Stop Reading!

I’ve been looking everywhere but can’t find it. The really interesting headline news, that is. ‘California Republicans like Huckabee’. We’re doomed. May I suggest my pet rock as a more viable candidate?

And speaking of doom. Besides the Global Warming problems and the fact that Washington D.C. will soon be under 2’000 feet of water, there is the headline from this weeks Economist, ‘The End of Cheap Food’. And the article details the reasons for it. Some facts; wheat has doubled in price since last spring. All other food crops are at record levels.

Agflation has arrived with the emerging economies. A Chinese consumer ate 44 pounds of meat in the year 1985 and now eats over a hundred pounds of it. And it takes grain in a ratio of 8 to 1 to produce a pound of beef.

And our drive for oil independence is not helping. We (The USA) had a record corn crop this year, but one third goes to biofuel. And thanks to the ‘corporate farmers’ we have decided that corn is the ideal crop for biofuel, even when the rest of the world thinks otherwise. (It’s sugar cane, stupid!) Could it be lobbyists (and greed) for the corporate farmers that have caused this? Fill your gas tank with ethanol made from corn and you have consumed the equivalent amount of corn needed for one person for one year. But, you’ve made ADM shareholders happy. And that record crop of corn? Ethanol production takes half of the worlds stock. This drives up the price of everything else that uses corn. Yes, even candy. ‘High fructose CORN syrup’.

Throw in the worsening water stocks here in the west and we have a real problem coming. Obviously, I have to stop reading.