Farmers still Doing Great on Oil Plateau

Global Food Prices 10% off Peak

Food Prices Still Elevated

Iowa Cropland Prices

April Food Prices Steady Near Recent Highs

A Little Relief on Food Prices

Food and Macronutrients Around the World

Long Term Crop Prices

Attributing the Food Price Spike

Farm Prices, Food Prices, and Biofuels

Food Prices Rose Again in February

US Ethanol Production

No, no, no, no!

Bloomberg:

Spain will lower highway speed limits, cut train ticket prices and use more biofuel under an emergency energy-saving initiative because of soaring oil prices brought on by unrest in Libya, an official said Friday.

and

Finally, oil companies will also have to add more bio-fuel to the gasoline and diesel they produce — from the current mandatory 5.8 percent proportion, up to 7 percent, the deputy prime minister said.

Emphasis mine. This is an unbelievably counterproductive thing to do. A significant part of the cause of the unrest in the Middle East is due to high food prices. The regimes are all rushing out buying food in an attempt to appease their populations. The unrest is now sharply increasing oil prices, and the geniuses in the Spanish government want to respond by calling for more food to be converted into biofuel, thus further increasing the strain on food prices?

Do Mediterranean Crop Yields Show Climate Stress?

Oil, Food, and the Wealth of MENA Countries

Misflation

Food Price Break-out

New High in Food Commodity Prices

Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People

The New York Times Dot Earth blog last night pointed out that Science magazine (one of the two premier publication forums for academic science) has removed the paywall from a review by Godfray et al (a set of British biologists and development studies specialists) titled Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People. This is a subject near to my heart, and I somehow missed it when it first came out online last month (I subscribe to Science but am inconsistent about reading it when it comes out - I mainly have a subscription so I can always go and search the archives and read any Science papers on some subject that I'm pursuing).  So I enthusiastically headed over to read it. It turns out the current issue of Science is devoted to food security, so I'll probably be blogging about it a lot.

The point of a scientific review is to provide a survey of some field of inquiry, with references to the important papers.  The best reviews provide the reader with a real synthesis of what the state of knowledge is currently, as well as an indication of where the frontiers of research currently lie - what things are most in need of further study (but where there is some hope of actually making progress).  The target reader of reviews is generally considered to be non-specialist scientists who need to understand the field, or graduate students just coming up to speed.  Actively working specialists in the field being reviewed are assumed to be up to speed on the literature and to already have their own perspective (though it can certainly be helpful to understand how someone else views the big picture).

Biofuels and Farm Prices