- MEDIA INFORMATION AND COMMENT MAY 9, 2008
-
- GLOBAL FOOD SUPPLIES TO STAY NEAR RECORD LOWS IN COMING
YEAR:
- NEW DATA RELEASED TODAY
-
- SASKATOON, SK, CANADA-Today, the United States Department
of Agriculture (USDA) released its first projections of grain production,
supply, and demand for the 2008/09 crop-year (the crop that Canadian,
US, and other Northern Hemisphere farmers are now planting). USDA World
Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) figures are online at
www.usda.gov/oce/commodity/wasde .
- USDA figures on food production and consumption are globally
accepted as the best available.
-
- The USDA projects global grain supplies at the end of
the 2008/09 crop-year to be equivalent to 56.7 days-nearly identical to
the record-low 56.0 day supply projected for the 2007/08 crop-year.
- (USDA's projected stocks/use ratio of 15.54% is equivalent
to 56.7 days of supply [15.54% x 365 days]. USDA food supply data goes
back as far as the 1960/61 crop-year.)
-
- In seven of the past nine years, the world consumed more
grain than farmers produced. With the USDA essentially projecting a "break
even" year in 2008/09, food supplies remain precarious. Today's
projections reaffirm that we have drawn down food supplies by more than
half since 2000-from 115 days in that year, to a projected 56.7 days in
the coming year. Despite today's projections that supply may cover demand
in 2008/09, we remain in the fastest, most consistent food supply drawdown
in the 49 years for which we have data, probably the fastest drawdown
in a century (outside of the World Wars and the 1930s drought).
-
- Partly as a result of the supply drawdown, global food
prices have gone up rapidly. For information and graphs on food prices,
see United Nations (UN) Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) data
at www.fao.org/giews/english/cpfs/index.htm .
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- Though grain prices have gone up rapidly-far too quickly
for the world's 1 billion+ urban poor-grain prices are not "high."
- Even with recent price increases for corn, wheat, rice,
soybeans, and most other grains and oilseeds, inflation-adjusted farmgate
prices remain below 50-year averages, and far below record highs.
- To illustrate, in the 1973/74 crop-year, Canadian corn
farmers received an inflation-adjusted average price of $13/bushel. Wheat
farmers received an inflation-adjusted average price of $22/ bushel.
Current average prices will be half (or less) those 1973/74 values. Grain
prices today have improved, but only when compared to the unprecedentedly-low
grain prices of the 1985 to 2005 period.
-
- Further, there is an increasing gap between what farmers
get and what citizens around the world are forced to pay-an increasing
gap between "grain prices" and "food prices." This
gap is largely a result of intermediaries taking more for themselves.
-
- Also, many farmers-those producing livestock, potatoes,
and some other foods-continue to receive very low prices and to earn near-
record-low incomes.
-
- The National Farmers Union (NFU) asks the media to be
especially cautious when reporting on food prices. We encourage everyone
to report on the destabilizing effects of too-rapid food price increases
and the damaging effects that this is having on citizens around the world,
but to refrain from characterizing grain prices as "high," from
giving the impression that farmers are receiving record or near-record
prices, or from implying that grain prices must go down. Journalists,
policymakers, and farmers alike must take care to distinguish food price
increases from grain price increases, and to note the widening gap between
what farmers receive and what citizens around the world are made to pay.
Also, everyone should keep in mind that farmers' input costs have risen
dramatically over the past two to three years. Fuel, fertilizer, chemical,
and other farm input prices are up by 50% to 100%. These increased costs
consume much of farmers' increased returns.
-
- The NFU has taken a lead role in calling attention to
the food supply drawdown and the food price crisis. For several years,
the NFU has attempted to call policy-makers' attention to the then- looming
crisis, pointing out that then-fashionable talk of food "oversupply",
"surplus", and "glut" was unsupported by the data
and extremely dangerous. (See, for instance, the NFU's January 2005 report
on Canadian farm and food security, available online at:www.nfu.ca/briefs/2005/
Ten_point_plan_to_end_farm_crisis_EIGHTEEN_FINAL.pdf ) Unable to get
Canadian policymakers to pay attention to the food-supply drawdown, in
May 2006, well before food prices began to rise, the NFU wrote to United
Nations then-Secretary General Kofi Annan calling his attention to the
unfolding crisis. The NFU letter to the UN said: "we may be risking
a calamitous shortfall in the world's grain supplies; global food security
is rapidly eroding". (For a copy of the NFU's letter to the UN,
please see www.nfu.ca/press_releases/press/2006/May_06/ UN_FOOD_LETTER_FINAL.pdf
) Despite ample warnings and clearly visible signs of falling supplies
and a looming food price crisis, Canadian and international leaders failed
to act.
-
- The NFU has also taken a lead role in laying out a coherent
and effective solution to the many problems in our food system: supply
drawdown, income crisis, increasing unsustainability, the displacement
of farmers around the world, and hunger. The thousands of farm families
that make up the NFU believe that, globally and in Canada, we must begin
again to value farmers and our local, regional, and national capacities
to produce nutritious food. Canada and other nations must replace export-focused,
agribusiness-dominated, industrial agriculture with "Food Sovereignty,"
an approach focused on maximizing the economic, environmental, and social
sustainability of farm families, local communities, and ecosystems.
-
- In the current system, at the World Trade Organization
(WTO) table and elsewhere, Canadian policymakers aggressively promote
globalized food trade and rules that compel nations to accept often- low-priced
food imports that damage local food production capacities. The food and
agriculture policies of Canada, the US, and other nations also encourage
nations in the Global South to refocus from feeding their own citizens
to producing export commodities for our consumption-nuts, flowers, feedstocks
for Agrofuels, and protein for petfood. And Canadian, US, and other
nations' policymakers encourage farmers around the world to reject low-input,
locally-appropriate, sustainable agriculture systems and to adopt the
high-tech, high-input, high-cost, fossil-fuel dependent model utilized
in Canada, the US, Europe, and Australia.
- In contrast, in a Food Sovereignty model, nations would
be encouraged to take all necessary steps to strengthen their own food
production and distribution systems, to make those systems more bountiful,
sustainable, resilient, equitable, and just.
-
- The multiple crises of food supply drawdown, price volatility,
climate change, energy-supply uncertainty, soil erosion, the destruction
of our family farms, and over 1 billion hungry or starving draw attention
to the failure of the globalized industrial model of food production,
processing, and trade. The recent report from the United Nations, the
World Bank, and dozens of nations-the IAASTD report-underlines that same
conclusion. (See http:// www.agassessment.org/ )
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- The NFU believes that the global food system stands at
a fork in the road. We have a choice: continue to promote industrial,
globalized, agribusiness-dominated, farm-destroying food production and
trade, or turn in a new direction, embrace food production and trade methods
that stabilize prices, enhance production, cut costs, support farmers
and communities, reduce energy dependence and greenhouse gas emissions,
and increase resilience and sustainability. The problems are many. The
solution is the Food Sovereignty model. The food price crisis is a global
wakeup call, an invitation to a better future.
-
-
- For more information, contact:
- Stewart Wells, NFU President:
(306) 773-6852
- Colleen Ross, Women's President:
(613) 652-1552
- Darrin Qualman, NFU Director of Research:
- (306) 492-4714
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