The Next Food Crisis Will Be Caused By Globalist Land-Grabs and Privatization

Susanne Posel, Contributor

The UN warns that global food stores like grains are depleting at an exponential rate; and when combined with failing harvests, there will be a food crisis in 2013.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) explains that “we’ve not been producing as much as we are consuming. That is why stocks are being run down. Supplies are now very tight across the world and reserves are at a very low level, leaving no room for unexpected events next year.” 

Since 2010, the FAO has stated that the rise in food prices is directly correlated to the 80 million people being added to the world’s population annually. This fact, according to the globalists at the UN, is beginning to “tax both the skills of farmers and the limits of the earth’s land and water resources.” Added to this problem are the 3 million people who are “moving up the food chain” eating more than their share in gluttonous nations like the United States and China. 

Global Food Reserves Have Reached Their Lowest Level In Almost 40 Years

Michael Snyder, Contributor

For six of the last eleven years the world has consumed more food than it has produced.  This year, drought in the United States and elsewhere has put even more pressure on global food supplies than usual.

As a result, global food reserves have reached their lowest level in almost 40 years.

Experts are warning that if next summer is similar to this summer that it could be enough to trigger a major global food crisis.  At this point, the world is literally living from one year to the next.  There is simply not much of a buffer left.

In the Western world, the first place where we are going to notice the impact of this crisis is in the price of food.  It is being projected that overall food prices will rise between 5 and 20 percent by the end of this year.  It is becoming increasingly clear that the world has reached a tipping point.  We aren't producing enough food for everyone anymore, and food reserves will continue to get lower and lower.  Eventually they will be totally gone.

Getting Used to Life Without Food, Part 1

Wall Street, BP, Bio-Ethanol and the Death of Millions

Grain Storage Wikimedia Image

William Engdahl
Financial Sense

My late grandfather, a man of sturdy Norwegian-American farm stock, who later became a newspaper editor and political activist during the First World War, used to say, 'A man can get used to pretty much anything with time, except dying...and even that with some practice.' Well, as fate has it, it seems we, the vast majority of the human race, are about to test that adage in regard to the availability of our daily bread itself.

Food is one of those funny things it's hard to live without. We all tend to take it for granted that our local supermarket will continue to offer whatever we wish, in abundance, at affordable prices or nearly so. Yet living without adequate food is the growing prospect facing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of us over the coming years.

How Seed Banks, Vaults and Exchanges Are Saving Our Food From Disaster

Seeds provide the kind of security to agriculture-oriented people that gold provides to the money-minded.

Seed Bank w/ instructions   on how to save seeds

Ari LeVaux
AlterNet

During the Nazi siege of Leningrad, a group of scientists at the world's oldest seed bank voluntarily starved to death rather than eat the wheat, potatoes, nuts and other seeds being stored at Leningrad's Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry. At the same time, courtesy of Stalin, the institute's founding visionary Nikolay Vavilov was starving to death in a Siberian prison -- but not before he'd gathered more than 50,000 samples from 40 different countries for his institute's collection.

Today the Russian government is attempting to sell Vavilov's land to private developers. The seeds can be moved, but not so easily transported are the hundreds of varieties of rare fruit trees planted in the institute's historic orchards.

Seeds are cheap these days, typically sold for fractions of a penny. But should supplies dry up, it will become difficult for a hungry populace to put a price on these tiny items, given the fact that they can produce infinite amounts of food. Seeds provide the kind of security to agriculture-oriented people that gold provides to the money-minded.

Food prices set to double by 2030, aid group says

"Now we have entered an age of growing crisis, of shock piled upon shock: vertiginous food price spikes and oil price hikes, devastating weather events, financial meltdowns and global contagion,"Oxfam said in a report.

MSNBC/Reuters

LONDON — Food prices could double in the next 20 years and demand in 2050 will be 70 percent higher than now, U.K. charity Oxfam said on Tuesday, warning of worsening hunger as the global food economy stumbles close to breakdown.

"The food system is pretty well bust in the world," Oxfam Chief Executive Barbara Stocking told reporters, announcing the launch of the Grow campaign as 925 million people go hungry every day.

"All the signs are that the number of people going hungry is going up," Stocking said.

Hunger was increasing due to rising food price inflation and oil price hikes, scrambles for land and water, and creeping climate change.

