A Note From our Milkman
Posted by Euan Mearns on September 30, 2007 - 9:59am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Economics/Finance
Tags: agricultural prices, inflation, milk [list all tags]
A curious custom in the UK is that we still get milk delivered to our door step by the milkman each day. Today we received a rather curious note from our milkman (Robert Wiseman Dairies) warning of higher prices, growing demand and extreme weather. What is the world coming to?
Dear Customer,
Doorstep Milk Prices - Sunday 30th September 2007
I am sure you will be well aware by now, from the extensive on-going press coverage, of the substantial increase in prices affecting the numerous agricultural associated products.
The primary factors influencing the increase in milk costs are due to the heightened demand for dairy products along with availablity issues. These issues are being intensified by the extreme weather conditions currenly being experienced around the world, which in turn has increased our costs considerably in recent months.
This increase will help to secure the future of our milk supply and the continutaion of the Doorstep Service.
Doortstep Price Increase as of 30th September 2007
Pint Glass - will increase by 4 pence per pint
500 ml carton - will increase by 4 pence per 500 mlsI would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your loyal custom and continued support.
In recent days I have picked up stories in the press about chicken / egg farmers going out of business because of increased feed prices and the same seems to be happening to pig farmers. In the interest of keeping inflation under control, it seems the supermarkets are refusing to pay higher prices to farmers.
Does this provide a glimpse of the future? We may have to eat fewer eggs, less pork and bacon and drink less milk.
Food prices have been increasing steadily since the midst of 2006, in the wake of higher energy prices and higher minerals prices.
This is how it goes, slowly cascading through the primary sector of the Economy and eventually reaching broadly.
In the next months we'll see a run up in bread, which is always a simpton of economic failiure (bread is a Geffen good - they rise during economic recession). Also expect the price of cotton and linen to follow, afecting more seriously the secondary sector.
We are entering slowly and smothly into recession, but that's exactly were we are going.
I agree fuel prices do add to the consumable price, zinging things around is going to have to stop. Wall street journal just quote Dan Yergin again, and Fed chair Bernanke, title is:
How Economoy Could Survive $100/bbl oil.
WSJ online is a pay wall, but never fear, you can read it here at Moneyweb
just put out a few hours ago.
OCB
Luis,
Definitely a wave that is hitting us now, but one of the little ones before the rogue wave.
One thing I have noticed just lately (last 2 weeks) is siginificant package alterations.
One example I noted today...cheese blocks of a standard 600g size for the last 5 years...just changed to 520g...same price.
A 13.3% change/price inflation. I think this will be more common in NA where it seems to be more acceptable (and most likely less people can read and recognize the change).
Time to get a cow :-P
Juice bottles from 14oz to 12oz as well. This is one thing I love about recycling - when packaging looks a little different, I often have an old one to compare it to.
In true Orwellian fashion this inflation will not show up in the official CPI. Some bureaucrat will invoke hedonics to claim smaller amounts are better for the consumer.
Interesting. And I thought it was only me!
Here's another data-point: my children eat a sort of chocolate granola bar when the get out of school. (And a piece of fruit, too!) Up until now, there were (statistically speaking) a dozen or so chocolate chips visible on the top of the bar.
My daughter opened a new packet on the weekend, and thought we had bought the wrong kind, since no chocolate chips could be seen. Turns out it was exactly the same package, same product. Evidently they have reduced the amount of chocolate in order to maintain the same price. We found one chip in the bar...
I expect we will be seeing more of this in the future.
While this is posted in the European side of TOD I have noticed this in the USA. I think I posted to a Drumbeat the other day in a thread talking about food prices, how I have noticed even the CHEAP food stores have rasied prices.
But in the USA they don't count food or fuel prices in the Core inflation numbers. Which is where it hurts the poor or middle class "paycheck to paycheck" people the most. I personally have never been what is termed middle class. I have never made over 20k $USD per year, which puts me in the Lower Class of wage earners in the US. Maybe I just notice things more than most people, Or maybe I can post my opinions online where others just have the street corner.
