America Confronted with Food Rationing

"There is no nutritional value in bread."

Our rice will definately get eaten!  We eat rice about 70% of the time now - our kids like rice with everything, esp beans.  One of their favorite lunches is rice cooked with chicken broth.

When I bought bulk foods, I substituted a lot of the wheat poundage for rice just because that's our slant.

I'm Welsh and American Indian and it is very traditional to eat rice for many of the tribes in the eastern US where it grows wild in the wetland areas.  Unfortunately many of the wetlands are destroyed now by pollution and the draining of swamp areas in favor of "progress".  Of course many Indians also have lost their traditions and instead eat like many white Americans do and buy their rice at the store.  I grew up eating rice often and I would miss not having it as would my family.  I made sure to put away a good amount months ago when I first thought this might happen.  I also canned many jars of butter to go on my rice.  Buy and put away your dairy products as grain shortages/prices, not to mention the price of gas and oil will also continue to effect  any products produced from animals as well. 

No food shortages in West Virginia, at least in Southern West Virginia. All of our Wallmarts and Kroeger's are fully stocked, no long lines, and no panic buying. All of us are however eying the gas pumps where it is hitting abou 3.85 in our town for premium at Shell.

New York Sun
April 28, 2008

Rice Rationing Spreads as Far as Israel
BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 28, 2008
URL: http://www2.nysun.com/article/75387

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Rationing of rice by retail stores has spread as far as Israel since The New York Sun reported on the phenomenon in Northern California last week.

The Blue Square and Supersol supermarket chains have begun limiting purchases of rice, Israeli newspapers said yesterday. Supersol is restricting each customer to "three bags per type of grain product," the Jerusalem Post reported.

Meanwhile, Asian grocery stores seem to be joining their larger wholesale-style competitors in curbing purchases. A supermarket chain which caters to Chinese Americans, 99 Ranch, is imposing two-bag-per-customer limits on most of its 20-pound and 50-pound sacks of rice, according to signs at its store in Cupertino, Calif. That store and others in the chain were selling rice without limitation a week ago.

Last week, Sam's Club announced it was limiting customers to four bags of imported Jasmine, Basmati, and long grain white rice. Costco had imposed such limits earlier, though they were not widely known until the Sun's report.

Trade associations for rice farmers and processors in America contend there is no shortage here, though prices for the grain have risen two to three times in recent months. However, there have been spot shortages of some of the imported varieties favored by immigrants and Asian restaurants, due in part to eateries stocking up to hedge against future price hikes or unavailability. Several big rice producing nations, including Vietnam and India, recently restricted exports to ensure supplies for their citizens.

fertilizer is an oil product, everything associated with oil will become more expensive, not necessarly in short supply.  

Prices are still the same here in Washington State, I was at the store today and some of what I bought was on sale.  Nonetheless, I'm going to prep with more nutribars and compact rations where I find them.  Impossible to store cheese and milk since they will go bad.

Too inconvenient and there's shipping and I work so I'm not home to receive the package.

Lol maybe they wanted to empty the silo's of rice stored and get rid of it cause it was getting old.  And now their gonna fill them up with fresh rice from the fields.

Independent.co.uk
Exposed: the great GM crops myth
Major new study shows that modified soya produces 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 20 April 2008


Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.


The study - carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt - has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.

Professor Barney Gordon, of the university's department of agronomy, said he started the research "reported in the journal Better Crops" because many farmers who had changed over to the GM crop had "noticed that yields are not as high as expected even under optimal conditions". He added: "People were asking the question 'how come I don't get as high a yield as I used to?'"

He grew a Monsanto GM soybean and an almost identical conventional variety in the same field. The modified crop produced only 70 bushels of grain per acre, compared with 77 bushels from the non-GM one.

The GM crop "engineered to resist Monsanto's own weedkiller, Roundup" recovered only when he added extra manganese, leading to suggestions that the modification hindered the crop's take-up of the essential element from the soil. Even with the addition it brought the GM soya's yield to equal that of the conventional one, rather than surpassing it.

The new study confirms earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsanto GM soya produced 6 per cent less than its closest conventional relative, and 11 per cent less than the best non-GM soya available.

The Nebraska study suggested that two factors are at work. First, it takes time to modify a plant and, while this is being done, better conventional ones are being developed. This is acknowledged even by the fervently pro-GM US Department of Agriculture, which has admitted that the time lag could lead to a "decrease" in yields.