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Food security is 'priority' for Washington: Clinton

Clinton announced humanitarian aid
for Libya's rebels on Thursday
© AFP Tiziana Fabi

AFP

ROME (AFP) - US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned on Friday about rising food prices and said food security was "a foreign policy priority" for the United States in a speech to the UN's food agency.

"Global food crises are once again on the rise," Clinton said in Rome, adding: "Food security is a foreign policy priority for our country."

"We must act now effectively and cooperatively to blunt the negative impact of rising food prices and protect people and communities."

How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis

Don't blame American appetites, rising oil prices, or genetically modified crops for rising food prices. Wall Street and The Fed are at fault for the spiraling cost of food.

Frederick Kaufman
Foreign Policy

Bankers recognized a good system when they saw it, and dozens of speculative non-physical hedgers followed Goldman's lead and joined the commodities index game, including Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Pimco, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, to name but a few purveyors of commodity index funds. The scene had been set for food inflation that would eventually catch unawares some of the largest milling, processing, and retailing corporations in the United States, and send shockwaves throughout the world.

The money tells the story. Since the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000, there has been a 50-fold increase in dollars invested in commodity index funds. To put the phenomenon in real terms: In 2003, the commodities futures market still totaled a sleepy $13 billion. But when the global financial crisis sent investors running scared in early 2008, and as dollars, pounds, and euros evaded investor confidence, commodities -- including food -- seemed like the last, best place for hedge, pension, and sovereign wealth funds to park their cash. "You had people who had no clue what commodities were all about suddenly buying commodities," an analyst from the United States Department of Agriculture told me. In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was roiling the markets. Food inflation has remained steady since.

The money flowed, and the bankers were ready with a sparkling new casino of food derivatives. Spearheaded by oil and gas prices (the dominant commodities of the index funds) the new investment products ignited the markets of all the other indexed commodities, which led to a problem familiar to those versed in the history of tulips, dot-coms, and cheap real estate: a food bubble. Hard red spring wheat, which usually trades in the $4 to $6 dollar range per 60-pound bushel, broke all previous records as the futures contract climbed into the teens and kept on going until it topped $25. And so, from 2005 to 2008, the worldwide price of food rose 80 percent -- and has kept rising. "It's unprecedented how much investment capital we've seen in commodity markets," Kendell Keith, president of the National Grain and Feed Association, told me. "There's no question there's been speculation." In a recently published briefing note, Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, concluded that in 2008 "a significant portion of the price spike was due to the emergence of a speculative bubble."

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5 Easy Ways to Protect Yourself From Food Inflation

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North Korea visit to focus on food crisis: Carter

© AFP Frederic J. Brown

AFP 

BEIJING (AFP) - A group of former statesmen led by ex-US president Jimmy Carter said Monday they will focus on food shortages, human rights and denuclearisation when they visit North Korea this week. 

A delegation of "The Elders" group of retired state leaders will visit Pyongyang on Tuesday in a bid to ease tensions over North Korea's nuclear weapon programmes, they told a news conference in Beijing.

The four-member group, led by Carter, includes former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, ex-Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland and former Irish president Mary Robinson.

20 Signs That A Horrific Global Food Crisis Is Coming

Dees Illustration

Michael Snyder
Blacklisted News

In case you haven’t noticed, the world is on the verge of a horrific global food crisis.  At some point, this crisis will affect you and your family.  It may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow, but it is going to happen.  Crazy weather and horrifying natural disasters have played havoc with agricultural production in many areas of the globe over the past couple of years.  Meanwhile, the price of oil has begun to skyrocket.  The entire global economy is predicated on the ability to use massive amounts of inexpensive oil to cheaply produce food and other goods and transport them over vast distances.

Without cheap oil the whole game changes.  Topsoil is being depleted at a staggering rate and key aquifers all over the world are being drained at an alarming pace.  Global food prices are already at an all-time high and they continue to move up aggressively.  So what is going to happen to our world when hundreds of millions more people cannot afford to feed themselves?

U.S. May Have `Problem' Meeting Surging Global Demand for Wheat, UN Says

Luzi Ann Javier
Bloomberg

The U.S., the world’s largest wheat shipper, may not have the logistical capacity to meet rising global demand after rains cut the quality of the harvest in Canada and Australia, the United Nations said.

As much as 8 million metric tons of Australia’s wheat harvest may be downgraded because of excessive rains and Canada’s output suffered from wet weather, pushing importers to seek alternative suppliers, said Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the UN Food & Agriculture Organization, citing government estimates.