I do work locally helping the Homeless, most of my work is running the e.mail site and the blog for a group called HUSH, Homeless United to Save the Homeless. While I am not homeless myself, nor is the lady that started the group, she felt that it was her calling because she had been homeless at one time in her life. I see a lot of free foods being offered the Homeless, but someone has to pay for the foods in the long run. As costs go up I am willing to bet the donations will take a hit. But as the world gets further along into the Peak and over the top on the down side more people will show up in the Homeless ranks and the Food will not be there for them.
I am glad there still is a few companies that have door to door service for milk and other products here in the USA.
In a move reminiscent of the Texas Railroad Commission removing oil production rationing in 1972 and thereby signalling that the U.S. had no remaining unused production capacity, the EU have scrapped “set-aside” for next year. The set-aside rules were introduced to reduce the Europe’s subsidised overproduction and resulting grain mountains. Times have changed.
Will we ever again pay farmers not to produce?
I seriously doubt it. We may overcome the Energy problems with Nuclear, Renewables and maybe Coal, but Agriculture is a different matter.
Thanks for point this out Chris, it was out of my radar.
8
This has been noted in Germany in the media months ago - in part, because the set aside was also seen as a long term conservation method. Before the EU, essentially all arable land in 'core' Europe was farmed (Russia being the major exception), and had been for centuries.
As has been noted by others (Roger Connor comes to mind), being able to collect data and look at things in perspective will be a critical skill in the future.
The EU used emergency grain stocks for the first time in its history to deal with drought in Spain and Portugal in 2005. That is why food stocks exist, after all - to deal with drought, war, etc.
Allowing farmers to produce food flat out in the short term is one thing - having them produce flat out for biofuels is another. And there, the EU does have policy directives in place mandating biofuel use.
However, at least in Germany, sustainable agriculture plays an increasingly large role in food production (much like renewable energy does - increasing, but certainly not sufficient), and to the extent that sustainable means lower yield and/or higher cost, it is not really a surprise that banked farm land is being drawn upon.
The real question is whether the withdrawals are from interest or capital, but at least in Europe, food production is not exactly treated lightly.
And it is not yet a sign of panic - except for the shock of diary prices, which is still very tightly regulated in the EU. Farmers who deliver more milk than their quota in Germany are still fined, apparently. However, it seems as if the farmers consider this more a ploy of the diaries to ensure absolute control over the market than anything else, as this quota is enforced at that level, preventing farmers from selling milk to anyone else.
The fishermen on the Grand Banks knew what the situation was for cod well before the collapse of that fishery, any small collection of data by scientists (considered 'reputable') was more than overwhelmed by political/ business intrests on land. Fishermen who spoke out were merely ignored.
It might be more in our interest to allow those 'on the ground' directly involved in agriculture to be our guides rather than those able to collect data and look at things in perspective. Those scientific views may be accurate but often arrive late or are muzzled by competing interests. (read tobacco!)
I am not a professional in agriculture but am 'on the land' enough to speak a little about Coastal British Columbia' where among other things there was no honey production in my area. The lack of sun this summer was phenomenal. The garden which I have been growing for about 8 years is slow by, IMO, two to three weeks, or else not maturing enough to be edible. To make up for what I see happened this summer.I plan to increase the area I am growing under glass now.
Any farmers and gardeners in the audience? Let's hear from them.
I am changing{upgrading} my garden capacity 4-fold this year due to uncertain weather and food outlook.My primary focus is fruit trees,and the advice my grandfather gave me has been a blessing.That advice was to always have a wide varieties of trees,not a mono crop of 1 or 2 varieties.I have blocks of 10-30{total around 140}on three acres.This year was a boom on pears,and bust on apples,though I have lots for the chickens due to a apple maggot infestation .Good yield on Bosc,Bartlett,and all my asian pears,especially the Chojuro.
