Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ggersh who wrote (105767)	4/22/2014 1:28:35 PM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Respond to of 217656

All is true but the investments are both in Russia and Ukraine look up on Google Earth the size of this port On 13th December 2013, Cargill announced the purchase of a stake in a Black Sea grain terminal at Novorossiysk on Russia’s Black Sea coast. Ukraine is known for many years as Europe bread basket, so nothing new there. Russia has ample agricultural land but it is not cultivated as it lacks infrastructure. That is the stupidity of Moscow, instead of investing in the army invest in infrastructure and cultivate grains. HTey refused to pay Monsanto for GM seed, so their harvest are meager and grow too slow for the short Russian summer further north. Don Volga and Kuban regions are very prosperous ans so are Samara, Orenburg, Kazan Ufa and the list is long all along the same latitudes. Read this if you can translate ria.ru, I exchanged e-mails with him a very smart man. While Europe struggled to shake-off the Great Recession, Ukraine’s agriculture sector grew 13.7% in 2013. Ukraine’s agriculture economy is hot. Russia’s is not. Hampered by the effects of climate change and 25 million hectares of uncultivated agricultural land, Russia lags behind its former breadbasket. According to the Centre for Eastern Studies, Ukraine’s agricultural exports rose from $4.3 billion in 2005 to $17.9 billion in 2012 and, harkening the heyday of the USSR, farming currently accounts for 25% of its total exports. Ukraine is also the world’s third-largest exporter of wheat and of corn.

To: ggersh who wrote (105767)	4/23/2014 2:12:39 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217656

So why did the Ukrainians prefer US companies over Russian companies when it came to developing their resources? Someone has to invest the money that is required.. So if Putin makes it too high of a political risk for western companies to invest in Ukraine, is that not economic imperialism? Hawk

To: ggersh who wrote (105767)

4/23/2014 3:25:59 PM

From: Haim R. Branisteanu

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217656

Food shortages could be most critical world issue by mid-century - Investment - BUY AGRICULTURAL LAND
by Staff Writers
Washington DC (SPX) Apr 22, 2014

File image.

The world is less than 40 years away from a food shortage that will have serious implications for people and governments, according to a top scientist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

"For the first time in human history, food production will be limited on a global scale by the availability of land, water and energy," said Dr. Fred Davies, senior science advisor for the agency's bureau of food security. "Food issues could become as politically destabilizing by 2050 as energy issues are today."

Davies, who also is a Texas A and M AgriLife Regents Professor of Horticultural Sciences, addressed the North American Agricultural Journalists meeting in Washington, D.C. on the "monumental challenge of feeding the world."

He said the world population will increase 30 percent to 9 billion people by mid-century. That would call for a 70 percent increase in food to meet demand.

"But resource limitations will constrain global food systems," Davies added. "The increases currently projected for crop production from biotechnology, genetics, agronomics and horticulture will not be sufficient to meet food demand." Davies said the ability to discover ways to keep pace with food demand have been curtailed by cutbacks in spending on research.

"The U.S. agricultural productivity has averaged less than 1.2 percent per year between 1990 and 2007," he said. "More efficient technologies and crops will need to be developed -- and equally important, better ways for applying these technologies locally for farmers -- to address this challenge." Davies said when new technologies are developed, they often do not reach the small-scale farmer worldwide.

"A greater emphasis is needed in high-value horticultural crops," he said. "Those create jobs and economic opportunities for rural communities and enable more profitable, intense farming." Horticultural crops, Davies noted, are 50 percent of the farm-gate value of all crops produced in the U.S.

He also made the connection between the consumption of fruits and vegetables and chronic disease prevention and pointed to research centers in the U.S. that are making links between farmers, biologists and chemists, grocers, health care practitioners and consumers. That connection, he suggested, also will be vital in the push to grow enough food to feed people in coming years.

"Agricultural productivity, food security, food safety, the environment, health, nutrition and obesity -- they are all interconnected," Davies said.

One in eight people worldwide, he added, already suffers from chronic undernourishment, and 75 percent of the world's chronically poor are in the mid-income nations such as China, India, Brazil and the Philippines.

"The perfect storm for horticulture and agriculture is also an opportunity," Davies said.

"Consumer trends such as views on quality, nutrition, production origin and safety impact what foods we consume. Also, urban agriculture favors horticulture." For example, he said, the fastest growing segment of new farmers in California, are female, non-Anglos who are "intensively growing horticultural crops on small acreages," he said.