Companies have a “good opportunity to make money” building the infrastructure needed to feed a world population growing by some 100m people a year, a top executive at oilseeds giant Bunge has said.
While the need to raise crop production by 1.7bn tonnes in the first half of the century to feed the growing population had been appreciated, the problems of transporting and storing the extra had been largely ignored, Carl Hausmann said.
“The infrastructure needs of the world have been underinvested in over the last several year,” said Mr Hausmann, the former chief executive of Bunge in Europe and North America, now head of the agribusiness giant’s corporate affairs.
“But if farmers do not get more facilities to store, deliver crops, they cannot increase their production. Infrastructure is a linchpin of the entire agricultural system.”
Public vs private sectors
Developing the transport facilities and silos needed to meet this demand looked likely to come down to private companies, given the squeezes on public sector finances.
“Most will be done by the private sector,” he said. “Private companies will see this as an opportunity to invest and make money.”
Bunge was exploiting this opportunity through a $200m export facility it was building on the US west coast.
“Think how many more such projects we will need in the coming decade to cope with 1.7bn tonnes in [extra] production,” he added, saying that the world had “five-to-10 years” before the jump in volumes really hit home in terms of logistical needs.
Environmental battles
While infrastructure shortfalls were particularly acute in developing countries, with 70% of Africa’s farmers living more than a 30-minute walk from an all-weather road, they were common in Western countries too.
“Even in nations like the US, things are in bad shape,” Mr Hausmann said noting that Bunge’s new export silo is the country’s first for 25 years.
Companies would be “happy” to invest in new infrastructure “as long as the [government] policies are healthy”.
In many cases, this would mean finding ways to improve relations with lobbies, such as environmental groups, who were holding up the development of many facilties.
“Many investors are not ready to see [manager] in the crosshairs,” Mr Hausmann said.

Via: http://www.agrimoney.com/news/silos-and-transport-offer-good-scope-for-profits–1891.html

Posted: 24 June 2010 under Agri solutions, Agribusiness worldwide, Romania.
Comments: none

By Lucy Knight

FARMERS are in need of a pay rise if they’re to be expected to keep producing food for the world, a parliamentary hearing in Canberra was told last week.

Science writer and former head of CSIRO media, Professor Julian Cribb, told a Senate Inquiry on food production last week that major investments in farmers were needed to make it worth their while getting out of bed each day.

What’s happening instead, he said, is increasing competition for cheap food supplies by major supermarket chains the world “closing down” or “destroying” local industries and driving more and more people out of agriculture.

Professor Cribb has recently launched a new book, The Coming Famine, where he speaks of the global food challenge and what efforts are needed to avoid it, including an entire chapter on securing a ‘fair deal for farmers’.

He told the hearing the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation last year revealed investments in the order of $80 billion a year in agriculture were needed to help meet these needs.

Professor Cribb said the FAO saw there was currently no incentive for farmers or scientists to invest in agriculture at the moment as “the returns are so poor”.

“Today we have the effect of global competition between large food and supermarket companies driving down the price in any country you care to name around the world as they seek to source cheaper and cheaper produce,” Professor Cribb said.

“This is having the effect of disrupting and even destroying entire local industries.

“We are seeing is happening to Australia: the dairy industry, the fruit and vegetable industry and so on. They are under and an awful lot of pressure by this globalisation of prices.

“I argue this is a one-way street. If you keep on doing that you will drive more people out of agriculture, you will throw away our lot of otherwise viable agricultural industries, you will definitely mine the soil and water resource much worse than it is being mined at the moment and basically you will undermine global food security.

“My conclusion from that is that farmers worldwide have to have a pay rise or they are not going to make the investments that are necessary to sustain global food production.”

Professor Cribb argued that price rise could take a number of forms.

“Most people get fair pay these days, whether they are politicians or journalists or actors or nurses or doctors. Farmers don’t. Farmers cop it both ways.

“They are confronted on the one hand by muscular companies selling them inputs at very high-cut prices and on the other hand by muscular companies offering to pay them very low prices for their output.

“Only a tiny smidgen of highly efficient producers can survive in that world. The logic of that, if we want global food security, is that it has to stop.”

Professor Cribb said it was important the “right signal” was sent to farmers to continue investing in agriculture, and for young farmers so they don’t leave the sector altogether.

Source: http://fw.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/finance/why-farmers-need-a-pay-rise/1859902.aspx?storypage=2

Posted: 21 June 2010 under Agri solutions, Agribusiness worldwide.
Comments: none

Via: www.investinganswers.com

1. Those with the enterprise lack the money and those with the money lack the enterprise to buy stocks when they are cheap.   -Benjamin Graham

2. A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.   -Henry Ford

3. Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.   -Donald Trump

4. After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.   -Calvin Coolidge

5. “Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.   -Paul Samuelson

6. If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.   -George Soros

7. I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living and that economy is a prime request of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.   -John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

8. I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.   -Pablo Picasso

9. And finally, no matter how good the science gets, there are problems that inevitably depend on judgment, on art, on a feel for financial markets.   -Martin Feldstein

10. As financial markets continue to broaden and deepen, the behavior of asset prices will play an important role in the formulation of monetary policy going forward, perhaps a more important role than in the past.   -Timothy Geithner

11. Being on a movie set is like one long financial crisis.   -John Cusack

12. Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.   -Warren Buffett

13. Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.   -Milton Friedman

14. Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.   -John Maynard Keynes

15. October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.   -Mark Twain

16. The four most dangerous words in investing are “This time it’s different.”   -John Templeton

17. If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn’t be in stocks.   -John Bogle

18. Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It’s almost always the wrong response.   -Larry Summers

19. Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.   -Warren Buffett

20. We’ve used derivatives for many, many years. I don’t think derivatives are evil, per se, I think they are dangerous. …So we use lots of things daily that are dangerous, but we generally pay some attention to how they’re used.  We tell the cars how fast they can go.   -Warren Buffett

25. Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.   -Woody Allen

26. If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.   -George Bernard Shaw

27. When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness.   -Nassim Nicholas Taleb

28. Everyone has the brainpower to make money in stocks. Not everyone has the stomach. If you are susceptible to selling everything in a panic, you ought to avoid stocks and mutual funds altogether.   -Peter Lynch

29. Most investors want to do today what they should have done yesterday.   -Larry Summers

30. Cash is a fact, profit is an opinion.   -Alfred Rappaport

31. Money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells.   -J. Paul Getty

32. I don’t like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves.   -Joe Louis

33. Budget: a mathematical confirmation of your suspicions.   -A.A. Latimer

34. Stock price movements actually begin to reflect new developments before it is generally recognized that they have taken place.   -Arthur Zeikel

35. A collapse in U.S. stock prices certainly would cause a lot of white knuckles on Wall Street. But what effect would it have on the broader U.S. economy? If Wall Street crashes, does Main Street follow? Not necessarily.   -Ben Bernanke

36. I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.   -Alan Greenspan

37. The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.   -Paul Krugman

38. Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.   -Sigmund Freud

39. People don’t like the idea of thinking long term. Many are desperately seeking short term answers because they have money problems to be solved today.   -Robert Kiyosaki

40. Financial peace isn’t the acquisition of stuff. It’s learning to live on less than you make, so you can give money back and have money to invest. You can’t win until you do this.   -Dave Ramsey

Source: http://investinganswers.com/a/40-investing-quotes-lead-you-through-any-market-1239

Posted: 31 May 2010 under Agri solutions, Agribusiness worldwide, Management.
Comments: none