Posts tagged: agriculture

Oil and Ag

It's all in the timing. I recently spoke to a client about the recent divergence between oil and the agricultural space. I'm not a chart specialist, but I do like to reference the charts for a quick view of history. In this case, the spread between oil and ag indices looks pretty stretched. .Viewing the remainder of this article requires a Subscription

World Growth is Slowing

World growth is slowing and that means that not all commodities are equal. Commodities have 2 opposing forces at play determining their prices. The first, is a complex, global, supply and demand equilibrium.Viewing the remainder of this article requires a Subscription

Japan – it happens

Japan was hit with another earthquake. It happens. I guess it more likely to happen in certain places than others, but such is life. They'll rebuild, they'll have more earthquakes. Is there any new story there? Not for me. The real story is in energy and food.Viewing the remainder of this article requires a Subscription

On the radio…

Just wanted to send along last week’s radio appearance. The main theme was inflationary pressures in food and agricultural prices – a theme I’ve discussed and which we’ve implemented for clients for a while. This, coupled with our concentrations in precious metals and energy, has worked well and I continue to see opportunities in these areas.
http://www.thewallstreetshuffle.com/thursday-march-31-2011-seg-1/

Relevant ETFs: GLD, SLV, CROP, MOO, DBA, JJA

A duck on the pond

There's an old visualization that's used in different scenarios about a duck floating on a pond. The water looks calm. The duck looks calm. However, underneath the surface the ducks feet are paddling rapidly.Viewing the remainder of this article requires a Subscription

Where have all the corn seeds gone?

USDA cuts corn crop estimates and corn goes limit up. The entire CRB complex is rallying. DBA up 5%, MOO up almost 3%, corn ETF up almost 7% (futures can trade limit up, but the ETF can keep on going?), JJA up almost 7%. All the world needs now is another little supply shock in energy and Bernanke & Co. might have what they always dreamed of: complete loss of faith in fiat currencies.

Meantime, USD continues down.

Back to ag

Last week I highlighted some inflation stories that were beginning to surface and readers sent me more – everything from gold and silver hitting new highs to anecdotal evidence of Malawi land prices. You are preaching to the choir – there are global imbalances on the one hand, and power-shifting demographic changes on the other that are supporting the underlying strength in certain commodities (not all). One of the areas that we’ve mentioned in the past as a source of stability in volatile periods, a hedge against inflation, and a hedge against worst-case scenarios for those prone to hyberbole is direct investment in agricultural land. I’ve been discussing it for a few years, mentioning the potential and also the difficulty (both in implementation and in management).

We are not alone, as money continues to flow to arable land: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/7997910/The-backlash-begins-against-the-world-landgrab.html. This article points out another trend that I’ve been discussing, which is the backlash against globalization as protectionist measures increase globally. In a best case scenario, I expect that countries will move to build up strategic supplies of food-stuffs, and perhaps place loose limits on foreign ownership – troubling, but manageable. In the worst case scenario, I think we could have actual land seizures, elimination of certain property rights – in the name of national security, ideology, or what have you, and nationalizations similar to previous decades in various parts. Egypt, which is enjoying a certain renaissance these days, comes immediately to mind, as do various South American countries.

Given some of the challenges of implementation, I continue to focus on diversified baskets of commodities, commodity-related companies, and second-degree beneficiaries for active investment opportunities. In terms of direct investment in agricultural land, there has been a mad rush to Africa, which I am currently avoiding (at the risk of missing significant returns), and sticking to areas that have ample water supply (north/midwest US and Canada). I don’t expect significant returns there – yields should hover in the 3-6% range unless inflation picks up, but in this environment, that’s not a bad place to wait.

For a succinct article with a few different options mentioned, click here.

