Most shipped bulk commodities

One other factoid I found interesting in Prime Movers of Globalization was the relative volumes of the most shipped bulk commodities (besides crude and petroleum products, which dwarf them).

• iron ore, ~800 million tons


• coal, ~800 million tons


• grain (I think including oilseeds as well), ~300 million tons


• bauxite and alumina, ~80 million tons


• phosphates, ~30 million tons
  

This might only be interesting for commodity nerds, but I thought the drop-off was impressive.

Cute analogy

Aluminum is to energy as grain is to water.

(Half courtesy of Laurence Smith's The World in 2050, via MR, and half courtesy of a conversation with a colleague.)

Brief book review: Merchant of Grain

About a year ago I bought Merchants of Grain and never got around to reading it - in fact, I lost track and had to order another copy when I decided to read it over Thanksgiving. Here's my brief take on its pros and cons:

Pros

• In many ways this is analogous to The Prize, Daniel Yergin's outstanding history of oil, thoroughly tracing modern grain trading from its inception in the early 19th century to the present day.


• Depth of research - the amount of information crammed into the 360 pages is truly impressive, most of it quite relevant and interesting, and his journalistic nose clearly enabled him to get to the bottom of some very complex stories and illuminate the characters involved and the very human dynamics of their interaction.

Cons

• Morgan is not a deep subject matter expert like Yergin, and it shows in his analysis. He does a fine job explaining the technical aspects of growing and trading staple crops, but in many instances his subjective assessment of situations seems off to me.


• He also writes with a vaguely accusatory tone that I find irritating and not constructive - e.g. when complaining that the global grain traders have more market information than the U.S. government, or that the global grain trade lacks transnational regulation. What do you propose instead - a benevolent supernational trade regulator?


• Writing is not great - the narrative is jumbled, and the prose itself is sometimes unnecessarily wordy or awkward.


• Out of date - it was first published in 1979, and has barely been updated since (the re-publishers have a trite note on the back that "little has changed' since the initial publication, but developments over the past 3 decades surely merit a similar treatment).

Overall, recommended as a history of the grain trade, but only because it appears to be the best available - I wouldn't give it top marks in the absolute sense.

Map of the day: Access to markets in Ethiopia

From Roving Bandit, these striking graphs show how close a given point in Ethiopia is to international and domestic demand centers, respectively, in terms of travel time. If you're a farmer, living in a green area means your end markets are very far away, and transport will eat up a big chunk of the end price of whatever you're producing.

Transport times like this give you large import/export parity price wedges like this:

... which obviously leads to a lot of price volatility, which is bad for producers and consumers alike.

(the latter graph is a favorite of mine from the World Development Report 2008 on agriculture and development.)

Algerian cereal harvest triples

A report issued by the Algerian Agriculture Ministry showed that the country has produced nearly 6 million tons of cereals in 2009, almost three times more than last year, APS reported.

This year's production rise was made possible by good rains and new financial incentives from the government, the ministry said. Those incentives have included soft loans for farmers and subsidies for fertilizers and high-yielding seeds. Last year, the government also said it would almost double the price it pays farmers for their grain as part of efforts to boost domestic output.

I find this news interesting because it illustrates the availability of additional food supply with high enough prices (or in this case, high enough subsidies). We really aren't butting up against Malthusian/Ehrlichian resource constraints on food production yet.