More grain exports halted  

The Globe And Mail reports that Kazahkstan and Indonesia have become the latest countries to join the grain export ban bandwagon.

Some of the world's biggest grain exporters barred their farmers from selling in global markets yesterday, exacerbating the food price crisis for poorer nations that import their food and highlighting the failure of governments to nurture stronger rules for agricultural trade.

Rice and corn prices soared to records on U.S. markets and wheat jumped to its highest in a week after Kazakhstan, the world's fifth-largest wheat exporter, and Indonesia, a major rice producer, became the latest nations to impose export bans. The price increases further inflated global food costs that already had surged 48 per cent since the end of 2006.

The latest moves highlight the difficulty of solving a problem that has its roots in years of trade policy indecision, the push by richer nations to produce more fuel from food crops, growing demand from developing countries such as China, and Wall Street investors who see a money-making opportunity in surging commodity demand.

"Business as usual is no longer an option," Paris-based UNESCO says in a sweeping report on the world agriculture system that was three years in the making and released yesterday. "There is a recognition that the mounting crisis in food security is of a different complexity and potentially different magnitude than the one of the 1960s."

Kazakhstan and Indonesia are trying to put a lid on food inflation to avoid the riots that have beset countries such as Egypt and Haiti.

While their policies may ease tensions at home, they threaten to make things worse for poorer countries that don't have the luxury of good agricultural land and temperate climates to feed their populations.

There’s one sentence in the article below that I’d like to highlight:

One factor helping the potato remain affordable is the fact that unlike wheat, it is not a global commodity, so it has not attracted speculative professional investment.

If you don’t understand why that sentence is so important, please see, CBOT Resembles Carnival Act as Billion Dollar Black Box Operators Move In.

Anyone concerned with food security should be growing their own potatoes. We grow our own and and they’re delicious.

Beware, though, because the Satanic FrankenpHood Cult is hard at work trying to wreck things for profit, or worse. BASF—split off from IG Farben, a company that was involved with the Third Reich’s human extermination industries—is developing GE potatoes.

Have a nice day.

Via: Reuters:

As wheat and rice prices surge, the humble potato — long derided as a boring tuber prone to making you fat — is being rediscovered as a nutritious crop that could cheaply feed an increasingly hungry world.

Potatoes, which are native to Peru, can be grown at almost any elevation or climate: from the barren, frigid slopes of the Andes Mountains to the tropical flatlands of Asia. They require very little water, mature in as little as 50 days, and can yield between two and four times more food per hectare than wheat or rice.

“The shocks to the food supply are very real and that means we could potentially be moving into a reality where there is not enough food to feed the world,” said Pamela Anderson, director of the International Potato Center in Lima (CIP), a non-profit scientific group researching the potato family to promote food security.

Like others, she says the potato is part of the solution.

The potato has potential as an antidote to hunger caused by higher food prices, a population that is growing by one billion people each decade, climbing costs for fertilizer and diesel, and more cropland being sown for biofuel production.