Around the markets in 6 charts or less

With so much noise and conflicting news, we’ll try to boil it down to some of the interesting areas (by no means an exhaustive review). While we’re not technically inclined, a picture is often worth a thousand words, so without further ado:

Chart 1 Gold:Euro

As troubles in the eurozone mount, markets are looking for outlets – heck, Europeans themselves are looking for outlets. We’ve mentioned the euro:yen pair and have maintained our usd:euro position, but gold in euro terms is hitting new all time highs and is acting as a real fear gauge for the European markets.

Chart 2 EEM

Speaking of fear gauges, the emerging markets were all the rage just a few short months ago, with strategists discussing divergence and internal growth metrics. Money poured into EEM as the USD was going down. Oh, how the world is changing. EEM now looks like it’s rolling over and while I am not posting it, Chinese equities, long the poster children of emerging growth, look poised to continue their downward spiral. Turns out valuations matter and government direction of the economy isn’t all that great.

Chart 3 IWM

I have to admit that IWM has been surprisingly strong and stable so far. I guess everything is up for interpretation: either you believe the markets are always right and the strength in light of bad news is a bullish signal, or you believe that markets are inefficient and haven’t yet priced in just how bad things are. Guess where I am…

Chart 4 10 year yield ($TNX)

I have a long term fear of the government inflating our way out of debt, but in the shorter run, treasuries are still offering a safe haven. I have a small exposure to short treasuries (through TBT), but it has moved against our portfolios; yet, I am not changing it. I believe longer term, treasuries are in a very dangerous position. While deflation might be in our future, I don’t think there is too much upside here. That said, I have been wrong so far. I’ll be looking to add to this position if levels go to the extreme levels of late 2009.

Chart 5 Oil

As we continue to think about the inflation/deflation debate, oil is a good place to start looking. At least at the moment, it doesn’t look like it’s pointing to rampant inflation. Might this be the final deflationary play? Maybe, but I’d at least point out that it can go a long way down and stay down for much longer than inflationary-minded investors would have you believe – peak or no peak.

Chart 6 Agriculture:REIT

And then, as if I wasn’t confusing you enough, I’ll refute my own deflationary assessment, and point out that agriculture has been lagging REITS. At first blush, this might suggest that agriculture is poised to rebound relative to the REITS sector, which sounds quasi inflationary. Au contraire… There is a big disconnect which we’ve pointed to before. In this new world order we can have deflation AND increasing yields. We can have inflationary pressure from ags AND deflationary pressure from real estate as credit gets unwound.

Lastly, I don’t have a chart for it, but I do want to highlight one other thing: geopolitics have been surprisingly calm in the news, pictures of civil unrest from Greece notwithstanding. But…Thailand is facing civil unrest, Israel and Iran are at a critical juncture, Russia is getting bolder, and today South Korea officially held North Korea responsible for the sinking of their boat a couple of months ago – just to name a few situations ready to provide fodder. Geopolitical risks remain and getting more contentious with the eurozone teetering, the US administration inwardly focused (misfocused?) and perennial troublemakers like Russia stepping it up.

Ratios, gold, and reflation

For most people, thinking in terms of absolute returns is natural, thinking terms of relative returns to a benchmark has become acceptable, and thinking in terms of relative returns between asset classes is far off. At it’s simplest, by making an investment from cash holdings investors are making a relative consideration: the investment should outperform cash over the anticipated holding period. Sounds pretty straight forward.

In the past 5 to 10 years, charts showing the Dow vs. gold have been floating around. While it sounds simple, this basic premise is actually at the heart of investing and a focus for macro traders. Currency investors are used to thinking of investments as relative between pairs of currencies, or in complex strategies, relationships between multiple moving yet interrelated parts.

Why all the intro?

Recently, I’ve been speaking to a number of traders and investors about the inflation/deflation debate and it’s implications for investors in the future. One trader (H.T. Macro Man) in particular prompted me with a seemingly simple thought: it’s not whether you’re long or short – it’s WHAT you’re long and short, as massive rotations, rolling bubbles, and inflation/deflation get implemented across and within asset classes.

