The history of wheat

History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive. It knows the names of the king’s bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly.  –           Jean-Henri Fabre (1823 –1915) French naturalist and author

 Wheat, barley and rye can trace their origin back to Triticeae, a grass that grew wild in the Fertile Crescent. Wild einkorn and emmer are wheat’s earliest ancestors; they had seed heads that quickly broke apart in the wind, scattering the seeds and permitting self-sowing. Modern-day wheat is the opposite: the grains now stay on the stalks no matter how strong the wind.

Modern-day wheat did not benefit as much as corn from the Fritz Haber process of combining nitrogen with hydrogen to make ammonia. Until the middle of the 20th century, applying nitrogen as fertiliser on wheat made it grow taller and thicker, but it fell over in the wind and rotted. Wheat needed to be genetically improved to take advantage of the technological progress in fertilisers.

One of the first leaps forward occurred in 1935 when a Japanese scientist named Gonjiro Inazuka crossed a semi-dwarf Japanese wheat species with two American varieties to produce an improved semi-dwarf variety Norin 10. Unlike previous types, which grew to 150 cm, Norin 10 only reached 60–110 cm.

In the late 1940s, Orville Vogel at Washington State University took another step forward when he imported Norin 10 into the US and crossed it with other varieties to yield high-yielding, semi-dwarf winter wheat.

However, the revolution in wheat—and it was a revolution—occurred in 1952. Norman Borlaug took some of these new Norin hybrid seeds to Mexico and grew thousands of unique varieties. He couldn’t sequence the wheat’s DNA to figure out which genes caused these traits because that technology didn’t exist then, but he carefully noted each variety’s characteristics. His work paid off, producing new kinds of dwarf wheat that were rust-resistant and didn’t blow over (lodge) in high winds.

By the 1960s, Borlaug was travelling the world to spread the news. His first stop was Pakistan where wheat yields were around 360kg an acre. Mexican farmers were by then getting more than three times that. His major success, however, was in India.

When India became independent in 1947, the country produced only 6.5 million tonnes of wheat each year, and yields were around 663 kg per hectare. It was not enough to feed the Indian population, and the country largely depended on food-aid imports from the US.

In 1963, India was on the brink of famine. The government invited Borlaug to India to test his new varieties. His yields were four or five times better, and India’s farmers quickly took up the new breeds. By 1974, India’s wheat production had tripled, and the country was self-sufficient in food. India has never faced a famine since.

In 1970 Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for enabling what came to be called the ‘Green Revolution’. He earned it.

World wheat production has more than tripled in the last sixty years, from 234 million mt in 1960 to 772 million mt in 2020. At the same time, wheat acreage has only risen 10 per cent, from 202 million hectares to 222 million hectares. Without Norman Borlaug, the world population would not have increased over that same sixty-year period from 3.0 to 7.7 billion. And what’s more, crop failures and famines would still be regular occurrences.

But it is not just the varieties of wheat that have evolved over the centuries; so too has the way humanity has sown, harvested and ground it into flour.

Ancient Egyptians sowed wheat by casting seeds into the mud after the retreat of annual floodwaters along the Nile. They then drove their cattle over the area to trample the seeds into the ground. Hand scattering of seed is still used today in many parts of the world.

Early farmers harvested their wheat with sharpened stones fitted into a wood or bone handle, but the introduction of iron and steel led to the sickle, a tool that is still widely used. Sickles are light enough to be used by women and children and allow wheat to be cut at any height so that they can leave the straw standing or cut it separately.

The sickle was so crucial in human development that the USSR put it with the hammer on its flag. The hammer represented industry, the sickle, agriculture.

The scythe was an improvement over the sickle with a longer blade at right angles to a long wooden handle. You can harvest wheat faster with a scythe than with a sickle, and you can stand upright while you do it. However, a scythe cuts the straw close to the ground, leaving it attached to the wheat head. A scythe is heavier than the sickle. But the scythe has again entered into our collective psyches with death portrayed as the Grim Reaper harvesting souls.

The first mechanical reaper appeared in 1831: a two-wheeled, horse-drawn contraption pushed a series of moving, scissor-like blades against the grain to clip it close to the ground. A rotating paddlewheel swept the stalks against the cutting bales, so they fell on a platform as the machine moved forward.

Once farmers had harvested the wheat, they spread it on a plot of hard ground or threshing floor. They then drove cattle or horses over the grain so that their hooves separated the wheat from the chaff. Winnowing, or tossing the mixture into the air, then allowed the wind to blow away the lighter chaff and the heavier wheat to drop back. The threshing machine later used fans to separate the chaff from the grain, mechanically doing the process.

As its name suggests, the modern combine harvester performs all these basic jobs in one operation. Hiram Moore developed the first version in 1834 and, by 1860, combine harvesters had cutting widths of several meters. In 1885, Hugh Victor McKay, from Australia, developed the first commercial combine harvester, called the Sunshine Harvester. It reduced the number of working hours needed to harvest one acre of wheat from 46 hours to 30 minutes. Today a modern combine can harvest 1,000 bushels per hour. That’s more than 27 metric tonnes.