A recommendation for the best gardening book I have read in a long time that gives some very hardheaded,practical advice on food production is "Gardening when It Counts"by the guy who started Territorial Seed co. Steve Solomon.Get it .Study it.People who don't have the benefit of having been raised by a depression era gardeners {like my grandparents} might have a a shortened learning curve when it is needed by using his information.
We had cool year here,much like the summers of my youth,when the coastal forests would keep the temps moderate.{Most of the big trees are underwater in japan now,exported,and stored.}I have noticed the changes that have increased the sun,and also the extremes.Rarely did the weather get as extreme as is has become,with windstorms,weird times in the spring{feb} where the temp will go to 70's for long enough to break winter dormancy of plants,thus making then vulnerable to the inevitable freeze that insures a 50%loss of my fruit{grrrr}Climate change is real,here,and the farmers know it well..
I'm about same with fruit-about 120 trees, mostly apple, but several varieties of plum, pear, asian pear, cherry, peach, and apricot. Poor results with apples this year, alot of pears, cherries, peaches. Probable bud freeze. Fencing this fall for another 150 apples-hobby to play with other varieties.
All that said, there is tons of more fruit than we can deal with-been canning, drying, pressing and storing. If it wasn't for livestock, much would waste. We sauce and then cellar apples, but greatest use is pressing to cider -hundred+ gallons per year. Mash to livestock.
Actually, 2 trees per fruit is about all most individuals will handle unless it's a full time job. It's easy to grow, the time consuming work is harvest and preserving before rot. Take pears, perhaps a week with Bartletts from hard to too soft at 60 degrees. A well pruned semi dwarf tree will give 3-4 bushels per year, a long, long time to spend home canning at about 10-12 quarts per bushel. Have everything else popping-from cider to animals and stock to care for, end of garden and the piles of tomatoes and corn to preserve, late plums, and you get swamped.
Could you do something like this?
http://www.appleannies.com/index.php
They have excellent fruit and produce, they let you eat all you want while picking your own, the prices are very good and they seem to be very prosperous.
Love the tomatoes above everything else.
Good year for pears, more cherries than last year. Apples were significantly down for us, too; might be just the every-other-year response of an orchard that we didn't prune or thin enough. I don't think it was a pollination issue, as we have both honeybees and orchard mason bees on site. Different plums were in vogue this year; the Italian prunes didn't show up, while the red Santa Rosa were in pretty good supply. Blueberries, raspberries, grapes made it through the dry summer in pacific northwest, but are too young and weed-choked still to bear.
We had a freak thunderstorm that knocked down the wheat in July, and caused a bit of mold. As newbies we dilly-dallied a bit, wondering if it was edible (it was). We ended up threshing only a bit, feeding some of the unthreshed to pig and chickens. We hadn't counted on it much anyway, as it was primarily forage cut for the cow.
Of course, it was a banner year for blackberries. Every year is a banner year for blackberries.
Rototillerman
Posted this yesterday on Roundup
Hi Stoneleigh,
Thanks, and found your post above of
Wheat prices climb to new high particularly startling.
Here is a bit more on that, concerning fallow land in Europe:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7014999.stm
A decrease in reserve food production capabilities and a future need for increased FF fertilizers to make up for the loss of fallow..
As I think I mentioned to Chris at the ASPO conference, my local bakery put a sign up a few weeks ago apologising that they were going to have to double their prices, as they have been hit by two major rises in the price of flour in the past few months. The sign explicitly attributed this to the rise in biofuel production in the US.
The impact on grain prices due to Bush's Agrifuels Subsidies, and thus on global food production in general, has already arrived here in Wales.
The extreme hike in livestock feed prices means not only that many good animals will be shot before their time, but also that some farmers will go the same way, while many more will go out of business.
And that is a serious loss of strategic food security.
This is not of course entirely due to Bush's Agrifuels mendacity -
a destabilized climate is also hitting us hard.