So today, I want to highlight a couple of the ratios we’ve started exploring with some of the implications:

Everyone knows that gold has been going up.

As it has, if we start looking at other assets priced in gold (I’ll use GLD as a proxy for our conversation) we start seeing some potentially undervalued opportunities.

(Source: The Big Picture)

It doesn’t mean the S&P is cheap, nor gold expensive, but the S&P priced in gold is certainly not as expensive as it was just a few short weeks ago.

But to continue our exploration…

Check out the agricultural sector (DBA used as proxy) priced in gold:

In 2005, Marc Faber discussed asset inflation vs consumer price inflation in his Gloom, Boom, and Doom Report and included a discussion of gold as an inflation hedge. The conclusion was that gold was a better hedge for deflation, perhaps as we’ve seen in the recent action, while agriculture was a better inflation hedge. Could the extension of this ratio signify the end of deflation and the beginning of inflationary pressure?

What about moving away from commodities and looking at some other relationship? As readers know, I’m not a big fan of the euro. Traditionally, bad political structures lead to significant underperformance over the long term. In that light, we have distrusted China, Russia, and the euro (the currency not all European firms). Last week we looked at putting money to work in Greece (while short the euro), which has turned out OK so far, with both NBG and OTE holding up nicely from our entry point. But what about the larger picture of the eurozone countries? I’m still pretty negative long term on the euro, but look at the relationship between EZU vs. SPY:

There is a good chance the relationship will get more extended before reverting, but it’s worth noting that at some point the eurozone countries will become a significantly undervalued relative to the S&P.

Lastly, Gartman brought up this relationship recently and it’s one a lot of traders I know have been looking at: euro/yen. While I’ve been focusing on the euro/usd, and anticipate that it will continue to weaken, euro/yen has broken down after having been in a relatively tight range:

What does it tell us? Money is coming out of the euro and going into yen. Risk is being taken off the table as carry trades are unwound and money is going back into funding currencies. This has obviously been a problem for both the US and Japan which are themselves trying to stimulate inflation. Japan has already announced additional quantitative easing, and the US is sure to follow…which leads us back to where we started…

Money will need to find a home in an environment of competitive devaluation, and while deflationary pressures have “won”, I believe that we are close to a turning point. I anticipate that it will translate into a challenging environment for bonds (increasing rates) and a potential opportunity for agricultural related investments (certainly relative to other asset classes, if not on a local currency basis). I’ll continue exploring implementation methods in the upcoming weeks, but I’ll certainly be looking at the ratios to find the undervalued assets.


Food inflation? Depends on your time frame.

We received the following article from the American Farm Bureau (h.t. Macro Man) and wanted to share it, especially in light of our article earlier in the week on eggs:

Retail food prices at the supermarket showed a modest increase during the first quarter of 2010, according to the latest American Farm Bureau Federation Marketbasket Survey. The informal survey shows the total cost of 16 food items that can be used to prepare a meal was $45.54, up $2.64 or 6 percent higher compared to the fourth quarter of 2009. The total average price for the 16 items dropped by $1.87 or about 4 percent less compared to one year ago. Of the 16 items surveyed, 14 increased and two decreased in average price compared to the prior quarter.

…Compared to a year ago, eggs increased 16 percent; apples increased 11 percent and toasted oat cereal increased 2 percent….The year-to-year direction of the marketbasket survey tracks with the federal government’s Consumer Price Index (www.bls.gov/cpi) report for food at home. As retail grocery prices have increased gradually over time, the share of the average food dollar that America’s farm and ranch families receive has dropped.

“From about the mid-1970s, farmers received about one-third of consumer retail food expenditures for food eaten at home and away from home, on average. Since then, that figure has decreased steadily and is now just 19 percent, according to Agriculture Department statistics,” Anderson said.

Using the “food at home and away from home” percentage across-the-board, the farmer’s share of this quarter’s $45.54 marketbasket would be $8.65.

