Paul Ehrlich wrong again: World Cereal Production Set To Reach Historic High

(Ahem.) Of course, the relevant metric is production PER CAPITA, and it has been dropping for many years now:
http://www.springerimages.com/Images/LifeSciences/1-10.1007_s12571-009-0026-y-4

“The fact that world population growth has been outpacing cereal production since 1984 readily attracts attention, but interpreted without any qualification, it is seriously misleading for two reasons. First, it hides the fact that much of the recent decline in world cereal production has occurred in relatively well-fed regions. Second, it does not account for the fact that the regional composition of humanity is changing. In particular, most demographic growth is happening in parts of the world with low levels of per-capita cereal consumption and, other things being equal, this fact tends to weight downward the average level of world per-capita cereal consumption (and hence production). ” — http://www.pnas.org/content/96/11/5929.full

@Sedron L
Total food production per capita has outpaced population growth.
http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/events/archive/2011/paa/david_lam.html

“…cereals account for approximately two-thirds of all human calorie intake.”
This paper breaks cereal production down into seven regions, and finds it is decreasing per capita in five of them: North America/Oceania, Europe/FSU, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Money quote:
“Finally…we now may be entering an era of rather greater international cereal price volatility than has prevailed for some time…. However, just a glance at Fig. 2 reveals the major rise in North America’s harvest volatility. This rise is important because the region is still the main supplier of cereals to world markets. This increased volatility in North America is largely weather-induced (witness the output declines of 1983, 1988, 1993, and 1995), and it is possibly a negative result of climate change.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/11/5929.full

Based on current demographic trends, by 2050 Europe’s population will have fallen 25%; the US population will go below 300 million; China’s median age will be about 50 as its population begin to plunge downward; Japan’s population will have dropped 35%, and most of Asia and North Africa will begin losing people.
This demand demand for food will decrease, as will the number of acres farmed. Demand for energy will drop rapidly, commodity prices will plunge, as strong deflationary pressures mount on a global scale. As the number of consumers and producers fall, so will the demand for food, energy, and consumer goods. It is high time the UN wake-up to this demographic nightmare. The AGW fetish has run its course.

Kon Dealer says:
July 22, 2013 at 9:13 am

When has Paul Ehrlich EVER been right?
How does this serial failure maintain any credibility?

Kon, you took the words right out of my keyboard.

Kon Dealer says:
July 22, 2013 at 9:13 am
When has Paul Ehrlich EVER been right?
How does this serial failure maintain any credibility?
—-
He says what the glitterati want to hear.

Ehrlich would still give the wrong answer if he stood in front of a clock and you asked him for the time of day. Only in leftie academics could he rise above an assistant janitorial position.

Sedron L says:
July 22, 2013 at 9:12 am
(Ahem.) Of course, the relevant metric is production PER CAPITA, and it has been dropping for many years now:
http://www.springerimages.com/Images/LifeSciences/1-10.1007_s12571-009-0026-y-4
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Lies by omission. That chart leaves out the USA, Canada, EU and Australia. Four big cereal producers.
From the EPA (Try not to gag)

Major Crops Grown in the United States
In round numbers, U.S. farmers produce about $ 143 billion worth of crops and about $153 billion worth of livestock each year….
Corn: The United States is, by far, the largest producer of corn in the world, producing 32 percent of the world’s corn crop in the early 2010s. Corn is grown on over 400,000 U.S. farms. The U.S. exports about 20 percent of the U.S. farmer’s corn production…..
Soybeans: Approximately 3.06 billion bushels of soybeans were harvested from 73.6 million acres of cropland in the U.S. in 2011…. Soybeans rank second, after corn, …. Over 279,110 (2007 Census of Agriculture) farms in the U.S. produce soybeans making the U.S. the largest producer and exporter of soybeans. , accounting for over 50% of the world’s soybean production and $3-4 billion in soybean and product exports in the late 2000s. Soybeans represent 50 percent of world oilseed production.….
Wheat: Over 160,810 (2007 Census of Agriculture)farms in the United States produce wheat and wheat production exceeds 2.27 billion bushels a year. The U.S. produces about 10% of the world’s wheat and supplies about 25% of the world’s wheat export market….
Grain sorghum: I….Grain Sorghumis used primarily as an animal feed, but also is used in food products and as an industrial feedstock….Worldwide, over half of the sorghum grown is for human consumption.
Some farmers grow sorghum as a hedge against drought. This water-efficient crop is more drought tolerant and requires fewer inputs than corn. Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Missouri produce most of the grain sorghum grown in this country. The U.S. exports almost half of the sorghum it produces and controls 70% to 80% of world sorghum exports.
As much as one-third of domestic sorghum production goes to produce biofuels like ethanol and its various co-products. With demand for renewable fuel sources increasing, demand for co-products like sorghum-DDG (dry distillers grain) will increase as well due the sorghum’s favorable nutrition profile. [distillers grain is a main ingredient in many pelleted animal feeds – G.C.]
Rice: ….U.S. rice production accounts for just under 2% of the world’s total, but this country is the second leading rice exporter with 10% of the world market. About 50 – 60% of the rice consumed in the U.S. is for direct food use; another 18% goes into processed foods, 10-12 percent goes into pet food, and most of the rest (about 10 percent) goes into beer production…..
Cotton: …. According to the National Cotton Council of America, farms in those states produce over 30% of the world’s cotton with annual exports of more than $7 billion…..

