by Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

According to a USA Today October 16th article by Sue Kirchhoff entitled, "World Events Work
Against Grain Buyers" a set of market, weather and grain demand events have produced the
"tightest world grain stocks in about 30 years". Reduced grain stocks "…are
contributing to rising food inflation, fueling worries about food shortages in some countries and
straining international aid budgets…" The article continues by saying that "…prices
are being pushed up by bad weather in a host of countries, surging world demand and a drive in the
USA and abroad to devote more acres to corn for ethanol production, which has tightened supplies of
some grains and tied crop prices more closely to energy prices."

The decline in the value of the dollar has also contributed to surging international demand for
U.S. grain. The falling dollar makes U.S. grain more affordable for foreign buyers while at the same
time making foods imported to the USA more expensive to buy.

Wheat touched $9.61 a bushel on Chicago futures markets in late September — doubling from the
previous year. Although the price of wheat could fall by harvest time in the spring of 2008, many
analysts do not believe that it will fall back to the $4 per bushel prices in 2007 and surely no
where near the $2 per bushel prices that the farmers in Southwest Georgia have been facing from 1998
through 2006.

The increased wheat prices have caused the rise in the price of bread and grain fed animals and
their products. In the USA, the average price for a loaf of bread is up 11% over the past 12 months.
Ground beef has risen 6%, chicken is up 9%, and eggs are up 31%. Overall U.S. food inflation is
running 5.6% so far this year, compared with 2.6% for all of 2006. Consumers spend about 10% of
take-home pay on food compared to only 6% ten years ago. The American consumer is on the way to
increasing the proportion of their income devoted to food to the world average of 26%.

World grain stocks are on pace to be the lowest since the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization
began keeping track 30 years ago, even as consumption increases in emerging economies — including
demand for grain-fed livestock — and population growth continues. In the mean time there is no
magic technology in sight to increase crop yields. Water supplies are being strained. The ethanol
market absorbed more than 15% of the U.S. corn crop in 2007 and could take 30% next year, if all the
ethanol plants now under construction come on line. Ethanol prices have recently fallen due to
problems in transportation and a glut of product.

The current crisis in grain stocks have a historical basis and a political basis, not just short
term supply and demand relationships. Food has been used as an economic weapon since WWII to destroy
Third World economies under the guise of food aid. American agriculture was revolutionized during
and after WWII through increased mechanization and fertilization. The same factories that produced
bombs using nitrogen during WWII were turned into fertilizer factories after the war. The use of
artificial nitrogen fertilizers greatly increased the yields of wheat and corn. This increased
supply prompted the food industry to develop a demand for meat which would eat up a lot of the feed
grains.

During the 1950s Africa and other Third World countries were clamoring to break from beneath
colonial rule and establish independent economies. The U.S. used her surplus grains to destroy these
emerging agricultural based economies by dumping cheap grain into the cities of these countries
while their local farmers were trying to bring their products to market. The farmers finally gave up
and moved to the cities themselves looking for employment, pushing their countries further into
dependency on the west.

By the 1980s and 90s the American farmer had served America’s economic warriors well and were
no longer needed. America first got rid of her Black farmers by denying them the farm price subsidies
that she gave to her white farmers and by denying the Black farmers access to capital that they
needed to enter the modern world of agri-business.

In 1996, a year after the Million Man March and the Nation of Islam’s return to farming, the
Congress of the United States passed what was called "The Freedom to Farm Bill". The
American farmers called it the "Freedom to Fail Bill" because this bill reduced the farm
subsidies on major commodities such as wheat, corn, soybeans and cotton. By 1999 prices for these
major commodities were almost half of what they were in 1996 and back to what prices were in the
1970s. In the mean time the price of tractors and other production inputs were three to four times
higher than they were in the 1970s. Now Black farmers and small white farmers had no recourse but to
sell out to the much larger white farmers. The big white farmers were taking a huge risk and were
looking for anything that would cut production costs. Along comes Monsanto and other big chemical
and biotech firms with genetically modified corn, soybeans and cotton which promised to reduce
production costs while increasing yields.

However, Europe and Japan rejected the genetically modified corn and soybeans from America and
even lowly Africa became suspicious of these untested genetic innovations and countries like
Zimbabwe rejected these crops as well. America’s big farmers were now being stripped of foreign
markets so the government steps in and revitalized the plan for large scale ethanol production which
was proposed by the Carter administration in the 1970s. As the USA Today article indicates there are
some demand problems developing in the ethanol market. But farmers have already shifted out of wheat
into corn. Now to shift back into wheat production becomes even more risky because wheat seed prices
have doubled and there are already reported seed shortages in the Midwest due to reduced spring
harvests precipitated by unusual floods over long time periods.

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan warned Bush to get out of Iraq or suffer the consequences
of God’s wrath. And in April of 2004 he said "watch the weather". Now the unusual
weather, man’s greed, his appetite for meat and cheap energy along with the U.S. using food as a
economic weapon plus her disrespect for nature could be the "perfect storm" to push the
world to the brink of famine and anarchy.