View topic - Price of bread rising on wheat shortage :: Free Dominion - Principled Conservative - Party and Canadian Politics

Price of bread rising on what shortage
By NICKI THOMAS, SUN MEDIA

A worldwide shortage of wheat means shoppers will soon be shelling out more dough for a loaf of bread.

"Within a week, our prices will increase by about 30%," said Hilton Dinner, who owns west Edmonton's popular Bon Ton Bakery. "And I think the whole baking industry is in the same boat."

The price of flour has risen by 100% to 150% in the last seven or eight months, said Dinner, adding that he's never seen such a leap in his 19 years in the baking industry.

"Prices creep up seasonably. They might go up 10%, then down 5%. They never go back to where they started, but they creep. This is not creeping, this is drastic," he said.

The wheat shortage is being driven in part by a two-year drought in Australia that has diminished yields.

The biofuel movement is also being blamed, as grain farmers switch from wheat to corn - the main crop used for ethanol.

"It's not something that's going to go away," said Dinner. "Food in general is going to go up. As wheat goes up, so does the price of eggs and chicken because they eat grain-based feed.

"It affects people who can't afford to pay more for their food."

The effects of the wheat shortage haven't been felt by the Edmonton Food Bank yet, said executive director Marjorie Bencz. But there are two ways it could impact the organization.

"A lot of our clients are already experiencing increased rent, so if staples start to increase, that could create a problem. It could mean that people who haven't used the food bank before will need to start," she said.

"The other thing is that we rely on donors to support us by donating product.

"I'm hoping it won't be a barrier, but there is the potential that people wouldn't be able to donate as much," she said.
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FREE DOMINION FORUM RULES
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people''''s money." Margaret Thatcher

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 12:35 pm Post subject:

The price paid for pride is hardly cheap.

At least the CWB doesn't cover corn, otherwise this tangled mess would be even messier.

Thanks to the Neville Chamberlain's of today's government in Ottawa we are being gouged even more.

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 12:49 pm Post subject:

The cost of wheat in a loaf of bread is minor compared to other factors
Price of wheat has far surpassed corn in the last year

Inflation is a main culprit here
And so is the policy of cheap food for the masses
_________________
Thinking like a peasant will always result in debt and slavery.

You cannot educate people who sincerely desire to remain ignorant.

“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.” - Aldous Huxley

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 1:08 pm Post subject:

Ethanol policy threatens to starve the world
Exclusive: Ernest Istook explains how billions in subsidies drives up cost of food
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FREE DOMINION FORUM RULES
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people''''s money." Margaret Thatcher

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 1:17 pm Post subject:

The "just in time" production and distribution model may work in industrial goods.

Its failure in agricultural goods is becoming evident. For it does not take into consideration "Mother" nature. Things like drought,insects,blight,salinity in soil,....

Posted a year ago what was happening to grain supply. And it is not improving.
_________________
Thinking like a peasant will always result in debt and slavery.

You cannot educate people who sincerely desire to remain ignorant.

“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.” - Aldous Huxley

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 1:21 pm Post subject:

World wheat and soybean stocks shrink
Friday, February 8, 2008, 4:14 PM

by John Perkins

The United States Department of Agriculture's updated supply and demand estimates showed the continued tightening of world wheat supplies and smaller soybean stocks, against a slight increase in corn supply.

According to the USDA, as of January 31, 2008, 2007/08 world wheat ending stocks were 109.70 million tons, compared to 110.93 million in the January report. Non-U.S. stocks are estimated at 102.31 million tons, down 680,000 tons. Production was raised 590,000 tons to 603.59 million, while imports were increased 830,000 to 104.73 million tons. Feed use is pegged at 99.39 million tons, compared to 98.49 million this time last month. Total use is placed at 618.97 million tons, up 2.52 million tons from January. Wheat exports are seen at 106.40 million tons, compared to the January figure of 104.68 million. Exports by the major non-U.S. exporters are projected at 41 million tons, unchanged from January. The USDA sees production in Argentina at 15.5 million tons, a half million more than last month, and European Union production is pegged at 119.54 million tons, 230,000 less than the report prior.

International corn ending stocks for the current marketing year are estimated at 101.88 million tons, up 550,000 from the January estimate. Non-U.S. stocks are placed at 65.37 million tons, compared to 64.81 million. Production is expected to be 766.23 million tons, a decrease of 490,000 from January. Of that, non-U.S. production is pegged at 434.14 million tons, compared to 434.62 million a month ago. Total world imports are placed at 92.43 million tons, compared to the January guess of 92.15 million. The export estimate is 94.12 million tons, compared to 94.34 million last month at this time. Feed use is projected at 491.05 million tons and total use is seen at 772.72 million tons, both smaller than the January estimates. USDA did lower its production estimate for Argentina 1 million tons to 21.50 million following weather damage.

