Article here.

According to them a lot of stores are limiting the amounts a customer can purchase.

I might need a bigger garden...

-Blast

http://www2.nysun.com/article/74994

Yeah, I saw that too. Remember my "Forest to Farmland" post? Time to start cutting!

Something was niggling at me last night to go to Walmart and buy a dozen cans of Ravioli. Now I know what it was, and I'm glad I got mine before the rationing starts.

You know, they can grow an awful lot of rice down here in the south, if the price would just go up a little. I know a handful of dryland wheat farmers that could start sowing their fields tomorrow if the global price of wheat weren't being so heavily subsidized. Maybe with the dollar so weak we might be able to start producing something to market to the rest of the world, besides debt.

While perusing the Walmart last night here, I noticed more than the usual number of pallets of rice sitting around waiting to be put on the shelves. Maybe I found out where all the rice is going.

Any shortage in the market now is just a supply/demand adjustment. I would expect such commodities to fluctuate from time to time, but I cannot accept that there's a shortage. I don't see that anything has changed in the production cycle to warrant it. Market shifts occur all the time, especially when currencies fluctuate significantly. I would expect prices to start going up now.

Rice is a lot more water-intensive than wheat. We have a researcher at work who focuses on developing strains that use less water, but it may be a while. At present, according to him, rice production accounts for 30% of the fresh water use in the world.

I read the article real early this morning and I just saw reports from CNN and Fox news talking about it. Fox had the reporter on but he didn't add any thing new, but did add a little more detail about foreigners coming in and buying wheat and rice. According to him they are not sure how much is for immediate use and how much is speculative.
I lean towards the speculative because of the following reasons.
The following article details the closing of the largest rice mill in the southern hemisphere
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/17/business/17warm.php
I also read an article (I can’t find it now) but here is another that basically says the same thing. http://allafrica.com/stories/200803101649.html

You can grow a bushel (32 dry quarts) of wheat on a strip of reasonably fertile soil 10'x110'.

Sue

Uh, when was the last time you ate 500 pounds of rice? That's close to 2500 servings.

Some people eat rice at every meal. Hoarding 500 lbs. of rice isn't that unusual if you eat it all the time, especially if you're hoarding it not just for yourself, but to feed a family.

And yet another article on shortages. This one in Japan. The entire country ran out of butter. They import nearly all their food.

http://business.theage.com.au/japans-hun...80420-27ey.html

Headline: "JAPAN'S HUNGER BECOMES A DIRE WARNING FOR OTHER NATIONS"

April 21, 2008

"MARIKO Watanabe admits she could have chosen a better time to take up baking. This week, when the Tokyo housewife visited her local Ito-Yokado supermarket to buy butter to make a cake, she found the shelves bare.

"I went to another supermarket, and then another, and there was no butter at those either. Everywhere I went there were notices saying Japan has run out of butter. I couldn't believe it — this is the first time in my life I've wanted to try baking cakes and I can't get any butter," said the frustrated cook."


With even a modest snowstorm forecast the stores in this area are stripped bare of butter, milk and eggs.

I wonder what reaction a forecast of shortages of these basic items would cause.