If this is a trend, then a lot of poor people who rely on wheat as a staple of their diet could be badly...including those poorer people in the US and other developed countries...

Half the population is under the age of 18. Tanzania's future is NOW...join the 50% campaign!

AFP: Drought again threatens Australian wheat output: trade minister

SYDNEY (AFP) -- Drought could wipe out Australia's wheat crop despite expectations that the country's worst dry spell for a century was easing, Trade Minister Warren Truss warned Tuesday.

"In many parts of Australia there has been some relief and a quite large wheat crop was planted," he told reporters on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific summit in Sydney.

"It's disappointing to hear reports now that the crop is deteriorating especially in New South Wales and parts of Victoria."

And in Western Australia:

Hot winds severely damage Australian wheat | World | Reuters

PERTH (Reuters) - Hot winds this week caused severe damage to the Western Australian wheat crop, further reducing the country's already struggling crop, Western Australia's Agriculture Minister said late on Tuesday.

In an interview with Reuters, Minister Kim Chance said bad weather was likely to wipe up to 2 million tonnes from the national wheat crop.

"The hot, windy day this week caused huge damage so we saw a number of crops written down on Monday on the basis of one day's wind in Western Australia," Chance said.

"Our total wheat crop could be about 1 or 2 million tonnes lower than the lowest end of the projections made so far," the state Minister of Agriculture and Food told Reuters.

Australia's wheat crop nationwide has been hit with extremely dry conditions throughout August, particularly in the past two weeks, analysts said on Wednesday.

This has reduced almost all forecasts of the wheat crop to less than 20 million tonnes, Ron Storey, head of private forecaster Australian Wheat Forecasters, said.

ACF this week reduced its forecast to 19.5 million tonnes and even this was at the upper end of the range of forecasts, he said.

Other trade forecasts were for a crop of 18 million tonnes or even less<...>

Australia's last wheat crop, for the year to March 2007, was decimated by drought, falling to 9.8 million tonnes from 25.4 million tonnes the year before.

So there seems to be some evidence Australia will not produce the usual amount (around 25 million tonnes) of wheat this year, with a shortfall of perhaps 7 m tonnes.

I'm not certain where we're at with this summer's crop from the northern hemisphere. In this exchange from Monday's Salon, Magnifico and asdf told us the US had a bumper crop. OTOH, this is the news from Canada, where drought has caused problems:

Brownfield Network: Stats Canada sees decline in wheat crop

The total Canadian wheat crop for 2007 is pegged at 20.322 million tons, as of July 31. That's down 19.6% from the 2006 figure of 25.265 million tons.

The EU's harvest is not all that good, and Russia has been talking about restricting exports because of a poor harvest.

All this comes on the back of a very bad 2006. So there would appear to be some objective reasons for high prices.

There's also speculation of two kinds: from market players, and from "hoarders". By the last I mean that grain merchants and farmers are hanging on to what stocks they have in hope of pulling in a bumper price.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

And let's not forget Peak Milk!

"This is nothing compared to how Putin rigged Eurovision."

RIA Novosti - Opinion & analysis - What the Russian papers say

Russia may limit grain exports this year

The Russian government is looking into the possibility of limiting exports of grain, primarily of wheat, as a way of curbing inflation, and could decide to do so as early as September 13.

Grain sales from state reserves should stop the rise in bread prices and the government included them in its package of anti-inflation measures.

Experts explain the steep surge in prices by poor harvests in Europe, Canada and Australia.

Apart from that, Ukrainian authorities imposed a restrictive duty on wheat exports in June, with Ukraine being the world's sixth-largest grain exporter.

Therefore, if Russia (which is the world's fifth-largest grain exporter), limits grain supplies, wheat prices may hit a new high.

"There is an opportunity to limit [grain] exports. A special working group has been set up by the Russian Agriculture Ministry to conduct consultations on these issues," said Arkady Zlochevsky, president of the Russian Grain Union.

The struggle of man against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting.(Kundera)

Looks like we're well on our way to Peak Human.

(But that's what you get when a species decides that it doesn't believe in the limitations set by the physical world.)

Peak Milk.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

The price of bread is already up 25% since the beginning of the year in Portugal, and rising.

We've got a rising population, falling agriculture production, 35% of all agricultural land has been damaged or destroyed, the best farmland - in the US - is buried under concrete, soil erosion, soil depletion, increasing oil prices impacting food production all along the logistics chain, GW, PO, H20 scarcity, changing weather patterns, idiotic agriculture policies in the First World countries, and a daft political/economic system.

Gosh.  Think all that might cause a tiny whoopsie in the wheat market?

Have epistemological model of Complex Information environments. Will Travel.

Industrial farming is an oxymoron.  It is not farming.  It's extraction.  Liquidation.  Stripmining.

In Iowa, the production of one bushel of corn may cause the loss of two bushels of topsoil.

That's Wendell Berry, some ten or so years ago.

The only reason chem/fossil farming seems to "work" and produce high yields is that it stripmines biotic resources.  Much as the only reason industrial capitalism seems to "work" and produce rapid growth is that it stripmines biotic resources.  Hornborg, Hornborg, Hornborg...

... and everyone goes on buying cheap air tickets.

The brick wall is close enough now that we can count the bricks.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

Vencit omnia veritas.