For instance, the lambs didn't grow properly due to lack of spring grass because it didn't rain here (in the Cambrian Mountains !) between mid January and mid May, after which it turned cold and extremely wet.
For instance, some of that unprecedentedly intense rainfall in July flooded a broken drain at Pirbright Animal Research Centre, releasing Foot & Mouth and closing livestock markets across the country, just as stock needed to be sold (because there's no more grazing for it).
For instance, the midges carrying Bluetongue disease now find Northern Europe warm enough to colonize and expand their range.
Most readers here are aware that the US regime knows full well that an Agrifuels boom due to subsidies will make no difference to GHG pollution, and little or no difference to liquid fuel supplies once PO begins to bite hard.
Similarly, it seems obvious that if cronies' agribusiness profits were the prime motive for the US Agrifuels Subsidy Policy then it would have been started six years ago -
making Agrifuels also far better developed to mitigate PO -
Moreover, Cheyney is on record from the '90s as being well aware of the need to meet a coming supply shortfall back then.
So, discounting GW, PO, and crony profits, what exactly is the prime motivation for the US Agrifuels Subsidy Policy ?
The one explanation that seems nonsense to me is that this is all a cock-up -
that the White House staffers just aren't interested enough in the global or US economies to have worked out just what mayhem the Agrifuels Subsidy Policy would achieve.
Two possible motives are visible to me, and I'd be glad of peoples' thoughts on them and on any other possibilities.
Motive 1/. That the policy would form an effective tool of economic warfare by so raising food prices globally as to coerce nations into accepting a US demand to maintain a legal entitlement to at least its present share of global Greenhouse Gas emissions under the forthcoming treaty agreeing their overall contraction.
(The alternative now being sought by Africa, India, Europe and others) is that all nations will converge to per capita parity of tradeable emissions entitlements).
Motive 2/. That the policy would form an effective tool of economic warfare by so raising food prices globally as to drastically impoverish nations,
to the extent that they will drop out of the bidding for increasingly scarce volumes of exported fossil fuels far sooner,
thus making those supplies far more affordable for US industry & citizens.
I recognize that Motives 1/. & 2/. are potentially complementary - that is, they may be seen by the US regime as being mutually reinforcing.
Yet I doubt that this is anything like the whole story - so I'd much appreciate others' perspectives on this question.
Regards,
Backstop
Backstop, if you are a livestock farmer you have my sympathy. My analysis may not seem sympathetic but is based more on the harsh realities of what confronts us.
Crop farmers I imagne will be making money these days. Secondary food producers, however, (dairy, eggs and meat) are facing escalating costs. It seems the supermarkets are intent on not raising food prices - perahps in colusion with the government, intent on keeping inflation down in our debt over burdened economy. The consequence will be less dairy and meat products for sale at higher prices - and we all know this is good for our health and is energetically more efficient. So it wouldn't surprise me if the government lets vast tracts of the dairy, egg and meat production system go to the wall. I love meat, eat tons of eggs etc and have a neutral opinion on the rights and wrongs of this outcome.
As for bio fuel production. Global food stocks are falling fast and once they reach zero, I believe famine will follow in the developing world. Now we all know that the global population cannot go on growing forever and it seems to me the OECD is intent on preserving their afluent life style at the expense of folks in the developing world eating lunch. I suspect this policy may come back to haunt us.
Thank you for your considered response - the points you make about climate change stressing farming systems are well made. I think we are in for many winters of discontent.
Hi Euan
I certainly hope you were being sarcastic with that. OK, energetically more efficient, probably. But not any better for health, as far as I can see. OK, that view is conventional wisdom, but it is actually contentious, and not really supported by any evidence. Hey, you yourself prosper on meat and eggs.
Paleolithic peoples ate large quantities of meat. Why people ever started to eat grain and to farm is actually unknown, seeing that it was such an obviously poor choice in comparison. (Health crash as measured from height and bone health.) Peoples like the Inuit survived, indeed prospered (relatively - they did live in the Arctic) virtually entirely on meat. The Masai ate only dairy and meat. The whole idea that meat per se is unhealthy and that 'less is better' is a modern myth.