Once harvested, wheat needs to be milled into flour, separating the outer bran and germ from the inner, more digestible, endosperm. Although wheat has been grown for thousands of years, humans’ teeth from excavated villages dating back to 6,700 BC show no signs of wear, indicating that those early people already milled wheat. Archaeologists have found grinding stones at sites of ancient settlements in almost all parts of the world.

Over the centuries, mills have been powered by men, horses, oxen, water, or wind, all geared to turn one stone against another. The Romans were the first to use waterpower for milling flour, in about 100 BC, and it remained a significant source of mill power. In 1870, most of the approximately 22,000 flour mills in the US were still water driven.

© Commodity Conversations ®

For more about wheat please click here

The politics of wheat

“No man qualifies as a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problems of wheat.” Socrates

Socrates was right: The Roman Empire needed a steady supply of wheat to flourish. Grain made into bread was the most critical element in the Roman diet, and the city required between 150,000 and 250,000 tonnes per year to feed its population. Rome imported most of its grain supplies and distributed a ‘dole’ of subsidised or free grain, and later bread, to about 200,000 less well-off residents, about a fifth of its population.

The Romans initially imported wheat from Sicily and Sardinia but later centred production on Carthage’s ancient city, in present-day Tunisia. In the second century BCE, the Emperor settled 6,000 colonists near Carthage, giving them about 25 hectares to grow grain. Later, when Egypt became part of the Roman Empire, the country became its primary supply source.

The Romans shipped the grain by barge to Alexandria, where they inspected it for quality and loaded it on ships for Rome. They transported it into sacks, rather than carrying it loose in the holds; ships transported an average of 350 tonnes, although some had as much as 1,500 tonnes. The ships were sail driven, unlike the Roman warships propelled by oarsmen. Sailing times from Italy to Alexandria in Egypt might be as brief as 14 days, but returning to Rome would have taken as long as 70 days as the winds were adverse.

Centuries later, Britain depended on wheat imports from its empire to feed itself and encouraged wheat cultivation in Australia and Canada.

In 1846, the UK abolished the Corn Laws, a system of tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food and grain introduced in 1815. (Remember, at that time the word ‘corn’ referred to all cereal grains, such as wheat and barley.) The government had introduced the laws to keep grain prices high and protect domestic farmers and (particularly) landowners.

The repeal of the Corn Laws was a decisive moment in British economic history. Their repeal lowered food prices, encouraged increased agricultural productivity, and freed up surplus labour to drive Britain’s industrialisation.

But the repeal didn’t just change England. As Dan Morgan wrote in Merchants of Grain,

“Parliament, with its stroke of repeal, …changed the world. Repeal of the protectionist system had opened England to the wheat of all the world, created incentives for the settlement of vast territories across the oceans, and established the conditions for modern international trade, with the new sea routes and modern trading empires.”

The pressure of cheap imports drove a steep decline in British domestic wheat production. At the same time, food became more affordable. Between 1840 and 1880, the cost of bread fell by half. By the end of the 19th century, Britain was importing 5 million tonnes of wheat per year, about 20 per cent of which came from Britain’s colonies: Australia (150,000 mt), India (300,000 mt) and Canada (450,000 mt).

On the other side of the Atlantic, early setters were dependent on imported flour from Europe, most often England, until they could produce wheat independently. Though corn saved the early settlements, many settlers didn’t like it. They baked a bread called ‘thirds’ which they added to the imported wheat flour: one-third wheat flour, one-third rye, and one-third cornmeal.

By the 1740s, the US was exporting wheat to England from the northern fields of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The US grew in importance as a wheat exporter after the American Revolution when the great migration into North America’s heartlands, along with the railroads, opened up new areas for farming.

Europe desperately needed this production, notably when their harvests failed in 1790 and 1807, and later, in 1860–1862. The Napoleonic wars (1803 to 1815) and World Wars I and II also led to spikes in wheat imports.

Wheat not only fed Europe during our numerous wars, but it also provoked conflicts. Writing in The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, the British historian Peter Frankopan argues that the Nazis invaded Russia for its wheat. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, wrote that the Nazis opened the Russian front for ‘grain and bread’, to capture ‘the vast fields of the east (which) sway with golden wheat, enough to nourish our people and all of Europe’.

We will never know, but some argue if the Nazis had never made that dash for Russian wheat—if they had never invaded the Soviet Union—they could have won the Second World War. Is it possible that we all owe our freedom to wheat?

© Commodity Conversations ® 2021

To continue reading, please click on this link for the third part of this blog.

The magic of wheat

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” Genesis 3:19

Unlike corn or soybeans, humans, not animals or cars, are the most important in terms of the world demand for wheat. On average, animals only eat about 18 per cent of the world’s total production of wheat. This number falls to less than 4 per cent in developing countries but as much as 35 per cent in developed countries. As a rule of thumb, wheat works as animal feed when it is 10 per cent cheaper than corn, or when wet weather reduces its protein content to under 10 per cent.

Even though wheat acreage has increased only modestly, wheat is now grown on more land area than any other food crop: 222 million hectares versus corn at 196 million hectares and rice at 163 million hectares. In 2020, the world’s farmers produced 772 million mt of wheat, making it the second most-produced cereal after corn at 1.1 million mt. Rice comes in at third place at 500 million mt.

