Topic of the week
After the Oil crisis, a Food crisis?
Is the world headed for a food crisis? And what is the cause for these shortages and prices hikes?
High price oil is the problem for the most part. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (QAO) reported last week that, at nearly $100 a barrel and as the result the price of oil has sent the cost of food imports skyrocketing this year. What is more, worldwide food reserves are at their lowest in 35 years, so prices are likely to stay high for the foreseeable future. Over the year, we have seen past shocks have quickly dissipated, but that’s not likely to be the case this time. The supply and demand have become unbalanced, and it can’t be fixed anytime soon.
However, those hit hardest won’t likely be the developed countries, but rather the third world countries, where many of the world’s poorest nations depend on both high cost energy, as well as food imports. In addition, the inflation has been driven by double -digit price hikes for almost every staple food over the past 12 months. Wheat is up 50%, and rice is up almost 100% in some parts of
What is the cause for these shortages? One of the key issues is biofuels. Biofuels, made from food crops such as corn, sugar cane, and palm oil, are seen as easing the world's dependence on gasoline or diesel. When the crude oil is expensive, these alternative energy sources can also be sold at market competitive prices.
What is the good news? Farmers can expect to sell their crops at higher prices, a bright future for agro students :).
What is the bad news? We may die of hunger before cashing in this huge profit.
Is engineering fighting for scarce resource with Agro?
By P & C
Ps: What is your opinion?
I've been hearing a lot about this lately. It seems like such a great idea, on paper, to use corn to power cars. The problem is, to get the corn out of the crop and into my gas tank takes a lot of energy. So does taking oil out of the ground. I wonder whether they're factoring other costs, such as the diesel burned to plant the crop, treat it with fertilizer and pesticides all summer, and then harvest it.
ReplyDeleteI imagine the transport costs would be comparable to that of oil, and intuitively, it seems that there would be less (or at least less harmful) bi-products from corn than oil. They say it burns cleaner.
But wouldn't it be much simpler to use cars less and free up the corn for human (and animal) consumption?
I think a lot of cities need overhauls to their transit systems. Right now, living in Saskatoon, it's very difficult to get by without a car if you're not along a major route, which I'm not. This creates a vicious cycle: transit sucks, so no one uses it, so there's no money coming in to improve it, so it continues to suck. We need the government to kick-start this and make it easier to bus.
I also wonder why we're using food crops to produce fuel, when there are probably non-edible plants that could more easily be grown in smaller spaces. If we could convert the oil refineries to greenhouses and grow ultra-potent fuel plants, we'd be killing two birds with one stone.