Unexpectedly! "Malthus Chokes on Bumper Wheat Crop" - Granite Grok

Unexpectedly! “Malthus Chokes on Bumper Wheat Crop”

From this post over at Watts Up With That, the alternative title could have been:

the “Paul Ehrlich is still spectacularly wrong” department:

Yep, we were all heading to hell in a handbasket when Paul Erlich was making his predictions – he was all the rage when I was in college in the Bio departments and the beginning of the environmentalist movement.  Now he’s just raging as most of them have gone toes up.  Yet, like Socialists who keep believing that their “we have to take it from you for the Common Good” has never failed, they keep hawking their snake oil communism.  Even as their predictions go down in flames.  Instead of scarcity due to environmental wastelands, we see this:

Malthus Chokes on Bumper Wheat Crop

A generation after leading scientists and experts warned the world of an escalating series of horrendous famines, the crop gluts continue. The latest kick in the pants to the Malthusian doomsayers is a bumper global wheat harvest. Defying not only the Club of Rome doomsayers, but also the climate Chicken Littles who have been warning about damage from rising temperatures to world agriculture, food production is booming even as meteorologists call July 2016 the hottest month ever.

The FT reports:

Extensive planting and benign weather have forced analysts to repeatedly raise crop outlooks. The International Grains Council last week increased its global wheat production forecast to a record 743m tonnes, up 1 per cent from last year. […]

The recent US winter wheat harvest was 45m tonnes, up 21 per cent from 2015, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Merchants who have run out of room in silos are piling wheat outdoors.Storage concerns are also growing in Russia, which is this year set to become the largest wheat exporter after hauling in more than 70m tonnes. In Canada, the government anticipates the second-largest wheat crop in 25 years, of 30.5m tonnes. Australia’s imminent wheat harvest is forecast at 26.5m tonnes, the most in five years.

And instead of soaring prices, they have actually gone down (amazing – the law of supply and demand still holds!)

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