The title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek… but the stories are getting increasingly surreal, and I didn’t want to leave these rice stories alone.

As the chart makes clear, the ascent of the cost of rice to $24 from $10 per hundredweight over the past year tracks the declining value of the American dollar. The link between the declining parity of the US unit and the rising price of commodities, including oil as well as rice and other wares, is indisputable. China has bid aggressively for rice all year, and last week banned rice exports, along with Vietnam and several other producers.
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Never before in history has hunger become a global threat in a period of plentiful harvests. Global rice production will hit a record of 423 million tons in the 2007-2008 crop year, enough to satisfy global demand. The trouble is that only 7% of the world’s rice supply is exported, because local demand is met by local production. Any significant increase in rice stockpiles cuts deeply into available supply for export, leading to a spike in prices. Because such a small proportion of the global rice supply trades, the monetary shock from the weak dollar was sufficient to more than double its price.
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The George W Bush administration might as well have used the State Department as a set for the Jackass reality show. American arrogance has eroded the ground under many of the governments on which its foreign policy depends. It is hard to characterize what will come next, except, like the stunts on Jackass, that it is going to hurt.
Asia Times

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Well, it’s official, reality and the mainstream media have finally begun to have something to do with each other. Once the New York Times admits that the peak is here, everyone else should follow, even the lunatic right if you give them some extra time to digest this new reality, and to find a way to blame this on the Clintons.

To many experts, the steadily rising price underscored longer-term fears about the future of a system that has supplied cheap oil for more than a century.

“This is the market signaling there is a problem,” said Jan Stuart, global oil economist at UBS, “that there is a growing difficulty to meet demand with new supplies.”

Today’s tensions are only likely to get worse in coming years. Consider a few numbers: The planet’s population is expected to grow by 50 percent to nine billion by sometime in the middle of the century. The number of cars and trucks is projected to double in 30 years— to more than two billion — as developing nations rapidly modernize. And twice as many passenger jetliners, more than 36,000, will in all likelihood be crisscrossing the skies in 20 years.

All of that will require a lot more oil — enough that global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, a leading global energy forecaster for the United States and other developed nations. For producers it will mean somehow finding and pumping an additional 11 billion barrels of oil every year.

And that’s only 22 years away, a heartbeat for the petroleum industry, where the pace of finding and tapping new supplies is measured in decades.
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“The country has been living beyond its means,” said Vaclav Smil, a prominent energy expert at the University of Manitoba. “The situation is dire. We need to do relative sacrifices. But people don’t realize how dire the situation is.”

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Well, finally Iran gets to laugh at the United States. Hopefully Israel will not get its wish for an invasion of Iran this year, and I think by next year this question will not really be very important anymore. And who knows, maybe the next US president might actually realize that’s it’s good policy to create strong international relations based on a degree of trust and good faith. Just a weird thought, excuse me if it’s off topic…

“The oil price of $115 a barrel in today’s global markets is a deceiving figure. Oil is a strategic commodity that needs to discover its real value,” the Web site quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.
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Ahmadinejad accused Western industrialized nations of “selfishness” in their quest for cheaper oil.

“When they get hold of oil, they assume that oil is a free commodity and belongs to them and has wrongly been placed in other territories. … This is the spirit of selfishness and arrogance,” Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying.
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A weaker dollar makes commodities such as oil less attractive to investors as a hedge against inflation, and it makes oil more expensive to investors overseas. Analysts believe the weaker dollar is the primary reason oil has soared this year. The effect tends to reverse when the greenback gains ground.
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Iran has stopped using the U.S. dollar in its oil transactions with the outside world, switching to currencies such as euro.

“The dollar is not money any longer but a handful of paper distributed in the world without commodity support,” the Web site quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

Will the USA respond by asking its tired and over-reached military forces to attack Iran? Keep in mind what happened in 2000 when Iraq started to sell oil in Euros. Stay tuned, pick your favorite quality news source and you’ll know soon enough…

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