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Cheap food may be a thing of the past
U.S. grain prices should stay unrelentingly high this year, according to a Reuters poll, the latest sign that the era of cheap food has come to an end.
U.S. corn, soybeans and wheat prices — which surged by as much has 50 percent last year and hit their highest levels since mid-2008 — will dip by at most 5 percent by the end of 2011, according to the poll of 16 analysts.
The forecasts suggest no quick relief for nations bedeviled by record high food costs that have stoked civil unrest. It means any extreme weather event in a grains-producing part of the world could send prices soaring further.
The expectations may also strengthen importers’ resolve to build bigger inventories after a year in which stocks of corn and soybeans in the United States — the world’s top exporter — dwindled to their lowest level in decades.
Story: Global food chain stretched to the limit Read more…
Australia Cyclone Yasi upgraded to Category 5
Ian Hitchcock / Getty Images
CAIRNS, Australia — A powerful cyclone bearing down on Australia was upgraded to a maximum-strength Category 5 storm, with the likelihood of serious damage and risk to life.
“This is the most severe, most catastrophic storm that has ever hit our coast,” Anna Bligh, premier of Queensland State, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “We’ve seen a number of worst case scenarios come together.”
“This impact is likely to be more life threatening than any experienced during recent generations,” Queensland disaster officials added in an updated warning.
Yasi is expected to make landfall overnight on the Queensland coast between Cairns and Innisfail. Read more…
Tropical Cyclone Yasi Headed Toward Queensland, Australia
NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of Yasi on Jan. 30 at 23:20 UTC (6:20 p.m. EST/09:20 a.m., Monday, January 31 in Australia/Brisbane local time). Although the image did not reveal a visible eye, the storm appears to be well-formed and also appears to be strengthening. Credit: NASA Goddard / MODIS Rapid Response Team
Tropical Storm Anthony made landfall in Queensland, Australia this past weekend, and now the residents are watching a larger, more powerful cyclone headed their way. NASA’s Terra satellite captured a visible image of the large Tropical Cyclone Yasi late yesterday as it makes its way west through the Coral Sea toward Queensland.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard NASA’s Terra satellite captured an image of Cyclone Yasi on Jan. 30 at 23:20 UTC (6:20 p.m. EST/09:20 a.m., Monday, January 31 in Australia/Brisbane local time). Although the image did not reveal a visible eye, the storm appears to be well-formed and also appears to be strengthening.
Warnings and watches are already in effect throughout the Coral Sea. The Solomon Islands currently have a Tropical Cyclone warning for Read more…
South Africa: Floods kill 120 and destroy crops
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — South Africa is reeling from unusually heavy rainfall that has caused flooding in many parts of the country, wiping out crops in what is the continent’s main breadbasket.
More than 120 people have been killed in the thunderstorms and flooding since mid-December, and some 20,000 people are in need of assistance. The South African government has declared disaster areas in eight of its nine provinces.
And it’s not over yet. Above-average rainfall is forecast for South Africa and neighboring countries for the next few months.
Much of southern Africa is now on flood alert, including Mozambique, where at least 13 people have died from floods and thousands have fled their homes for higher ground. Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia are also on alert for flooding.
While this is the annual rainy season in southern Africa, the heavier than usual rainfall has been blamed on La Nina, the weather pattern behind the severe flooding in other southern hemisphere countries including Australia, Brazil and the Philippines.
In South Africa, the government has put the flood damage at $211 million, but this is an early estimate and expected to rise. At least Read more…
Australian ‘inland sea’ flood threatens towns
MELBOURNE — Australia’s flood crisis deepened Saturday with a giant “inland sea” threatening more communities in the southeast, as officials continued the grim search for bodies in worst-hit Queensland.
Sandbagging was underway in some villages in Victoria, where weeks of floods have affected as much as one-third of the state, with swollen rivers overflowing in 75 towns and flooding some 1,770 properties.
“We know that this is the most significant flooding in the north west of Victoria since records began… about 130 years ago,” a spokeswoman for the State Emergency Service told AFP.
“We are still on alert for towns in the north of the state.”
