Price of food is causing world revolutions

dollar value droppin' but as long as we don't venture
out of the country, shouldn't hit as hard.

stock up on the goods. it'll pick up someday.
if not, then we go to war!!! that always picks
the economy up!
 
Well let's see.....
-----------------------------------------
Field corn has 2400 calories per pound

58 lbs per bushel = 139,200 cal per bushel

/2000 cal per day required per person

1 bushel feeds one person for 70 days

need 5.2 bushels per year per person

USDA estimates for the marketing year of 2010-2011, 4.9 billion bushels of corn will be used for ethanol production

4.9 billion/5.2 = 942,307,692 people
-------------------------------------------------
Yep,

There is enough corn being burned in the US to feed 1 Billion people every year.

Only 2 billion bushels of corn are being exported, and 5 billion being burned.

And burning ethanol is for what exactly? For each gallon of ethanol produced, one gallon of petroleum is consumed for distillation, transport, fertilizer, etc.
 
Quote from kipster:


if not, then we go to war!!! that always picks
the economy up!
More...

how does war pick up the economy? I know you can point to history as an example, but I'm asking you why that works?
 
Quote from TraDaToR:

Bernanke? No, it is the speculators... They use predatory high frequency quote stuffing algorithm to manipulate the price of food and front-run it to the upside while never taking delivery and never putting money down to back their insider positions...

You should read the news, man...
More...

No, speculators always get blamed when prices go up when they actually have very little to do with causing the price increases. (Strangely, speculators never get any credit when prices go down, even though the good ones are on the short side at that time.)

The world population grows every single year. So somehow farmers must grow more food every year no matter what. Merely staying even will cause food shortages. But sometimes bad weather and other factors mean that farmers can only stay even, or worse. Add to that the fact that our central bank is deliberately exporting inflation, and nobody should be shocked that food prices are increasing. Speculators are not the cause of food price increases, they are merely the messengers signaling that future prices are likely to be even higher. (And if they are wrong they lose money, which should warm the hearts of all the spec haters.)
 
Quote from olias:

how does war pick up the economy? I know you can point to history as an example, but I'm asking you why that works?
More...

I dont think that model works anymore.
 
It is surprising so many supposed traders don't even understand the fundamentals of pricing. Spot price is determined by people taking delivery. So the only way "speculators" affect spot price is by putting product into storage. Storage is relatively minor for most commodities.

Speculators are always blamed for inflation. Do you expect the Central Banks to come out and admit that they counterfeit for their friends and this creates inflation? Come on guys, the average American may get taken in by the propaganda, but if you are trading without a basic knowledge of fundamentals you are in trouble.

As for food prices, not only are they inflating, but more importantly they are becoming less affordable in relative terms. Oil and food production has been flat in recent years while world population increases. What we see now is only the beginning if the trends don't change.
 
Quote from FightTheFuture:

USDA estimates for the marketing year of 2010-2011, 4.9 billion bushels of corn will be used for ethanol production. Only 2 billion bushels of corn are being exported, and 5 billion being burned. And burning ethanol is for what exactly? For each gallon of ethanol produced, one gallon of petroleum is consumed for distillation, transport, fertilizer, etc.
More...
Worldwide oil production for year 2010 was 30 billions of barrels.

Some 7 billion tonnes of coal is produced worldwide per year which is equal to weight of 14,000 world trade center buildings (9/11).

http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch5en/appl5en/worldoilreservesevol.html

http://www.worldcoal.org/coal/coal-mining/
 
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