Ironically, we may be forced to become near vegetarians (cereal-tarians, to coin a phrase - hey, we aren't that far from it already), as a result of Peak Oil. But that will be a 'lifeboat' choice, the best choice from amongst a load of very, very bad choices. Just because we can survive on such awful foods doesn't mean we are actually supposed to eat them, or at they will be 'better' for us. Better than starving, yes. Better than meat ... no.
Franz--
I doubt paleolithic people hunted corn-fed beef. I think the high fat content we breed and feed into our meat is the source of the current ills associated with meat consumption. But our ancestors also did not survive on a meat diet alone; our bodies need carbs as well. We were, and continue to be, omnivores. And meat production can continue in the form of grass-fed beef, lamb, etc. (and eggs, Euan), just not at the quantities of consumption and waste we currently use, and the end product will probably not be as tender as we would like (although I just started raising Angus/Devon crosses of which both parent breeds are supposed to produce a fine-grained, high quality meat on grass alone).
Jelly fish burgers, juicy insect larvae and rat er rabbit stew anyone? There are lots and lots possible options to supplement our future hydroponically grown vegetable production with available animal protein. It may be time to start thinking outside the box on a lot of things besides our dependence on fossil fuels as our main source of energy.
http://scienceblogs.com/shiftingbaselines/2007/07/mmmm_mmm_jellyfish_bur...
http://www.food-insects.com/
No rat stew, please.
WR
I propose a new restaurant chain -- "Tastes Like Chicken".
Franz--
You are correct--
When humans switched to a grain diet, they lost 6" in height, and had a shorter life span. Also more time was required for food production compared to hunter gathering.
Agriculture brought on slavery, class oppression, reduced life span, and a selection pressure among the population toward a submissive, authoritarian personality. Plus, survival was a condition of labor, rather than information- hunter gatherers survived on information and knowledge.
The advantage was one could reproduce every year, wealth could be masses in the hands of elities (in which they cold have free time to pursue other things),
and we could progress toward our extinction at a much more rapid rate.
The whole idea that meat per se is unhealthy and that 'less is better' is a modern myth.
Ironically, we may be forced to become near vegetarians
The first statement is false. For over 50 years the health consequences of meat consumption have been documented. But they've been known for much longer. Certainly Roman solidiers (barley grinders) knew the health benefits of being vegetarian. "western" or "diseases of the kings" include heart disease, osteopourosis, obesity, high blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, and a whole lot more. I suggest reading The Food Revolution, Diet For a New America (both John Robbins), The China Study and anything by MDs John McDougall, Dean Ornish, Joel Fuhrman for starters. All of the population studies since the 50's and earlier document that as one moves from a vegeterian diet there are signif. health consequences. The China Study documents that down to very small amounts of animal product consumption - signif. increases in all those diseases even when consumption is very small.
One can arrest and even reverse many diseases by a change of diet. Even MS has been treated for many decades by a change in diet (check Dr. Swank) and it's an autoimmune disease and those are best treated by the removal of animal proteins from the diet as they just fuel the fire so to speak.
Much has changed in modern times and the effects of an Atkins diet (high in animal proteins) are well documented (and they don't include the increase in cancers that you otherwise would not see with near vegetarian diets. We are not active the way our anscestors were. We do not end up being forced to fast the way they did (meat will only last so long stored under water).
One must remember that meat products are deficient in many vitamins, fiber, phytochemicals and overloaded with iron while being overburdened with saturated fats and cholesterol. Heme iron is interesting in that it bypasses the bodies regulatory mechanisms - forcing the body to store it. One theory for why pre-menopausal women are more healthy than men is that they monthly purge excess iron from their bodies and iron is a form of free radicals. Iron from plants does not pose that issue.