Wheat is still the world’s biggest traded agricultural commodity by volume. In 2020 world exports were 194 million mt, just ahead of corn at 184 million mt and soybeans at 170 million mt; little of the world’s rice production trades internationally: 45 million mt in 2020.

If you were to ask your guests at your next dinner party to list the top wheat-producing countries in the world, I bet that they would all get it wrong. They may guess correctly that the EU tops the list at 136 million mt, but few would know that China now produces more wheat—134 million mt—than any other country in the world. China’s farmers now grow about the same quantity of wheat as Russia (85 million mt) and the US (50 million tonnes) combined. India is the world’s third-largest producer at an estimated 107 million mt.

Your party guests may have more success with exporters. Russia is now the world’s largest exporter at 39 million mt, followed by the US at 27 million tonnes and Canada and the EU, both at 26.5 million mt. Ukraine comes in fifth on the list at 17 million mt. (All figures are for 2020.)

I can guarantee that none of your dinner party guests could name the world’s top wheat importers! Although Egypt used to supply the Roman Empire with wheat from the Nile valley, it is now the world’s largest importer at 13 million mt. Unsurprisingly, when you consider their large population, Indonesia comes second at 11 million. China imported nine mln mt of wheat in 2020, while Turkey comes fourth at 8 million mt.

Wheat is an essential source of carbohydrates, but with a protein content of about 13 per cent, it is also the world’s leading source of vegetal protein in human food. However, it is just this protein content—the gluten—that is now causing controversy.

Gluten gives dough its elasticity, helping it rise and keep its shape while at the same time leaving the final product with a chewy texture. However, gluten can trigger adverse inflammatory reactions—a broad spectrum of gluten-related disorders, including celiac disease—in 1 or 2 per cent of the population. Also, between 6 and 10 per cent of people suffer from non-celiac gluten sensitivity. ‘Wheat Belly’ symptoms can include bloating, headaches, tiredness, and skin problems.

In his bestselling book Wheat Belly published in 2011, the American cardiologist William Davis claimed that modern wheat is addictive; he recommended that you exclude it entirely from your diet.  In promoting his book, he wrote:

‘The wheat of today is nothing like the wheat of 1960, 1950—that is, the wheat that our moms or grandmothers had—so it has been changed. This new crop has implications for human health that have never been anticipated. So, this is appropriate for nobody, no human, nobody in this audience, should be eating this modern creation of genetics research.’

He added: ‘I’d like to make the case that foods made with wheat make you fat…. I’d go as far as saying that overly enthusiastic wheat consumption is the main cause of the obesity and diabetes crisis in the United States.’

His views have been vigorously contested both by scientists and by the wheat industry. As an ex-sugar trader, I am personally delighted that he is blaming wheat rather than sugar for the obesity epidemic of the past forty years. I am, however, unqualified to give an opinion on the matter.

© Commodity Conversations ® 2021

Commodity Conversations Weekly Press Summary

Some developing nations are starting to struggle with rising food prices, a consequence of trade disruptions caused by the pandemic, export curbs in places like Argentina and Russia, higher commodity prices and depreciating currencies. Governments now have to decide whether to prioritise economic growth or step in to control inflation. The Brazilian central bank recently hinted that it would change its priorities and focus on keeping prices under control. Experts say Russia and South Africa are likely to focus on lowering food prices as well. 

In contrast, some countries are actively looking to remove trade barriers and sign new free trade agreements. The removal of trade barriers could be one of the most effective ways of addressing food security and nutrition issues, according to an economist at the World Bank. He highlighted the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) which was implemented at the start of 2021. 

The UK is also looking for new trade partners and announced that it would apply to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). The deal would only have a small impact as the region represented 8.4% of the UK’s exports in 2019, the same as exports to Germany alone. At the same time, some estimates suggest that the UK’s exports to the EU dropped 68% in January because of the UK’s departure from the bloc. 

Trade disruptions and higher raw material costs pose a challenge to food producers who have otherwise been dealing with a strong consumer demand amid the pandemic. Unilever revealed that its margins fell below initial estimates which affected revenue growth. Costs are expected to remain high in 2021 and weak currencies in emerging markets could start to impact purchases. 

Raizen announced it was buying Louis Dreyfus’ Biosev for BRL 3.6 billion (USD 670 million) this week, which some say is a sign Louis Dreyfus is taking another step towards exiting the sugar industry. The head of Raizen – a joint venture between Shell and Cosan – said that the final price tag was a good discount. The sale of Biosev marks another exodus from the sugar industry by the ABCDs, shortly after Cargill said it would sell its stake in Alvean. 

The CEO of Cargill revealed that the firm was looking for acquisitions to enter the aquaculture market. Cargill already owns 38 fish feed facilities across 20 nations but is now looking to produce its own seafood products. The CEO argued that global meat demand was still rising despite the growing popularity of plant-based protein, as he highlighted that fish was the fastest-growing protein source. 

The car and the drive-in experience is making a comeback as restaurants try to adapt to the restrictions imposed by the coronavirus. Many fast food chains were looking to move away from drive-ins and some cities even banned them completely in 2019, but restaurants recently unveiled new designs centered around the car. Some chains like Starbucks and Subway were disadvantaged by their focus on walk-in customers and have had to close hundreds of restaurants in cities with no car access. 

