

High snowfall and cold weather to blame.











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RE: I knew!!
By Ringold on 10/16/2008 9:05:10 PM , Rating: 2
1. Is it better to produce too much food, so we can keep prices down and throw away the stuff we don't eat?

Lower prices doesn't necessarily mean food gets tossed in the ocean.

2. Lower prices for food means farmers get less paid. The ones that are hurt the most by this is third world farmers who cannot afford the luxury of using oil-based fertilizers.

I'll also tackle 3, regarding historic low prices. Prices were low for a reason. Prices surged for a reason. The reasons are the same. Governments, in America, Europe as well as developing countries, have erected trade barriers and put in place large subsidies that distort global markets and protect their farmers. This has meant that farmers who should've gone on to other things have stuck around pumping out too much food, depressing prices. Then we, the US, comes along and suddenly over the space of a few years divert about 1/3 of our domestic maize crop to ethanol, and put in place mandates for even more ethanol. Economists warned at the very start of the ethanol craze it'd drive up prices, asking how ethical that would be.. but when the farm lobby and liberals get together, the resulting force is unstoppable.

Prices did need to be a bit higher, but before prices came back down it was way too high.

4. Most ethanol is produced in Brazil. I doubt growing cheap food in South America will help the Africans much.

We have an import tariff on Brazilian ethanol, and thus almost none is imported.

5. ...but the cheaper oil prices as a result of more people using bio-fuels will help everyone!

Not if, as has been the case up till now, biofuels wreak havoc in other markets just to have a tiny impact on oil prices. Oil is coming down because of a global recession, not ethanol. Also, you appear concerned about Africa and poor countries, but that happens to be where a lot of oil is. Lower oil prices mean less revenue their governments have to invest in human capital and infrastructure. Double edged sword!

just how large a population can our planet sustain?"

As long as we aren't burning food for fuel, Brazil alone has vast tracts of land that could be brought under cultivation, and if everybody had the same productivity as American farmers.. we're no where near the limit we could sustain over time. The above question only rears its head with the same idiots that thought in the 70s that by 2000 the world would have already collapsed in to mass famine.


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