According to USDA, Americans spend just under 10 percent of their disposable annual income on food, the lowest average of any country in the world. A total of 73 shoppers in 30 states participated in the latest survey, conducted in early March.

To read the full article, click here.

An overlooked asset class: eggs?

What if I told you there was an asset class that was down 90% over the past 100 years. It is widely used in everything from food to medical testing, and will not be replaced. 10 years ago, people were saying similar things about gold, and at 200 it was, in fact, a great deal. Look at the following chart:eggs

Source: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/04/happy-easter-enjoy-cheap-eggs-and-food.html

This brings us back to a theme we’ve been increasingly interested in: agriculture and staples. The implications are many-fold. For starters, what would drive the price of a product like eggs up? Inflation? Supply/demand shifts? How would a deflationary environment impact staples? Staples vs. everything else? One of our readers has often described a situation where there is inflation in needs and deflation in wants. Is this where we’re headed?

Which brings us to a whole new set of questions which revolve around risk. Will eggs (for example) go to zero? How far further can ags fall? How long can we hold on? Are there market dynamics that make investing in the asset class unfeasible? For the various investment vehicles (agricultural land, companies in the space, ETF’s, commodities directly, etc.) what are the opportunities/risks?

These questions are all part of our exploration, and we will share our findings. For now, we are looking at this space as one with potential. We have no specific direct position yet, and might not have one at all for a while, but I wanted to share one of the places we’re looking at.

World Economic Forum Risks-Report 2010

In anticipation of this years World Economic Forum, the organization put out a report highlighting what they see as the greatest risks to the world, including political, economic, social, military, etc. Here’s an excerpt from their press release, and a link to the full report is at the bottom.

…Daniel M Hofmann, group chief economist of Zurich Financial Services said, “The events of the last year have shown that there are underlying risks within the global economy that need to be addressed. In reaction to the financial crisis, many countries have put themselves at risk of overextending their fiscal positions and being burdened with extremely high levels of debt. This could put upward pressure on real interest rates, rein back growth and lead to protracted high levels of unemployment.”

More widely, the report points to the impact of the global recession on longstanding under-investment in infrastructure, especially in energy and agriculture, and the rising costs of treating chronic disease. These “creeping” risks have not appeared overnight, but the recession has limited the ability of decision-makers to combat them effectively.

This is particularly true for energy with respect to the pressing global need to invest in infrastructure. John Drzik, CEO of Oliver Wyman, an MMC operating company, said, “The recent drop in oil prices has been good for consumers, but has also contributed to a significant cut in much-needed investment in energy infrastructure and renewable energy projects. This comes at a time when governments – as well as business and consumers – are looking for long-term security of an energy supply that is both sustainably-sourced and reasonably priced. The fragile global economy will make itself more susceptible to oil price-related shocks if this underinvestment continues.”

A massive US$ 35 trillion of infrastructure investment is required over the next 20 years, according to the World Bank. “This is particularly acute for agriculture and food security,” said Swiss Re’s Chief Risk Officer Raj Singh. “We need a vast increase in food production to feed the growing world population, and a billion people are already undernourished. Billions of dollars need to be spent on water provision, energy supply, transport and climate change adaptation measures. Governments must work together with the private sector to make it happen. Insurers can provide risk management tools that create greater financial stability for farmers and the agriculture industry.”

The report also highlights risks where the levels of awareness and preparedness are currently very low; these include transnational crime and corruption, cyber-vulnerability and biodiversity loss.

For the full report, click here.

Increasing interest rates, infrastructure, agriculture, energy, disease management. Those seem to be the big ones.