The pandemic has also shined a light on so-called cloud-kitchens like the Dubai-based Kitopi. The firm handles delivery orders from multiple food brands and is looking to expand across the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The delivery industry in the Middle East is growing fast but the head of Careem, which was acquired by Uber for USD 3.1 billion, argued that the sector was currently “not sustainable”. Carem announced that it will no longer charge a commission but a fixed fee to help food suppliers. Noon, a competitor, also announced that it will cut its commissions to better compete with Deliveroo and Talabat. 

Regulators in the US have already capped the fees collected by delivery services in Washington state and New York City. Rhode Island now wants to implement a maximum fee cap of 15%, half of what some services currently charge, until the Governor removes coronavirus restrictions. In Australia, New South Wales is looking to protect delivery workers by instructing companies to avoid imposing unreasonable delivery deadlines and limiting their shift to 12 hours. Workers currently have limited protections as they are classified as independent contractors. 

The UN published a new report on the environmental footprint of our food and – perhaps unsurprisingly – recommended switching to a plant-based diet as the best way to reduce the carbon footprint of food, followed by the need to set aside land for nature and improving our farming practices. For more detailed recommendations, the BBC unveiled its “Foodprint Calculator”, which you can find here

This summary was produced by ECRUU

 

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Cornucopia

Farming looks mighty easy when your plough is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the cornfield.  – Dwight Eisenhower

Corn is an awkward crop. Because of its shallow roots, it is susceptible to droughts, intolerant of nutrient-deficient soils, and prone to being uprooted by high winds. Corn reproduces sexually each year, randomly selecting half the genes from a given plant to propagate to the next generation. Corn breeding in prehistory led to larger plants and larger ears. Modern breeding began in the 19th century and, in the past 75 years, both conventional cross-breeding and genetic modification have succeeded in making corn less awkward, increasing output and reducing the impact of droughts and pests.

Many of the corn varieties grown in the US and Canada today are hybrids; over 90 per cent are the result of genetic modification. Grown commercially since 1997, GM corn now accounts for about one-third of the corn grown in the world, most of which has been genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate, or to provide protection against natural pests. Glyphosate, sold as Roundup, is a relatively inexpensive herbicide that kills all plants except those with genetic tolerance, which pretty much means all of them.

Monsanto released glyphosate-resistant soybeans under the name Roundup Ready Soybeans in 1996 and within ten years 80 per cent of all soybeans grown in the US were Roundup Ready.

Roundup Ready corn received FDA approval in 1997 and it was commercially released in 1998. It used much the same technology as in soybeans but also had built-in insect protection in the form of a Bt protein, a naturally occurring bacterium that lives in the soil and is toxic to insects.

Scientists also modified corn genes to make the crop more drought tolerance. The USDA approved drought-tolerant GM corn in 2011 and it was first commercialized in 2013.

Over the past twenty years, GM technology has revolutionised farming and transformed the seed and agricultural input business. Previously, much of a farm’s cost of production was in purchasing chemicals, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides. Chemical companies made their money selling these inputs. Now the cost is in the development of the seeds. The result has been a merging of chemical and seed businesses with large chemical companies buying up the seed businesses.

Although GM technology has revolutionised the industry, its effect on yields is sometimes overstated.  By one estimate, about 50 per cent of yield increases since the 1920s have been the result of breeding, including genetic modification, while the other 50 per cent has come from improved farming practices. Better farming techniques have been just as important as genetics.

The USDA first began to publish corn yield estimates in 1866. Yields of open-pollinated corn varieties in the US remained fairly stagnant, averaging about 1.6 tonnes per hectare, for 70 years until about 1936. There was no significant change in productivity during that entire time period, even though farmers’ seed-saving practices represented a form of plant breeding.

Agricultural yields began to lift off with the adoption of hybrid corn in the late 1930s, but the most significant improvement in the annual rate of yield gain began in the mid-1950s in response to continued improvement in crop genetics, increasing adoption of nitrogen fertilizer and chemical pesticides, as well as agricultural mechanization. Since 1955, corn grain yields in the U.S. have increased at a fairly constant 1.9 bushels per acre per year, sustained primarily by continued improvements in genetics and crop production technologies.

The increase in global corn production in the last forty years has been more than impressive. In 1979, farmers in the US harvested 201 million tonnes of corn; in 2019 they harvested 366 million tonnes. In that same forty-year period, world corn production has increased from 425 million tonnes to 1.122 billion tonnes. Total world trade has increased by 100 million tonnes, from 70 to 170 million tonnes. However, in the same period, corn acreage has increased only 13 per cent, from 29 to 33 million hectares.

In his book More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next the bestselling author Andrew McAfee writes:

‘Farms of less than one hundred acres grow 15 per cent less corn per acre than farms with more than a thousand acres. And bigger farms get better faster. Between 1982 and 2012 farms under one hundred acres grew their total factor productivity by 15 per cent, whereas farms over a thousand acres grew theirs by 51 per cent.’