My family went veg because of the environmental destruction of modern meat "production". I'm from a farming family and don't see a vegetarian or vegan (I'm basically vegan) diet as viable in the long term in this part of the world (southern Canada) due to food storage issues but I certainly can't deny the health benefits I've experienced.
I agree with Dr. McDougall - that one should get diary products out of their diet as a first step due to the variety of health issues with them. They're unnatural, unhealthy and a sure way to dig your grave one mouthful at a time; esp. in this age when every meal is a feast. In times gone by you didn't see people running thru fields sucking on the teats of animals. As for the health of Innuit just note how they're doing with a lack of exercise (diabetes, obesity) and they're also a stunning example of how osteoporosis increases with increasing calcium consumption - err animal products.
We are not carnivores and such a diet is utterly unhealthy for us. Foragers predate agriculture and were more healthy. The Last Rays of Anchient Sunlight, Thom Hartman, covers some research about that.
Just curious, what do you mean by 'food storage issues'?
Wouldn't it be easy to put up and store bean, grains etc?
It is well documented that almost every hunter-gatherer tribe that has been studied in the last 200 years ate meat in some degree. Some hunter-gatherer tribes even got the bulk of their calories from meat. Humans have been meat eaters since we evolved into existence which is also documented by anthropological research.
The difference, however, is that historically most humans did not eat large quantities of meat and that most humans got copious amounts of cardiovascular exercise. That is the key difference between how we evolved and right now. Research suggests that the vast majority of hunter gatherers tended to eat a few ounces of meat per day. Compare that with the American diet of meat at every meal and in large quantities!
Further, most of the meat eaten by hunter gatherers was extremely lean meat compared to what we are given today. Today you find people buy the "marbled" beef, which is to say beef laden with lots of fat. We take specific actions to force our meat sources into being extra fatty for the flavor (and thus the profit) that this entails.
Having said all this, a vegan diet does present health benefits. But it is not historically accurate to claim that homo sapiens was strictly a forager. We never were. In my opinion, most people would get by splendidly eating a few ounces of fish or rabbit once per day and by vastly increasing activities that give cardiovascular benefit. And if you can adopt a vegan diet, then do so.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Hunter gatherers are more knowledgeable about food than we are, they particularly prize offal, rather than muscle meat. That's not to say that everything isn't eaten, it is, but it's the muscle meat that goes to the dogs. Their social conditioning and environment ensures they eat correctly, whereas the opposite is true for us.
As far as I can ascertain the correct diet for humans is meat (especially offal), vegetables and fruit. We shouldn't eat dairy foods or grains as we're not adapted to them (although Europeans and some others have adapted to a certain degree, including for alcohol). If people simply ate meat, vegetables and fruit the medical profession would be bankrupt and the hospitals empty, but that isn't going to happen any time soon.
The problem we have today is that people have been conditioned to eat those foods which are easy to produce by capital and technology intensive industries; namely grains, dairy products and muscle meat. This is a major problem when it comes to adapting sensibly to an altered future, people simply will have great difficulty adapting to a different diet.
Carbohydrates are the cheap fuel of civilisations and are comparable to what artificial fertilisers are to modern agriculture.
Hi Burgundy,
I would also add that that growing root vegetables give the calories needed without the necessity for great amount of land to grow grains. The maggoty fruit, we will have without pesticides, will do for the rest of our diet. (I'm almost serious here, but I think I will go fishing and leave them apples for the chickens:)
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|Edit:
The thing that grains have going for them is that they store well for many years. Great stuff to have kicking about the manse for times of famine, even if not the best form of human fodder. I wonder if that could be a good part of the reason they've gained their popularity?
I can confirm this one - I'm a tiny bit autistic (Asperger's Syndrome) and I have the wheat intolerance that sometimes goes along with it. I learned this two years ago, changed my diet, and twenty pounds came off like magic while lots of health related issues just dropped away ...
