It was great to read some positive agricultural news put out by a portfolio strategist in Sydney last week. The basis for his analogy was that the growth in China has seen “soft commodities” lead the present commodity rally.
Soft Commodities under his classification include rice, corn, wheat and now beef. In overall terms China has already overtaken the United States in the consumption of grain, meat, coal and steel. He suggests as the Chinese become even wealthier and more westernised, the change in dietary habits from chicken and pork will turn more to beef. With the Chinese economy expecting to double every nine years, the figures certainly become quite incredible.
China’s total meat consumption would rise from the current 64 million tonnes to 181 million tonnes in 2031 or roughly 80% of the current world meat production. These statistics are certainly amazing, as one mainly thinks of China being the major growth factor for minerals only.

I suppose it helps when you have 1.5 billion people to feed.

Read an interesting article this week in relation to the predictions by the “Boffins” that we are in for a global food shortage. The fact that farmers are now looking at some of their worst prices in years for grain crops must certainly be a worry as we all know, or thought, that these prices are market driven. The point that economists say that the average price for the past decade has risen for farmers in relation to grain and beef certainly doesn’t mention two-fold price in production costs.
Some interesting stats to come out of this report that the world produced 2,200 million tonnes of the most common cereal grains ie: corn, rice and wheat. This would mean that every man, woman and child in the world would have 324 kgs per year to consume.

The food shortage it appears is caused by political unrest, lack of distribution in third world countries or in other words, the inability of nations to feed their populations. My thoughts always were, the best things we could do for starving people and support our own farmers is instead of giving millions of dollars, give them our good agricultural products. Unfortunately it seems that conflicts, politicians and greedy people appear to make this impossible.

One can only be amazed at the outrageous decisions that our Federal Politicians and the Cattle Council of Australia are making in regards to the dropping of the restrictions of the importing of beef from countries that have been affected by BSE (Mad Cow Disease).

They tell us that this will have no effect from other countries flooding our market with cheap beef. An unfortunate fact of life is that price on the shelf DOES matter. Regardless of the scientific & whatever evidence supporting the most miniscule possibility of introducing such a serious disease to our herd, must be avoided. We are in the elite position of being completely clear of all these nasties and therefore clear of the World Trade Organisation obligation should an outbreak occur, to pull every bit of meat off the shelf.
With the state of our Beef Industry at the moment, where most people are battling to make a respectable living, even the thought of cheap and inferior meat flooding our market is just madness.

What are our Industry and Political leaders thinking???