World soybean stocks were pegged at 45.82 million tons, compared to 46.24 million in the January report. Non-U.S. supplies were placed at 41.47 million tons, down 10,000 from the prior figure. The total 2007/08 world crop is seen at 220.07 million tons, compared to 220.34 million a month ago. Imports are estimated at 75.32 million tons, compared to 75.11 million in January. The total world bean crush is expected to be 204.85 million tons, compared to the January estimate of 204.91 million tons. That brings total domestic use to 235.50 million tons, an increase of 240,000. Exports are seen at 75.75 million tons, compared to the last guess of 75.54 million. Non-U.S. exports were revised down, while U.S. sales were raised slightly.

http://www.brownfieldnetwork.com/gestalt/go.cfm?objectid=FB1D1E91-9B33-07FC-EE3E8EFF9ED1F70D
_________________
Thinking like a peasant will always result in debt and slavery.

You cannot educate people who sincerely desire to remain ignorant.

“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.” - Aldous Huxley

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 1:26 pm Post subject:

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 1:27 pm Post subject:

Thursday, December 13, 2007 12:44 PM CST

World Wheat Supply Threatened

A new wheat stem rust strain is on a worldwide march, threatening a global food problem and wheat shortage on a scale unknown since the 1950s. At that time, a strain of stem rust reached epidemic proportions and destroyed 40 percent of the spring wheat crop in North America.

The fungal disease - which also threatens barley - has now jumped the Red Sea, from east Africa to Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and is perfectly positioned to move on to Egypt, the Middle East, and Asia.

At the same time, Yue Jin, a plant pathologist at the Agricultural Research Service’s Cereal Disease Laboratory (CDL) in St. Paul, Minn., has confirmed that a new variant of the already virulent pathogen has occurred in Kenya, one that could broaden the disease’s reach to beyond the 80 percent of the world’s wheat already at risk.

All this is occurring at a low point in world wheat supplies. The Middle East and Asia’s 160-plus million acres of fields, which account for a quarter of the word’s annual wheat harvest, are in the direct path of the disease’s advance. And the spores of this fungal disease of plants could reach our continent sooner or later.

Global cooperation

The Global Rust Initiative was formed in 2005 to fight the disease. Two international organizations - CIMMYT (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo, or the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), based in El Batan, Mexico, and ICARDA (International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas), based in Aleppo, Syria - are leading the initiative, and ARS has been a supporter from the start. Governments and other research institutions in Australia, Canada, India, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Kenya, South Africa, Sudan, Turkey, Uganda, and Yemen are joining the initiative’s efforts to address the current crisis.

Rick Ward, a wheat breeder from CIMMYT, coordinates the initiative from offices in El Batan. He says that in the beginning he realized how “incredibly close we came to not being prepared to deal with this crisis. The line of defense was incredibly thin.”

As the only facility in the United States that can identify various forms of stem rust and other cereal rusts, CDL is helping to jump-start the international effort to deal with the stem rust threat.

Stem rust is the worst of three fungal rust diseases that infect wheat. It grows mostly in the plant stem, destroying stem tissue so that carbohydrates can’t get from the leaves to the grains, which then shrivel. The diseases are called “rusts” because of the powdery, reddish-orange spores that form on infected plants.

Keeping the revolution “green”

The launch of the Global Rust Initiative was spurred by Norman E. Borlaug, the CIMMYT researcher who won a Nobel Prize in 1970 for breeding high-yielding wheat varieties with resistance to stem rust. Borlaug realized that the new stem rust mutant threatened to undo the successes of the so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s that, with ARS’s help, ushered in a 40-year era of dependable high yields of wheat to feed the world.

Edward B. Knipling, who heads ARS, agreed to help the rust initiative with start-up money and expertise. ARS would screen wheat collections and currently grown U.S. varieties for resistance to the new strain of stem rust in east Africa. Called “Ug99” for its discovery in Uganda in 1999, it is caused by the fungus Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici.

ARS has worked with the National Wheat and Barley Improvement Committees to collect and send U.S. wheat and barley breeding lines to east Africa for screening against Ug99 in collaboration with CIMMYT and the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI). Data from the Kenyan field-screening nursery will give U.S. wheat and barley breeders a headstart on developing new varieties with resistance to Ug99.

Interest in the effort is growing, helped in part by the results to date shown by Jin and colleagues at ARS, CIMMYT, ICARDA, KARI, the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, the University of Minnesota, and many other institutions.

At the end of 2006, Jin confirmed that a new variant of Ug99 has occurred in Kenya and is even more virulent - it defeated resistance gene Sr24, putting even more wheat varieties in danger. “We have to closely monitor for new forms of stem rust to make sure they cannot overcome the resistance genes we plan to introduce into wheat varieties,” says Jin.

CDL scientists have safeguarded and maintained a collection of rust strains, including stem rust, from domestic and international sources over the past 50 years. That, together with long-conserved, ARS-managed collections of wheat germplasm lines at Aberdeen, Idaho, is invaluable to researchers.

Watching our southern flank

ARS and wheat breeders from southern states are targeting a “southern strategy.” Kay Simmons, ARS national program leader for plant genetics and grain crops, explains that ARS is helping to develop increased genetic protection for the entire United States, but especially in the southern states - such as Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia - where stem rust is able to survive through winter. Jin explains that high levels of Ug99 resistance developed and deployed in the southern states could prevent Ug99 from taking hold there and spreading to the rest of the country.

