$109.79 (price of Brent crude oil spot price, $US/Barrel)

[TODD & NORA]

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[Snowflower]

Schmoopie, I was under the impression that thread titles can only be altered by moderators? As for the subject, peak oil being what started me on the journey of enlightenment in the first place, I am very interested to learn that they have finally shoved it back over $100 and are likely to inch it upward from there. The historical November tipping point expected by Clif
High this coming November seems more and more likely with events galloping along toward that point at an ever-increasing acceleration.

[donk]

In my opinion (from what I understand): oil price is not a good indicator of inflation, though in many cases it is the cause. It is completely manipulated outside of any silly "economic laws" like supply & demand.

...then again, very little does (follow the economic rules we were taught in the late '90s at a "good business school") anymore (especially financial securities), so I guess it's as good as any. The CPI is a joke...

[Lifebringer]

Why do people do this every year? I mean why do they follow the msm's description of what your holiday plans and travel are? If Americans stayed home a whole year instead of eating out, bought brown bag lunches and bought a generator and coverted it to hemp oil or cooking oil, they'd crash this economy. The best way to stop them from raising prices is not to use "their" designated holidays for your travel times and money. Instead of the days or month they hike the prices, simply do it the month before or after and fool them as they fool US every time we get an extra dollar or dime. When I had to use food stamps after losing a job, I would never really shop, until after the 10th, but now this system has divided the times according to alphabetical order, up until the 9th of the month, so that means they catch all the hard earned $$ for 9 consecutive days of high prices.
So what's a "belly to do" to save on the high price of food now? Starve? If you have children, you certainly can't let their little tummies go hungry, so the small grocery stores pillage the poor, for "convenience" in the neighborhoods.
WE don't have to follow their script/path for US. Rebellion is more than just picking up a gun or screaming and marching. There's economic rebellion also, and if they can't figure the public out, they can't bet on our livelihoods and therefore there are over 300,000,000 of us in just this country and I say that can make a greedy person pull their ears off if they can't control the flow of where the public's money is spent and when. They just got caught using "time delay results to WS" so, it stands to reason the people are cracking down on the perpetrators of "fraud and deceptive financial instruments."

Personally, I think they are being set up, to be busted by US. They've been manipulating the price of oil, by crying broke/crying wolf, too long. Never a wolf at the door, but plenty of buzzards on the fence waiting to pounce on the carcass of who ever falls prey.

[Lifebringer]

I think they are making the consumer pay for the oil and tanker spills by train and truck, trying to "make us yield" to a leaky pipeline.

What do you think is causing all these spills, human error, or deliberate? I don't know for sure, but it seems the price went up to make us pay for their loss. It feels that way, anyway.

Do you think it could be like the faux flags to get us into military involvement for the corporations? Spill, spill, spill and then say: "See, would you rather have a little in the ground, or in your water supplies?

Simon Barsinisters and WE the Underdogs, have to win by out thinking them. Brains over power braun, any day.

[TODD & NORA]

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[Rocky_Shorz]

Coffee prices skyrocket as fungus kills high-end beans...

[QUOTE]If you’ve noticed the cost of a cup of coffee at your local shop has been inching up lately, it’s because a fungus has decimated Central America’s Arabica bean crop. Now the US is stepping in to try to eliminate the deadly coffee rust fungus.

Leaf rust, or la roya in Spanish, is a yellow- and orange-colored, plant-choking fungus that has devastated coffee crops from Peru to Mexico over the past three years, costing $1 billion in damages in Central America in the late harvest season of 2012 alone. The fungus is especially ruinous to the Arabica bean, which is used in higher-end coffees, as it is said to produce better-tasting coffee than the other major commercially grown coffee species. It contains less caffeine but a more robust flavor. Arabica accounts for 75 to 80 percent of the world’s coffee production, according to the Coffee Research Institute.

The effects of leaf rust have decimated local economies.

“Big farmers hire fewer workers to pick the ripe coffee cherries that enclose the beans. Smaller farmers go into debt and sell livestock or tools to make up for the lost income. Sales fall at local merchants,” the New York Times reported. “Teenagers leave school to work on the farm because their parents can no longer hire outside help. At the very end of the chain are the landless migrant workers who earn just a few dollars a day.”

Central America has been particularly hard hit. Four million people there and in southern Mexico rely on coffee for their living, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. In Guatemala, twenty percent of the half-million jobs directly tied to growing coffee have already disappeared, estimated Nils Leporowski, the president of Anacafé, the country’s coffee board.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has taken note. On Monday, the agency announced a Global Development Alliance partnership with the World Coffee Research center and the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture, which are both programs within Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Research. The $5 million research project will focus on “establishing a higher quality Central American coffee sector through plantation renovation with high quality, disease resistant coffee varieties and a constant pipeline of newer, higher performing varieties,” the World Coffee Research statement said.

