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-- The Impending International Food Crisis
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| Originally posted by Fir3start3r /obligitory  Was it Canada or States (or both?) that were going to look into why, if these oil companies are making record profits they are still getting government cuts and grants? Wasn't there an inquiry or something? |
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| Originally posted by Krypton What people choose to pay for a commodity would not be what that commodity is actually worth. This is why we have market bubbles and on the other end of the spectrum, undervalued markets. People are not choosing to pay $3.50 a gallon for gasoline. They don't have a choice but to pay $3.50. Capitalism dictates a choice for the consumer between competitors who compete for market share. Do you see energy companies competing? HELL NO. I see cartel behavior going on, even so far as to illegally drive up prices. This is not capitalism my friend... Here is just one example, and there are many... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20388297/ |
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| Originally posted by jerZ07002 i'm not going to argue that the oil and gas market is a free market because i don't think it is. however, it is utterly incorrect when peole like yourself say that that consumers pay $3.50 because they are forced to pay that amount. People make lifestyle choices that dictate that they live in sprawling surburban neighborhoods with two SUVs. If people made better lifestyle choices they wouldn't pay anything for gas. I haven't purchased gas in over 6 months. I choose not to buy it. I take the train or a bus everywhere i go. I don't live in NYC and it's not the most convenient thing, but it works and I save a ton of money. The choice to buy gas is on the consumers. People can take trains, buses, car pool, etc... The fact that you want to live in an area where you need to drive means that you are choosing the purchase gas at that price. Therefore, even though the gas market is not entirely free to set its own equilibrium because of OPEC, consumers still have a major impact on the price of gas by creating the demand that needs to be supplied. If americans chose to live more densely, you would see a huge decline in the demand, and also the price of gas. |
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| Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov +1 - six months is pretty good... I've gone about three months now, but start a new job that isn't Metro-accessible next week. |
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| Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov I don't think it is entirely incoherent, though I see your point. But I would argue that if we spent half as much time thinking about innovation in food production as we do on innovation of, say, video games, we'd have seen a dozen Norman Borlaugs by now. Populations will continue to grow - and an effort should be made to curb that growth (hint: abstinence-only education is not the way to go on this one) - but why not work on increasing sustainability as well? The Green Revolution succeeded in feeding millions of people that surely would have starved. I see no reason to believe that we can't do that again if we put our minds to it. Sadly, it isn't a priority in the West, which will always eat before our counterparts in S. Asia and Africa. |
i love this idea:
http://nymag.com/news/features/30020/
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| Originally posted by jerZ07002 i'm not going to argue that the oil and gas market is a free market because i don't think it is. however, it is utterly incorrect when peole like yourself say that that consumers pay $3.50 because they are forced to pay that amount. People make lifestyle choices that dictate that they live in sprawling surburban neighborhoods with two SUVs. If people made better lifestyle choices they wouldn't pay anything for gas. I haven't purchased gas in over 6 months. I choose not to buy it. I take the train or a bus everywhere i go. I don't live in NYC and it's not the most convenient thing, but it works and I save a ton of money. The choice to buy gas is on the consumers. People can take trains, buses, car pool, etc... The fact that you want to live in an area where you need to drive means that you are choosing the purchase gas at that price. Therefore, even though the gas market is not entirely free to set its own equilibrium because of OPEC, consumers still have a major impact on the price of gas by creating the demand that needs to be supplied. If americans chose to live more densely, you would see a huge decline in the demand, and also the price of gas. |
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| Originally posted by jerZ07002 i love this idea: http://nymag.com/news/features/30020/ |
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| Originally posted by Krypton A few things... 1. Public transportation in the USA is abysmal. |
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| Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov I think you missed Jer's point. You still have a choice. You can move to a place where a car is not required. For instance, when I look for an apartment, the first thing I do is look on a public transportation map and see how accessible it is. I pay about forty bucks a month in transportation, but I'm on the bus all the time going places. |
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| Originally posted by Krypton Yes, but most people can not do that. The majority of people can not just simply pack up and move, stop using their car, or give it up. It is not that simple. |
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| Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov Because they continue to demand gas. At what point will they cease to be willing to pay? Supply and demand, no? Put it this way - if I'm in the movie theater business and I discover that I can raise my prices and not lose any customers to the video rental place across the street, isn't that just me being a savvy capitalist? |
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| Originally posted by Krypton Yes, but most people can not do that. The majority of people can not just simply pack up and move, stop using their car, or give it up. It is not that simple. |
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| Originally posted by Krypton 1. People don't have to go to movies. As I pointed out, many people don't have a choice but to use private transit. 2. No one is having to choose between buying food and going to the movies. 3. I also stated the oil market is not capitalism but rather a cartel which uses capitalism to gauge production and demand levels. But supply and demand unfortunately dictates little of current oil prices. OPEC themselves have stated that a reasonable oil price is $45 a barrel. ------------------------ So to answer your question, yes the you the movie theater owner are a saavy capitalist. Unfortunately, the oil industry are hardly capitalist, but rather, monopolists. |
Hey guys,
I dropped by to see whether everything was all right, and I noticed this thread. Being Brazilian, I find this whole food crisis really bizarre... specially the accusations against ethanol.