“Right now, the only country that would have such supply to compensate for the downgrade of Australia and also Canada would be the U.S.,” Abbassian said in an interview. “The problem is that the capacity in the U.S. for terminals to absorb enough milling wheat for shipment, it’s just not there.”

Increased demand from the U.S. may lead to supply bottlenecks, delaying deliveries and intensifying competition among importers, said Park Yang Jin, business manager at Seoul- based Daehan Flour Mills Co., South Korea’s largest milling wheat importer. This would help sustain a rally in Chicago futures, he said. The U.S. accounts for 27 percent of global wheat trade.

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Tighter food supplies, high prices to persist

Svetlana Kovalyova
Reuters

World food prices are set to remain high in 2011/12 with supplies tightening and demand running strong, the United Nations' food agency economist told Reuters on Wednesday after a new jump in prices.

"The chances of prices to remain high and extremely volatile well into 2011/12 are stronger than ever," FAO's economist Abdolreza Abbassian told Reuters in a telephone interview.


Food prices rose in November on the back of surging sugar and strong gains in cereals and oils.

That was despite the lack of fundamentals which could have justified the rises and also a stronger dollar, which usually sends agricultural commodities prices lower, Abbassian said.

"That shows that there is tremendous market sentiment in favor of high and perhaps still rising prices," he said.

Agricultural commodities demand remained strong, triggering an increased use of reserves and fuelling concerns about tighter supplies next season, especially because the level of new plantings situation in producing countries remained unclear, he said.

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Rice May Triple in 18 Months as Supplies Tighten, Duxton's Peter Forecasts

Chanyaporn Chanjaroen
Bloomberg

Rice, the staple food of more than three billion people, may as much as triple in 18 months as flooding in exporters including Thailand tightens supplies and demand climbs, according to Duxton Asset Management Pte.

“Rice will blow out the stocks,” said Ed Peter, chief executive officer, who co-founded the company last year with Managing Director Desmond Sheehy. Both worked at Deutsche Asset Management and the Deutsche Bank AG unit owns 19.9 percent of Duxton, while Peter, Sheehy and staff own the rest. Duxton, based in Singapore, invests in farmland, Asian stocks and wine.

Peter’s forecast, in an interview on Nov. 29, would put rice at more than the peak during the 2008 food crisis, which triggered social unrest in poorer states. Wheat and corn also surged that year, while record oil prices boosted fertilizer costs. Kiattisak Kanlayasirivat at Novel Commodities SA, which trades rice, said farmers can replant quickly as floods recede.

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Banksters Inflate Speculative Food Bubble

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Surviving the Food Crisis

Empty Shelves in Mexico During Swine Flu Scare

Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press

Food production is one of the most essential concerns of any society. Without direct availability and ease of consumption, without the consistent flow of agricultural goods, every nation existing today (except the most primitive) would immediately find its infrastructure crumbling and its people in a furious panic. It’s strange to me, then, that long term independent food planning is the one concern that many Americans seem to take most for granted. Firearms and ammo, camping gear and bug-out-bags, MRE’s, beans, and rice; these are the easiest part of your survival foundation. The hard part is not storage of goods, but devising a solid and practical plan for sustainability in the long term. This starts with the capacity to support your own agriculture regardless of how long the grid is down, even if it is down indefinitely.

Understandably, there will be some people who do not have enough land to implement many of these strategies. They should still know the fundamentals and be ready to apply them at a retreat location or within a community should the opportunity arise.

In the first chapter of our ‘Survive Anything’ series, we covered all the consequences of a nuclear attack on American soil, and how to not only make it out alive, but even thrive after such an event.


The reason Neithercorp covered survival tactics for a nuclear strike first was simple; we wanted to make it clear that the title of this series is not an exaggeration. Truly, ANYTHING is survivable with the right knowledge and preparation. Those who promote a ‘doomer’ view of economic collapse or global war are on average people who have simply given up before the struggle has even started. Therefore, their opinions on survival are empty, and barely worth the effort to ignore. Life goes on after collapse, as it always has since the beginning of organized civilization. It is YOU who decides whether or not you will be a part of that life. It is you who decides your chances of success.

