UN food price index up 3.4% from December, the highest level since the organisation started measuring food prices in 1990 Unilever, the consumer goods firm whose brands include Flora and Persil, today warned that more price rises were on the horizon as it struggled to digest rocketing commodity prices. Its chief executive, Paul Polman, said foods made with edible oils such as margarine and salad dressings would be hardest hit. The price of palm oil and sunflower oil has risen by 75% and 60% respectively in the last year. Crude oil was also up 40%, he said, which pushed up the cost of bottling products such as Timotei shampoo or Domestos bleach. "We continue to live in volatile times but the business is in significantly better shape than it was two years ago," he said, blaming the poor harvests caused by flooding and other unforeseen weather events such as Cyclone Yasi. His comments came as the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN said world food prices had surged to a record high in January, for the seventh consecutive month. Its food price index was up 3.4% from December to the highest level since the organisation started measuring food prices in 1990. Cereal prices were up 3% from December and the highest since July 2008, but still 11% below their peak in April 2008. Rising wheat prices are one factor that triggered the unrest in Egypt, and the protests in Tunisia. Egypt is the world's largest wheat importer. Polman said commodity markets were a concern but said the situation was not yet as grave as during the 2008 financial crisis, when the oil price approached $150 a barrel. "At that time Lehman Brothers was collapsing and economies were grinding to a halt. Today most countries are showing growth." The Anglo-Dutch Unilever group has been steaming ahead in emerging markets such as Brazil, India and China but until recently had been struggling in Europe. Polman said he had a frank exchange with the European council president, Herman Van Rompuy, at the World Economic in Forum at Davos last week, as he was concerned the region was losing its competitive edge: "Europe is already happy when it shows some growth but that is a complacency that will kill it. A European internal market still doesn't exist. You still have to register your patents in every European country." Unilever surpassed City forecasts with a 5.1% rise in underlying sales for the fourth quarter, but analysts were worried about the impact higher input prices were having on its profit margins, which are already showing signs of strain. The company plans to cut costs by at least €1bn this year to help mitigate rising raw material costs. Its shares closed down 20p at £18.37. Investec analyst Martin Deboo said: "With Unilever struggling for margin in the face of what we think are only the foothills of input cost inflation, we expect even bigger challenges when it faces the peaks to come."Unilever warns of price rises as food costs soar
The Eminent Food Shortage
Before I get started on "How to prepare for December 21, 2012" I'd like to focus on the up and coming food shortage and why its eminent. I would like you to read about this Food Bill that was passed.
Not what the American people ordered – HR 2749, martial law and the enslavement of their farmers
Strange Martial Law via Food Control: HR 2749
HR 2749 is a strange bill in many ways. While the other “food safety” bills have been around since winter, allowing for much public discussion on the internet, HR 2749 has only suddenly appeared. It is a mutant conglomeration of the worst of the other bills, with the addition of one very original part – martial law.
When it was a draft, it was Waxman’s bill. But once given a number, it became Dingel’s who already had a “food safety” bill, HR 759. So Waxman got none and Dingel got two. (Was this because Waxman, being Jewish, was a hideous choice to introduce a bill with Codex in it – designed by the Nazi pharmaceutical companies that funded Hitler, provided the gas for the gas chambers, experimented on prisoners with vaccines – and is expected to kill millions? Read More
HR 2749 would give FDA the power to order a quarantine of a geographic area, including “prohibiting or restricting the movement of food or of any vehicle being used or that has been used to transport or hold such food within the geographic area.”
This - "that has been used to transport or hold such food" - would mean all cars that have ever brought groceries home or any pickup someone has eaten take-out in, so this means ALL TRANSPORTATION can be shut down under this. This is using food as a cover for martial law.
Under this provision, farmers markets and local food sources could be shut down, even if they are not the source of the contamination. The agency can halt all movement of all food in a geographic area.
This is also a means of total control over the population under the cover of food, and at any time. See this DailyKos entry.
The bill is unusual, too, because slow as it was to appear. The little bugger of bill has made up for it since. It got a number on June 10, went to committee on June 17, passed instantly, and is headed for a vote on the floor of the House.
The first Patriot Act was passed using fear of terrorism. This Patriot Act is more coy, hiding under a cloak of “food safety” and but also using fear – fear of food contamination. Evidently, Americans are supposed to be so frightened by the slightest possibility of a terrorist or of E-coli, they would trade away all their precious, hard fought freedoms for the promise of safety.
Or at least, that is what the trade-off has become. “Terrorism” and “contamination” are great bugaboos used to open doors to an end to the US Constitution. That is exactly what we are left with after those who wrote HR 2749 are done.
Who did write these bills? It seems Monsanto had not only a hand, but a “defining” influence. http://farmwars.info/?p=594
This redefining of reality is what seems to be underlying all the loss of freedom. Normal and free are disappearing into the maw of corporate definitions of reality. See this Yup Farming piece.