Although we've never really had a severe food shortage around here in Brazil, food distribution has always been problematic, reason why our government has been trying to tackle this problem intensively for the last decade. And, luckily, this has brought some very interesting results: our middle class is larger than ever, the production of most grains is rising (our production of wheat, in particular, spiked up in the 80's) and the production of sugarcane (from which we extract ethanol) has grown 961% since 1960.
This is why, of all politicians I heard so far, I think Angela Merkel is the one that seems to have hit the nail on the head:
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| BERLIN (Reuters) - Bad agricultural policies and changing eating habits in developing nations are primarily to blame for rising food prices, not biofuel production as some critics claim, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday. Environmentalists and humanitarian groups have stepped up campaigning against biofuels, arguing they divert production away from food and animal feed while contributing to sharp rises in the price of cereals and milk products. But Merkel, whose country is Europe's largest biofuel producer, said the rise in food prices was not mainly due to biofuels but to "inadequate agricultural policies in developing countries" as well as "insufficient forecasts of changes in nutritional habits" in emerging markets. "If you travel to India these days, then a main part of the debate is about the 'second meal'," Merkel said. "People are eating twice a day, and if a third of one billion people in India do that, it adds up to 300 million people. That's a large part of the European Union," she said. "And if they suddenly consume twice as much food as before and if 100 million Chinese start drinking milk too, then of course our milk quotas become skewed, and much else too," she said referring to EU limits on dairy production. Biofuels, which are seen by supporters as a way to increase energy security and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, are made mainly from food crops such as grains, oilseeds and sugar. Critics argue there are few, if any, environmental benefits for so-called first generation biofuels. They have also been blamed for increasing grain demand and pushing up prices at a time of growing threat of famine in some parts of the world. The FAO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have said biofuels were "one of the main drivers" for forecasts of food price increases of 20 percent to 50 percent by 2016. |
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| Originally posted by Lira Hey guys, I dropped by to see whether everything was all right, and I noticed this thread. Being Brazilian, I find this whole food crisis really bizarre... specially the accusations against ethanol. Although we've never really had a severe food shortage around here in Brazil, food distribution has always been problematic, reason why our government has been trying to tackle this problem intensively for the last decade. And, luckily, this has brought some very interesting results: our middle class is larger than ever, the production of most grains is rising (our production of wheat, in particular, spiked up in the 80's) and the production of sugarcane (from which we extract ethanol) has grown 961% since 1960. This is why, of all politicians I heard so far, I think Angela Merkel is the one that seems to have hit the nail on the head: http://uk.reuters.com/article/email...721113520080417 As I humbly see it, the world scenario is changing drammatically, and some turbulence is bound to happen. ps.: Oh, concerning the price of petrol, the reason why I've been away is because I'm moving to an apartment downtown, and I'm bidding my car goodbye. It's a really small place, far from being in a good location, but I can safely ride my bike there to work. Apparently, it was that simple |
Oil April, 2005: 55 USD/barrel
Oil April, 2007: 120 USD/barrel
= International Food Crisis.
