Let them eat cake!

Posted on August 25, 2009
Filed Under General |

From harvest reports coming in now, I believe that there is an imminent worldwide food shortage coming. Actions and comments such as the one attributed to Marie Antoinette being made by other world leaders will also lead to revolutions similar to what happened in France in 1789. Daily reports are coming in now with titles like Guatemala at food shortage risk after drought, Global Starvation Imminent as US Faces Crop Failure, Indian government to import food items to plug drought-triggered shortage, and Australian Drought a factor in food aid shortage: UN. Crop harvests are failing all over the world due to drought and poor water management. The worst areas being hit are Australia, India, China, Argentina, California and Texas. This will lead to dramatic increases in food prices in the near future as many of the poorer and undeveloped countries will have to compete for food imports with the likes of India and China. This will spell doom for many third world governments as they fight off revolution and civil war as a result of mass starvation.

“Let them eat cake!” is a common misquote supposedly exclaimed by Marie Antoinette just prior to the start of the French Revolution in 1789 when she was told that no one had bread to eat. The quote actually first appears in The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1736), “Finally I recalled the worst-recourse of a great princess to whom one said that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: ‘Let them eat brioche…’” However, the French misconception that Marie Antoinette had actually uttered such a phrase only piled on more disgust by the starving populous for the frivolousness and extravagance of the French Aristocracy. The public was so convinced of Marie Antoinette’s role in France’s dire financial situation that they labeled her “Madame De’ficit.”

“Quietly, the last of the U.S. government’s wheat reserves, held in the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust, were sold in late May onto the domestic market for cash. The cash was put in a trust for food aid. With no other government wheat holdings, U.S. government wheat stocks are now totally exhausted. Since 2000, government wheat holdings dropped steadily until recently when the last of the government-owned wheat was sold.

With no formal plan for wheat stocks by the U.S. government, wheat stocks have defaulted to the arena of the private free-market sector. Unfortunately, the private sector has no plans for any kind of minimum wheat stocks that would protect from a price and/or availability standpoint for the American public. Holdings by the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust for corn, sorghum and rice are also zero.

Of these stocks, o­n-farm wheat stocks are at 25.6 million bushels, the lowest level of o­n-farm wheat stocks since the USDA started keeping tabs back in 1934. So as you are driving in rural America before wheat harvest, the farmer’s bins have never been so empty.” (http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/07/us-govt-completely-out-of-wheat.html)

Here is a chart of the world populations. Note that the continent of Africa just hit an estimated 1 billion in population this summer.

From: http://www.prb.org/DataFinder.aspx
Population Reference Bureau 2009
Country     Population (millions)
China                  1,331
India                   1,171
United States      307
Indonesia            243
Brazil                   191
Pakistan              181
Bangladesh         162
Nigeria                153
Russia                 142
Japan                  128

(Source: Carl Haub and Mary Mederios Kent, 2009 World Population Data Sheet.)

The areas hardest hit by poor grain harvest this year will be Africa, India, China and Australia. There are now over 3.5 billion mouths to feed in Africa, India and China. India and China have cash to buy food for this year, but there will be starvation across most of Asia and likely mega-famine on the African continent as a result. Prices for food will skyrocket for North America, Europe, Central and South America, and Australia. Worldwide starvation will be at our doorstep for the last quarter of 2009 and all of 2010. This is sadly not being talked about in the mainstream media and there is nothing coming from the US government on this impending food crisis that will likely affect us all. So, at the risk of being glib, I guess our response is let them eat cake.

Clayton

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