Agro-Imperialism – some misguided notions

I was forwarded the article below (ht MacroMan) about countries buying access to ag resources, mainly in Africa. As a quick summary: exporting countries like those from the Middle Eastern bloc and China are sitting on lots of dollars but not enough arable land. Africa is poor as dirt but might have some land for sale. Ergo ipsum and quot erat demonstratum, agro imperialism. My own opinion is that this strategy might work in a trade-friendly, peaceful situation, but in that scenario, needing access to those resources is most efficiently done on the global markets. Conversely, in a non-friendly scenario or (gasp) war situation, shipping wheat from Ethiopia to Saudi Arabia will become down right impossible and not achieve the  desired effect. So, bottom line, if I was in Africa, I’d be happy to have the Saudi’s bid up my land value and sell them subpar wheat that they could have gotten cheaper from Russia or Brazil, and if things get really bad, I’ll just nationalize it back. In the meantime, the article discusses a professor (Zeigler) who went to Saudi Arabia with the intention of helping them build domestic capacity, but that was something they shirked. Hmmm.

Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?

By ANDREW RICE

Dr. Robert Zeigler, an eminent American botanist, flew to Saudi Arabia in March for a series of high-level discussions about the future of the kingdom’s food supply. Saudi leaders were frightened: heavily dependent on imports, they had seen the price of rice and wheat, their dietary staples, fluctuate violently on the world market over the previous three years, at one point doubling in just a few months. The Saudis, rich in oil money but poor in arable land, were groping for a strategy to ensure that they could continue to meet the appetites of a growing population, and they wanted Zeigler’s expertise.

There are basically two ways to increase the supply of food: find new fields to plant or invent ways to multiply what existing ones yield. Zeigler runs the International Rice Research Institute, which is devoted to the latter course, employing science to expand the size of harvests. During the so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s, the institute’s laboratory developed “miracle rice,” a high-yielding strain that has been credited with saving millions of people from famine. Zeigler went to Saudi Arabia hoping that the wealthy kingdom might offer money for the basic research that leads to such technological breakthroughs. Instead, to his surprise, he discovered that the Saudis wanted to attack the problem from the opposite direction. They were looking for land.

In a series of meetings, Saudi government officials, bankers and agribusiness executives told an institute delegation led by Zeigler that they intended to spend billions of dollars to establish plantations to produce rice and other staple crops in African nations like Mali, Senegal, Sudan and Ethiopia. “They laid out this incredible plan,” Zeigler recalled. He was flabbergasted, not only by the scale of the projects but also by the audacity of their setting. Africa, the world’s most famished continent, can’t currently feed itself, let alone foreign markets.

The American scientist was catching a glimpse of an emerging test of the world’s food resources, one that has begun to take shape over the last year, largely outside the bounds of international scrutiny. A variety of factors — some transitory, like the spike in food prices, and others intractable, like global population growth and water scarcity — have created a market for farmland, as rich but resource-deprived nations in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere seek to outsource their food production to places where fields are cheap and abundant. Because much of the world’s arable land is already in use — almost 90 percent, according to one estimate, if you take out forests and fragile ecosystems — the search has led to the countries least touched by development, in Africa. According to a recent study by the World Bank and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, one of the earth’s last large reserves of underused land is the billion-acre Guinea Savannah zone, a crescent-shaped swath that runs east across Africa all the way to Ethiopia, and southward to Congo and Angola.

Foreign investors — some of them representing governments, some of them private interests — are promising to construct infrastructure, bring new technologies, create jobs and boost the productivity of underused land so that it not only feeds overseas markets but also feeds more Africans. (More than a third of the continent’s population is malnourished.) They’ve found that impoverished governments are often only too welcoming, offering land at giveaway prices. A few transactions have received significant publicity, like Kenya’s deal to lease nearly 100,000 acres to the Qatari government in return for financing a new port, or South Korea’s agreement to develop almost 400 square miles in Tanzania. But many other land deals, of near-unprecedented size, have been sealed with little fanfare.