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| Chickenfeedhawks Global warm-mongering. By Mark Steyn Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of the U.S. Marine Corps raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: �How To Win The War On Global Warming.� Where to begin? For the last ten years, we have, in fact, been not warming but slightly cooling, which is why the eco-warriors have adopted the all-purpose bogeyman of �climate change.� But let�s take it that the editors of Time are referring not to the century we live in but the previous one, when there was a measurable rise of temperature of approximately one degree. That�s the �war�: one degree. If the tree-raising is Iwo Jima, a one-degree increase isn�t exactly Pearl Harbor. But General Stengel wants us to engage in preemptive war. The editors of Time would be the first to deplore such saber-rattling applied to, say, Iran�s nuclear program, but it has become the habit of progressive opinion to appropriate the language of war for everything but actual war. So let�s cut to the tree. In my corner of New Hampshire, we have more trees than we did a hundred or two hundred years ago. My town is over 90 percent forested. Any more trees and I�d have to hack my way through the undergrowth to get to my copy of Time magazine on the coffee table. Likewise Vermont, where not so long ago in St Albans I found myself stuck behind a Hillary supporter driving a Granolamobile bearing the bumper sticker �TO SAVE A TREE REMOVE A BUSH.� Very funny. And even funnier when you consider that on that stretch of Route Seven there�s nothing to see north, south, east, or west but maple, hemlock, birch, pine, you name it. It�s on every measure other than tree cover that Vermont�s kaput. So where exactly do Time magazine�s generals want to plant their tree? Presumably, as in Iwo Jima, on foreign soil. It�s all these third-world types monkeying around with their rain forests who decline to share the sophisticated Euro-American reverence for the tree. In the Time iconography, the tree is Old Glory and it�s a flag of eco-colonialism. And which obscure island has it been planted on? In Haiti, the Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was removed from office on April 12. Insofar as history will recall him at all, he may have the distinction of being the first head of government to fall victim to �global warming� � or, at any rate, the �war on global warming� that Time magazine is gung-ho for. At least five people have been killed in food riots in Port-au-Prince. Prices have risen 40 percent since last summer and, as Deroy Murdock reported, some citizens are now subsisting on biscuits made from salt, vegetable oil and (mmmm) dirt. Dirt cookies: Nutritious, tasty, and affordable? Well, one out of three ain�t bad. Unlike �global warming,� food rioting is a planet-wide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy. So what happened? Well, Western governments listened to the eco-warriors, and introduced some of the �wartime measures� they�ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from �biofuels� by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S. added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in �biofuels� production by 2022. The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you�ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it�s not �you� who�s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about. Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that to date the �carbon debt� created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse. The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized: �The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world�s environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?� You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you. Here�s the self-same Independent in November 2005: At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a �biofuel obligation� on oil companies... This has the potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol� Etc. It�s not the environmental movement�s chickenfeedhawks who�ll have to reap what they demand must be sown, but we should be in no doubt about where to place the blame � on the bullying activists and their media cheerleaders and weathervane politicians who insist that the �science� is �settled� and that those who query whether there�s any crisis are (in the designation of the strikingly non-emaciated Al Gore) �denialists.� All three presidential candidates have drunk the environmental kool-ethanol and are committed to Big Government solutions. But, as the Independent�s whiplash-inducing U-turn confirms, the eco-scolds are under no such obligation to consistency. Finger-in-the-wind politicians shouldn�t be surprised to find that gentle breeze is from the media wind turbine and it�s just sliced your finger off. Whether or not there�s very slight global cooling or very slight global warming, there�s no need for a �war� on either, no rationale for loosing a plague of eco-locusts on the food supply. So why be surprised that totalitarian solutions to mythical problems wind up causing real devastation? As for Time�s tree, by all means put it up: It helps block out the view of starving peasants on the far horizon. � 2008 Mark Steyn |
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| Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles Ethanol sucks ass, it's a scam, and it's a big part of why this mess is happening. |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo |
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| Originally posted by jerZ07002 Brazil has it right. apparently sugar is a much more efficient precursor to ethanol. Additionally, sugar doesn't need the most fertile ground to grow like corn does. Corn is also the base in many of the things we eat and drink, ie., livestock feed, corn syrup. The US needs could do alot of good in the Americas by purchasing sugar cane from our neighbors and produce ethanol with sugar instead of corn. On the other hand, we can purchase from Brazil and strengthen our relations with Brazil, which will be vital considering Brazil's potential. |
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| Originally posted by atbell I think it is part of the problem. What it also does is begins to tie energy and food together. This makes sence but it sucks. For the first time in history machines and humans are competeing directly. Yes, now driving your car is starving Africans... Once the world understands that food is just another form of energy all kinds of different lines of thinking are going to emerge. |
| 2007 world fuel ethanol production | |
| Country | Millions of Gallons |
| USA | 6498.6 |
| Brazil | 5019.2 |
| World Total | 13,101.7 |
does anyone else think that the rising prices of gas is a good thing.
