We don’t have to scratch so deeply to find concerns about economic, energy and food insecurity these days. John Vidal writes in the Guardian (via the Age today):

EMPTY shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products.

…The price rises were a result of record oil prices, US farmers switching from cereals to grow biofuel crops, extreme weather, and growing demand from India and China, the UN said.

“There is no one cause but a lot of things are coming together to lead to this,” the head of the FAO’s Food Outlook program, Ali Gurkan, said.

He said cereal stocks had been declining for more than a decade but were now about 57 days, which made global food supplies vulnerable to an international crisis or disaster such as a drought or flood.

That’s right. We’ve been consuming more grain than we’ve been producing as a globe for most of the last decade. You can track it yourself in the FAO’s biannual Food Outlook reports. Are Australians, with our rising dollar, immune to the implications of this? Can’t we buy the food we need? The troubling question of who would miss out aside, I wouldn’t count on it. In The Age today:

THE man responsible for investing $41 billion of the State’s money has warned mum-and-dad investors to prepare for a massive sharemarket crash.

He says a dramatic downturn is inevitable as the rapid rate of investment is unsustainable, and the repercussions of the $300 billion subprime lending crisis in the US are yet to be felt fully.

State Treasury has revealed that Victoria looks set to lose just $1.9 million directly from the subprime fiasco.

But the chief investment officer of the Victorian Funds Management Corporation, Leo de Bever, is taking no chances, telling The Sunday Age that he is managing the risk of further losses “as best as humanly possible” by shifting investments to safer options.

Mr Baillieu warned that millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money was at risk and accused the Premier of failing to come clean about potential losses.

“We know hospitals and local governments have been exposed, we know there is a level of exposure to the VFMC, and John Brumby won’t even provide a basic reporting process,” Mr Baillieu told The Sunday Age.

However, Mr de Bever — who oversees the investment of money from entities including the Royal Children’s Hospital, the Royal Women’s Hospital, the National Gallery of Victoria, the University of Melbourne and the Transport Accident Commission — described the subprime debacle as being “the least of our concerns”. It was the “roaring bull” market that kept him awake at night, he said.

The boom of the past five years could not be sustained and mum-and-dad investors stood to lose if they did not act now.

So even state assets are exposed to the collapse of the US subprime lending scams.

Note also that Australians have more personal debt in history, worse even than before the Great Depression.

I updated the Energy Bulletin Peak Oil Primer this week, adding this paragraph:

Already peaked? As of writing, there is mounting evidence that we have past not only the all time peak in regular conventional oil in May 2005, but also the peak of all-liquids in July 2006. A study by the German Government sponsored Energy Watch Group, oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, and the former head of exploration and production at Saudi Aramco, Sadad al-Huseini have all recently supported this view.

Ie. oil very well may have peaked already, some very reasonable and influencial people think so. This is an example of the type situation which has James Howard Kunstler using the word ‘clusterfuck’ for a reason. Greater competition for scare food, meets global and local financial bubbles, meets an already declining energy base. Food security aside, did I mention there is more than one reason to Grow Your Own?