THERE has been little evidence of global warming over Easter and I fancy the weekend has proved particularly taxing for farmers and shepherds busy with lambing.
However, at least those producers who have been selling the remnants of last year's lamb crop will be more than pleased with current prices.
The fact is that ex-farm prices have risen by around 40 per cent since late December when of course the t
rade was ruinously low. But the strange feature is that there has been very little movement in retail values over the past three months.
The obvious conclusion has to be that supermarkets were doing mighty well in December and January and the statistics show that back then little more than 35p of the price charged to consumers actually went directly to farmers.
Everyone has to make a profit, but there has to be an equitable division.
THE currency speculators have certainly had a busy week but, hopefully, some sense of normality will now resume. Normality, however, is a term that is becoming increasingly difficult to apply to world food supply and demand and the recent trend to higher prices is absolutely certain to continue.
Last Monday evening, along with several colleagues, I attended a dinner in Renfrew hosted by the Agricultural Industries Confederation.
The meal was excellent, but we were given some further food for thought in a presentation on future raw material supplies: it was a thoroughly sobering occasion.
The headline statement was to the effect that world food production cannot be increased quickly enough to keep up with unusually strong demand.
In addition Credit Suisse has argued that global food production needs to increase by 3.3 per cent each year to cope with the demand for food, animal feed and biofuels.
Farmers have made enormous progress in terms of increased production in modern times, but the reality is that the growth in cereal production has only been 1.3 per cent annually over the past two decades. The end result is that world stocks of virtually all raw materials have fallen to disastrously low levels – reserves of grain are at the lowest for 46 years. Even allowing for a reasonable growing season in all the main area of cereal production, it is a certainty stocks will decline still further this year.
Soya is an important source of protein for humans and animals, but there again the news is not encouraging. According to the US Department of Agriculture world production of soya in 2006-7 was 235.6 million tonnes, but the forecast for 2007-8 is only 220 million tonnes. Meanwhile, total usage in 2006-7 was 224.7 million tonnes, but the forecast for the current year is 235.5 million tonnes – that's an extra 10 million tonnes that the market will be short of in the coming months.
And then there are the vagaries of the currency markets. A fall of just one cent in the value of the US dollar equates to an increase of £1.30 in the price of soya, with parallel effects on the cost of maize. There are many in the agricultural world who claim that most of the supply problem could be solved if there was a wider acceptance of genetically modified crops, but this is anathema to consumers oin the European Union.
Let's look at the facts: traditionally, the EU has imported up to six million tonnes of maize from the US each year. However, that figure fell dramatically last year because it is becoming increasingly difficult to source non-GM maize.
In addition shippers are not prepared to take the risk of importing non-GM maize from the US in case it may have been subject to cross-contamination. Were this to happen, the entire cargo would be rendered virtually worthless.
The GM issue was raised on Tuesday at a media briefing chaired by Mike Russell, the environment minister at Holyrood. He once again trotted out the official SNP line that the cultivation of GM crops would harm the green image of Scotland.
Sometime soon politicians are going to have to grasp the subject of GM crops in a much more rational manner – it will not go away and all the while the EU is being left behind the rest of the world.
However, attitudes appear to be changing, according to a recent European barometer survey. Just 20 per cent of all Europeans are seriously worried about GM compared to 24 per cent in 2004 while 80 per cent of the respondents stated that they had no qualms about farmers growing GM crops.
That, of course, is not the same as saying that they would be quite happy eat cornflakes grown from GM maize, but it is a move in a more positive direction.
FOOD may become scarcer and more expensive and the same can be said regarding land. I noted that Alex Salmond opened a new facility in Lockerbie to produce electricity from timber. That venture is very much in line with the policy of sourcing power from renewable resources and has to be welcomed. But it did get me thinking about how Scotland plans to utilise its land.
The Scottish Government is on the record as stating that it wants to see 10,000 hectares of new forestry established each year for the foreseeable future. That is an awful lot of land. The big question is how one reaches a balance between forestry and food production.
True, if half of the Highlands were planted with trees, there would be little discernible effect on food production. But what would the tourists think if the hills and glens were covered in a blanket of trees?
Decisions will have to be soon on how the land is used and what crops are grown. The world is getting hungrier by the day.
My own view is that there is an inevitability about GM technology that cannot be fudged.
The full article contains 1007 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