Floodwaters which national broadcaster ABC described as a moving “inland sea” covering an area 90 kilometres (56 miles) long and 40 kilometres wide, were threatening towns around Swan Hill, some 300 kilometres northwest of Melbourne.
“In the actual Swan Hill township itself, we are very confident that the levee system around the town is built to a very high grade and will protect the township,” Mayor Greg Cruickshank told ABC radio.
But rural and outlying areas “will have significant amount of inundation through them,” he said.
While thousands of people around the state have been urged to evacuate, emergency services warned that those people who choose to remain on their properties in the rural areas could be stranded by the floods.
“A number of these communities will be isolated for days as this huge amount of floodwater comes through,” SES spokesman Kevin Monk said. Read more…
Huge ring appears over Australia, is HAARP involved?
After receiving an urgent e-mail from a contact in Australia informing me of bizarre weather on the weather satellite imagery, I checked out the data and just hours later more strangeness. I am waiting to hear from the Australian Government’s weather bureau for their own explanation.
“There is very strange weather happening here – please check”
Written at 2230 Hrs (US Eastern) 15th January 2010.
A contact in Australia just alerted me to what he describes as “very strange weather taking place over the south west of Australia”. He told me to go to the national weather satellite images if I could not open the images he attached (See left). By the time I had discovered the e-mail and checked, the large clearly defined ring had mostly dissipated but still was just visible on a time loop which was spiraling counter clockwise (Low Pressure system). Read more…
The Future of Food Riots
This is a map of the countries in which there have been food riots
If all the food in the world were shared out evenly, there would be enough to go around.
That has been true for centuries now: if food was scarce, the problem was that it wasn’t in the right place, but there was no global shortage. However, that will not be true much longer.
The food riots began in Algeria more than a week ago, and they are going to spread. During the last global food shortage in 2008, there was serious rioting in Mexico, Indonesia, and Egypt. We may expect to see that again this time, only bigger and more widespread.
Most people in these countries live in a cash economy, and a large proportion live in cities. They buy their food, they don’t grow it.
That makes them very vulnerable, because they have to eat almost as much as people in rich countries do, but their incomes are much lower.
The poor, urban multitudes in these countries (including China and India) spend up to half of their income on food, compared to only about 10 percent in the rich countries. When food prices soar, these people quickly find that they simply lack the money to go on feeding themselves and their children properly—and food prices now are at an all-time high.
“We are entering a danger territory,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, chief economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization, on January 5.
The price of a basket of cereals, oils, dairy, meat, and sugar that reflects global consumption patterns has risen steadily for six months. It has just broken through the previous record, set during the last food panic in June 2008.
“There is still room for prices to go up much higher,” Abbassian added, “if, for example, the dry conditions in Read more…
Brisbane on edge ahead of catastrophic flood peak
Authorities are urging people to stay calm as Brisbane and Ipswich prepare for unprecedented flooding over the next two days.
Heavy rain, releases from the giant Wivenhoe Dam and high tides will combine to cause major flood peaks in both cities in the next couple of days, with river levels rising above the historic 1974 floods.
And a four-year-old boy’s death in Ipswich has taken the Queensland floods death toll to 10.
“We are facing one of our toughest ever tests, we will only pass this test if we are calm,” Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said.
“Now is not a time for panic, it is a time for us to stick together.”
Authorities say about 6,500 properties could be flooded as the Bremer and Brisbane rivers hit hits record levels over the next two days.
As panicked residents strip supermarket shelves bare, Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson says people should stay calm.
“Stay calm but act wisely and if you’re in doubt, evacuate to friends or evacuate, don’t take any unnecessary risks,” he said.
The Brisbane River is predicted to rise to 3 metres tonight, 4.5 metres tomorrow and is likely to peak higher than the 1974 floods that reached 5.45 metres.
Large parts of Brisbane are already affected by flooding. A number of shops Read more…
WikiLeaks: China Hiding Military Build Up
AUSTRALIA’S intelligence agencies believe China is hiding the extent of a huge military build-up that goes beyond national defence and poses a serious threat to regional stability.
