World Grain Reserves Drop, Kansas Harvest Drops, Ethanol Uses Precious Water

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Even as America begins to transition into using food for gasoline, droughts, dropping world grain reserves and speculators cause rapid inflation. Ethanol also uses tremendous amounts of clean water to produce which impacts both farmers and cities. Beet and sugar growers who use a lot of irrigation also want to start ethanol factories. The planet earth can't sustain gas guzzling for very much longer.

World grain reserves plummet as millions starve in third world countries.

by Lester Brown, Enery Bulletin

This year’s world grain harvest is projected to fall short of consumption by 61 million tons, marking the sixth time in the last seven years that production has failed to satisfy demand. As a result of these shortfalls, world carryover stocks at the end of this crop year are projected to drop to 57 days of consumption, the shortest buffer since the 56-day-low in 1972 that triggered a doubling of grain prices.

World carryover stocks of grain, the amount in the bin when the next harvest begins, are the most basic measure of food security. Whenever stocks drop below 60 days of consumption, prices begin to rise. It thus came as no surprise when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) projected in its June 9 world crop report that this year’s wheat prices will be up by 14 percent and corn prices up by 22 percent over last year’s.

This price projection assumes normal weather during the summer growing season. If the weather this year is unusually good, then the price rises may be less than those projected, but if this year’s harvest is sharply reduced by heat or drought, they could far exceed the projected rises.

Energy inflation becomes food inflation. I know that when I shop at the markets, the bite on my wallet grows and grows. The farmers aren't getting rich off of all this because they have to consume a great deal of oil in order to produce these grains. Paradoxically, good years are not good for farmers, actually, they want everyone else to have a bad year while they have a good year. This is why the Feds created a system for controlling how much grain was sown and harvested.

Of course, the GOP ditched all that.

Grain dealers as well as farmers have been overjoyed at the prospect of using ethanol. They don't care if this system is destructive and unsustainable. They just want to make money today. Farmers who used their lands for hundreds of years, passing it down to succeeding generations, no longer exist in America. Everyone wants to make a profit off the land and then hightail it down to Florida or Arizona or some such place while the kids flee even earlier.

The bounty of the 'green revolution' was possible entirely and totally thanks to oil. This is why we can be so blase about using food for fuel. There is so much, so long as we ignore the starving who live elsewhere anyway!

The Europeans are growing angry about Americans causing an energy crisis because we gas guzzle.

By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 15 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Americans paying $3 per gallon at the pump have it relatively cheap when compared with prices globally, say oil and gas company executives who defend their record profits as essential to maintaining supplies.

In parts of Europe and elsewhere in the West, gasoline prices are more like $5 per gallon to $7 per gallon, said the chairman of ConocoPhillips Co., James J. Mulva.

"This is a global business, and it's not only that we need to add to supply, but we need to reduce demand," Mulva said. "In the United States alone, we have about 2 percent of world oil reserves, 5 percent of the population and yet we use about 25 percent of the world's consumption of oil."

When America hit the Hubbert Oil Peak in 1970, right on the nose as Mr. Hubbert predicted, we began to experience tremendous inflation just like we did in 1980 when the Iran/Iraq war caused prices to shoot up and today. There is a time delay before high energy prices translate in to high food prices. Usually, it begins with farmers deciding to not utilize marginal lands. Farmers who can no longer afford to work marginal farms go out of business altogether. Then there is Mother Nature. Like in the 1930's, she and whollop farmers hard.

The Kansas red winter wheat is 100 million bushels less than last year.

Friday, May 05, 2006 :: infoZine Staff : The final estimate for the 2006 hard red winter wheat tour sponsored by the Wheat Quality Council was announced at the Kansas City Board of Trade. The final participant estimate for the three-day tour average was a yield of 37.3 bushels per acre, 8.9 bushels lower than the 2005 estimate of 46.2 bushels per acre.

Participants in the tour made individual estimates on the total size of the crop, which ranged from 238 million bushels to 395 million bushels. The weighted average was 319.2 million bushels. Last year's final estimate for the tour was 419.76 million bushels.

Overall, the Kansas wheat crop showed definite signs of drought stress, with plants shorter in stature and smaller head development. This year's crop is rapidly maturing and the wheat should be headed out throughout most of the state of Kansas going into next week, according to tour participants. Wheat throughout the state showed a range of development, between the boot and flowering stages, with a larger percentage of the wheat in the heading stage for this time of year. Areas of southwest and central Kansas showed lower yields because of the dry weather and freeze damage. While rain in some areas of the state could still improve kernel development in wheat plants, there are fields where moisture could be too late at this point to save the crop.

If one flies over the USA, it is easy to spot marginal farmlands. Often, they are located in low rain districts but use well or river water to irrigate soil that has been enriched by past convulsions of the Yellowstone caldera. Yesterday, Kansas was hit by more tornadoes and hail. Hail it particularily damaging. I have lost vegetable harvests to hail storms in the past.