And as for the environmental costs of large-scale farming, Andrew McAfee writes:

A comprehensive review published in Nature Sustainability in 2018 concluded: “The data does not suggest that environmental costs are generally larger for high yield farming systems. If anything, positive associations – in which high yield, land efficient systems also have lower costs in other dimensions – appear more common.”

In other words – and contrary to popular belief –  large farms are generally more environmentally-friendly than small farms.

But I am getting ahead of myself here. More on this in later posts.

© Commodity Conversations ® 2021

This is an extract from my next book: ‘Commodity Crops – and the merchants who trade them.’

Commodity Conversations Weekly Press Summary

Over the past few months, shippers have been rushing back containers to China to capture the high premium, resulting in a shortage of containers elsewhere and crops destined for export piling up. The head of Hapag-Lloyd said this week “the charter ship market is, at the moment, basically sold out.” Some exporters are switching to shipping in bulk as a result which is causing freight rates to soar and could result in more expensive food. Bloomberg added that China’s Covid customs clearance processes were exacerbating the situation by causing delays at ports and a piling up of cold containers waiting to be cleared. 

Chinese customs defended themselves, saying that checks at exporting countries were insufficient which increased the need for safety procedures on arrival. Customs officials said they had tested 1.3 million items as of mid-January and found 47 items positive with the virus. The China Federation of Logistics & Purchasing said the number of contaminated items was increasing, a sign that China should continue to follow strict procedures. 

A Chinese shipping analyst argued that the main issue was the slow pace at which containers were coming back to China due to lower port efficiency in other countries, and notably the US, as a result of Covid measures. He expects that the shortage will continue until Mar-Apr.  

An official at the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said China’s buying spree was pushing up food prices and exacerbating the risks of hunger in import-dependent countries. The situation is made worse by countries limiting exports, such as Russia, which could spook other countries into following suit. The WFP had said back in November that it was struggling to source food for humanitarian aid. As a result, and following a suggestion from Singapore, some 53 WTO member countries agreed last week to facilitate the export of food for non-commercial humanitarian purposes. 

A bioeconomist in Belgium warned that the Covid-led trend to prioritise locally sourced food was not necessarily better for the environment. She argued that the pandemic had shown that our supply chain was, in fact, “very robust” as there were very few food supply issues in Europe. Besides, she explained that it would take twice as much land to consume only local livestock and that local products tend to be more expensive and therefore less accessible to the poorer section of the population. 

While a big chunk of China’s crop buying is going to feed its growing hog population, the CEO of plant-based meat maker Impossible Foods said he was committed to substituting every animal product currently in use. The company announced a 15% price reduction at the wholesale level in the US in a bid to become more competitive. Future Meat said it managed to reduce the price of a quarter-pound serving of its cultured chicken breast to USD 7.50, down “1,000 times over the last three years.” A family pack of Impossible Burger ground beef still costs USD 65, meanwhile. 

Beyond the cost, the taste of meat alternatives continues to be an issue. Impossible Foods uses genetically modified (GM) ingredients, notably soy leghemoglobin, to replicate the taste and feel of meat, some of which have not been cleared by countries like the UK. Future Meat tackles the problem differently by using both cultured meat and plant-based ingredients, or what it calls the “best of both worlds.” It also makes its own cultured fat to avoid using palm oil or having to add a lot of salt. 

The world of luxury dining won’t be left behind with Michelin-starred restaurant Disfrutar tying up with Novameat to create the world’s “biggest cell-based meat prototype.” The Counter said it looked like “an ottoman” but you can decide for yourself here

An analysis on Seeking Alpha argued that Danone’s core dairy business was at risk due to the exponential growth of the plant-based market. Oat milk company Oatly, which saw a sales growth of almost 100% in 2020, is taking on the challenge of converting the sceptics. The company identified middle-aged men as most unlikely to switch to a plant based diet and put together a provocative and humorous ad campaign called ‘Help Dad’ to get the younger generation to push them to make the switch. 

This comes at a time when research by Euromonitor showed that consumers increasingly want to buy products from brands whose values they are aligned with. In the same vein, in the US, Coca-Cola announced it would withhold up to 30% of its legal fees from law firms that do not have the minimum diversity requirements. The group’s global general counsel said that good intentions were no longer enough. 

This summary was produced by ECRUU

 

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

More on the economics of cocoa

Readers have posed some interesting questions following my blog last week on cocoa.

One asked me to explain why I said a minimum sales price becomes a ceiling on the market. The answer is that if the price can’t go up, it will go down. If traders and manufacturers know that they can buy at a specific price, they have little risk in being short below that price. If the price rises, they can cover their shorts at a predictable loss. Minimum prices skew the risk/reward ratio and encourage people to sell short.

On a broader level, one commented that, because Ghana and Ivory Coast account for 60 per cent of world cocoa, they have the market power to set cocoa prices. He suggested that cocoa producers should get together to form COPEC, cocoa’s equivalent of OPEC.

Unfortunately, cocoa is not the same as oil. Oil producers can reduce supply by turning off a tap; they can leave it in the ground. It doesn’t deteriorate. Cocoa producers can’t turn off a tree. The trees keep producing, cocoa builds up at the ports, rots in the warehouses, and loses some, or all, of its value. In the meantime, farmers are left unpaid – with all the dire consequences that entail.

