Iraq. Iran. $100 A Barrel Oil. Wall Street Panic. Gee, it’s getting so you just don’t know which crisis is the worst. Then you see this in a January 7th article by Alisa McMullen in the Financial Post, ‘Forget oil, the new global crisis is food,’ and you realize all those other dangers will take a back seat if the world starts starving in catastrophic proportion.
The Food Channel’s dedication to ‘all things food’ also includes our concern about where all that food will come from. The Financial Post article reports that a shortage is facing us in the very near future. It quotes Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO, as saying, ‘It’s not a matter of if, but when. It’s going to hit this year hard.’
His reasoning is very difficult to refute. The rise in raw food prices will increase sharply with the increased demand for meat and dairy products for the growing middle class in India and China. This coupled with the growing needs of the biofuels industry is literally gobbling up all the corn that can be grown. The ravenous demand has driven up the price of corn 44% in the last 15 months. And it’s not just corn. Wheat is up 92% in the last year.
The food haves will definitely have a big edge over the have nots. Those Illinois cornfields that yield 200 bushels per acre just don’t exist anywhere else in the world. And if you’re thinking about investing in stocks that will benefit from rising food costs, Coxe suggests there are several that will ‘redefine the world’s food supplies.’ Unfortunately, he didn’t say which ones.
So, next time you’re filling your car up, or watching your 401K go down—think about how food is our oil, how emerging countries will need it, and how you might do some research to find out which ‘food’ stocks to buy. Oh, and when you find the winners, send them along to me. I promise I won’t tell a soul.
That’s it, from the edge of the food world,
Read earlier editions of Food News from the Edge.
Some information provided by the International Food Futurists
