Sowing the Seeds of Self-Reliance for Forty Years
Weather, Wheat and Beans
Top Wishes for the New Year
14 Jan 97
by Geri Guidetti
All contents copyright © 1997. All rights reserved.
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The calendar hanging over my desk says 1997 all right, but a study of national and global weather patterns since the beginning of this new year reveals just how little has changed. Life is, indeed, a continuum, and the extreme weather patterns that have marked recent years show no signs of letting up just because we trashed the old calendar on December 31.
A few years ago conservative climatologists argued that the historic floods, snowstorms, hurricane seasons, droughts and heat waves that challenged the survival of crops, man, woman and beast were just that—historic—those once every hundred year or so events that had little chance of being repeated until, well, a hundred years from now. Today many of these same climatologists have gone from hundred-year convictions to head scratching and, now, to predictions that we ARE in some sort of cycle of extremes. How long the cycle will last is anybody’s guess, but from 10 to 50 years are common guesses.
What does that mean for the global food supply? It means that in a world just beginning to come to grips with the inevitable natural limits of trying to feed ever-increasing numbers of people on a planet with finite resources and deteriorating agricultural lands, the challenge to produce enough for just the CURRENT year is growing. There are a lot of people in high places in a lot of countries who are starting to really worry, and those who aren’t have their heads tucked firmly in the sand.
Let’s look at world grain production, for example. Though there are variations from one year to the next, production has leveled off now for ten years, this at a time when global population is increasing at a rate of 1.7 million people per week. Poor weather conditions in the world’s major grain producing regions is increasingly becoming a factor in production figures.
Recent and current weather is already impacting prospects for the U.S. wheat crop this year. A January 10 report by the Department of Agriculture disclosed that the area seeded to winter wheat in 1997 totals 48.2 million acres, down 7% from 1996. This will be the smallest winter wheat seeded acreage since 1978! From flooded fields and late plantings in the Pacific Northwest and Plains States, to drought in South Central and Southwestern states, weather conditions at planting time this fall prevented optimal seeding. Durum wheat seeding in Arizona and California for 1997 harvest is down 28%. Durum wheat is used to make pasta. These shortfalls do not bode well for this year’s winter wheat harvest prospects, and winter wheat traditionally provides the lion’s share of the annual wheat harvest.
Also from the most recent Department of Agriculture data, the projected 1996/97 ending stocks of corn are down 198 million bushels from last month. You might remember from one of our fall updates that the USDA had reported the ’96 corn crop was much larger than predicted given this past summer’s weather problems in the Corn Belt states. The crop was more than 1.8 billion bushels larger than last year. But, larger feed and other uses, up 225 million bushels, more than offset the larger harvest. As a result, corn futures for March delivery rose on Wall Street this week as stocks are much tighter than expected. Watch crop reports coming out of South America. A good harvest there could buffer shortfalls. A poor harvest there would definitely portend even tighter global supplies and higher prices for corn based sweeteners and foods, corn fed animals and ethanol.
While soybean stocks have been adequate over recent years, I suggested some time ago that increasing global consumption for soybean oil and animal feed would soon impact international supplies. Soybean stocks in the U.S. totaled 1.82 billion bushels on December 1, 1996, according to the latest data. This is down 1 percent from the same date in 1995. By September 1, the Agriculture Department now says that soybean supplies in the U.S. will dwindle to 155 million bushels, about a three week supply and the lowest levels in 20 years.
Commenting on the unexpected lower estimates and record demand, Joel Karlin, a research analyst with Everen Securities, Inc. told The Associated Press, "This is exceptionally tight. It almost mandates good production in both Argentina and Brazil." As you can see, despite national boundaries, our food supply is becoming increasingly globally interdependent.
The markets are already reacting to a potential squeeze. While the average price for the 1995/96 marketing year was $6.80/bushel, this week’s soybean futures for March delivery rose to $7.292.
It is also interesting to note that oats--an excellent source of human nutrition though most produced in the U.S. is fed to animals—were estimated to be at 129 million bushels on December 1, 1996. This is down 16 percent from the stocks a year earlier. Weather played a prominent role in this decline as well
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At the Midwest Agricultural Outlook Conference held this August in Michigan, Darrell Good from the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois said, "World grain inventories have been reduced to extremely low levels. World consumption of wheat and coarse grains (combined) has exceeded production in each of the past three years. As a result, world inventories have been reduced to the lowest level in two decades. On a per capita basis, inventories may be at, or near, record levels."
If there is a common thread woven throughout the tapestry of data coming out of fields and farms around the world it might be: The past is not prologue. We can no longer confidently EXPECT that the crop will always come in, that there will be sufficient stocks available from our excess production to feed us when we lose a year to weather or other mishap. Food will become an increasingly personal and political issue in the years ahead. We can no longer afford the luxury of complete dependence on others to provide this very basic human need....Geri Guidetti, The Ark Institute
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E-mail: arkinstitute@aol.com
This article may be reprinted IF my copyright and Sig. File are reprinted intact.
All contents copyright © 1997, Geri Guidetti. All rights reserved.
Revised: 7 Feb 97
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