I’ve been meaning to get to this topic for some time (like every time I see or hear about the looming food shortage crisis or when I throw away all the extra food at my house that is so abundant that I clog my disposal from time to time trying to put to much in at once) but I knew there would be no dearth of opportunity to use a current link. These nut cases are usually more careful than to predict catastrophe within the next 12 months but this guy Donald Coxe procedes confidently onto the limb:
A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club’s 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto on Thursday.
“It’s not a matter of if, but when,” he warned investors. “It’s going to hit this year hard.”
Relatively speaking, if you know how to cook, food is so cheap it’s not even funny. If you eat out all the time and consume only pre packaged foods, then it is a bit more expensive. The next time you drop a hundred and fifty bucks in the grocery store, give the three-foot long receipt a closer look and note the big-ticket items. It’s not fruit and veggies eating a hole in your wallet. It’s not corn. It’s water-based drinks of all flavors and potencies draining the bank account. It’s tobacco if you smoke (most of which money goes to the government, which is to say, up in smoke.) And it’s toiletries and medicinals sending a good chunk of the paycheck down the toilette.
The mistake these guys make in predicting doom is basing their assumptions on the zero sum theory where there is a state of equilibrium and for any one person to have more means another has to do with less. They make no adjustment for human ingenuity and the power of freedom and capitalism. It never occurs to them that the millions of people who are coming into the middle class can take care of themselves which is largely the reason they are coming into the middle class.
Mr. Coxe said crop yields around the world need to increase to something close to what is achieved in the state of Illinois, which produces over 200 corn bushes an acre compared with an average 30 bushes an acre in the rest of the world.
There ya go, but I would have thought Iowa would have the honor of being the biggest huskers. It sure seems odd that Illinois has such an advantage over Iowa and the rest of the world. If I lived in Iowa, or Texas for that matter, and were a corn farmer I would move my operations to Illinois.
Here is what I think Mr Coxe is afraid of:
“[Increasing crop yields] will be done with more fertilizer, with genetically modified seeds, and with advanced machinery and technology,” he said.
I guarantee that there are people out there who would be only too happy to let billions of people subsist in poverty and squalor than to use more fertilizer and genetically modified seeds. They will just have to wait until we find a better way to feed them.
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