World food supplies precarious
June 11th, 2008 by Jim JustAt a time when food prices and shortages are already leading to unrest and riots around the world, further disaster is threatening.
With supplies of most of the key commodities at their lowest levels in decades, there is little room for error this year. Yet American corn and soybean farmers are suffering from too much rain, while Australian wheat farmers have been plagued by drought. China also faces trouble: the agriculture ministry issued an urgent notice to wheat and rice farmers in southern China on Sunday, telling them to harvest as much of their crop as possible immediately in the face of unseasonable torrential rains expected to rake the region for the next 10 days.
And the U.S. has no remaining grain reserves, nothing in our emergency food pantry. No cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or anything else left in reserve. All that’s left in the CCC larder is 2.7 million bushels of wheat – about enough wheat to make ½ of a loaf of bread for each of the 300 million people in America.
The USDA Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) was created to stabilize, support, and protect farm income and prices, to maintain balanced and adequate supplies of agricultural commodities, and to aid in their orderly distribution. The 1996 farm bill eliminated the government’s grain reserves as well as the Farmer Owned Reserve (FOR).