5-Feb-11 News -- Food prices surge +3.4% in January

[John]

5-Feb-11 News -- Food prices surge +3.4% in January to fresh historic highs


Iran's Supreme Leader takes credit for 'Islamic Awakening' in Egypt and Tunisia

** 5-Feb-11 News -- Food prices surge +3.4% in January to fresh historic highs
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... 05#e110205

Contents:
"Iran's Supreme Leader takes credit for 'Islamic Awakening' in Egypt and Tunisia"
"Food prices surge +3.4% in January to fresh historic highs"
"Additional links"
Anti-government protesters jubilant in Cairo, Egypt
PKK terrorist attacks up in Turkey in 2010
Tribal elders turning against Taliban in Sangin, Afghanistan
Clashes on the border between Thailand and Cambodia
Resentment builds against Germany in European financial talks
Tens of thousands protest in Yemen 'Day of Rage'
China's huge housing bubble continues to expand

[thrive]

What about hydroponics to help alleviate the food crisis? On Wall Street there is such interest in solar to help alleviate the energy crisis, but I don't hear much (anything, actually) about hydroponics or aeroponics. Maybe there is not a viable system yet that produces big enough margins for investors to be interested.

Searching on the term hydroponics here at the GD Forum I found an interesting post by Spirlaman (thanks) suggesting we could Feed the world salad veggies using the land mass of Manhattan (that's my summary of what he said, not his actual words) http://generationaldynamics.com/forum/v ... s&start=30

Of course, being vegetarian could be detrimental to some men, according to the Feb 3 GD weblog.

Women consider men who eat meat to be more manly, according to research at University of British Columbia. Vegetarian men are seen as wimps and less macho than meat-eaters, even by vegetarian women. Daily Mail

[vincecate]

As I've written many times, most recently in "10-Jan-11 News -- Governments around the world struggle with increasing food prices," food prices have been rising steadily since 2002, with no end in sight.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, what we're seeing is what I call the "Malthus effect," a continuing increase in the price of food as the population grows faster than the supply of food, especially during a generational Crisis era.

Why was there no "Malthus effect" from 1990 to 2002?

The birth rate in 2009 was the lowest since the Great Depression. Why would the Malthus effect be more pronounced now?

http://www.rightpundits.com/?p=7125

Are you comfortable with the Malthus effect explaining copper, iron, gold, silver and all sorts of non-food prices going up too?

We are not getting a 40% drop in prices like when people were trying to leave paper money for gold in the Great Depression, and you predicted, except when measured in gold today. Bernanke's printing of over $1 trillion new dollars per year has ensured that as interest rates go up we will get big time inflation, unless he can withdraw that money, which he can't.

http://howfiatdies.blogspot.com/2010/11 ... ndard.html
http://howfiatdies.blogspot.com/2011/01 ... ation.html

[Lily]

Thrive - hydroponics alone will not work because the energy requirements of replacing the sun with artificial light are too high; the cost to fuel the setup makes it impossible to compete with normal agriculture except for luxury items. However, if combined with efficiently produced algae biofuels, organic permaculture could easily provide more than enough food for everyone in the world to have plenty at reasonable prices. In this context, urban hydroponics systems might have a place for providing local natural food supplies to huge city populations, but there is so much land available and it is so productive that hydroponics would not actually be needed. The only thing that's causing the food crisis to continually deepen is our unsustainable industrialized agricultural practices.

"Why was there no "Malthus effect" from 1990 to 2002?"

The Malthus effect he's talking about, if I understand it right, is more about the third world than the first. The Green Revolution introduced industrialized annual monoculture agricultural techniques into the third world for the first time. These kinds of practices produce enormous yields for a few decades, until they deplete the soil and cause an ecological collapse. This is what happened in the Oklahoma dust bowl during the US's last crisis period, and it is happening in India and elsewhere today. The crash in Indian agriculture started around 2005-2007 and is ongoing.

Societies that try to use these kinds of agricultural practices often find a kind of demographic scissor effect - the boom in production leads to a huge baby boom, the results of which now make up much of the population in the third world. But when industrial multiculture inevitably destroys the ability of the soil to support life, yields crash, and suddenly there's a lot of excess population. Cue war, famine, and disease. This is the Malthus effect.

So it was definitely 'there' from 1990 to 2002. It was just offstage, lurking.

"The birth rate in 2009 was the lowest since the Great Depression. Why would the Malthus effect be more pronounced now?"

In the US, it was. But not in the third world, which is where the Malthus effect is really gaining steam. The third world just recovered from a huge baby boom.

I do think you're right about commodity and equity prices in general, though, Vincecate. Those are going up because of Bernanke, not Malthus.

[Lily]

*that should be 'industrial monoculture,' not 'multiculture'. Thanks, spellcheck.

[vincecate]

Thrive - hydroponics alone will not work because the energy requirements of replacing the sun with artificial light are too high; the cost to fuel the setup makes it impossible to compete with normal agriculture except for luxury items.

Hydroponics can use natural sunlight too. In Anguilla we have at least 2 substantial hydroponics farms using sunlight. If you want to ship stuff by air so it gets here fast and is fresh then it is costly. I am not sure lettuce counts as a luxury item. If oil costs go way up (odds seem good) the higher transportation costs could shift the economics to where local farming makes more sense in many more places.

[vincecate]

This graph showing how gold tracks the CRB index seems interesting. I had no idea they were this close.

CRB CCI and Gold Jan 2011.gif (10.69 KiB) Viewed 7527 times

John's position is that food prices are up due to Malthus but that gold is a bubble. But it sure looks like both are driven by the same thing, perhaps the devaluation of the dollar.

In any case, a country that used gold coins for money would not be noticing any inflation in the CRB, Malthus or no.