< Split from Oil and Food - Discussion on the business of Food - Mod >


UPDATE 1-China buyer defaults on US soy as CBOT slumps

this was on Reuters

It did not link for me but if you google the words it will come up. All types of probucts are traded. In the funny movie Trading Places in was orange juice that was traded. I think there is even a market for wool

A lot of lads lose their shirts on these exchanges but imagine having to explain that you lost everything you had on' pork bellies.'

youngdan wrote:

A lot of lads lose their shirts on these exchanges but imagine having to explain that you lost everything you had on' pork bellies.'

Youngdan I have always wanted to know what pork bellies are: they are hardly pork bellies are they?

It seems here that the American taste in bacon is such that the most prised meat is taken from underneath the belly area. So a pork belly is the amount of meat gotten from an average pig and is 13 pounds. Maybe gold and silver are just more glamerous but Auditor you are right. Baring a financial crisis the gold price could be said to have no impact on people but the trading in foodstuffs has a big bearing. I don't track the wheat price but did see that it has more than doubled recently and traded up the daily limit. It's rise is explained by the change of acerage to biofuel among other things. Another possible lure of the metals markets is the hope that there might be a squeeze due to someone taking delivery. The Hunts almost succeeded in the silver market in 1980 where they pushed the price from less than 2 dollars to 54 dollars before they were cleaned out.

I'll try to get a good site on the prices of edible commodities so...

http://www.quotemarkets.com/agricultural.html


ft article on rising food prices
http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto022620081315470144

worldwatch institute keeping an eye on food price
http://www.worldwatch.org/taxonomy/term/512

Looks like you'll have to liquidate your commodity positions, lads! Look here:

Running out of steam

Can this not go in the Food Oil Watch thread?

Just to hop back onto topic, did anyone notice in the IT today that Indonesia has banned rice exports due to shortage and high prices?

Cactus. This all ties together. Magic Arse was in the far east recently where they have no spuds and had to eat rice. When they saw how much he was able to shovel in it is not surprising that panic buying ensued

youngdan wrote:

Cactus. This all ties together. Magic Arse was in the far east recently where they have no spuds and had to eat rice. When they saw how much he was able to shovel in it is not surprising that panic buying ensued

Responding to your Nighthawks post, youngdan - too late to post on that thread.
Time to hedge all bets with water and land, in my view, youngdan - someone told me yesterday that the price of Roundup had doubled in the last year as a lot of setaside lands in the States are being cleared for agriculture again. Suspicion that those b's in Monsanto were holding back to push the price up. This will knock on to food prices yet again.
Your views therefore on
Food futures
Water (asset-rich companies only)
Water treatment technology companies
Agricultural land (doubled in the UK last year)
Agribusiness generally.

The small ranch with own water supply and a good little gun for the bunnies - or would the State Troopers flush you out?

This is another area in which I would like to have more knowledge. I have been on about the return of a fuedal system elsewhere after the econonies are crashed. There will be a lot of huffing and puffing to disguise who is a fault. It will be described as a global problem so that the plebs will accept a global solution. What is coming is well known because once the money supply is slowed or contracted it is over. Monsanto and the others are trying to control the food supply of the world. A great threat to the common man at the moment is this carry on with genetically modified food. They have developed a non repplicating seed so that the farmers will have to buy these seeds each year from Monsanto. Poor countries are being forced to change over to these new type crops. Yesterday I was reading on P.ie the Mugabi thread and some new poster was trying to defend him. He mentioned that Mugabi was trying to resist these companies forcing these non replicating crops on Zimbabwee. I do not know how valid that point is and others on Pie have a far greater grasp of this gm food issue than I. There is also a law being introduced in the EU which is very bad. It is called Codex Alimentarius. It is trying and succeeding to outlaw vitamins and suppliments. Getting back to the seeds when the are modified they are subject to copyright law so the company totally controls who gets to have a crop and who don't. I would consider it a very lucky man that has some farm land and most importantly the bunny bagger. Of course the most important thing is for Ireland would be to withdraw from the EU. As you probably know I am a Ron Paul fan so I will leave this clip where a rep and a dem congressman both have a few words to say. I will view to find one with a more European emphasise video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3273956447915041292 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3273956447915041292

Thanks for that Youndan will listen when not in company.

Watched a programme a few years ago about Easter Island. This little place went for slash and burn agriculture and had a high old time when the soils were ultra rich - everything got slashed and burnt, soils eroded and they ended up entrenched in family groups with fortified stone hen houses trying to protect their last meal.