If we use food plants which are rich in energy as gasoline, we will not only see great inflation, we will see starvation increase, loss of ecosystems as even the most marginal lands are hijacked into energy production (switchgrass, anyone?) and desertfication will take off, it is already a great force. Deserts are growing rapidly and this is due a great deal to human interventions.

Many forms of energy creation use tremendous amounts of water, even ethanol uses massive amounts of water.

By JIM PAUL, Associated Press Writer Mon Jun 19, 1:55 AM ET
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - City officials in Champaign and Urbana took notice when they heard that an ethanol plant proposed nearby would use about 2 million gallons of water per day, most likely from the aquifer that also supplies both cities.

"There was concern about impacting a pretty valuable resource," said Matt Wempe, a city planner for Urbana. "It should raise red flags."

The proposal for a 100 million gallon-per-year ethanol plant is just one of many that have popped up in the past several months across Illinois, which already has seven operating plants and is the nation's No. 2 ethanol producer after Iowa.

Mining for gold uses up tremendous amounts of water. Generating nuclear power uses up tremendous amounts of water. Damming rivers all over the planet causes more evaporation as well. The BBC reported this week that more than half of the world's populations now live in cities and cities are notorious water wasters. Due to the accident in history of London and Paris being on major rivers, human waste is flushed with water nearly universally so water pollution is way up, and let's not be fooled by water 'purification' plants, they let lots of pollution like birth control medicines, pass through into nature, changing the ability of water animals to reproduce, for example.

Desertfication is spreading. Sucking up all the available water resources to both farm and then refine ethanol products will merely accelerate this process way past the tipping point. It also will contribute to global warming just like mining coal will pollute the environment and tremendously increase global warming. Ceasing our gas guzzling is cheaper, much easier, and safer which is why we refuse to do it.

Sugar and beet producers want a slice of the gas guzzling pie.

By FREDERIC J. FROMMER, Associated Press Writer Sun Jun 18, 3:23 PM ET
WASHINGTON - With the market for corn-based ethanol booming, lawmakers from sugar-producing U.S. states are hoping that beet and cane growers can soon jump onto the renewable fuel bandwagon.

They cite the model of Brazil, which produces ethanol made from sugar cane. But critics, pointing out that sugar is much cheaper in Brazil than in the United States, question whether the economics of sugar-based ethanol would work in America.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is expected to issue a long-awaited study around July 1 on the viability of converting sugar into ethanol.

Hitler decided to use food for fuel during WWII. So he came up with the nifty idea of starving millions and millions of people to death. Coupled with working millions to death as slaves, he managed to reduce the population of Europe by a significant amount. We aren't being quite so ruthless, yet. But the possibility of us acting the same way rises each day. Brazil has cheap sugar because they have excess population which wears rags, are very skinny, and work like slaves and then die young. We use energy intensive machines to work our fields. Again, this all comes down to who gets a slice of the energy pie. Wealthy people will gas guzzle and the rest of humanity gets to die.

The Iranians cause world oil prices to drop, temporarily.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oil eased away from $70 on Monday after shedding 2.4 percent last week, with dealers weighing more positive signals from Iran on its atomic program.

U.S. light, sweet crude fell 67 cents to $69.21 a barrel on Monday, snapping a three-day rising streak. Brent crude dropped 73 cents to $68.07 a barrel.

Oil slumped to a more than three-week low of $68.10 last Wednesday amid a commodities and equities sell-off sparked by inflation concerns, but later recovered in tandem with other markets after a more doveish message from the Federal Reserve.

An election is coming up. Bush and his minions are scared. They have to drop energy prices a tad, just enough to fool the usual suspects into voting GOP one more time. Our government (sic) is being pulled in two directions. To keep up the appearance of democracy, the GOP has to have elections. They can't steal them even with Diebold machines if they are wildly unpopular. So they need cheap fuel prices plus tax cuts to keep on trucking.

But the Israelis want us to menace Iran so our government which is partially owned by the Zionists, stirs up trouble with Iran. Even rumors of this drives up world oil prices. This schizoid business is causing great instability which has been exploited by others in various clever ways.

The Iranians have figured it out and they deliberately roil world oil markets whenever they feel like it just like Saddam did before our illegal invasion.

TEHRAN, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi Sunday blamed the United States for its activities to prevent the Europe Union (EU) from offering a compromise on Iran's nuclear dispute.

"Obviously, the U.S. is trying to bring the Europe to a place where the nuclear case can not be resolved," Asefi told reporters.

Washington always imposed preconditions on the nuclear negotiation, which has reduced the possibilities to hold talks and added more difficulties for all parties to come to an agreement, denounced the spokesman.

The American media wants to pretend Iran is anxious and we are not scared to death. This orientation is stupid. All the pictures I see of the Iranians doing these negotiations show happy, smiling Persian kitty cats, purring happily. Pictures of Condi and her crew are all furrowed brows and dark scowls.

If only we ceased gas guzzling. Then the world will right itself and we will have a small breathing space before the really nasty effects of the Hubbert World Oil Peak begin in ernest.

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