Australia: http://www.nff.org.au/commodities-grains.html
China is the larges producer of wheat and India is second largest. The United States is the third largest producer of wheat in the world. France is the fourth largest producer of wheat, Russia is the fifth largest producer of wheat in the world, and Canada is the sixth largest producer.
Australia is the seventh largest wheat producer in the world, and exports average 14,936 TMT, which is over 75% of their total production, and makes Australia one of the largest exporters of wheat in the world. Germany is the eighth largest producer of wheat and the sixth largest wheat exporter in the world.
Above data stolen from: http://www.spectrumcommodities.com/education/commodity/statistics/wheat.html

Sedron L says:
July 22, 2013 at 9:46 am
….However, just a glance at Fig. 2 reveals the major rise in North America’s harvest volatility. This rise is important because the region is still the main supplier of cereals to world markets. This increased volatility in North America is largely weather-induced (witness the output declines of 1983, 1988, 1993, and 1995), and it is possibly a negative result of climate change.”…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>…
Absolute bopkes!
In 1995 Bill Clinton ratified the World Trade Organization treaty (and shipped US jobs overseas)
Amstutz was VP of Cargill. He wrote the WTO Agreement on Ag in 1995. (Even Clinton admitted that agreement lead to starvation and riots of 2008) Amstutz then wrote the Freedom to Farm act in 1996. This law was later called the Freedom to Fail act as US farmers over produced and grain prices dropped like a rock. Grain traders used the surplus of very cheap grain to bankrupt farmers around the world. This was actually a KNOWN US policy as Clinton has just admitted.

President Bill Clinton, now the UN Special Envoy to Haiti, publicly apologized last month for forcing Haiti to drop tariffs on imported, subsidized US rice during his time in office. The policy wiped out Haitian rice farming and seriously damaged Haiti’s ability to be self-sufficient. http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/1/clinton_rice

Amstutz was also responsible for wiping out the US grain reserve system. How to fight a food crisis: To blunt the ravages of drought and market greed, we need a national grain reserve… the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act abolished our national system of holding grain in reserve.
Amstutz then went to work for Goldman Sachs. This has always puzzled me until I finally ran across the last piece of the puzzle.
That is where things get really interesting. This is stolen from WANTtoKNOW. Info: Excerpts of Key Financial News Articles in Major Media
The first articles states:

Commodity Futures Trading Commission judge says colleague biased against complainants
..Painter said Judge Bruce Levine … had a secret agreement with a former Republican chairwoman of the agency to stand in the way of investors filing complaints with the agency. “On Judge Levine’s first week on the job, nearly twenty years ago, he came into my office and stated that he had promised Wendy Gramm, then Chairwoman of the Commission, that we would never rule in a complainant’s favor,” Painter wrote. “A review of his rulings will confirm that he fulfilled his vow….
Levine had never ruled in favor of an investor. Gramm [wife of former senator Phil Gramm (R-Tex.)], was head of the CFTC just before president Bill Clinton took office. She has been criticized by Democrats for helping firms such as Goldman Sachs and Enron gain influence over the commodity markets. After leaving the CFTC, she joined Enron’s board.

NOW we know WHY Goldman Sachs hired Dan Amstutz!
The second Article states:

How Goldman gambled on starvation
This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions.” Through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations [controlling agricultural futures contracts] were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into “derivatives” that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in “food speculation” was born. The speculators drove the price through the roof.

Here is the real attitude of these sons of syphilitic jackals:

In summary, we have record low grain inventories globally as we move into a new crop year. We have demand growing strongly. Which means that going forward even small crop failures are going to drive grain prices to record levels. As an investor, we continue to find these long term trends…very attractive.” Food shortfalls predicted: 2008 http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/dancy/2008/0104.html

Recently there have been increased calls for the development of a U.S. or international grain reserve to provide priority access to food supplies for Humanitarian needs. The National Grain and Feed Association (NGFA) and the North American Export Grain Association (NAEGA) strongly advise against this concept..Stock reserves have a documented depressing effect on prices… and resulted in less aggressive market bidding for the grains.” July 22, 2008 letter to President Bush http://www.naega.org/images/pdf/grain_reserves_for_food_aid.pdf

Dan Amstutz was president of the North American Export Grain Association.
They even named an award after the B@ur momisugly$t@ur momisuglyrd!

The Amstutz Award is given by the North American Export Grain Association in honor of Dan Amstutz and in recognition of his outstanding and extraordinary service to the export grain and oilseed trade from the United States. Appropriately, the first recipient of this distinguished service award was Mr. Amstutz… http://naega.org/?page_id=301

More on Biofuel, starvation and profit:

Biofuel starvation wasn’t “unforeseen consequences”
The U.S. corn crop, accounting for 40 percent of the global harvest and supplying nearly 70 percent of the world’s corn imports…
Congress required that biofuel use increase five times…
wheat prices have tripled, corn prices doubled and rice prices nearly doubled…
…. there were real warnings about possible starvation as a consequence of the law Sarasohn refers to [the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 ].

The possible consequences were clearly communicated in a Senate briefing a week before initial passage of the Senate bill and 6 months before final approval of the final House-Senate bill.
Here’s a bit from a June 13, 2007 Senate briefing given by Lester Brown from the Earth Policy Institute:

The U.S. corn crop, accounting for 40 percent of the global harvest and supplying nearly 70 percent of the world’s corn imports, looms large in the world food economy. Annual U.S. corn exports of some 55 million tons account for nearly one fourth of world grain exports. The corn harvest of Iowa alone exceeds the entire grain harvest of Canada. Substantially reducing this export flow would send shock waves throughout the world economy.
In six of the last seven years, total world grain production has fallen short of use. As a result, world carryover stocks of grain have been drawn down to 57 days of consumption, the lowest level in 34 years. (See Data.)

To add insult to injury Congress did not even see if biofuel actually saves on the use of oil. It does not! David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell found it takes more fossil fuel to produce biofuel than is recovered:
* corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
* switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and
* wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
* soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, and
* sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
WHO PROFITS? That should alway be the question you ask about any seemingly idiotic moves by politicians.