With that success in mind, let’s dive into the most important aspects of food survival in a country where infrastructure has ceased to function…

Emaciated Grocery Chains

Last winter, I witnessed perhaps the most incredible snow storm I have ever seen in my life. A low pressure system punished the Northeast with downpour after downpour, stopping most road travel and cutting power to millions for at least a week. Being that the average family has only a week’s worth of food or less in their pantry, you can imagine the chaos that unfolded. Those grocery stores with backup power were flooded with customers buying armloads of batteries, water, ice chests, and, of course, foods that don’t require refrigeration. Now, what I want you to imagine, is what would have happened if no grocery stores had been open that week. What would have happened if they had never reopened? How many people would have been in the very real position of starving to death? From what I observed that winter…far too many…

The problem of storage and backstock is widespread in the U.S. and the culprit is actually one which we have been trained to admire; efficiency. It is because of the over-application of efficiency in grocery models and in the freight sector that most outlets carry little to no backstock in goods. Instead, they order goods as quickly as they sell out, refilling shelves on a product by product basis. This means that in most grocers, what you see on the shelf, is all that they have. The speed of trucking deliveries makes this business model possible, but its operation suffers from a seriously fatal flaw…

Grocery stores may seem like a bounty of goods at first glance, but if freight shipments shut down, or even slowed, those aisles would empty within the span of a few days. Many households in America operate on the same faulty “efficiency”. They rely on the weekly trip to the grocer to maintain the pantry while also attempting to save money by reducing backstock. It’s a frayed rope holding up too much weight, a completely inflexible system that cannot withstand any deviation from the set routine. One unexpected disaster could render the entire food and agriculture distribution network immobile.

Many grocery chains also function on a line of credit from banks while operating at a loss. Profits are poured directly into the liabilities the companies incur from loans and then more money is borrowed to continue ordering goods. Some stores in the chain (flagship stores) usually bring in enough money to cover the red ink of the other branches, however, what if banks were to cut off credit completely to a grocery chain? Or maybe ALL grocery chains? The cycle of debt, to sales, to profit, to debt, becomes disrupted. Any stores that rely solely on credit to stay open for business would immediately lose the ability to bring in new stock. Again, we are faced with empty shelves in less than a week.

This scenario is entirely possible in the U.S. today, especially in the event that big banks institute capital retention in order to protect themselves from a further collapse of investment markets. Banks have already restricted loans to consumers down to the bare minimum. A restriction of loans to the business sector in the near future is not that far fetched.

Must Read - Full Article HERE

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How the U.S. Government Guaranteed the Coming Global Food Crisis

Steve Sjuggerud
Market Oracle

Porter Stansberry with Braden Copeland write: Over the last several years, I've written constantly on the growing likelihood of a global currency collapse.

The governments of Europe and the United States have accumulated debts so large they can't ever hope to repay them, except with currencies whose value will be inflated away by money-printing.

That's led me to recommend inflation hedges like railroads, gold, silver, and various forms of energy. Owning these "real assets" is the single best way to protect yourself from the inflationary crisis. But make sure you don't forget the most important inflation hedge of all: food.


If you've been reading the financial press for the past few months, you know the prices of vital food commodities are soaring. The price of corn is up 47% since this summer. Soybeans are up 30%. Wheat is up 43%.

I expect this trend of higher food prices to continue for years as the U.S government intentionally debases the dollar while lying to you the whole time about wanting a "strong currency." (Make sure to read our essay hereabout this great lie.) There's also a good supply/demand case to be made for owning agricultural assets. Let's start with the largest crop in the United States, corn...

In 2009, U.S. farmers grew 39% of the world's corn – 307.4 million metric tons. The crop was worth $48 billion. Our corn exports totaled $8.7 billion.

Most harvested corn in the U.S. is used to feed livestock – 43% of 2009 production. Almost as much (41%) was used for food, consumer, and industrial products (toothpaste, adhesives, cosmetics, starches, sweeteners, oils, beverages, industrial alcohol, fuel ethanol, etc.). The remainder was exported. The U.S. sent most of its corn to Japan, Mexico, and South Korea.

The second-largest corn grower, China, produced 165.9 million metric tons, or half the U.S. production. The European Union was a distant third, harvesting 62.7 million metric tons. Brazil checked in fourth, at 51 million metric tons.

In 2009, a severe drought in China killed millions of bushels of corn. Stockpiles dwindled to alarming levels as the government sold corn to keep the price from rocketing higher. Into 2010, the situation hasn't improved. The Chinese have become net importers of corn for the first time in 16 years. Experts predict China will require 6 million to 8 million metric tons of corn this year.

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Banksters Inflate Speculative Food Bubble

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