Food

Food.  Food, or should I say lack of food, has laid low kingdoms and empires.  Napoleon famously said that "an army marches on its stomach".  In the past several days the U.N. and the IMF have had press releases on the seriousness of the world's food situation, and articles have made the front page of the New York Times, Washington Post, the WSJ, etc...  This is serious, and this problem just isn't going to go away.

In early 2005, while researching energy opportunities to invest in, we stumbled across some rather disturbing data on grain inventories.  This was long before ethanol became a household word, and before the Federal mandates that would later sop up far too much of the U.S. corn crop.  What we stumbled on was fairly simple and straightforward, really.  That within a decade, give or take a couple years, the world's grain inventories would fall to zero.  Now I fully expected that there would be some actions taken by the markets and governments in that time frame that would alter the slope of the line on the XY chart.  Still, the trend line was unmistakable, and I wrote about it on several occasions.

The trend line is worsening (as measured by those who might want to eat).  That is also quite unmistakable.  So much for my expectations that SOMEONE might step up and do something.

Mentatt (at) yahoo (d0t) com