So, we begin with contaminated food from filthy corporate processors and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). And what do we end up with after that reality is ground up by corporate legal hands? Changes in the definition of risk so that natural things are treated as dangerous and toxic things are untouched, such that:
Healthy, normal farms are taken over by government as though they were run by criminals and contaminated corporate slaughterhouses are untouched;
The necessary freedom of individuals to live and grow food and be left alone are somehow suddenly destroyed, though they were never the source of any food contamination issue; and such that.
The profit and control and power of corporations which were absolutely the source of the increasingly terrible food, is somehow suddenly vastly increased.
Thanks to corporate control over reality, our wanting to clean up corporate processors and feedlots and CAFOS and end up with farmers’ markets and local farms and organic food has become the industrialization and potential destruction of every healthy part of the food system and the triumph of the most contaminated and toxic part.
And in the non-bargain, we lost all freedoms and they took all control. And “all” is not a hyperbole here, for one need only look at another provision of HR 2749 to feel how insane, how distant from all we ever wanted.
HR 2749 would empower FDA to regulate how crops are raised and harvested. It puts the federal government right on the farm, dictating to our farmers.
What is missing in pointing out this astounding control, is that it opens the door to CODEX and WTO "good farming practices" will include the elimination of organic farming by eliminating manure, mandating GMO animal feed, imposing animal drugs, and ordering applications of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. Farmers, thus, will be locked not only into the industrialization of once normal and organic farms but into the forced purchase of industry's products.
They will be slaves on the land, doing the work they are ordered to do - against their own best wisdom - and paying out to industry against their will. There will be no way to be frugal, to grow one's own grain to feed the animals, to raise healthy animals without GMO grains or drugs, to work with nature at all. Grass-fed cattle and poultry and hogs will be finished. So, it needs to be made clear where control will take us. And weren't these the "rumors on the internet" that were dismissed but are clearly the case? See this DailyKos entry.
When we wanted not to get E-coli in processed meat, did we intend to put our farmers into corporate servitude? Did we plan to have our own lives straight-jacketed by a million new controls over our own gardens, our own desire to grow food, our own plans to start small businesses, our own dreams to have a small piece of land and farm ourselves? Who has the audacity to take our needs and grotesquely bastardize them in these ways, while giving the destruction and totalitarian control the sham name of “food safety”?
We wanted good food. We never wanted to trap our farmers into an industrial prison on their own land, afraid moment to moment of not fulfilling some monstrous set of instructions that never end – rules the farmers loathe, rules that have not only nothing to do with real farming but which are antithetical to it. Why have we ended up with HR 2749, an intense corporate nightmare around the most central and necessary aspects of a free country and of free human beings – farming and food?
American farming needs to be relieved of the burdens it has been under, not finished off by its corporate competition. It needs freedom to flourish again. Obviously – and Congress people who would think to vote for such absurdities, take note – the imposition of surveillance, monitoring, warrant-less entry, taking of all records, licensing, fees, Codex and NAIS, in addition to massive penalties and prison terms (all without judicial review over even appropriateness and validity), are not how one thanks American farmers for holding together the only working part of our food system. See Literal Enslavement by Linn Cohen-Cole.
HR 2749 is the most vicious and insane bill one could imagine. Who treats our farmers in this way? Who believes that such police measures can provide for the rebirth of farming and the return of healthy food? Who wrote this bill that trashes the freedom of all our lives? HR 2749 was not what we ordered and it should be sent back the bowels of hell it came from.
HR 2749 is both insane and cruel. And the deceptiveness of hiding a Patriot Act in it and the brutal rush to slip it through Congress are ANTI-democratic.
Go here to tell Congress, “No.” http://www.ftcldf.org/petitions/pnum993.php.
2010 Food Crisis Means Financial Armageddon
Eric deCarbonnel
Market Skeptics
Friday, December 18, 2009
If you read any economic, financial, or political analysis for 2010 that doesn’t mention the food shortage looming next year, throw it in the trash, as it is worthless. There is overwhelming, undeniable evidence that the world will run out of food next year. When this happens, the resulting triple digit food inflation will lead panicking central banks around the world to dump their foreign reserves to appreciate their currencies and lower the cost of food imports, causing the collapse of the dollar, the treasury market, derivative markets, and the global financial system. The US will experience economic disintegration.
The 2010 Food Crisis Means Financial Armageddon
Over
the last two years, the world has experience faced a series of
unprecedented financial crisis: the collapse of the housing market, the
freezing of the credit markets, the failure of Wall Street brokerage
firms (Bear Stearns/Lehman Brothers), the failure of Freddie Mac and
Fannie Mae, the failure of AIG,
Iceland’s economic collapse, the
bankruptcy of the major auto manufacturers (General Motors, Ford, and
Chrysler), etc… In the face of all these challenges, the demise of the
dollar, derivative markets, and the modern international system of
credit has been repeatedly anticipated and feared. However, all these
doomsday scenarios have so far been proved false, and, despite
tremendous chaos and losses, the global financial system has held
together.
The 2010 Food Crisis is different. It is THE CRISIS. The one that makes all doomsday scenarios come true. The government bailouts and central bank interventions which have held the financial world during the last two years will be powerless to prevent the 2010 Food Crisis from bringing the global financial system to its knees.