But the fact that GM crops did worse than their near-identical non-GM counterparts suggest that a second factor is also at work, and that the very process of modification depresses productivity. The new Kansas study both confirms this and suggests how it is happening.

A similar situation seems to have happened with GM cotton in the US, where the total US crop declined even as GM technology took over. (See graphic above.)

Monsanto said yesterday that it was surprised by the extent of the decline found by the Kansas study, but not by the fact that the yields had dropped. It said that the soya had not been engineered to increase yields, and that it was now developing one that would.

Critics doubt whether the company will achieve this, saying that it requires more complex modification. And Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington "and who was one of the first to predict the current food crisis" said that the physiology of plants was now reaching the limits of the productivity that could be achieved.

A former champion crop grower himself, he drew the comparison with human runners. Since Roger Bannister ran the first four-minute mile more than 50 years ago, the best time has improved only modestly . "Despite all the advances in training, no one contemplates a three-minute mile."

Last week the biggest study of its kind ever conducted - the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development - concluded that GM was not the answer to world hunger.

Professor Bob Watson, the director of the study and chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when asked if GM could solve world hunger, said: "The simple answer is no."

I'm pretty sure SOMEONE is making profits out of any food hikes/shortages as well with oil. I know it's not me.:O(

I have been buying 1 lb bags of navy beans at Wal Mart as a prep and also to fill the spaces between large vacume sealed bags. They have been 58 cents forever. Today all the prices had been on the dried beans had been changed. The navy beans were $1.04. The whole section of the shelf looked different. More product. Like they expected some business there.

Penham..my daughter and husband,kids were at Whidby island for four years.. beautiful place ...if you get a chance go visit...
Thats scarry no rice on shelves at commisary,there is a diverse culture on the island that would use a lot of rice ....the shelves were always full of everything when I went with my daughter.....It has access from land ,air and water for shipments..very strange....

NationalEconomist.com
May 14, 2008
Inflation Data Show Food Prices Soaring
— Robert Wegner @ 9:01 am

The Consumer Price Index increased at an annualized rate of 7.2% in April, before seasonal adjustments, the Labor Department is reporting.

However, food prices climbed at annualized rate of 10.8% in the month of April.

Prices of most basic items, from bread and milk to coffee and fresh fruits, all increased.

Prices for bread increased 1.5 % in April and were 14.1% higher than a year earlier. Milk prices rose 0.9% and were 13.5% than in April 2007. The index for nonalcoholic beverages increased 1.7%, reflecting large price increases for coffee and for carbonated drinks In April alone coffee prices were up 4.0% and nonalcholoic beverages were up 2.2%.

On the downside, though likely only on a temporary basis, the transportation index declined 0.7% in April, reflecting a 2.0% decrease in the index for gasoline.

The military commissary system is now rationed rice to 20 lbs per person per day.  This is the first time I have seen rationing in the commissary in over 32 years of usage. 

I was comparing notes with a friend last week on food quality after finding out we'd both had bad experiences in the same local sub shop, and had independently come to the conclusion it was the bread. I was talking to him again today, and he told me that just the other day his boss had ordered in food from a place they've used many times, and the breadsticks (which are usually to die for) ended up being thrown away because they were awful. He was intrigued and went online, and from what he could find out it seems that unbleached wheat flour is getting so expensive that companies are buying cheaper bleached flour, hence the drop in quality.

FMNN
Grain Markets Panic Buying, Export Controls, and Food Riots
Commodities / Agricultural Commodities
May 18, 2008 - 12:08 PM

By: Joseph_Dancy


Long term global demand and supply trends in the agricultural sector remain very favorable for investors. New and expanding biofuel facilities, growing global population, and the upgrading of diets in many Asian countries continues to increase demand for grains at a rapid pace.

Supply growth is constrained by export controls recently implemented by many large grain producing countries, drought in several producing regions, and the lack of readily available acreage suitable for expanding farming operations. Western agriculture methods are also incredibly energy intensive, which increases the cost of expanding supplies. The following developments occurred in the sector last month:



The collapse of Australia 's rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months. Six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia 's rice crop by 98 percent. Price increases have led the world's largest exporters to restrict exports, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania , the Philippines , Thailand , Uzbekistan and Yemen . (New York Times)
The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) issued a forecast that rice prices will keep rising as demand for the staple is outstripping production. The Philippines-based body said that more research was needed in how to increase rice productivity. The price of rice has risen by as much as 70% during the past year, with increases accelerating in recent weeks. (BBC News)
U.S. restaurants and other large-scale customers are buying so much rice that Costco, Sam's Club and other wholesalers have put limits on the amounts they sell. This has resulted in some individual stores in places like California reportedly running out of rice. The supply problems with flour and rice are connected to dramatic price increases tied to global shifts in the commodity markets, where prices of corn, wheat, rice and soybeans have hit record levels. A rise in rice prices has led to restaurants and other big users stocking up to avoid future hikes, thus upsetting the supply chain. ( Chicago Tribune)