Cocoa is a front-loading crop: grinders and chocolate manufacturers tend to hold large stocks that they can run down if producers hold off new sales. Cocoa buyers are more affluent and better financed than producers – and they probably have better infrastructure.

One reader argued that the market is almost as concentrated on the buy-side as it is on the sales side. I very much doubt that cocoa buyers work together in the same way that cocoa producers do. Still, I would guess the balance weighs in the buyer’s favour in terms of market power.

A couple of readers pointed out that as growers only receive around 5 per cent of a chocolate bar’s cost, increasing the cocoa cost by $400 per tonne would only increase the bar’s price by one or two per cent. They have a point. Besides, Cargill recently conducted a survey that showed consumers would be willing to pay more if they thought that the farmer would benefit. ‘Surely,’ asked one reader, ‘consumers would pay 2 per cent more for their chocolate if they thought that it helped the farmers?’

The answer is that it would, but, increasing the price that farmers receive would encourage them to produce more, adding further pressure on prices.

Expressing this problem differently, another reader said that producing and consuming countries should cooperate in setting a fair price for cocoa.

In the past, the United Nations has done that by setting up commodity organisations to ‘manage’ the markets; cocoa, coffee, or sugar were three such examples. These commodity organisations tried to use stock management to bring supply and demand into balance at a price that gave a decent return to growers and a reasonable price for consumers.

When world prices fell, the various commodity bodies set to work by either purchasing (in the case of cocoa) physical cocoa to hold off the market or asking (in the case of coffee and sugar) producers to build stocks and limit exports. When prices rose again, they released these stocks.

These noble efforts, sadly, failed. When prices fell, coffee producers continued to export; they desperately needed the money to feed themselves. In the case of cocoa, the ICCO ran out of funding. In the case of sugar, producers failed to build the stocks they were supposed to. (Brazil famously said that their inventories were in the cane in the fields.)

As a consequence, when prices rose, either the stocks weren’t there or were insufficient to stem the prices’ rise.

As we saw earlier, market participants will tend to sell short ahead of a stock release price level; if stocks aren’t there, then the price explodes as shorts run for cover. It means that not only do international price agreements not work, they also actually increase market volatility. They are like communism: a great idea in theory, but a disaster in practice.

It is true even if the producers are in rich, developed countries.

The EU used to fix minimum prices for many agricultural products, maintaining them through a mix of quotas, stock management and subsidised exports. Over the years, production costs dropped as farmers became more efficient. Still, the EU continued increasing their minimum prices in line with general inflation. In the end, sugar prices were so profitable that French farmers used to call sugar beet quotas’ white gold’. Butter mountains and wine lakes built up. So did subsidise exports – to the detriment of farmers in importing countries.

The EU has gradually wound down their market management schemes (sugar and milk were the last to go), along with, thank goodness, subsidised exports. The EU has replaced them with direct income support. Agriculture is still the largest item in the EU’s budget at 38 per cent, but down from 73 per cent in 1985.

Finally, one, rather astute, reader argued that the Ivory Coast should have thanked Hershey for taking delivery of the December futures market. By doing so, Hershey pushed the world cocoa price higher, taking some of the old crop cocoa (that had been weighing on prices) off the market. He may have a point.

Instead of manipulating the world price, what should Ghana and Ivory Coast do to help their impoverished growers? I posed that question this week to the head of one of the leading NGOs in the sector. I will publish his replies shortly.

© Commodity Conversations ® 2021

Commodity Conversations Weekly Press Summary

The US shipped record amounts of corn and soybean to China in the last quarter of 2020, just as the dry weather in South America led to forecasts of poor crops and pushed up prices. This helped grain merchants post impressive results and ADM’s share price reached a new record while Bunge’s reached the highest since 2018. Analysts say the outlook for 2021 also looks promising for grain traders and farmers, although they warn that US farmers might now look to significantly increase their output thanks to a sharp rise in income. 

US firms were not the only ones to benefit from strong Chinese demand in 2020 as COFCO saw its revenue exceed CNY 500 billion (USD 77 billion) for the first time, including profits north of CNY 20 billion (USD 3 billion), according to Chinese media. As a result, COFCO became the world’s second-largest grain trade house after Cargill. 

China’s impressive import pace might not last, however, as the country continues to issue warnings that frozen food imports could be a source of coronavirus contamination. Some shops have now completely banned the sale of imported meat and supermarkets in Beijing and Shanghai need to store imported meat on separate shelves. Most experts still doubt the idea that frozen food and packaging can be a source of contamination, although a draft WHO guidance which was released by error outlines the potential risk of the virus spreading through the cold chain. China imported a record amount of meat in 2020 to rebuild stocks but Rabobank warned that meat imports could drop 30% in 2021. 

Food firms are being criticised by government officials and human rights groups for their involvement with factories in Xinjiang that probably rely on forced labour from the Muslim Uyghur ethnic group. Coca-Cola’s factory close to Urumqi was highlighted as it is surrounded by a dozen prisons or so-called re-education camps. Coca-Cola has another reason to be wary of its relationship with China as a Chinese engineer is due to face trial this year for the alleged theft of company secrets. The engineer reportedly stole confidential information on Coke’s can-coating research and was granted funds by the Chinese government to open a firm to compete using the stolen technology. 

