The food bubble is going to pop
Thanks to Mark O’Conner for this article. See http://www.thespec.com/print/article/575310
The food bubble is going to pop
Gwynne Dyer
August 8, 2011
There are all kinds of bubbles. We had the financial bubble that burst in 2008, causing economic devastation that we are still paying for. There is the Chinese real estate bubble, the biggest in history, which may take the whole world economy down with it when it bursts. But nothing compares with the food bubble.
Back in 2008, the OECD published a report on world food supply predicting that the price surge of that year would quickly revert to normal: “Barring any underlying climate change or water constraints that could lead to permanent reductions in yield, normal higher output can be expected in the very short term.” And barring age, disease and accidents, we will all live forever.
Between April 2010 and April 2011, the average world price of grain soared by 71 per cent: not a very big deal for people in rich countries who spend less than 10 per cent of their incomes on food, but a catastrophe for poor people who already spend more than half their money just to keep their families fed. And that is before “climate change and water constraints” get really serious. But they will.
To read the full article, please click here: http://www.thespec.com/print/article/575310
December 30th, 2011 at 12:32 am
Gwynne Dyer always produces great material, but I suspect that she has a word limit that,in the case of “The food bubble is going to pop” leads the reader to insufficiently pessimistic conclusions. Below is a list of some of key issues that she neglects. All of these are covered in considerable detail in my website.
(1) The declining soil organic matter in the semi-arid grainlands of the US and Canada.
(2) The declining fallow lengths in the semi-arid grainlands of the US and Canada. Probable end-result – more dustbowls.
(3) The increasing use of grain for livestock feed.
(4) The increasing use of grainlands for biofuels.
(5) The theoretical limits to the Green Revolution, limits that we are now close to.
(6) The shrinkage of the world’s glaciers – source of the irrigation water for a significant fraction of the earth’s irrigated lands and therefore a significant fraction of the world’s food supplies.
(7) The decline in the world’s dam backwater volume per capita.
(8) The inability of African farmers to import more than insignificant amounts of chemical fertilizer due to the extremely inadequate transportation infrastructure. The result: a cost in terms of man-hours of labor needed to buy a ton of chemical fertilizer that is 60 times greater than in the EU. Another result: African farmers mining the nutrients from their croplands.
(9) The decreasing ability of the Third World to afford the dams needed to expand irrigated acreage (a result of the $3+ trillion in external debt).
(10) The ever-decreasing lengths of fallow periods in tropical soils. Result: ever-declining cropland productivity of tropical soils.