World Food - the Good and the Bad...

 

 

 

"The United States continues to produce a cornucopia of good food for domestic and international consumption..."

 

With all the talk in recent days about the growing threat of global warming, I thought it might be high time to take a look at what all this climate change has done to our global food supplies. I know, I know. The global warming crowd seems to be besieged by bad luck, the most recent coming from the global warming scientists getting stuck in the Arctic ice last week. This upcoming week is going to be so cold and snowy, it could be one for the record books.

 

However, let us get back to global food and how the climate change is affecting it. A December 2013 Bloomberg article had the following to say about global food production:

 

Corn plunged 40 percent in 2013, the most among 24 commodities in the Standard & Poor’s GSCI Spot Index, as the U.S. harvest rose to a record, recovering from the prior season when crops were hurt by the worst drought since the 1930s. Farmers worldwide are producing record amounts of everything from soybeans to wheat, leaving food costs tracked by the United Nations 13 percent below an all-time high reached in 2011 and spurring banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to predict further declines in crop prices in 2014.

 

What this article is telling is the good new and bad news of global food. First the bad news. Farmers worldwide are now victims of their own success. Higher yields often time lead to lower prices. Now the good news. In a world with an increasing population, we are still able to feed everyone. Now the other bad news. We still can't feed everyone. Not because we don't produce enough, it is because we can't distribute enough.

 

Even locally, we have seen this distribution problem. You can go to just about any feed store and buy 50 pounds of corn for less than $10. Yet, we have millions of people in this country who need the SNAP Program and help from food shelves to make it from week to week. Worldwide, we have over 4,000 children die daily from lack of food or clean water. This is in a world that in 2013 is literally awash in food.

 

I have said this before. Our agricultural business in this country is second to none. Every year it gets better with more drought resistant and higher yielding hybrids. And it could get even better. We will develop better water delivery technologies which will protect our nation's aquifers while producing higher yields. We will better balance our land use between agriculture and non-agricultural, while still increasing production. Farmers are already using GPS and other satellite technology to increase their efficiency.

 

So to our global warming alarmists, please, put a sock in it. After going out to get the paper this morning, I am too cold to think about global warming today.