The Independent reports today: Wheat is the new gold in time of plenty for America’s breadbasket
Comment: the US may well be ‘basking’ in the glow of good times regarding better conditions in agriculture, there is something to be said about being sceptical when things are ’too easy’ in terms of the natural world and its state of balance. Where we ’gain’ from the natural order, but at a price, there is usually a ‘reverse balance’/counter-swing in nature’s favour. Humans can only hope that this counterbalance does not in itself have a negative impact!
As fires wreck Russia’s harvests and poor countries brace for shortages, it’s boom time for Kansas farmers.
ildfires, floods, crippling droughts, and even a threatened plague of locusts have wrecked crops and ruined the world, raising fears of global food inflation shortage and food riots.
But as they hose off the dust and chaff caked on their exhausted combine harvesters, farmers in America’s plain states are adjusting to something possibly wonderful: a combination of unusually good wheat yields and suddenly soaring prices – thanks to disastrous circumstances elsewhere – has put them at the centre of a gold rush.
Wheat is the new gold in time of plenty for America’s breadbasket
As fires wreck Russia’s harvests and poor countries brace for shortages, it’s boom time for Kansas farmers.
The thin soil of the plains is not always so kind. Scorching drought and relentless rains are frequent visitors to the breadbasket of America. So it is startling for some to find themselves singled out for good fortune, while the rest of the US combats an unemployment rate that refuses to come down.
Russia announced that weeks of fierce heat and uncontrolled fires would cost the country a quarter of its crop and that its wheat exports, which will be frozen from tomorrow, may not resume until next year. Output in Ukraine and Kazakhstan has slumped too. Canadian wheat farmers have been struggling with crops drowned by rains that won’t stop, and in eastern Australia, the wheat crop could be devastated by a plague of locusts expected to start hatching next week.
Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat importer, and Indonesia and Thailand, which also both rely on imports of grain, complained this week that they face a sudden price squeeze on such staples as bread, pork and sugar and with that, the risk of social unrest of the kind witnessed in 2008, when food price hikes provoked riots in a number of countries.
Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome, said Morocco, Libya, Tunisia and Iran all face higher budget deficits because of the amounts they spend on bread subsidies. “Some are politically unstable countries – they simply cannot afford” the social effects that bread queues could have on the urban poor.
Whether the risk abates could depend on farmers in the American Midwest and whether they decide to cash in by planting more wheat, the world’s most consumed cereal. The rosy outlook for them was confirmed by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). It expects US exports to surge by 36 per cent this year.
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