Some of the world's biggest grain exporters barred their farmers from selling in global markets last month, exacerbating the food price crisis. Rice and corn prices soared to records on U.S. markets and wheat jumped after Kazakhstan , the world's fifth-largest wheat exporter, and Indonesia , a major rice producer, became the latest nations to impose export bans.
China , Egypt , Vietnam and India , representing more than a third of global rice exports, curbed external sales this year. The price of rice, the staple food for half the world, is double the price a year ago and a fivefold increase from 2001. (Globe & Mail, Financial Times)

The cost of staple foods are at least 50% higher than they were this time last year. "We consider that the dramatic escalation in food prices worldwide has evolved into an unprecedented challenge of global proportions that has become a crisis for the world's most vulnerable, including the urban poor," the UN said in a statement. "The challenge is having multiple effects with its most serious impact unfolding as a crisis for the most vulnerable."
The price of some fertilizers has nearly tripled in price in the last year. A squeeze on fertilizer supply has been building for roughly five years. As demand has grown the fertilizer manufacturers of the world were unable to keep up. Some dealers in the Midwest ran out of fertilizer last fall, and they continue to restrict sales this spring because of a limited supply. “If you want 10,000 tons, they'll sell you 5,000 today, maybe 3,000,” said W. Scott Tinsman Jr., a fertilizer dealer in Davenport , Iowa . “The rubber band is stretched really far.” (New York Times)
Overall global consumption of fertilizer increased by an estimated 31 percent from 1996 to 2008, driven by a 56 percent increase in developing countries, according to the International Fertilizer Industry Association. Fertilizer is a combination of nutrients. The three most important are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. The latter two have long been available. But nitrogen in a form that plants can absorb is scarce, and the lack of it led to low crop yields for centuries.
That limitation ended in the early 20th century with the invention of a procedure, now primarily fueled by natural gas that draws chemically inert nitrogen from the air and converts it into a usable form. As the use of such fertilizer spread, it was accompanied by improved plant varieties and greater mechanization. (New York Times)

Prices at a terminal in Tampa , Fla. , for diammonium phosphate, a fertilizer component, jumped to $1,102 a ton from $393 a ton in the last year, according to JPMorgan Securities. Urea, a type of granular nitrogen fertilizer, jumped to $505 a ton from $273 a ton in the last year. Manufacturers are scrambling to increase supply. At least 50 plants to make nitrogen fertilizer are under construction, many in the Middle East where natural gas is abundant. Phosphorous and potassium mines are being expanded. But these projects are expensive and take time to ramp up. Supplies are expected to remain tight for years. (New York Times)
From 1900 to 2000, worldwide food production jumped by 600 percent. Scientists said that increase was the fundamental reason world population was able to rise to about 6.7 billion today from 1.7 billion in 1900. Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba , calculates that without nitrogen fertilizer, there would be insufficient food for 40 percent of the world's population (based on today's diets).
From 1965 to 1985, the heyday of the Green Revolution, world production of cereal grains — wheat, rice, corn, barley and sorghum — nearly doubled, from 1 billion to 1.8 billion metric tons. Cereal prices dropped by 40 percent. Today, wheat provides about 20 percent of the food calories for the world's people. (New York Times)
Stem rust is the most feared of all wheat diseases. It can turn a healthy crop of wheat into a tangled mass of stems that produce little or no grain. The fungus spores travel in the wind, causing the infection to spread quickly. It has caused major famines since the beginning of history. In North America , huge grain losses occurred in 1903 and 1905 and from 1950 to 1954.
The new strains of stem rust, called Ug99 because they were discovered in Uganda in 1999, are much more dangerous than those that, 50 years ago, destroyed the American wheat crop. Ug99 is devastatingly damaging to wheat.