A US author Jeanette Winterson I hear has based a novel on this which I have not read.

It is certainly a warning to us that all good things can come to an end.

Winterson is as Brit as they come.

The novel is called The Stone Gods.

Kate P wrote:

Winterson is as Brit as they come.

The novel is called The Stone Gods.

Any good?

cactus flower wrote:

Kate P wrote:

Winterson is as Brit as they come.

The novel is called The Stone Gods.

Any good?

I haven't read it - reviews are very mixed. It's a science fiction tale and a cautionary one at that I believe.

There is a great book by Jared Diamond called Collapse. It tells of different groups which died out when circumstances turned unfavourable. I read it about 2 years ago so I will have a quick reread of the chapter that dealt with Easter Island. There is another great book I have someplace that deals with what the auther expects after peak oil but I can't think of the title.

That other book is called The Long Emergency by a guy called Kunstler. It is a great read and the can be checked for summaries on Amazon. Earlier in this thread Ard-Taoiseach linked to a site which recommended many good books and is worth a look. BTW he was not been seen for a few days here or on P.ie so I hope he is not sick or after getting any type of bad news.

youngdan wrote:

As you probably know I am a Ron Paul fan so I will leave this clip where a rep and a dem congressman both have a few words to say. I will view to find one with a more European emphasise video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3273956447915041292 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3273956447915041292

While looking for part II of this above I came across 5 youtube videos of someone called Rima Laibow, a nutritionist, talking in Orwellian fashion on the WTO, WHO, FAO, FDA. It seems she believes that BIG PHARMA want to try outlaw small natural remedy merchants through fixing WTO laws on terms of trade...

(I couldn't find part II btw and also btw I split this topic into two - Food only and Oil nearby on another thread.)

I look forward to watching these this afternoon. Orwell would be thrilled if he saw how lies are presented as truth today. With supplements unavailable and everyone eating rubbish food, it will be time to cull 7 billion. For those who never heard of the Georgia Guidestones I present this introduction video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3490568771316655904

That is a very good video that you linked Auditor. To those who have never heard of this it seems unbelieveable but it is all available on the web if one wants to check it out. She expects 3 billion to die but others expect all but 500 million to die. Awareness is rising here. It is just beginning. Rice is 22 dollars per 100 pounds which is double than last year.. Economies have been deliberately set up to crash. Populations have been diversified through migration so that the killing when food gets scarse will be magnified. The food today has little nutritional value and therefore cancer rates in age groups that rarely got cancer are high. All this while everyone is signing up to accept EU and UN mandates. Ireland is screwed

seeing as you are all spending your entire evening on the internet you might want to check out the relevant podcasts on the IIASA website.

I will have a listen later on but in the meantime what is the gist of their and your point of view. I see they mention European biofuels. Here this is the reason for the food problem. The farmers are subsidised to produce piss poor fuel that takes 70% of it's energy to produce. So the price of wheat has rocketed. This was the desired and easily seen outcome, otherwise they would copy the Brazilian where they take something like 20% to produce the energy.

Started a thread a while ago saying-

Quote :

Maintaining food security was an important focus of post second world war politics and shaped the EU to some extent.
We are now facing very serious threats to food security. Climate change impacts, the displacement of food crops by fuel crops, the shift from cereal grown for human consumption to cereal grown for meat production, oil prices and the increased cost of transporting food, the impacts of oil prices on agricultural costs have all contributed to a rapid decline in world food stocks.

FAO has announced this year that world wheat stores declined 11 percent to 12 weeks of the world's total consumption, down from an average of 18 weeks consumption 2002-2005, with only 8 weeks of corn supply.


"U.S. wheat futures broke $10 a bushel for the first time Monday, the agricultural equivalent of $100 a barrel oil" -

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=10167

It was reported two days ago that Indonesia has banned food exports (normally rice) and that there have been big demonstrations and strikes in Eygypt and Slovenia over wages and prices: a massive inflation would seem hard to resist as people will demand, as they did in Zimbabwe, higher wages to match rising food prices.

It is hard to say this, but it has the appearance of the onset of a major global famine unless there is a very quick and large scale global reaction to the need to produce more food - and that, if acheived, in turn would increase the demand for oil, as a high percentage of global food supply is oil dependent.

When I said get out and plant potatoes (turnips, peas, beans, anything that grows) I was not being altogether facetious.

I think we should be taking the lead as a country, having suffered famine in the not too distant past, in putting global food security on the agenda. We are not talking here about cyclical famine in countries with subsistence economies -and we should not ignore those either- but "life as we know it".