Financial crisis will kick into high gear
So
far the crisis has been driven by the slow and steady increase in
defaults on mortgages and other loans. This is about to change. What
will drive the financial crisis in 2010 will be panic about food
supplies and the dollar’s plunging value. Things will start moving fast.
Dynamics Behind 2010 Food Crisis
Early
in 2009, the supply and demand in agricultural markets went badly out
of balance. The world was experiencing a catastrophic fall in food
production as a result of the financial crisis (low commodity prices
and lack of credit) and adverse weather on a global scale. Meanwhile,
China and other Asian exporters, in effort to preserve their economic
growth, were unleashing domestic consumption long constrained by
inflation fears, and demand for raw materials, especially food staples,
was exploding as Chinese consumers worked their way towards
American-style overconsumption, prodded on by a flood of cheap credit
and easy loans from the government.
Normally, food prices should have already shot higher months ago, leading to lower food consumption and bringing the global food supply/demand situation back into balance. This never happened, because the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), instead of adjusting production estimates down to reflect decreased production, has been adjusting estimates upwards to match increasing demand from china. In this way, the USDA has brought supply and demand back into balance (on paper) and temporarily delayed a rise in food prices by ensuring a catastrophe in 2010.
Overconsumption is leading to disaster
It
is absolutely key to understand that the production of agricultural
goods is a fixed, once a year cycle (or twice a year in the case of
double crops). The wheat, corn, soybeans and other food staples are
harvested in the fall/spring and then that is it for production. It
doesn’t matter how high prices go or how desperate people get, no new
supply can be brought online until the next harvest at the earliest.
The supply must last until the next harvest, which is why it is critical that food is correctly priced to avoid overconsumption, otherwise food shortages will occur.
The USDA, by manufacturing the data needed to keep supply and demand in balance, has ensured that agricultural commodities are incorrectly priced, which has lead to overconsumption and has guaranteed disaster next year when supplies run out.
An astounding lack of awareness
The
world is blissful unaware that the greatest
economic/financial/political crisis ever seen is a few months away.
While it is understandable that general public has no knowledge of what
is headed their way, that same ignorance on the part of professional
analysts, economists, and other highly paid financial “experts” is mind
boggling, as it takes only the tiniest bit of research to realize something is going critically wrong in agricultural market.
USDA estimates for 2009/10 make no sense
All
someone needs to do to know the world is headed is for food crisis is
to stop reading USDA’s crop reports predicting a record soybean and
corn harvests and listen to what else the USDA saying.
Specifically, the USDA has declared half the counties in the Midwest to be primary disaster areas, including 274 counties in the last 30 days alone. These designated are based on the criteria of a minimum of 30 percent loss in the value of at least one crop in a county. The chart below shows counties declared primary disaster areas by the secretary of Agriculture and the president of the United States.
For a list of Secretarial disaster declarations, see here.
For a list of Presidential disaster declarations, see here.
The same USDA that is predicting record harvests is also declaring disaster areas across half because of catastrophic crop losses! To eliminate any doubt that this might be an innocent mistake, the USDA is even predicting record soybean harvests in the same states (Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama) where it has declared virtually all counties to have experienced 30 percent production losses. It isn’t rocket scientist to realize something is horribly wrong.
USDA motivated by fear of higher food prices
The USDA is terrorized by the implications of higher food prices for the US economy, most likely because it knows the immediate consequence of sharply higher food will be the collapse of the US Treasury market and the dollar, as desperate governments and central banks dump their foreign reserves to appreciate their currencies and lower the cost of food imports. Fictitious USDA estimates should be seen as proof of the dire threat posed by higher food prices, as the USDA would not have turned its production estimates into a grotesque mockery of reality if it didn’t believe the alternative to be apocalyptic.
While the USDA may be the worst offender, the US isn’t the only government trying to downplay the food situation out of fear. As one Indian reporter writes, governments are lying about the looming food crisis.
…
some experts and governments, in full cognizance of the facts, want us
not to create panic and paint a picture of parched crops and a looming
food crisis. This, they say, would push up food prices unnaturally,
lead to hoarding and ultimately result in a situation where many more
millions across the world would go hungry. And whether it
is the developing world or the developed, it is those at the bottom of
the pyramid who are the most affected in such scenarios.
This
leads to a confusing divide between reality and government
pronouncements, or even between the perspectives of government
departments
Confusing divide between reality and government pronouncements
For months now, the media has been reporting two distinctly, contradicting realities. One of these realities is filled with record crops and plentiful supply, and the other is filled agricultural devastation and ruin. It has been a mad, frustrating experience to read about agricultural disasters and horrendous crop losses in virtually every state combined with predictions of a US record harvest, sometimes in the same article.
A Reality of record crops and plentiful supply
The accepted, “official” reality is found in USDA crop and WASDE reports. In this reality, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is projecting the largest US soy crop on record, at 3.3 billion bushels, and the second-largest corn crop at 12.9 billion bushels.
Below are the government’s numbers for US soybean production by state. The USDA is expecting record high soybean yields across the Midwest in 2009, leading to production numbers significantly higher than the 5 year average. The large increase between the August and November estimates also indicates that the USDA doesn’t believe crops suffered much damage during the fall harvest.
