Revelation 6: verses 5-6

I’m not religious, but the imagery is appropriate...

If you read a lot of news, you’ll likely know that Russia is banning the export of wheat for the remainder of 2010. The Russians have lost at least 20% of their crop, and are ensuring that there is no homegrown shortage. As Gwynne Dyer wrote in a recent column about this: “If anybody starves, it won't be Russians.” At least, not yet.

I believe that we are likely at the maximum population that our agricultural capacity can carry. It’s likely that without heavy inputs of fertilizers, water, and pesticides that we are far exceeding what the planet can actually feed. Global warming or not, we’ve seen how vulnerable our food supply is to the weather.
Here in Manitoba, a bumper crop around Portage La Prairie has seen upwards of four inches of rain on it in places. If you get just the wrong breaks, that crop might rot in the fields. Add that to the smallest acreage of wheat seeded on the Prairies this spring since 1971, and you have the potential of another major exporter limiting its exports.

The ‘reserve’ of wheat around the world is now about 50 days, down from three times that not that long ago. It would not take too much more bad weather or failed harvests to shrink that number further. Indeed, it may shrink anyway as the world population continues to increase. So what is the bottom line for you?

Right now, likely nothing at all. Oh, you might wind up paying a bit more (or a lot more) for flour and products made with them. There might be food riots in faraway places like Mexico or Pakistan, but nothing like that here. Life will likely trundle along without much notice of the increasingly thinner margins that are developing between the plenty we still enjoy, and the famine that much of the rest of the world endures periodically.

So as you butter your toast, bite on that bagel, or chow down on that bowl of Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs, give some thought to the future. Maybe an extra bag of flour in the larder isn’t such a bad thing. It might just keep one horseman from your door.

Link to the Dyer article I quoted. A worthwhile read:

http://vueweekly.com/front/story/grain_wars/

Originally posted august 20, 2010 @MPN