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Breaking stories
US drought affects Europe
By Stephen Cadogan
Crop failure in the US sends a message that Europe must get businesslike about food production.
Drought has left half of the US maize crop and more than one third of the soyabean crop classed as poor or very poor.As recently as mid-June, a record tonnage of US maize production was projected.
But prolonged blasts of heat came out of nowhere to hit emerging stalks and plants.
The crops were hit in the crucial pollination phase, leaving many maize plants without kernels.
There was nothing that farmers in the country with the best seed, fertiliser, and machinery technology — and the money to buy it — could do.
They could only watch as about one third of the world’s corn and soyabean crop suffered under the relentless sun.
Crop insurance will protect most of the farmers, but concern now switches to the grain importing countries which depend on imports of grain from the American midwest. Last year, 40% was exported.
The absence later this year of these huge tonnages will hit the global grain trade hard. Most US maize and soyabeans are eventually eaten by livestock, or go to the processed food or biofuel industries.
But wheat will be affected, primarily because many farmers around the world will feed their animals more wheat, without their usual supply of US maize.
The 2012 US crop failure is expected to have long-term impact, because when maize and soyabean prices rise and rise, farmers will plant bigger acreage with these crops next year — reducing the supply of wheat, for example, and inevitably leading to higher 2013 prices for this important food grain.
The fragility of world food supplies has been exposed by the drought in the US.
But it also exposes the dangers of the EU’s slow conversion of the Common Agriculture Policy to a Common Environment Policy.
Current proposals require every farmer in Europe to set aside 7% of his or her land for ecological areas.
It’s a non-issue for many Irish farmers, because it can include hedgerows, forests, wetlands, marshes, and scrubland.
But it will seem incongruous for EU crop farmers if the US drought leaves the threat of a worldwide grain shortage. These farmers will also depend on carrying out good works for the environment — rather than for the world’s hungry — in order to keep earning about 30% of their EU annual income support.
Current proposals also require Ireland’s most productive farmers to lose about 33% of their EU income support, on average.
Maybe the world could better afford to make European farms environment-friendly if the US ethanol industry was not mandated to use at least 40% of the US maize production.
But so far, Barack Obama’s government sees no need to reverse this decision. That is not likely to change ahead of the November election in which President Obama, a supporter of ethanol, seeks a second term.
Crops for ethanol and farming for the environment are signs of political extremism on each side of the Atlantic.