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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (74922)	8/1/2006 11:12:22 AM
From: T L Comiskey	Respond to of 361243

Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006). The first big test of the international community’s capacity to manage scarcity may come with oil or it could come with grain. If the latter is the case, this could occur when China—whose grain harvest fell by 34 million tons, or 9 percent, between 1998 and 2005—turns to the world market for massive imports of 30 million, 50 million, or possibly even 100 million tons of grain per year. Demand on this scale could quickly overwhelm world grain markets. When this happens, China will have to look to the United States, which controls the world’s grain exports of over 40 percent of some 200 million tons. 32 This will pose a fascinating geopolitical situation. More than 1.3 billion Chinese consumers, who had an estimated $160-billion trade surplus with the United States in 2004—enough to buy the entire U.S. grain harvest twice—will be competing with Americans for U.S. grain, driving up U.S. food prices. In such a situation 30 years ago, the United States simply restricted exports. But China is now banker to the United States, underwriting much of the massive U.S. fiscal deficit with monthly purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds. 33 Within the next few years, the United States may be loading one or two ships a day with grain for China. This long line of ships stretching across the Pacific, like an umbilical cord providing nourishment, will intimately link the two economies. Managing this flow of grain so as to simultaneously satisfy the food needs of consumers in both countries, at a time when ethanol fuel distilleries are taking a growing share of the U.S. grain harvest, may become one of the leading foreign policy challenges of this new century.