how far is the us from food shortages or riots, page-18

Food, Fuel, and Finance: The Crisis of the Three Fs
By Dan Denning • April 14th, 2008 • Related Articles • Filed Under
About the Author
Dan Denning is the author of 2005's best-selling The Bull Hunter (John Wiley & Sons). A specialist in small-cap stocks, Dan draws on his network of global contacts from his base in Melbourne, Australia and pens the small cap newsletter, The Australian Small Cap Investigator. He is also a contributing editor to the Australian resource investing publication Diggers & Drillers.

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Filed Under: Featured • Resources
Tags: crisis • finance • food • food crisis • fuel

While the share market digests the news of collapsing brokers and falling financial profits, the grand poobahs of the world's economy are wringing their hands in worry. What's keeping them up at night? The three Fs, each its own kind of crisis: food, fuel, and finance.

"The World Bank met on Sunday faced with a mounting food price crisis that has sparked deadly unrest in developing countries, underscoring the urgency of fighting hunger and poverty," reports Channel News Asia.

How urgent, you ask? The Prime Minister of Haiti was sent packing this weekend by crowds protesting soaring food and fuel prices. We don't even know who the man is but reckon he won't be the last public official to be ridden out of town on a rail before this current crisis is over (and it may not be any time soon).

As usual, it's the people at the margin (whether lending or with food) that are affected first when surplus turns to scarcity. Despite all the daily signs of abundance here in Australia, let us not forget that there are about four and half billion people on the planet who have little margin for error in their daily lives. If food prices go up, many of these people go hungry.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick, doing his best impersonation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wants a "new deal" for global food programs. He's asked richer nations to contribute US$500 million immediately to help get food to poorer nations.

IMF President Dominique Strauss-Kahn was less pragmatic but more rhetorical. Wrapping up his organisation's annual spring meeting, he said that, "Food prices, if they go on like they are doing today ... the consequences will be terrible…Hundreds of thousands of people will be starving…As we know, learning from the past, those kinds of questions sometimes end in war."

People often talk about resource wars being a common feature of the coming century (or decade). But it's usually oil and energy they're talking about, not rice and wheat. Food is fuel for the body (we've been watching the Biggest Loser). If you don't have access to cheap calories, what good is cheap fuel?

It's our contention here at the Daily Reckoning that both food and fuel are getting more expensive. The scary thought is that artificially low interest rates and cheap energy have, for many years now, sent bogus signals to the world about how much and how fast the population can grow. Agricultural abundance is only a very recent (and perhaps temporary) historical phenomenon. It's no coincidence that it occurred alongside the energy boom from cheap oil.

Not that it's any consolation to starving people stranded in long petrol lines, but businesses in the agricultural sector are going to boom (provided they aren't nationalised). Farm equipment, fertilizer, and large producers should all see earnings rise this year. And next year. And the year after that.