with the price going up a couple of cents, twice a week, people are starting to rethink their driving habits. frankly, i think, that if prices continue to go up, their will be less cars on the road. a change in the american way of life, but for feck sake is it necessary.
"Americans constitute less than 5% of the world's population, but produce 25% of the world�s CO2,[2] consume 25% of world�s resources,[3] including 26% of the world's energy,[4] although having only 3% of the world�s known oil reserves,[5] and generate roughly 30% of world�s waste."
get off your asses fat americans and WALK!!!!
so i was at the local Sam's trying to get a bulk of rice, and there is none to be had, WTF! I use rice in most of my dishes. now what do i cook.
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| Originally posted by jerZ07002 you are definitely missing the point. First, supply and demand is an aggregate concept. It takes an entire population of consumers to determine the supply and demand of a product. It is no different for living quarters and gasoline. To think that demand we create by using gas has little or nothing to do with the price of gas is naive. I will admit that speculation and political instability are components of gas pricing, but the largest price determinate is certainly demand for the product. Even if a products equilibrium isn't set 100% by market forces, the market forces still help determine the price at which people purchase that product. |
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| as for gas specifically, there are two solutions. One which is easier than the other. The easier solution is to pick up and move somewhere with transportation. Just because someone doesn't want to do it doesn't mean that it isn't an option or that it isn't feasible. Leb moved from Minnesota to DC and now uses the DC metro. I know he goes to school in DC but he could have easily chose an apartment where he couldn't take public transportation. The fact that it may not be an easy decision to leave your family doesn't make it any less a voluntary decision of yours. As for the stigma attached to it, that's a poor excuse for why you are "forced" to pay $3.50 a gallon. You're going to have to do better than that. There wouldn't be a stigma if more people did it. The only reason there is a stigma is because you and all your friends are 100% dependent on your cars. This can't change unless you take the necessary steps, ie., taking public transportation. You and most americans make a conscious decision to drive to work everyday instead of taking public transportation. your decision is one of tens of millions of decisions that are inhibiting the creation of a better public transportation system in this country. public transportation systems don't just spring up out of nowhere. like many products, the demand drives supply. |
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| The second option, which is consistent with the aggregate notion of supply and demand, is that the people could demand denser housing that is more apt for efficient public transportation. All you need to do to contribute is to purchase in a downtown area. If more people started thinking like that then developers would take notice and develop properties that suited the desires of the people. Since people want 1 acre lots in florida off some highway in the middle of nowhere, they are implicitly saying that they want to rely on a car. That's a decision those people make and they know the consequences when they make that decision. It's the people's desires, not need, for automobiles that is creating this problem. If people changed their behavoirs and stop complaining then this problem would be mitigated to a large degree. |
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| you are definitely wrong that demand has little effect on price. Think if everyone didn't want gas anymore, how much do you suspect it would cost? |
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| anyway, the price of gas and the price of oil are not the same thing. Gas is highly refined petroleum with additives. Gas prices are increasing also because of refining capacity. The US doesn't expand its refining capacity because it creates a shortage of supply, and the steady demand causes the price to shoot up when we can't increase supply to catch up with demand. I admit supply shock is the main cause of price spikes, but increased demand is also a huge determinate. here's another question, if china wasn't in the world market, how much do you think oil would cost per barrel? i'm sure it wouldn't be $115. |
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