With corn and other food prices soaring, some firms will for sure make a few good deals. As the drought has spread around, the mighty commodities titans will be there to “sort it out”. Before proceeding to the article below, we suggest reading how Glencore plans making a killing.

With the US experiencing a rerun of the drought “Dust Bowl” days of the 1930s and Russia suffering a similar food crisis that could see Vladimir Putin’s government banning grain exports, the senior economist of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Concepcion Calpe, told The Independent: “Private companies like Glencore are playing a game that will make them enormous profits.”

Click here.

Let’s now turn to some thoughts by John Aziz.

From that sun which is truly ‘of this great world both eye and soul’ we derive our strength and our weakness, our success and our failure, our elation in commercial mania, and our despondency
and ruin in commercial collapse.
W.S. Jevons, 1909

With crop yields falling due to drought, and crop prices breaking out so much that some farmers are feeding their cows discarded candy, perhaps now is a good time to consider the slightly offbeat theories of English economist W.S. Jevons who believed that the business cycle is driven by the 11-year solar cycle:

W.S. Jevons and then his son H. S. Jevons believed that cyclical behaviour of solar activity cause changes in agricultural output and therefore general economic activity. This has been named the “sunspot” theory. Although sometimes regarded as bordering on the bizarre, it is not too farfetched. Non-irrigated agrarian societies obviously would suffer pronounced effects upon agricultural production (and therefore incomes) from climatic alterations. It follows that relative large variations in agricultural production would lead to variations in supporting industries (forward linkages) and then impacts upon industrial output which use raw materials from agriculture (backward linkages) and eventually overall economic activity.

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