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Post by twawki on Mar 9, 2009 10:44:20 GMT
The little ice age demonstrated the devastation a cooling world brings to crop production. If the current solar output remains low with correlating cooling to our climate we are facing a similiar scenario though with a much higher population base to support.
In our newspaper on the weekend (cant find online) there was an article about how governments from China, India, the middle east etc are buying up farmland in Australia, Russia, America etc in order to feed their own populations.
This would mean we may end up with a situation where we cannot feed our own populations as well as tension between nations as to who the food goes to.
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Post by twawki on Mar 9, 2009 10:49:46 GMT
Ahhh found it as follows; www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,25148808-5013110,00.html The head of the Middle-East Foodstuff Consortium is on a spending spree, targeting millions of hectares of farmland around the world to use as Saudi Arabia's "rice barn". ............. But many farmers are asking, who will put food on our tables when our land has been sold from under us?
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Post by madman2001 on Mar 9, 2009 16:04:04 GMT
Sorry, but this is a non-issue. It's not like the Saudis are going to ship the land overseas. Moreover, food is food and it's a very liquid market. When a market is liquid, prices find their own level.
It's really hard for me to envision any sort of scenario where Aussies would be starving while the grain from Aussie farms is shipped to the Middle East. The only reasonable explanation for these purchases (if they are indeed above the norm) is that the Saudis feel that the land would be a good investment, which is understandable if food prices soar.
Madman
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Post by nautonnier on Mar 9, 2009 16:28:29 GMT
Sorry, but this is a non-issue. It's not like the Saudis are going to ship the land overseas. Moreover, food is food and it's a very liquid market. When a market is liquid, prices find their own level. It's really hard for me to envision any sort of scenario where Aussies would be starving while the grain from Aussie farms is shipped to the Middle East. The only reasonable explanation for these purchases (if they are indeed above the norm) is that the Saudis feel that the land would be a good investment, which is understandable if food prices soar. Madman You should read the history of the Irish Potato Famine. Where just that happened. While the indigenous population starved food was shipped back to England, Scotland and Wales. It could happen if a farmer in Australia were to decide to export all his crop to <name a country> for profit, even if the local people are short of food. There is no legal bar to that farmer exporting the food if the customer in <name a country> were to outbid local consumers.
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Post by twawki on Mar 9, 2009 19:47:28 GMT
The article referenced states "The international corporations have all the rights of a property owner" ... "they can decide to whom they sell their food"
Some of the groups buying land;
Suntime (China) Al Qudra (Middle East) Mawashi (Qater) Trafco (Bahrain) G2G (india)
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Post by twawki on Mar 9, 2009 19:48:42 GMT
Sorry, but this is a non-issue. It's not like the Saudis are going to ship the land overseas. Moreover, food is food and it's a very liquid market. When a market is liquid, prices find their own level. It's really hard for me to envision any sort of scenario where Aussies would be starving while the grain from Aussie farms is shipped to the Middle East. The only reasonable explanation for these purchases (if they are indeed above the norm) is that the Saudis feel that the land would be a good investment, which is understandable if food prices soar. Madman Food prices will soar when food availability is redirected elsewhere
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Post by madman2001 on Mar 10, 2009 2:57:37 GMT
Today's food market is very liquid and absent government intervention (e.g. capping prices), the Saudis or whomever would not somehow be able to take food out of Aussies' mouths or cause a food shortage.
Like any farmland owner, they would be able to benefit from higher prices. Maybe they think that farmland is the new oil-land.
Madman
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Post by nautonnier on Mar 10, 2009 11:36:28 GMT
Today's food market is very liquid and absent government intervention (e.g. capping prices), the Saudis or whomever would not somehow be able to take food out of Aussies' mouths or cause a food shortage. Like any farmland owner, they would be able to benefit from higher prices. Maybe they think that farmland is the new oil-land. Madman They are expecting that as a multinational they will be able to export food home when the food shortages start. This is not vague theorizing as the food shortages are already happening elsewhere : "The international rice market is currently facing a particularly difficult situation with demand out stripping supply and substantial price increases," Concepcion Calpe, senior economist for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said in Rome.
The FAO predicts the international rice supply available for trade to drop 3.5% to 29.9 million tonnes this year as some rice-growing countries hoard their crops amid droughts in China and Australia and production declines in the United States and Japan.
China, India, Egypt, Vietnam and Cambodia have either imposed minimum export prices, export taxes or export quotas and, as is the case in India, bans. As a result, demand has surged in countries that rely largely on rice imports, such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Iran.
The fall in exports is expected despite a 1.8% increase in rice production. Ms. Calpe said higher rice production may help reduce some of the price pressure, however, population growth would offset much of the gain"www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=420099
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Post by poitsplace on Mar 10, 2009 16:16:49 GMT
You know what's truly sad...this prolonged minimum has (as it so often seems to) caused lower crop yields. What do you want to bet these morons will blame it on global warming. We'll see some stupid news stories about how the climate change is accelerating beyond anything they'd ever imagined because food production has already dropped.
I grow tired of seeing stories (and I use both meanings of that word) in the news every day about how things are warming up faster (outright lies) or ironically that it's NOT warming but how the global warming is building up underneath the cooling. Oh, it's always there...lurking. The earth could plunge into another ice age but that warming would still be a problem that needed to be stopped. *sigh*
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Post by enginer on Mar 13, 2009 0:48:23 GMT
Sometime last year I started a "What if Global Cooling..." thread that predicted that if Theodor Landscheidt's prediction of Little Ice Age conditions by 2024 - 2030 were correct, the carying capacity of the earth might be about 2 billion people less than normal.
That still seems likely, but in the mean time: Just wait. John Holdren, of Woods Hole fame, is a reasonable man. I just dread him coming out and saying that the current potential Dalton Minimum gives us a fantastic chance to pass cap&trade laws to solve the AGW crisis before warming starts again!
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