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cmac2012 · #1 04-21-2008, 07:14 PM

understand why the severe rice shortage in many nations is not a problem and in no way indicates a possible excess of world wide population pressure.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/d08bdc8ed113a42989155893cca08dec.htm

One story I heard on the news had it that the Bangladesh govt. put our a call to buy umpteen metric tons of rice and got no offers. That is NO offers..

Botnst · #2 04-21-2008, 07:40 PM

Rice, oats, wheat, barley, corn, grain sorghum (milo). The 6 most important food crops on the plant for humans and livestock. 3 are tropical/subtropical (rice, corn, grain sorghum) and 3 are temperate/subarctic (oats, wheat, barley).

Most people have food preferences that they learned as children. Most of us in North America don't consume much barley (except as beer!), but it's the 2nd or 3rd most important food crop! And so forth. The result is that folks who grow-up eating say rice, aren't likely to adapt quickly to grain sorghum, and vice versa.

There is also the issue of palatability. There maybe a lot of rice (for example) around of a long grained variety but if you're a short grain culture you may not like it.

As I understand it, with rice there is a transportation problem more than a production problem. What is a transportation problem? It is when a producer is unable to ship his produce to the consumer. There are many ways that can happen. With corn it's a problem of industrial applications competing for food. Livestock finishers are substituting wheat and other grains for corn since the corn is now going into ethanol production. So the wheat prices go up under pressure from consumers.

And it cascades around and around until some sort of new dynamic equilibrium is reached.

Speaking of transportation problem, what would happen if producers were unable to ship their grains because of say, a fuel interruption? Imagine a food importing country like oh ... North Korea, China, Iran etc.

B

cmac2012 · #3 04-21-2008, 08:59 PM

The instability of transportation costs is a lot of why I don't whole heartedly embrace shipping off all of our production capacity to China, a la Aklim.

One of my clients are (married couple) personnel trainers. Every few months they get a huge pallet or two of dumb-bells, from 5 to 35 pounds usually, from China. Not knocking them, everyone does it now, but it just seems a bit weird to ship scrap ahrn to China and then ship it back as dumb-bells.

It looks like it works on paper, better cash flow for someone, but oil is being squandered for this bizarre arrangement.