Recommendation: make sure you get to the top of the food chain. If not at the top of the food chain - pray for a series of back to back to back to back technological breakthroughs that I cannot even fathom at this point.
Folks, rising prices are not due to the dollar or due to speculators. Maybe that causes it around the edges. I do believe the Malthusian era is now upon us. And I hope I'm wrong from a human perspective, but as an investor most of my investing themes revolve around this. Remember, it is not that we will "run out" of some of these natural resources, it is simply the fact that too much money (much of it brought into the world by Western governments out of thin air) is chasing too few supplies of hard assets (those supplies already stressed by the basic supply/demand dynamic), causing prices to go up. Out of the reach of those who can least afford it.
So we have a new shortage to add to our list... pork shortage? iron ore shortage? hops and barley shortage? corn? wheat? soybeans? cotton? potash? power? milk? salt? rice? Is it just me or do you notice a pattern? [Feb 24: Commodity Prices Over the Last Year] This is *all* caused by a weak dollar? and speculators? right? I didn't even throw good ole crude in there. But if the magic man in D.C. holds rates steady (or cuts less than expected and then "talks" about inflation) that will cause global inflation to go away... that's the Wall Street thinking. And these guys run our country's financial system.
What's the next shortage? Soil. Our faming techniques and stress on land (not letting the land rest in between seasons) are causing topsoil to run off at an alarming rate. Now I assume the shortage of dirt is going to affect some more than others... for example, people who have resorted to eating it to survive [Jan 30: Hungry Haitans Resort to Eating Dirt] But let's put more corn into our fuel tanks while we mull the issue.
- The planet is getting skinned. While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet. Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than three feet of topsoil -- the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and also appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.
- "We're losing more and more of it every day," said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. "The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture."
- "It's just crazy," fumed John Aeschliman, a fifth-generation farmer who grows wheat and other grains on the Palouse near the tiny town of Almota, just west of Pullman. "We're tearing up the soil and watching tons of it wash away every year," Aeschliman said. He's one of a growing number of farmers trying to convince others to adopt "no-till" methods, which involve no tilling of the land between plantings, leaving crop stubble to reduce erosion and planting new seeds between the stubble rows.
- Montgomery describes modern agricultural practices as "soil mining" to emphasize that we are rapidly outstripping the Earth's natural rate of restoring topsoil. "Globally, it's clear we are eroding soils at a rate much faster than they can form," said John Reganold, a soils scientist at Washington State University. "It's hard to get people to pay much attention to this because, frankly, most of us take soil for granted."
- The National Academy of Sciences has determined that cropland in the U.S. is being eroded at least 10 times faster than the time it takes for lost soil to be replaced.
- As such, true living topsoil cannot be made overnight, Montgomery emphasized. Topsoil grows back at a rate of an inch or two over hundreds of years.
But don't worry. Buy stocks.
No position