Franz, I wasn't being sarcastic (for once). My understanding is that obesity is fast becoming one of the biggest health issues in the OECD. To what extent that stems from eating too much meat or just eating too much in general I don't know, but my feeling is too much fatty crap is the root cause.
But don't get me wrong, I do agree that a balanced diet of meat, dairy and vegetables suits us best. But I do suspect that my own health would be improved if I ate less meat and eggs and cheese and drank less wine.
Euan writes
That’s interesting – I wonder how long it will stay that way. Clearly the situation in the UK is different to that in Germany and other parts of continental Europe. Some weeks ago the discount chain Aldi made sensational headline news in Germany when they declared that they were forced to raise the price of approx. 40 to 50 basic food products for the first time in years. Lidl, Plus and Penny have followed suit. Aldi blames the price hikes on ‘rising oil and energy prices, higher raw material prices and bad harvests.’
.
Clearly you haven’t read Björn Lomberg’s ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’. If you had, you would have learnt that thanks to human ingenuity there are no physical limits to exponential growth :-)
The link below is to an interesting development in ethanol production... the headline states it.
Ethanol’s Boom Stalling as Glut Depresses Price
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/business/30ethanol.html?hp
Euan - thankyou for your concern - We're livestock farming on mountain commons and valley fenced land, with 3 native breeds of mountain sheep, plus a small beef suckler herd and some fowls being the range so far.
Tamworth & Large Black pigs, St Gallen Goats and other fowls are somewhere down the road.
We are also training both shepherding horses (for work on the mountains here) and sheepdog pups for sale.
This place has potential to support a small village, in that, beside meat & by-products,
there is a fair orchard potential, plus suitable ground for a cerial-roots 4-year rotation,
plus about 35 acres of varied coppice woodland and several thousand tonnes of standing derelict hedge-trees (which must come down for the hedges to be re-established).
It's my feeling that wealthy populations do eat too much meat of truly lousy quality. Imagine eating something reared, as the norm, on industrial anti-biotics !
Eating less meat of better quality and far higher price looks to me both likely and desirable.
But last week lambs sold in Ross-on-Wye mart for just 65 pence per kilo, while by contrast retail prices average around £5 for the 600gms sold after butchery. Normally we would expect between £1.40 and £1.60 per kilo of liveweight at this time of year.
You can imagine what this (Govt. generated) cut in income is doing to the stockfarms' present viability.
You mention the profitability of crop growing, but it faces the same problem of a destabilized climate, with unprecedented flood & drought losses being now so common as to go largely unreported.
In addition crop production costs/acre are rising sharply, led by fertilizer, which I'm told is up 60% since January.
At present govt' continues to victimize the farmer (as opposed to the agribusinessman) and has people shuffling paper for an absurd fraction of the (7day) working week.
At some point surviving farms will face the task of trying to pass on what they know to as many people as possible.
Until that time we shall prepare the accomodation and facilities needed and make a start with encouraging skilled & unskilled participation under a commonwealth approach.
One (of many) aspects of farming that is not widely understood is the sheer diversity of the land resource.
For instance, we can't grow things here that are viable in farms just a mile along the valley, but four hundred feet lower down, and the farm further up the valley is still further constrained in its choices.
And that is just altitude, out of a whole spectrum of limiting factors. Local knowledge is critical in this regard, and national average yields per acre are actually pretty much meaningless.
I think you are right re the probability of recurrent famine, but I rather doubt it will be so neat as to aflict only developing countries, whose people are at least an order of magnitude more effective than us at subsistence farming.
The critical shift is in politics as far as I can see, and that is not merely in EU banning the import of farm-based agrifuels - we need leadership that bases a wholesale policy review on the issues of GW + PO.
Anything less is effectively reckless endangerment by those elected to the highest duty of care.
So at some point perhaps it may be worth assembling an inditement for prosecution at the ICJ on the Hague ?
Just the threat, and associated publicity, might leverage significant effects on policy reform.
Regards,
Bill