“Coffee rust threatens more than your morning coffee—it affects jobs, businesses, and the security of millions across the Americas,” USAID’s Associate Administrator Mark Feierstein said in the agency’s statement about the project. “We must tackle this outbreak to ensure farmers and laborers have stable incomes, don't start growing illicit crops, or be forced to migrate because they can no longer support their families. This partnership will tap innovative solutions to address the immediate and long-term impacts of coffee rust and help this key agriculture sector rebound.”

Helping coffee farmers rebound doesn’t just fight poverty and hunger throughout Latin America. It also helps prevent an increase in violence and drug trafficking, the Associated Press reported. Coffee farms in Latin America are smaller than their Asian counterparts that mass-produce the blander brews that coffee snobs turn their noses up at, such as instant coffee or the cheap stuff in your office coffee pot. But smaller farms means less money coming in, so the farmers often don’t have the money to buy fungicides or lack the training to plant in ways to avoid leaf rust contamination.

“There are nights when you cannot sleep, thinking how to pay back the money,” Román Lec, a Guatemalan coffee farmer who lost half his crop in 2013, told the Times. He borrowed about $2,000 for fertilizer and fungicide this year, but still lost much of his crop to the deadly fungus.

The researchers studying the coffee leaf rust crisis blame climate change for causing the devastation, which was further exacerbated by the unpreparedness of the sector due to low coffee prices and underscored by the use of older, rust-susceptible varieties, according to World Coffee Research. Higher temperatures in Central America allowed the fungus to thrive at the higher altitudes where much of the region’s crop is grown, the according to the Times. Prices for Arabica coffee jumped to a two-year high in the futures market earlier this month, thanks in part to a severe drought in Brazil, the Daily Mail reported. As prices have climbed, the farmers can’t afford to replace their aging plants that are more susceptible to la roya.

“Roya has exposed the depth of the social and economic problems in terms of people’s vulnerability to the market and to climate change,” Peter Loach, the director of aid agency Mercy Corps in Guatemala, said to the Times. “What makes it different and complicated is that it’s a slow-onset natural disaster over two to three years.”

World Coffee Research said fungicide spraying is essential to protect that viability of coffee production in 2014 and 2015. The center is looking to assist producers in making the best investment decisions in choosing high-quality, pest-resistant varietals for plantation renovation, as well as to create a high-tech breeding program of the best varieties and make them readily available to the producers. Researchers will also focus on collecting coffee production trend data to create a comprehensive analysis of the industry in Central America.

"Supporting the farmer's ability to access information, technology and resources allows them to adapt to these uncertainties and ensures the longevity of our industry's supply chain," said Craig Russell, Starbucks Global Coffee executive vice president. Starbucks even bought a Costa Rican farm for research purposes, AP reported.

Along with USAID and Texas A&M, the research partnership includes coffee research and development institutions from Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, Dominican Republic and Jamaica (PROMECAFE), the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE), the USAID’s Feed the Future initiative, the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) and the Federal University of Viçosa in Brazil. Most of the exploration will be done in Central America, though two biotechnologists will work as post-doctorates at the Texas A&M Institute for Biotechnology and Genomics, and an innovative rust bio-control approach will also be executed with the Federal University of Viçosa and Kew Gardens in London, according to World Coffee Research. link /QUOTE]

I dropped by Costco and picked up 20 pounds...

how do you like our choice, pay more for coffee, or they are going to spray the coffee plants with fungicide for a few years to bring the price back down...

the spots appeared after Fukushima, of course a little cesium has nothing to do with it...

but could the radiation have worked like steroids on the living fungus?

[thunder24]

would love to know what varieties are the replacements, who's providing them, and from whose stock... g.m.o.'s what foundations provided grant money to any of these places mentioned...

good call on cesium

post update:
http://giving.tamu.edu/donors/HonorR...s/default.aspx

"charles koch foundation"
almost every oil company
"Mars Inc.
Mars Health, Nutrition & Public Policy Excellence Fund—Nutrition & Food Science"

[Rocky_Shorz]

after 2 years will they be telling us the fungicide didn't work, so prices can jump again?

have we been drinking radiated coffee since Fukushima?

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by shmoopie_3119 (here)
The title of the thread posts will change to reflect the actual price of Brent crude oil spot price, so if you don't want to bother reading the thread updates, you'll simply see the spot oil price in the title of the thread post.

Posted by Snowflower (here)
Schmoopie, I was under the impression that thread titles can only be altered by moderators?

That's right, Snowflower. Thread titles can only be changed by moderators. I added the qualifier "(price of Brent crude oil spot price, $US/Barrel)" to this thread's title, so that the number, which will be forever $109.79, would make sense.

Post titles (each post has a title as well as the entire thread) can however be changed by the poster. When you reply to someone else's post, the default title for your post is taken from the post you're replying to (with a "Re: " prefix if there is not one already.) But you can change that if you like.

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