After oil/natural gas, what is the next vital resource nations will go to war over?

Food, mostly grain crops. Grain is easy to produce, transport and store, if you have the proper soil, seed, equipment and climate. Grain feeds animals and makes bread, cooking oil, burned for heat, and fuel for transportation (ethanol), also the old favorite corn/rye whiskey. Fourteen by-products for corn alone are used every day in American households. Grains can be stored for times of shortage and disaster; societies that grow rice, wheat, barley, corn, along with the unsung hero of many advanced nations the soybean, are more productive and advanced than those who do not.

Estimates of the population growth are troubling for most of the world. The American birthrate is low, that is a fact. The birth rate and the rate of children who survive to 10 years is exploding in India, China and all over Asia, and increasing dramatically. In the last 17 years child deaths have been reduced worldwide from 12.6 million to 5.4 million, even with an increasing birth rate.  Is that a bad thing? No, but it is a problem the world economy needs to face. How will the world feed up to 9.7 billion by 2050?

Historically bad harvests have caused European/Asian tribes/groups to invade neighbors in search of food and safety from others. A sustained drought, an unusually wet period, war, cold or heat can cause crops to fail and good people to become desperate. Assuming the projections are true, we will need to double the world’s food production or stand by for massive conflict and migration.

In researching this column, I Googled American farmers feeding the world and found site after site that tell us American farmers do not feed the world but use the grains grown to destroy the planet. NPR is apoplectic over ethanol and cattle feed and advocating for reduced production in meat/dairy and grains.

Friends and neighbors, you can’t make this stuff up. Oil for fuel bad, natural gas for fuel bad, renewable grains for fuel, immoral. American agriculture uses fertilizer and pesticides so it is evil, American agriculture feeds feed/dairy cattle so it is evil, cow flatulence is a major source of greenhouse gasses and is destroying Mother Earth. NPR rails about the end of the earth due to cow flatulence. Really? And just how does one measure cow flatulence?

The United States exported 140 billion dollars in crops in 2017 and is on target to expand that this year. So how does the world feed the 9.7 billion humans by 2050? Many folks do not care; “let them eat cake” a famous statement made by French Queen Marie Antoinette to starving French citizens, is the kind of attitude the many exhibit. The French revolution decapitated their Queen and for good reason; people must eat, or they get violent.

Just who feeds and how do we feed the world’s population? Not my problem, according to the environmental movement and the folks living in the large cities. Two percent of the American people (6.4 million) are directly employed on farms and ranches, not a huge voting bloc; 78 percent or 249.6 million refer to themselves as environmentalists, an enormous voting bloc.

Ask the coastal city dwellers and Earth First folks and most will say we can feed the world without using fertilizers, antibiotics, pesticides and genetic engineering, only natural (whatever that is) agriculture. Not true; no way in the world can we feed a doubling of the world’s population by 2050 with organic agriculture. People believe what they want to believe, and many want to believe we can feed the world with love and good intentions, not meat, potatoes, rice and other grains.

“No compromise in defense of Mother Earth!”, Earth First. The people of the world will gladly go hungry in the name of protecting Mother Earth. I am sure you will be happy to see the folks you care about go hungry in years to come, in the name of ecology, although it will be the people in Asia and Africa who starve first.

Please travel to the Mississippi River in the fall and watch the thousands of large grain barges going down to the gulf coast and then shipped worldwide. The world will need more American grain, not less, with a population increase of 84 million per year and expanding exponentially.

Thank God for the American farmer, let them farm.