"Bill Sornson" <
[email protected]> wrote
> You can't even quote correctly. Hint: DI did not write the above. He
> wrote:
Translation, you can't set up your newsreader correctly.
Meanwhile....
A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice - New York Times
April 17, 2008
The Food Chain
A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice
By KEITH BRADSHER
DENILIQUIN, Australia - Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern
Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. "It was our
little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety," he said, imitating the
giant
fans that dried the rice, "and now it has stopped."
The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once
processed enough grain to meet the needs of 20 million people around the
world.
But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia's rice
crop
by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.
Ten thousand miles separate the mill's hushed rows of oversized silos and
sheds
- beige, gray and now empty - from the riotous streets of Port-au-Prince,
Haiti,
but a widening global crisis unites them.
The collapse of Australia's rice production is one of several factors
contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months -
increases
that have led the world's largest exporters to restrict exports severely,
spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off
violent
protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia,
Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and
Yemen.
Drought affects every agricultural industry based here, not just rice - from
sheepherding, the other mainstay in this dusty land, to the cultivation of
wine
grapes, the fastest-growing crop here, with that expansion often coming at
the
expense of rice.
The drought's effect on rice has produced the greatest impact on the rest of
the
world, so far. It is one factor contributing to skyrocketing prices, and
many
scientists believe it is among the earliest signs that a warming planet is
starting to affect food production.
It is difficult to definitely link short-term changes in weather to
long-term
climate change, but the unusually severe drought is consistent with what
climatologists predict will be a problem of increasing frequency.
Indeed, the chief executive of the National Farmers' Federation in
Australia,
Ben Fargher, says, "Climate change is potentially the biggest risk to
Australian
agriculture."
Drought has already spurred significant changes in Australia's agricultural
heartland. Some farmers are abandoning rice, which requires large amounts of
water, to plant less water-intensive crops like wheat or, especially here in
southeastern Australia, wine grapes. Other rice farmers have sold fields or
water rights, usually to grape growers.
Scientists and economists worry that the reallocation of scarce water
resources
- away from rice and other grains and toward more lucrative crops and
livestock
- threatens poor countries that import rice as a dietary staple.
The global agricultural crisis is threatening to become political, pitting
the
United States and other developed countries against the developing world
over
the need for affordable food versus the need for renewable energy. Many
poorer
nations worry that subsidies from rich countries to support biofuels, which
turn
food, like corn, into fuel, are pushing up the price of staples. The World
Bank
and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
called
on major agricultural nations to overhaul policies to avoid a social
explosion
from rising food prices.
With rice, which is not used to make biofuel, the problem is availability.
Even
in normal times, little of the world's rice is actually exported - more than
90
percent is consumed in the countries where it is grown. In the last
quarter-century, rice consumption has outpaced production, with global
reserves
plunging by half just since 2000. A plant disease is hurting harvests in
Vietnam, reducing supply. And economic uncertainty has led producers to
hoard
rice and speculators and investors to see it as a lucrative or at least safe
bet.
All these factors have made countries that buy rice on the global market
vulnerable to extreme price swings.
Senegal and Haiti each import four-fifths of their rice, and both have faced
mounting unrest as prices have increased. Police suppressed violent
demonstrations in Dakar on March 30, and unrest has spread to other
rice-dependent nations in West Africa, notably Ivory Coast. The Haitian
president, René Préval, after a week of riots, announced subsidies for rice
buyers on Saturday.
Scientists expect the problem to worsen. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate
Change, set up by the United Nations, predicted last year that even slight
warming would lower agricultural output in the tropics and subtropics.
Moderate warming could benefit crop and pasture yields in countries far from
the
Equator, like Canada and Russia. In fact, the net effect of moderate warming
is
likely to be higher total global food production in the next several
decades.
But the scientists said the effect would be uneven, and enormous quantities
of
food would need to be shipped from areas farther from the Equator to feed
the
populations of often less-affluent countries closer to the Equator.
The panel predicted that even greater warming, which might happen by late in
this century if few or no limits are placed on greenhouse gas emissions,
would
hurt total food output and cripple crops in many countries.
Survival Techniques
Paul Lamine N'Dong, an elder in Joal, Senegal, worries that hot weather and
failing rains have already crippled his village's crop of millet, a coarse
grain
eaten locally and traded for rice.
Sitting on a concrete dais reserved for elders, Mr. N'Dong said on a recent
morning, "The price rises very quickly, which means we really have to go and
look for money."
"It is live or die," he said.
For farmers in a richer nation like Australia, the effects of the current
drought are already significant.
