The Telegraph UK
Thursday 07 February 2008
Vulnerable regions of the world face the risk of famine over the next three years as rising energy costs spill over into a food crunch, according to US investment bank Goldman Sachs.
"We've never been at a point in commodities where we are today," said Jeff Currie, the bank's commodity chief and closely watched oil guru.
Global oil output has been stagnant for four years, failing to keep up with rampant demand from Asia and the Mid-East. China's imports rose 14pc last year. Biofuels from grain, oil seed and sugar are plugging the gap, but drawing away food supplies at a time when the world is adding more than 70m mouths to feed a year.
"Markets are as tight as a drum and now the US has hit the stimulus button," said Mr Currie in his 2008 outlook. "We have never seen this before when commodity prices were already at record highs. Over the next 18 to 36 months we are probably going into crisis mode across the commodity complex.
"The key is going to be agriculture. China is terrified of the current situation. It has real physical shortages," he said, referencing China still having memories of starvation in the 1960s seared in its collective mind.
While the US housing crash poses some threat to the price of metals and energy, the effect has largely occurred already. The slide in crude prices over the past month may have been caused by funds liquidating derivatives contracts to cover other demands rather than by recession fears. Goldman Sachs forecasts that oil will be priced at $105 a barrel by the end of 2008.
The current "supercycle" is a break with history because energy and food have "converged" in price and can increasingly be switched from one use to another.
Corn can be used for ethanol in cars and power plants, for plastics, as well as in baking tortillas. Natural gas can be made into fertiliser for food output. "Peak Oil" is morphing into "Peak Food".
Land use for biofuels has shot up from 12m to more than 80m hectares worldwide over six years. Biofuel provides 3pc of global energy needs, which will rise to an estimated 10.6pc by 2030.
In a pure market, sugar cane would be the only viable biofuel with a cost of $35 a barrel (oil equivalent). The others are sugar beet ($103), corn ($81), wheat ($145), rapeseed ($209), soybean ($232), cellulose ($305).
Subsidies drive the business. The US offers tax relief of $1 a gallon for biodiesel. The EU has a 10pc biofuel target by 2010.
The crop switch comes just as China and India make the leap to an animal-based diet, replicating the pattern seen in Japan and Korea, where people raised their protein intake nine-fold as they became rich. It takes 8.3 grams of soya or corn feed to produce a 1g weight gain in cattle - compared with 3.1g for pigs, 2g for chicken and 1.5g for fish.
Mr Currie said investment cycles in energy typically last about 10 to 12 years as producers struggle to catch up with demand. However, this cycle has been short-circuited by politicians after barely six years.
"The political environment is extremely hostile. The world is looking like the 17th century under mercantilism when countries saw economics as a zero-sum game. They exported as much as they could to get gold, and erected enormous barriers. China looks like that, so does Russia, the Mid-East and most of Africa and Latin America," he said.
While the West has much of the skill for developing energy projects, it is blocked by nationalist petro-states from investing directly.
Oil Crisis Will Lead to 10-Year Financial and Political Crisis
Energy Tech Stocks
Thursday 07 February 2008
A growing chorus of voices is screaming for the United States to undertake a Manhattan Project-type program to wean America off its oil dependency. But as Charles T. Maxwell, the "dean" of Wall Street's energy analysts, looks into the future, he deeply fears that Washington won't do anything to head off the oil crisis he sees rapidly developing starting in 2010. He says this will make the financial crisis he fears even worse. Also, because Washington will be seen by angry voters (who will be paying $12 to $15 for a gallon a gas) as the cause of their "Nightmare on Main Street," Maxwell sees the American political system being shaken to its roots.
Princeton and Oxford-educated Maxwell believes that if the Democrats are in power, their core constituencies - farmers, workers and intellectuals - will be ranged against one another, resulting in an impasse. If the Republicans are in power, he expects whatever "solution" they come up with to be politically untenable because it will be premised on people with money continuing to consume as before, with the have-nots expected to do without.
Seeing no chance of a timely political response to America's looming oil calamity, Maxwell, senior energy analyst at Weeden & Co., expects an oil-induced financial crisis to start somewhere in the 2010 to 2015 timeframe. He said that, unlike the recession the U.S. appears to be in today, "This will not be six months of hell and then we come out of it." Rather, Maxwell expects this financial crisis to last at least 10 or 12 years, as the world goes through a prolonged period of price-induced rationing (eg, oil up to $300 a barrel and U.S. pump prices up to $15 a gallon), while waiting for new technologies that can wean nations off their oil dependency to take hold in the marketplace. (It will take time to change over the world's one billion or so oil-consuming cars and trucks.)
As this combined oil and financial crisis worsens, Maxwell would not be surprised if the U.S. government started functioning the way it did in World War II, when the democratic dialogue was often put on hold so that unilateral decisions could be made by people given special powers. He described them as little tyrants who will be able to cut off debate, effectively weakening the democratic process. Not a pleasant prospect, Maxwell emphasized, but one that may be unavoidable in the oil-scarce world that's coming.
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