Tuesday the 16th is World Bread Day!Flour, water, yeast, salt... and maybe a little prayer is not such a bad idea this year as we break some of the crunchy stuff here in one of the true breadbaskets of the world.
Argentina, mainly Buenos Aires Province, produces a staggering amount of wheat: 70% of all the wheat in South America and is at least 5th in the world in exports. That has kept bread cheap and on the table all over the globe for about a century.
But today wheat is losing it's 12,000 year old starring role among grains. It cannot be genetically modified as easily as corn, soy and rice and increasing amounts of wheatland are being converted to corn and soybeans in the race to feed automobiles instead of people.
The UN estimates that worldwide stores of wheat are at their lowest point in 26 years. The US and Australia, both enormous producers, haven't seen their reserves drop this low since 1948.
The price of wheat this year alone has risen from about U$4.00/bu. to over U$9/bu. Those higher prices have caused countries that still have large stores of wheat to sell and reduce stockpiles even more.
The price has dropped a bit recently on anticipation that more farmers will switch to growing wheat to take advantage of these record prices. However, there is every indication that they will not. The lure of corn and soybeans, with their GM yields and government sponsored fuel programs, is just too strong.
You don't eat bread? Well, don't forget her twin, barley. Essential to beer, prices for this grain are also at record levels and what stockpiles exist may not remain for long. Barley is actually more difficult to grow than wheat in that it is more sensitive to climate changes. Prices for "liquid bread" are already climbing with no end yet in sight but are mitigated somewhat by megabrewers' long-term contracts with barley growers. Microbrewers cannot protect themselves from barley prices quite as well.
The price of bread has already risen... in some parts of the world it has already skyrocked... but bakers and their suppliers have generally swallowed some of the costs so as not to completely shock consumers. Next year's World Bread Day could see a different story when fewer acres of the world are planted in wheat and world stockpiles are even smaller.
Be it crusty pan de campo or buttery brioche, do yourself a favor today... get to that little gem of a neighborhood panadería and take a moment to truly savor one of the great human pleasures.
3 comments:
>barley
Mike, if you could pull some strings with the Menendez family to the point where they would give me some land (workers and machinery included), cough, for free, I'd be happy to grow barley for beer.
“Sabemos que en Escocia se produce cebada cervecera y creemos que por las condiciones climáticas y del suelo similares, en Río Grande se podría producir cebada cervecera."
http://www.tiempofueguino.com.ar/main/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2918
I love bread but the kind home baked or some of those found in bakery goods stores are really delicious to chew on. Wow. My mouth is watering. But I gave it all up until I drop 40 pounds. So far, I eat something ekin to Melba toast except harder.
I didn't want to make too much of it but the barley situation is actually scarier than wheat.
And the popularity of your diet, Linc, is actually mentioned as one of the million causes... that and the "no gluten" requirements of some people.
This year is especially bad because of weather (climate change?), Canada got hurt bad, Australia got stomped, W.Europe didn't have a good one, the US had a bunch of trouble getting into the fields to plant as did Argentina but we recovered really well, gracias a dios.
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