Global grain stocks | Wergosum's

Although they are of paramount strategic importance or, maybe, because of their strategic importance! They are mostly estimated indirectly based on other data, with a large error. It can be assumed that the largest stocks are maintained by the latter. Even if guessing food stocks is a perilous exercise, it is interesting to understand where the uncertainties come from…. Indeed, while many entities—most countries in the world, FAO, many farmers and traders associations, and numerous institutions funded by governments or professional associations—publish stock data, most information is obtained indirectly and is subject to several sources of errors and uncertainties.

Grain stocks in India. The concept of SGRs was originally developed in the s to avoid the lengthy process of importing emergency food, as happened during the Sahelian food crises of the s Lynton-Evans, They came to renewed attention after the food price crisis Prakash, , which also led to initiatives aimed at monitoring and stabilizing food prices, including the Nice Declaration G20, , mostly in the hope that transparency about food production and stocks would avert future crises FAO Things, however, are not so simple, and links between stocks and prices are far from obvious Gilbert and Morgan , Wright , Kornher and Kalkuhl , Gouel , and Kornher Click this link for a collection of expert quotes about prices and stocks.

Food can also be stored using a bewildering array of methods Proctor, This involves not only cereals and pulses, but also categories of fruits,. Village grain storage in Senegal. A comprehensive account on food stocks should naturally also cover major animal products, the main source of proteins. In spite of numerous calls for transparency about prices, production, and stocks, the global food stocks —the sum of national stocks—are very imperfectly known and possibly unknowable Schmidhuber Many countries, including some major producers, have unreliable stocks data, not only because of actual technical difficulties but also because of their reluctance to disclose information that may be of strategic importance.

Finally, formal food stocks are also expensive to maintain, and countries need to achieve a balance between local production, trade, and stocks in a way that ensures a smooth food supply in cities and rural areas at an acceptable cost. Asian rice-producing and consuming countries are often quoted as having done this using relatively light government interventions and procurements, allowing an efficient private sector to prosper. In Africa, on the other hand, many countries struggle to maintain efficient and cost effective operational stocks even during non-crisis periods Gilbert The issue again is somewhat different in the export-oriented countries in the west, in South America Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay , and elsewhere Ukraine, Thailand where stocks play a minor role in national food security.

It is thus unclear how food stocks are changing. The largest stocks are held by some of the major exporters in North America and Oceania, while Europe, the Mediterranean, and Middle-East maintain small stocks, with the largest countries logically also managing the largest stocks Laio et al Assessment methodologies and methodological issues.

Modern grain storage silos in Ralls, Texas. Stocks can be assessed based on various techniques. One such method is the use of sampling surveys of stocks, which—in theory—provide useful information in food security assessments, in particular the error affecting estimates as well as the statistical distribution of informal micro-stocks. According to Schmidhuber , who assessed a number of national situations, household surveys systematically underestimate stocks, particularly in the lowest income countries, i.

Importantly, stored foods and the crops covered in this section also carry a varying amount of residual moisture, which is normally a temperature and air moisture dependent variable. Moisture levels are usually controlled in modern storage but can nevertheless vary and thereby introduce variations in stored amounts; they can correspond to large amounts of food.

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Another methodology to assess food stocks is the use of Food Balance Sheets FBS , a simple model to assess national food availability using information on national production, imports, and consumption. In the FBS methodology, stocks are estimated at a certain time, T2, using information on i the stocks at a previous time T1 and the ii change in stocks over the T1 to T2 timeframe:. In most cases, T1 to T2 is taken as the marketing year, which may change from country to country. As is clear from the formula above, all absolute errors affecting Stock T1 are automatically carried over to Stock T2.


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Moreover, the computation of Delta T2-T1 assumes that the variation is possible and not exceeds the initial stock Note 1. Next, the change, Delta T2-T1 , is the carry-over and obtained from information about national production, import, export, use, and waste all expressed in tons , which can be expressed as follows:. Losses in fact occur at all stages of the food chain, including at harvesting, threshing if applicable , transport, storage and milling and all forms of processing.

FBS components by crop—production and stocks variability for maize, rice, wheat and soybean. The components, from production to loss, that influence Delta T2-T1 all vary at different spatial and time scales Ben-Ari and Makowski, Finally, short-term variations seasonal or annual , which are most relevant for food security planning, come on top of long-term variations that are associated with development, geopolitics, and links with other sectors such as industry.

Of all the terms, Use — Use T2-T1 — is probably the least elastic, at least as far as human consumption is concerned, while domestic production Prod T2-T1 might be the most variable term. Statistics between and related to the variability of stocks and production in the major global food producers Note 3.

Grain Reserves and the Food Price Crisis: Selected Writings from 2008–2012

For the terms 2 and 3 of the equation, numbers for exports and imports are usually known with fair accuracy, if only because exports mostly originate from well monitored agriculturally advanced sectors in the national economy that are monitored by associations of traders, customs, the ministries of agriculture and transport, and port authorities, among others. As a result, the receiving end, imports, are equally well known.

Next, the quantities of food that fall under the remaining terms of Use and Waste are far less well known. In the FAO FBS, waste appears as an explicit variable, although methods for waste estimation are not explicitly described note 4. In the table above it is expressed in a percentage of the sum of production and imports, as some crops that appear in the FBS of countries are not produced there but are imported, especially in the case of wheat and soybeans.

Waste is in fact one of the most difficult components to assess, as different losses are associated with all the other terms in the equation of? T2-T1 , including mostly transportation, storage, and processing losses, as already mentioned above.


  • Grain Reserves and the Food Price Crisis: Selected Writings from – | World Family.
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    • Very low values rounded to 0 do occur in some countries refer to the D1statistic in the table while some others reach values from 5. Seed and feed have a larger elasticity than food, while industrial uses, linked to specific industrial processes such as energy production from crop biomass, are less elastic. They want to lessen their dependence on imports and stabilize international markets, aware their reliance on those markets has never been so high.

    The idea also has resonance in developed countries looking for tools to stabilize agricultural markets for farmers and consumers. So did the G Both left only very small doors open to further work to expand the use of food reserves. This collection provides an overview of recent writing on reserves, points to work in progress and encourages a more open and rigorous debate about how reserves fit into local, regional, national and international food security strategies.

    Global grain stocks

    Selected Writings from — IATP works locally and globally at the intersection of policy and practice to ensure fair and sustainable food, farm and trade systems. Your email address will not be published. You may use these HTML tags and attributes: World Family is creating a space for dialogue and resource sharing between small scale farmers and all of us who value our environment and our communities. All over the world we have a common interest in opposing the take over of the food supply by agribusiness. People and the food we eat are too important to be turned into mere commodities. It is through a thousand small acts of solidarity that we can support and empower the small scale farmers to feed the world.