Pigs and Global Warming, What's the Connection?

Sometimes the world is just too ridiculous. You have to fall down laughing.

On the one hand we have riots around the world from food shortages. On the other hand, the Canadian government is going to spend money to destroy pigs in order to create a shortage.

In what is being called an unprecedented move, the federal government will pay Canadian pork producers $50 million to kill off 150,000 of their pigs by the fall as the industry teeters on the brink of economic collapse.

The animals are being destroyed at slaughter plants and on pig farms in a bid to cull the swine breeding herd by 10 per cent.

Most of the meat is to be used for pet food or otherwise disposed of, but up to 25 per cent of it will be made available to Canadian food banks.

Great! So the pets get a cheap meal. The poor and homeless will get free food. But the working stiff is expected to suck it up and watch while the government spends tax dollars to make sure that the price of meat stays high. Why not let the pork producers send the pigs off to slaughter and let the retailers lower the price to clear the market and give the population to enjoy cheap meat?

By the way, why are the pig producers having to kill their pigs in such a rush? Here's the official government reason:

Producers are weighed down by the cumulative impact of low prices, increasing feeds costs and the high value of the loonie. They are also facing new country-of-origin labelling rules for meat products in the United States that are to go into effect later this year.

There's a lot of hogwash in there. The real reason is hidden in the middle: "increasing feed costs". Because of the worldwide food shortage, prices of all agricultural foods have doubled and tripled. So a pig farmer can't afford to pay big bucks for food for his pigs. So farmers need to rush the pigs to slaughter to reduce costs. Of course that means we'll all pay a whole bunch more for meat next year. In the interim, the Canadian government is going to short circuit the whole thing by using tax dollars to remove the meat from the human consumption market to "raise" prices. Thanks Mr. Bureaucrat. I elected you to make my food costs higher! Yeah, sure.

If you want to see an economist get hyperbolic about the coming crisis, watch Don Coxe, an economist with Bank of Montreal be interviewed about the global food shortage. He paints a very grim picture. He's more worried about the food crisis than he is about the financial crisis. He foresees governments falling and the rise of "Hitler-style autarky" as the crisis leads beyond riots to crowds overthrowing governments.

Meanwhile, the Canadian government is not looking past its nose. It is fixated on the short term, the "need" to clear the market of excess pork, and not seeing the longer term problem: higher costs for feedstocks will cause pig farmers decimate their herds by selling off animals at whatever price they can get to the cut their costs which means that meat prices will go sky high next year because the herds have been decimated and the costs of feedstocks are double, triple, or quadruple the traditional costs. With government bureaucrats "solving" a non-existant problem (short term drop in prices as pig farmers panic to clear stocks) while ignoring the real problem coming down the track: sky high prices as all agriculture products a rising astronomically. (This kind of government shooting itself in the foot reminds me of the Nixon government doing a secret deal to sell large amounts of food to Russia and thereby causing food costs in the US to go sky high right in the middle of the "stagflation" of the 1970s.)

Step back for a second:

Is there any reason why we've run into this agricultural problem at this time? As Don Coxe points out, for 50 years the governments in the developed world have been busy running programs to pay farmers to not grow crops. But now that the warehouses are empty, nobody has noticed and changed policy. The trigger has been drought in a few areas (Australia). And it can get worse. As Don Coxe points out, the corn crop is already two weeks late in being planted in North America. Why? Oh, because last year was the coldest in a long time, a full 0.7 degrees below normal, so the growing season is shorter. He traces this to the low sunspot activity. (He doesn't mention La Nina, but that is also playing a role.)

I laugh myself silly because we have governments running around trying to set up programs to deal with Global Warming when in fact the weather (at least short term) has gone cold and crops are failing and we will have mass starvation. So again, bureaucrats are firmly dealing with the wrong problem.

This is all so ludicrous you wonder, could anyone create this story and be believed? No! It is just too crazy. Just too silly. Just too much incompetence. But, sadly, this is the real world.