WINNIPEG -Manitoba must adapt to more frequent and extreme floods, droughts and other weather events that will result from climate change, a Winnipeg-based environmental think-tank warned Wednesday.
Corn prices reached another record Monday, closing in on US$8 a bushel, as devastating U.S. Midwest floods raised fears of a sharply smaller U.S. corn crop and another spike in world food prices. Corn futures for July delivery jumped to an all-time high of $7.60 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade before falling back to settle at $7.325 a bushel, up 0.75 cent. Prices for the corn in the ground now surged even higher. Corn for December delivery hit a record $7.91 a bushel before easing back to settle flat at $7.65 a bushel. It was corn's eighth consecutive day of trading records.
With floodwaters rising in lakes and rivers, more communities east and north of Saskatoon have declared states of emergency, provincial government officials said Saturday. They huddled in hotels in Saskatoon and Prince Albert and in a community centre in Saskatoon, where they bedded down on cots and were served food and hot coffee. In some places they're getting close to not being able to contain the water, but they're being immediately identified and sandbagged," he said.
The current economic crisis, the continuing ineffectiveness or unwillingness of our "globalized" system to deal with hunger and climate change, and today's quickly rising oil prices due to Mideast conflict are fuelling not only higher, but also more unpredictable, food costs. Reduced production due to inclement weather (climate change) has been combined with increased, even panic, buying because of natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and droughts (in Australia, Eastern Europe, New Zealand and East Africa), thus exacerbating price rises.
In a message to local officials, Queen Elizabeth II said she was "deeply concerned and saddened by the dreadful flooding across Britain." British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said [Bill Barker] "was a very heroic, very brave man. Heavy rain and gales also brought widespread flooding to Ireland, as more than a metre of water shut down the centre of the country's second-largest city, Cork, and more than a dozen towns and villages. The Irish army was used to rescue the stranded from waist-deep floodwaters and a helicopter winched to safety a County Galway family of five, including the 87-year-old grandmother.
It's not a very good picture at all. We're looking at possibly a good reduction in acres (hectares) if a lot of this crop remains underwater," said Chad Hart, an agriculture economist at Iowa State University. "There's still hope, but it wanes with each rainstorm. In Iowa, the country's top corn producer, about nine per cent of the anticipated crop either hasn't been planted because farmers can't get into their fields, or it needs to be replanted because it's waterlogged, said Roger Elmore, a corn expert at Iowa State. That's more than 485,000 hectares of corn -- almost 1.5 per cent of the country's anticipated harvest -- that may produce only a fraction of its potential yield. Rain continued falling in much of Iowa on Friday, and it's already late to be planting corn.
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