lived sustainably in the rainforest for centuries.
Brings to mind the recent pronouncements of Blairo Maggi, the powerful Brazilian politician who’s also its biggest soy grower and business partner of Cargill, Bunge, etc. I found it a bit chilling when he declared:
With the worsening of the global food crisis, the time is coming when it will be inevitable to discuss whether we preserve the environment or produce more food. There is no way to produce more food without occupying more land and taking down more trees.
(21 May 2008)
Forget Saudi Peak Oil-Worry About Peak Grain
Marianne Lavelle, Beyond the Barrel (journalist blog at US News & World Report)
To oil world watchers and worriers, the words Twilight in the Desert are instantly recognizable. That’s the name of the book by energy investment banker Matthew Simmons, who used hundreds of internal documents to bolster his case that oil production has peaked or soon will be peaking in Saudi Arabia-home to what the world trusts as the largest source of petroleum reserves. But it turns out that long before we learn whether Simmons’s prediction pans out, the sun is setting on another resource in the kingdom.
Grain production in Saudi Arabia is now down 42 percent from the peak of 4.9 million tons reached in 1994 and is now on track to decline rapidly in the coming years. Thanks to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute for compiling these figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture:
It’s a stunning reversal for Saudi Arabia, which realized after its role in the Arab oil embargo of 1973 that it was vulnerable to retaliation. To protect itself, Saudi Arabia aimed to become self-sufficient in grain production, and to do that in its largely desert landscape, it tapped into a large fossil aquifer-a deep, ancient water source that is not replenished by rain or streams. As it turned out, the wells’ days were numbered-even more surely than the days of the fossil fuel that Saudi Arabia pumps to the world.
(21 May 2008)
IMF “Cure” for Food Crisis Also a Cause
Emad Mekay, IPS
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it is responding to the global food crisis by doling out new emergency loans to 15 of the world’s poorest nations, mostly in Africa.
But the new loans carry the same controversial conditions, such as tariff and subsidies cuts, that many analysts now agree are partly to blame for the soaring inflation and inability of developing country governments to cope.
… But analysts say that both loan programmes could in fact make a bad situation worse. The conditions that these two programmes share include trade liberalisation, cutting social spending, trimming subsidies to local producers and limiting bailouts to troubled national sectors.
Under those conditions, international financial institutions such as the IMF and its sister institution the World Bank helped force developing countries to dismantle much of their agricultural tariff systems, allowing in huge quantities of cheaper farm goods from Europe and the United States.
Critics say this effectively sabotaged national food security systems and has left poor countries ever more reliant on food imports and defenseless in the face of the latest price increases. Today, according to figures from the Global Policy Forum, nearly three in four developing countries are net importers of food.
“The IMF adjustment programmes forced poor countries to abandon policies that protected their farmers and their agricultural production and markets,” said Henk Hobbelink of the international non-governmental organisation GRAIN, which promotes sustainable agriculture and biodiversity.
“As a result, many countries became dependent on food imports, as local farmers could not compete with the subsidised products from the North. This is one of the main factors in the current food crisis, for which the IMF is directly to blame,” he added.
(20 May 2008)
Hunger Prompting Desperate Acts
Alison Raphael, OneWorld
An Afghan father, unable to feed his family, sold his 11-year old daughter for $2,000 to buy food for the rest of his family, IRIN News reported Sunday.
Illiterate and unable to find work, the man could no longer support his family by scavenging, he told a reporter for the UN-based news agency, because high food prices mean less food is being thrown away and more Afghans are scavenging.
“I know people will say I am a cruel and merciless father who sold his own child, but those who say so don’t know my hardship and have never felt the hunger that my family suffers,” said the Afghan man, identified only by a pseudonym.
Poor people across the planet tend to spend half their income on food, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Rising food prices are rapidly pushing the world’s 100 million poorest citizens to the limit of their humanity.
In a policy brief issued Friday, IFPRI called for immediate implementation of a “comprehensive solution” consisting of two sets of emergency measures: short-term aid to help people weather the crisis, and a longer-term “resilience package,” to enable the poor to become more self-sufficient.
(19 May 2008)
Also from OneWorld: What’s Happening and How You Can Help.
