This is a summary of an article in The Week magazine that quoted several national publications. I thought you might be intersted.
Larry Kopsa CPA
Prices for corn and other staples soared on commodities exchanges last week, after the U.S. government warned that next year’s corn crop would be “dramatically” smaller than this year’s, said Gregory Meyer in the Financial Times. The U.S. Department of Agriculture cut its forecast for next year’s corn harvest by 4 percent, to 12.7 billion bushels, and warned that corn reserves could fall to half of this year’s 1.8 billion bushels. The USDA hasn’t issued such a large downward revision since 1995. The U.S. grows most of the world’s corn and exports more grain than any other country.
Even if the lower forecast is accurate, next year’s U.S. corn crop will probably be one of the largest in history, said Scott Kilman and Liam Pleven in The Wall Street Journal. But it still might not satisfy strong demand from the “accelerating economies of emerging nations such as China” or from Russia, whose wheat crop was decimated by wildfires over the summer. The looming shortages have raised the specter of food riots like those that rocked the developing world in 2007. Grain traders in the Middle East and North Africa have already started to hoard supplies.
