PANIC! SIX THINGS THE WORLD IS RUNNING OUT OF Global warming, climate change, the world running out of resources... blah, blah, blah. We’ve been hearing it for years. But once they start talking about chocolate and bacon shortages, they’ve got our attention. Chocolate: The majority of the worlds cocoa supply comes from West Africa, where many countries have yet to outlaw things like child labor, trafficking, or slavery; in other words, the kind of labor that produces the chocolate youre putting in your mouth. Even with slave labor, though, farming cocoa beans isnt financially lucrative for your average West African farmer. Harvesting cocoa is time-consuming (each new crop takes five years to grow), has to be done by hand, and even worse, has to be done by hand in excruciating heat. And the final payoff? A whopping eighty cents a day—for the farmer, that is. At this rate, in about 20 years, chocolate could become a luxury with a caviar-comparable price points. And thats with the continuation of child labor. With fair-trade laws slowly but surely inching their way into the industry and child labor laws being (rightfully) enforced, the price of labor is going to go up, putting farmers at an even greater loss. Tequila: Back in 2007, Mexicos blue agave yield (the plant tequila comes from) already wasnt doing so hot. Twenty percent of the crop was crippled by disease. Couple that with the fact that growing corn is far more lucrative than blue agave. So what does a farmer do when he wants to replace his blue agave with a cash crop? Burn it down…fields upon fields of the precious potential tequila. But dont start drowning your sorrows just yet; major producers have been carefully storing away tequila for the upcoming shortage. Because when it finally does hit, that gold liquid will turn into liquid gold, which isnt great for the consumer, sure. Better stock up while you still can. Helium: You may not realize, but helium is a highly necessary commodity in the modern world. Everything from MRI magnets to fiber optics and LCD screens needs the element to function, so without it, pretty much everything weve grown to depend on gets hit hard. The US government established a national helium reserve in 1925, and today a billion cubic meters of the gas are stored in a facility near Amarillo, Texas. In 1996 Congress passed an act requiring that this strategic reserve, which represents half the Earths helium stocks, be sold off by 2015. As a result, helium is far too cheap and is not treated as a precious resource. And when we do eventually run out of our current store, our only other option is to recover helium from the air—which will cost 10,000 times what it does today. Wine: Despite a one percent rise in global wine consumption, production actually fell by over five percent last year—the lowest its been since the 1960s. Even more unsettling, last years wine production in Europe, which produces about half of the worlds supply, dropped a staggering 10 percent. Goat Cheese: Back in 2010, the UK saw a major outbreak of Q fever disease. As a result, over 50,000 pregnant goats and sheep were removed from breeding, and some farmers decided to halt breeding altogether. And the country where goat cheese is popular—China—and is willing to pay—a lot. This is putting goat cheese suppliers in quite a predicament. Retailers would either need to pay more for goat products or risk being left short. Bacon: According to Britains National Pig Association (NPA), which is a delightfully real thing, a world-wide shortage of bacon (and other pork products, for that matter) is now unavoidable. The NPA largely attributed the shortage to the rising cost of food, a cost which can in turn be attributed to the previous years weak corn and soybean harvests. But its not just Britain; these very same trends are being mirrored all around the world. The US Department of Agriculture released a report in August of 2012 that accurately predicted that hog farmers would cut production in order to minimize their losses, which had the potential to be great thanks to 2012s Midwest drought. Of course, this doesnt mean that bacon will be disappearing entirely any time soon, but prices are certainly going to reflect the diminishing stock.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 12:37:47 +0000
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