Investors who are taking part in the land rush say they are confronting a primal fear, a situation in which food is unavailable at any price. Over the 30 years between the mid-1970s and the middle of this decade, grain supplies soared and prices fell by about half, a steady trend that led many experts to believe that there was no limit to humanity’s capacity to feed itself. But in 2006, the situation reversed, in concert with a wider commodities boom. Food prices increased slightly that year, rose by a quarter in 2007 and skyrocketed in 2008. Surplus-producing countries like Argentina and Vietnam, worried about feeding their own populations, placed restrictions on exports. American consumers, if they noticed the food crisis at all, saw it in modestly inflated supermarket bills, especially for meat and dairy products. But to many countries — not just in the Middle East but also import-dependent nations like South Korea and Japan — the specter of hyperinflation and hoarding presented an existential threat.

“When some governments stop exporting rice or wheat, it becomes a real, serious problem for people that don’t have full self-sufficiency,” said Al Arabi Mohammed Hamdi, an economic adviser to the Arab Authority for Agricultural Investment and Development. Sitting in his office in Dubai, overlooking the cargo-laden wooden boats moored along the city’s creek, Hamdi told me his view, that the only way to assure food security is to control the means of production.

Hamdi’s agency, which coordinates investments on behalf of 20 member states, has recently announced several projects, including a tentative $250 million joint venture with two private companies, which is slated to receive heavy subsidies from a Saudi program called the King Abdullah Initiative for Saudi Agricultural Investment Abroad. He said the main fields of investment for the project would most likely be Sudan and Ethiopia, countries with favorable climates that are situated just across the Red Sea. Hamdi waved a sheaf of memos that had just arrived on his desk, which he said were from another partner, Sheik Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a billionaire member of the royal family of the emirate of Abu Dhabi, who has shown interest in acquiring land in Sudan and Eritrea. “There is no problem about money,” Hamdi said. “It’s about where and how.”

A long the dirt road that runs to Lake Ziway, a teardrop in the furrow of Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley, farmers drove their donkey carts past a little orange-domed Orthodox church, and the tombs of their ancestors, decorated with vivid murals of horses and cattle. Between clusters of huts that looked as if they were constructed of matchsticks, there were wide-open wheat fields, where skinny young men were tilling the soil with wooden plows and teams of oxen. And then, nearing the lake, a fence appeared, closing off the countryside behind taut strings of barbed wire.

All through the Rift Valley region, my travel companion, an Ethiopian economist, had taken to pointing out all the new fence posts, standing naked and knobby like freshly cut saplings — mundane signifiers, he said, of the recent rush for Ethiopian land. In the old days, he told me, farmers rarely bothered with such formal lines of demarcation, but now the country’s earth is in demand. This fence, though, was different from the others — it stretched on for a mile or more. Behind it, we could glimpse a vast expanse of dark volcanic soil, recently turned over by tractors. “So,” said my guide, “this belongs to the sheik.”

He meant Sheik Mohammed Al Amoudi, a Saudi Arabia-based oil-and-construction billionaire who was born in Ethiopia and maintains a close relationship with the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s autocratic regime. (Fear of both men led my guide to say he didn’t want to be identified by name.) Over time, Al Amoudi, one of the world’s 50 richest people, according to Forbes, has used his fortune and political ties to amass control over large portions of Ethiopia’s private sector, including mines, hotels and plantations on which he grows tea, coffee, rubber and japtropha, a plant that has enormous promise as a biofuel. Since the global price spike, he has been getting into the newly lucrative world food trade.

Ethiopia might seem an unlikely hotbed of agricultural investment. To most of the world, the country is defined by images of famine: about a million people died there during the drought of the mid-1980s, and today about four times that many depend on emergency food aid. But according to the World Bank, as much as three-quarters of Ethiopia’s arable land is not under cultivation, and agronomists say that with substantial capital expenditure, much of it could become bountiful. Since the world food crisis, Zenawi, a former Marxist rebel who has turned into a champion of private capital, has publicly said he is “very eager” to attract foreign farm investors by offering them what the government describes as “virgin land.” An Ethiopian agriculture ministry official recently told Reuters that he has identified more than seven million acres. The government plans to lease half of it before the next harvest, at the dirt-cheap annual rate of around 50 cents per acre. “We are associated with hunger, although we have enormous investment opportunities,” explained Abi Woldemeskel, director general of the Ethiopian Investment Agency. “So that negative perception has to be changed through promotion.”