So far agricultural scientists have not been able to find an effective defense against it. Ug99 has defeated the two main gene complexes which protect most wheat strains from stem rust. It appears to resist most fungicides. Of the 50 genes we know for resistance to stem rust, only 10 work even partially against Ug99. Less than 1 percent of the world's wheat crops contain these genes. After being restricted to East Africa , Ug99 has now been identified in Yemen . Today's lush, high-yielding wheat fields on vast irrigated tracts are ideal environments for the fungus to multiply, so the potential for crop loss is greater than ever. ( Middle East Times, Financial Times)

As he's done every spring for 20 years, agricultural meteorologist Elwynn Taylor spent the past week barricaded inside his office at Iowa State University , poring over weather patterns to answer a crucial question: Will a drought strike the Midwest 's corn and soybean crops?
Last month Taylor delivered some bad news. He pegs the odds of a major drought at 1 in 3, about double the usual risk. "There is a significant chance of drought," he said. At Iowa State , Taylor seeks to put the reams of weather data into historical context. A major drought typically strikes the Midwest every 18 or 19 years, and the last one hit in 1988. Taylor noted the average length of time between major Midwest droughts is 18.6 years. "The longest gap between major droughts in 800 years is 23 years, so if we don't have one by 2011, we'll break an 800 year-old record," Taylor said "We're overdue," he noted.

In addition, the past 17 droughts were preceded a year earlier by dry conditions in the Southeastern U.S., just as occurred last year. "That gives a significant chance of drought," he said.

Those historical parallels go only so far. Droughts don't arrive by clockwork, and dryness in the Midwest doesn't always follow the lead of the Southeast. Still, the cumulative evidence is powerful enough to indicate a 72.6 percent chance of corn yields below the trend line at harvest time, Taylor said. "I only go with the data," he said. "This is a legitimate concern." ( Chicago Tribune, Brownfield Network)

In many areas of the Midwest the corn planting schedules are well behind schedule. Corn planting has fallen further behind last year and 5-yr average. As of April 27 th only 10% of the U.S. corn crop was in the ground vs. 20% this time last year, and a 5-yr. average of 35%. Planting was behind last year's pace in 15 of 18 states. Iowa , Illinois , and Missouri , remain well behind pace as wet weather has taken a toll, raising the potential for a shortfall. (Bank of America )
Commentators note that corn is not like wheat. Wheat can survive drought and cold quite well. Corn is more temperamental, needing dry conditions to get the crop planted in timely manner and consistent rain once it germinates. If planting is delayed several more weeks the expected yield will be impacted adversely in many farming areas.

At least 14 countries have been racked by food related violence in the last year. After hungry mobs and violent riots beset Port-au-Prince , Haitian Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis was forced to step down earlier this month.
In Malaysia , Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is struggling for political survival after a March rebuke from voters furious over food prices. In Bangladesh , more than 20,000 factory workers protesting food prices rampaged through the streets two weeks ago. ( Minneapolis Star Tribune.com)

By Joseph Dancy,
Adjunct Professor: Oil & Gas Law, SMU School of Law
Advisor, LSGI Market Letter

http://www.lsgifund.com

Evergreen on NSSM 200:

RICHARD-FL wrote: The military commissary system is now rationed rice to 20 lbs per person per day.  This is the first time I have seen rationing in the commissary in over 32 years of usage.    My wife runs a small Asian food store and she cannot get rice whole sale from her sources since Jan 08.  So rice is not being imported into this country in the amounts we have used in the pass.     What other food items are disappearing off the shelves?

Hey johngardner1, good to see you back!

Littleraven Posted: April 24 2008 at 9:31pm wrote: ]I don't have a source  other than from the horse's mouth so to speak-----My husband who was recently out in Arkansas and knows a few of the large farmers out there told him that there is definately a shortage in the real sense of the word and that it was going to get worse.  The grains which are in reserves---much of it is being exported to other countries and due to the bad weather they have been experiencing --the crops will be in bad shape.  Many of the fields have suffered from  flooding etc...  They can't get their equipment into many areas to plant anything.  They said it was a mess and that even the rice fields have to be prepared.  They say many of next years crops will not keep up with the demand,

LittleRaven your husband gave us a heads up nearly two months ago

http://standeyo.com/NEWS/08_Food_Water/080711.meat.prices.rising.html

My Dad grew up in London during the war years and I remember him talking about the garden at my grandparents house in Finchley. It was maybe 30 feet wide, and about 250 feet long. To cope with the rationing they grew all kinds of fruit and veg, and they raised chickens as well. It was a bit overgrown by the time I came along, but in the years before my Gran died we'd go and visit and she'd send us down the garden to collect blackberries, blackcurrants, rhubarb, gooseberries, cherries, raspberries, etc. The cherry tree used to scare the heck out of me - probably the worst climbing tree I'd ever seen and she'd still send us up.