Nationally, ARS scientists and university cooperators have planted susceptible and resistant wheat varieties at multiple locations around the country to monitor for new and emerging rust strains. Such outdoor plantings are used to provide early warnings of cereal rust disease for both researchers and producers.

Counting on resistance genes

In 2005 and 2006, greenhouse studies at CDL and field studies in both Kenya and Ethiopia showed that Ug99 had overcome most of the known stem rust resistance genes deployed in wheat cultivars over the years. Instrumental in this critical work were Jin, CDL research leader Marty Carson, wheat breeder and geneticist Ravi P. Singh of CIMMYT, and wheat researchers in Kenya and Ethiopia.

ARS is working with the U.S. wheat and barley breeders to identify and apply DNA marker technology to deploy effective resistance genes into every major class of U.S. wheat and barley.

The four ARS regional small-grains genotyping laboratories are now focused on the wheat classes grown in their regions: hard red spring wheat and durum wheat at Fargo, North Dakota; hard red winter wheat at Manhattan, Kansas; soft red winter wheat at Raleigh, North Carolina; and soft white winter wheat at Pullman, Washington.

For this work, ARS is partnering with U.S. breeders through the National Wheat and Barley Improvement Committees. A priority is to develop breeder-friendly DNA markers to locate genes effective against Ug99 and deploy them into wheat and barley cultivars.

At the Raleigh lab, for example, ARS geneticist Gina Brown-Guedira is targeting three genes effective against Ug99 that have not been used widely in U.S. wheat - Sr22, Sr25, and Sr40 - for transfer into advanced breeding lines of soft winter wheat supplied by breeders. These genes are being pyramided with two effective resistance genes - Sr36 and an unnamed rye gene that is already present in soft winter wheat germplasm.

Singh and other CIMMYT breeders are coordinating the transfer of genes from resistant spring wheat lines to CIMMYT breeding lines. They identify resistant wheats by planting them in screening nurseries in east Africa. Then the seed is brought to Mexico to grow the next generation of plants. Still further generations are then grown in Africa to test against Ug99 and in Mexico for final selection. The next crop season, they test to be sure yields are adequate. ICARDA is carrying out similar work.

Resistant selections are distributed to U.S. wheat breeders through international nursery systems. At CDL, Jin helps to determine what genes are present in these materials by testing them with multiple stem rust races at the seedling stage. Experiments on Ug99 are done by exposing seedlings in special greenhouses and plant growth chambers in midwinter in St. Paul, Minn., when the weather is too cold for any possible escaping spores to survive.

Les Szabo, an ARS geneticist at CDL, has helped create a genetic map of the Ug99 fungus’s genome. This will help researchers build a diagnostic kit to quickly identify new forms of the disease in fields and find resistance genes faster in wheat.

Training is the key

The Global Rust Initiative is training scientists around the world to recognize stem rust and understand ways to prevent it and strategies for breeding resistant wheat.

“We want to enhance the knowledge of contemporary genetic techniques in Ethiopia, Kenya, and other countries,” Ward says. “We also want to support efforts in those countries to breed wheat varieties that will resist Ug99 and other rusts.”

It was a CIMMYT-trained researcher in Uganda who first spotted the new form of stem rust on wheat in fields at a research station in 1998.

“Had we not had people like him trained in over 90 countries, we might not have spotted Ug99 until years later,” Ward says.

And Simmons agrees. “It is in the interests of the United States to have such trained people in other countries to extend our early-warning lines of defense worldwide.”
http://www.agriview.com/articles/2007/12/13/crop_news/crops09.txt
_________________
Thinking like a peasant will always result in debt and slavery.

You cannot educate people who sincerely desire to remain ignorant.

“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.” - Aldous Huxley

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 1:34 pm Post subject:

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 2:09 pm Post subject:

The law of unintended consequences [or more accuarately, unstated consequences - I believe that the agri-business honchos and their cheering section in the PMO and White House fully intended to drive up wheat and corn prices through the ethanol subsidies].

You cannot just decide to switch to another form of energy without it having a major impact on the economy. We've all heard of the benefit of Hydrogen fuelled vehicles, but you rarely hear about how much electicity in costs to generate the hydrogen - electricity which must be generated with primarily fossil fuels. Some people think you can just switch from home heating fuel or natural gas, without considering how the electricity will be generated. The long term solution is of course nuclear energy, but the enviros won't admit it and insist that notoriously unreliable wind and solar is the answer. In the meantime, the fat cat buddies of the powers that be will continue to profit from this latest intervention by "conservative" governments into the free market [and it doesn't hurt that the farmers are going to enjoy artificially inflated commodity prices either]. Razz

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 2:22 pm Post subject:

Last I heard the cost of the wheat in a loaf of bread was 2 cents. Now it is 4 cents. Big Fing Deal. Its been 30 years since farmers had a few months of good fortune.

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 2:27 pm Post subject:

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 2:38 pm Post subject:

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 4:01 pm Post subject:

Posted: 02/ 25/ 08 9:53 pm Post subject:

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