Last summer we had fires in Russia, which directly impacted their wheat crop. Pakistan flooded, which got their summer cereal crops. Wheat there is a winter crop, but the summer losses put stress on them.
The spike in wheat prices bowled over regimes all over North Africa and the Middle East.
I watch this stuff closely, and I just found the third major grain production impact event for 2011. The troubles in lands where people on the edge spend half their income on grain based foods are going to get worse, not better, no matter what democratic reforms they undertake.
If you haven’t been following this, you should read the back story in Egypt’s Grim Future. The links to the stories on Russian wheat, Pakistan’s crop loss, the massive U.S. winter storm, and the mixed news of the simultaneous Australian typhoon are in there.
Today’s tidbit on grain production is implicit in this story about drought in five Chinese provinces.
The affected provinces, Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei, and Hunan, are in the upper Yangtze watershed. They’re center right on the map. They’re also downstream from the massive There Gorges Dam hydroelectric and flood control project. The drought is due to a lack of rain, not a lack of flow in the Yangtze, but we’ll need this piece of the picture to understand China’s grain production.
This map shows China wheat production – the Three Gorges reservoir sits in the middle of Sichuan, their richest wheat producing region.
Wheat likes a bit of rain, rice demands a lot of water, and corn falls somewhere between them. The most recent numbers I could easily locate were for 2004, but this should give an approximation of what’s at risk in those provinces - this is production in millions of tons.
Province |
Rice |
Wheat |
Corn |
Jiangsu |
9.3 |
7.2 |
1.8 |
Anhui |
7.0 |
7.9 |
2.6 |
Jiangxi |
8.5 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
Hubei |
8.4 |
1.8 |
1.5 |
Hunan |
12.6 |
0.2 |
1.0 |
So this is not good, not good at all. Two big bad events in central Asia last year, two big events this year, one bad in the U.S., one mixed in Australia, and now something ugly happening drought wise in China.
And I've not even begun to track what is happening due to the Mississippi valley flooding, but this article on U.S. rice production indicates we've got troubles there, and the corn and soybeans in the upper Midwest also got hit pretty hard.
People who haven't eaten for a day can be unreasonable. Make it a week and they're downright hostile. We need to remember what happens when we stick our noses into climate and food based disputes for which there simply are no good answers.