A potentially promising technology, vertical farming, might not deliver on its promises to reduce hunger, restore forests and lower agricultural emissions. Vertical farming operations are finding that powering lamps for 12-16 hours a day, on top of heaters, makes it hard for them to compete with crops grown under natural – and free – sunlight. A US operation said its products cost 3-5 times more than the competition grown on traditional farms, although they require significantly less water.

A new study by Mintel revealed that meat-eaters in the UK made less of an effort to cut down on meat consumption amid the pandemic in 2020. Some 41% of the people surveyed said they were actively looking to eat less meat, compared with 51% in 2019, although 42% of people conceded that a meat-based diet was bad for the environment, up from 25% in 2018. Researchers explained that people were looking for familiar comfort food during the pandemic, as even canned meat sales increased, while the trend should return to favour plant-based alternatives after the pandemic. 

Investors certainly believe in the future of plant-based diets as Blue Horizon Ventures exceeded its target of raising EUR 100 million (USD 121 million). The venture capital fund is planning to invest in startups looking at alternative proteins. Governments are also under pressure to reconsider their meat consumption as an assessment of the meals served to British MPs found that 72% of the carbon footprint came from meat products. Humane Society International is calling on MPs to replace 50% of meat products with plant-based alternatives. 

Finally, Jonathan Kingsman, the founder of Commodity Conversations, has recently published ‘Crop to Cup – Coffee Conversations’. The book looks at all aspects of the coffee supply chain and contains interviews with leading figures in the sector. It is now available on Amazon.

This summary was produced by ECRUU

 

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Cocoa economics

Cocoa farmers in Ivory Coast went on strike last week in protest against the low prices they are currently being offered for their crop. They have also threatened to block port warehouses where more than 100,000 tonnes of cocoa have backed up due to a lack of demand. A farmers’ representative told Bloomberg that farmers are only being paid 800 CFA francs per kilo against the state-guaranteed minimum price of 1,000 CFA francs, roughly $1.85/kg.

Covid19 is partly to blame for the lack of demand. The FT (subscription required) reports that the virus has disrupted ‘sales of chocolate at airports, hotels, restaurants and speciality boutiques’. As a result, world cocoa demand fell 2-3 per cent last year, prompting processors and chocolate manufacturers to delay shipments on quantities that they have already bought, and hold off on new purchases. This drop in demand has hit the Ivory Coast particularly hard. Together with Ghana, the country produces 60 per cent of the world’s cocoa.

Ghana and Ivory Coast work together more closely than in the past, setting similar ex-farm prices and reducing smuggling across their borders. In 2019, they looked at ways to increase farmers’ incomes and discussed setting a minimum export price. They eventually rejected the idea and instead introduced a ‘Living Income Differential’ (LID), a $400 per tonne premium that buyers had to pay over the world price, starting with the 2020/21 season.

The $400 per tonne LID was not just a premium over the futures; it was also in addition to the country differentials.

Country differentials (premia and discounts relative to the futures) fluctuate widely; they often depend on the cocoa that the market expects to be delivered against the futures. Processors prefer new crop cocoa to old crop, and the futures can be depressed, for example, if old crop is expected to be delivered.  For the 19/20 season, exporters probably paid an average premium of about £75 for Ivory Coast and £125 for Ghana, as these purchases were made starting in September/October 2018.

The larger cocoa processors – particularly the ones with factories in Ivory Coast – have paid LID on their 2020/21 purchases, but they have had difficulty passing it on to their buyers. Unlike Fairtrade or the Rainforest Alliance, LID doesn’t come with a certificate that can be handed on to the chocolate manufacturers. Without a certificate, manufacturers can’t put a label on their retail packaging, nor ask their customers to pay more.

Rather than pay LID, Hershey was reported last month to have taken delivery from the December futures contract: a mixture of the old crop cocoa from West African, Ecuador and Sulawesi.

In response, Ivory Coast and Ghana launched an unprecedented media campaign against Hershey. They also threatened to suspend the company’s sustainability programmes in the two countries. It is not clear what arrangement Hershey made with Ivory Coast and Ghana, but it has been reported that Hershey has agreed to pay the Living Income Differential. Still, as Hershey does not buy directly from the Ivory Coast, it is unclear how that works.

It is also unclear how Ghana and the Ivory Coast expected LID to work in the first place.

By asking their customers to pay $400 per tonne more for Ghanaian or Ivory Coast than for other cocoa, chocolate manufacturers had a strong incentive to buy alternative origins. Ghana and Ivory Coast have tried to stop this by putting media – and local – pressure on the big chocolate companies. Still, the big companies account for less than half of the world’s chocolate production and an even smaller percentage of beans.

The cocoa market is looking at a surplus this year of up to 300,000 tonnes. Because of LID, this surplus is now primarily made up of cocoa from Ivory Coast and Ghana. At this time of the year, the Ivory Coast would have customarily sold all of this crop, most of their mid-crop and a significant chunk of the following main crop. Instead, they still have an estimated 500,000 tonnes to sell from the 2020/21 season and a similar quantity from the 2021/22 crop. They have not sold anything yet for 2022/23.