A strategic assessment by the agencies found China’s military spending for 2006 was $90 billion – double the $45 billion announced publicly by Beijing.
Australia’s peak intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments, as well as the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Defence and Foreign Affairs departments concluded that China was building a military capability well beyond its priorities of self-defence and preventing Taiwan’s independence.
”China’s longer-term agenda is to develop ‘comprehensive national power’, including a strong military, that is in keeping with its view of itself as a great power,” says a copy of the secret assessment provided by Foreign Affairs officials to the US embassy in Canberra.
”We agree that the trend of China’s military modernisation is beyond the scope of what would be required for a conflict over Taiwan. Arguably China already poses a credible threat to modern militaries operating in the region and will present an even more formidable challenge as its modernisation continues.”
Details of the 2006 intelligence assessment are contained in a US embassy cable obtained by WikiLeaks and provided exclusively to the Herald.
The Australian document goes on to warn that the pace of China’s military build-up and ”the opacity of Beijing’s intentions and programs” was ”already altering the balance of power in Asia and could be a destabilising influence”.
”There is the potential for possible misconceptions which could lead to a serious miscalculation or crisis,” it says.
The Australian intelligence agencies suggest China could overestimate its own capabilities with a significant risk of strategic miscalculation and instability.
”The nature of the [People’s Liberation Army] and the regime means that transparency will continue to be viewed as a potential vulnerability. This contributes to the likelihood of strategic misperceptions,” the document says.
”The rapid improvements in PLA capabilities, coupled with a lack of operational experience and faith in asymmetric strategies, could lead to China overestimating its military capability. These factors, coupled with rising nationalism, heightened expectations of China’s status, China’s historical predilection for strategic deception, difficulties with Japan, and the Taiwan issue mean that miscalculations and minor events could quickly escalate.”
Although successive Australian governments have called on China to be more transparent about its military spending, ministers and diplomats have studiously avoided public reference to the scale of the discrepancy between Beijing’s published figures and the likely reality behind the scenes.
The Australian estimate of a 2006 military budget of $US70 billion ($90 billion at the September 2006 exchange rate), has not been revealed previously – though it is consistent with academic and published US government estimates of China’s growing military spending.
The secret Australian assessment is also much sharper than the language later employed in the Rudd government’s 2009 Defence white paper, which said China was on the way to becoming Asia’s strongest military power ”by a considerable margin” and warned that the pace and scope of its growth could give its neighbours cause for concern if not properly explained.
The Rudd government publicly played down reports of a hostile Chinese reaction to the white paper when it was published, but secretly briefed the US that Beijing had threatened that Australia would ”suffer the consequences” if references to China’s growing military capabilities were not watered down.
The Defence Chief, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, and the then defence minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, insisted that China had no problem with the white paper. But other leaked US embassy cables report that the then deputy secretary for Defence, Mike Pezzullo, briefed US diplomats that he had been ”dressed down” by Chinese officials who had a ”look of cold fury” at the references to China in the white paper.
In the September 2006 briefing of the US embassy, Foreign Affairs officials advised that Australia hoped to use its defence relationship with China to promote increased transparency in that country’s military development plans.
”We remain focused on deepening the Australia-China defence relationship in areas such as peacekeeping, counter-terrorism and junior leadership exchanges, while remaining cautious to avoid practical co-operation that might help the PLA to fill capability gaps,” the Australian paper presented to the embassy concluded.
The Royal Australian Navy and the Chinese navy held their first joint exercise involving firing of live ammunition in September last year.
Last month the Defence Department secretary, Ian Watt, and Air Chief Marshal Houston attended the 13th annual Australia-China Defence Strategic Dialogue, which was hosted in China by General Chen Bingde, the chief of the PLA General Staff.
Dr Watt said that the dialogue was ”an integral component of Australia’s defence engagement with China, and provided the opportunity to have frank and open conversations and to exchange views on areas of common interest”.
Dr Watt and Air Chief Marshal Houston also met the vice-president and deputy chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, Xi Jinping.
Air Chief Marshal Houston said: ”We committed to continuing to develop our military relationship and practical cooperation together.”
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