Cocoa is what is known as a ‘front-loading’ commodity. The harvest runs from October through March, with shipments concentrated during this period; processors then store the cocoa and use it throughout the year. With storage costs at around £12 per month, it is not surprising that buyers have been delaying purchases, aggravating the build-up at the origin. Time is on the side of the buyers; they can afford to wait.

The inevitable has happened: both Ghana and Ivory Coast have reduced prices to tempt buyers. Country differentials have fallen to a discount of £150 – 200 per tonne. Unfortunately, they have little success even at those prices; buyers have either already bought elsewhere or are waiting for prices to fall even further.

But isn’t this just bad luck on the part of Ghana and Ivory Coast? Wouldn’t LID have worked if the balance sheet had been in deficit rather than surplus? Unfortunately, the answer to both questions is ‘no’.

If there had been a deficit, the outright cocoa price would indeed have risen. Unfortunately, neither Ghana nor Ivory Coast would have been able to sell if they had continued to ask for a premium of $400 per tonne over the market. The world price could have gone to the moon, but they would still have asked for $400 per tonne more. To move their crop, the country differentials would have been reduced – probably to levels similar to where they are today. As with all farmers, it is the outright price that matters, not the differentials.

So, what is to be done? With hindsight, the obvious answer would have been to go with the two countries’ original idea and set a minimum price, not a differential. Even then, with a market in surplus, the world price would have fallen below the minimum price; Ivory Coast and Ghana still wouldn’t have sold. The minimum price would have become a maximum price with the market only buying it when it was needed.

It is sad to say, but cocoa economics are the same as everyone’s else’s economics: the only cure for low prices is low prices.

© Commodity Conversations ® 2021

Commodity Conversations Weekly Press Summary

The pressure is increasing on major trade houses to step up their commitment to end deforestation in Brazil after three small soy traders that supply Norway’s salmon industry committed to zero deforestation in their supply chain this week. Brazil’s oilseeds crushers association Abiove, however, refused to impose a “soy moratorium” on farmers in the Cerrado, arguing that farmers own their land and should have a right to decide what to do with it. Abiove argued that downstream companies that are putting pressure on soybean farmers should instead look to work with them to find a solution. 

The issue continues to hold diplomatic proportions, as France’s President said that importing soybean from Brazil would be akin to condoning the deforestation of the Amazon. But with the EU importing over 8 million mt of Brazilian soy in 2020, up 61% on year and the second biggest market after China, displacing Brazilian soybean won’t be easy. While the latest pledge will help make the EU’s salmon supply chain deforestation-free, an analyst argued that reducing our meat consumption was the only realistic way of fighting deforestation in Brazil. Until then, the EU’s food safety agency just cleared worms, saying they were safe to eat, something that the UN FAO has been saying since 2013. 

Following in the footsteps of Louis Dreyfus, Cargill is looking to sell its 50% stake in sugar trading group Alvean, which would effectively signal Cargill’s exit from the world of sugar trading. This comes as the US Food and Drug Administration is under increasing pressure from consumer groups to have stricter rules for sugar content labelling. The FDA doesn’t allow the “Low Sugar” label to be used in marketing because it has not defined what the threshold is. However, a report by the New York Times shows that F&B companies are using other misleading labels, such as “lightly sweetened.” A number of these companies have faced lawsuits by consumers claiming the labels were deliberately misleading. 

In a move that grabbed headlines, Coca-Cola withdrew its support from the International Life Sciences Institute, an organisation Bloomberg said was known to focus on pro-sugar lobbying and research. Coca-Cola was also among a number of other F&B giants to freeze lobbying money following the attacks on the Capitol. This is part of a wider move from major US companies increasingly wary of their image in the eyes of consumers. The country’s biggest F&B groups already slashed political donations by up to half in the 2020 Presidential campaign compared to the previous one. 

Research carried out in Australia found that the type of food delivery that produced the most packaging waste was burgers, followed by Thai food. It also found that paper bag packaging produced more emissions than plastic as a result of the carbon released. The good news, though, is that Amazon announced it was banning toxic PFAS chemicals which often line cardboard and wrappers as well as limiting non-recyclable packaging for its Amazon Kitchen brands. In the same vein, McDonald’s said it would phase out PFAS in its food packaging by 2025. 

Restaurants continue to resent the high commissions charged by third party delivery companies. As one podcaster put it, while UberEats doubled revenues in 2020, 17% of the US restaurants shut down. Regardless, delivery companies continue to push innovation. Grubhub, for instance, tied up with Fiat Chrysler to make it easier to order food from inside a car. Meanwhile, Walmart is testing a smart locker delivery system that would make it easier for people to order their groceries and get delivered even when they’re out. The delivery app companies also welcomed a new bill passed by the outgoing President making it easier for them to classify their workers as independent contractors instead of employees, saving the companies a lot of costs. There is a strong likelihood that the new President will overturn that rule, however, The Counter said. 

Last but not least, Unilever is testing a new concept: a food factory inside a sea container. The containers would be able to produce things like bouillon, mayo, ketchup and even ice cream while being shipped around the world. 

This summary was produced by ECRUU

 

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.