The government’s pliant attitude, along with Ethiopia’s convenient location, has made it an ideal target for Middle Eastern investors like Mohammed Al Amoudi. Not long ago, a newly formed Al Amoudi company, Saudi Star Agricultural Development, announced its plans to obtain the rights to more than a million acres — a land mass the size of Delaware — in the apparent hope of capitalizing on the Saudi government’s initiative to subsidize overseas staple-crop production. At a pilot site in the west of the country, he’s already cultivating rice. Earlier this year, amid great fanfare marking the start of the program, Al Amoudi personally presented the first shipment from the farm to King Abdullah in Riyadh. Meanwhile, in the Rift Valley region, another subsidiary is starting to grow fruits and vegetables for export to the Persian Gulf.

Al Amoudi’s plans raise a recurring question surrounding investment in food production: who will reap the benefits? As we drove down to the waterside, through fields dotted with massive sycamores, a farm supervisor told me that the 2,000-acre enterprise currently produces food for the local market, but there were plans to irrigate with water from the lake, and to shift the focus to exports. In the distance, dozens of laborers were bent to the ground, planting corn and onions.

Later, when I asked a couple of workers how much they were paid, they said nine birr each day, or around 75 cents. It wasn’t much, but Al Amoudi’s defenders say that’s the going rate for farm labor in Ethiopia. They argue that his investments are creating jobs, improving the productivity of dormant land and bringing economic development to rural communities. “We have achieved what the government hasn’t done for how many years,” says Arega Worku, an Ethiopian who is an agriculture adviser to Al Amoudi. (Al Amoudi declined to be interviewed.) Ethiopian journalists and opposition figures, however, have questioned the economic benefits of the deals, as well as Al Amoudi’s cozy relationship with the ruling party.

By far the most powerful opposition, however, surrounds the issue of land rights — a problem of historic proportions in Ethiopia. Just down the road from the farm on Lake Ziway, I caught sight of a gray-bearded man wearing a weathered pinstripe blazer, who was crouched over a ditch, washing his shoes. I stopped to ask him about the fence, and before long, a large group of villagers gathered around to tell me a resentful story. Decades ago, they said, during the rule of a Communist dictatorship in Ethiopia, the land was confiscated from them. After that dictatorship was overthrown, Al Amoudi took over the farm in a government privatization deal, over the futile objections of the displaced locals. The billionaire might consider the land his, but the villagers had long memories, and they angrily maintained that they were its rightful owners.

Throughout Africa, the politics of land is linked to the grim reality of hunger. Famines, typically produced by some combination of weather, pestilence and bad governance, break out with merciless randomness, unleashing calamity and reshaping history. Every country has its unique dynamics. Unlike most African nations, Ethiopia was never colonized in the 19th century but instead was ruled by emperors, who granted feudal plantations to members of their royal courts. The last emperor, Haile Selassie, was brought down by a famine that fueled a popular uprising. His dispossessed subjects chanted the slogan “land to the tiller.” The succeeding Communist dictatorship, which took ownership of all land for itself and pursued a disastrous collectivization policy, was toppled in the aftermath of the droughts of the 1980s. Under the present regime, private ownership of land is still banned, and every farmer in Ethiopia, foreign and domestic, works his fields under a licensing arrangement with the government. This land-tenure policy has made it possible for a one-party state to hand over huge tracts to investors at nominal rents, in secrecy, without the bother of a condemnation process.

Ethiopia’s government denies that anyone is being displaced, saying that the land is unused — an assertion many experts doubt. “One thing that is very clear, that seems to have escaped the attention of most investors, is that this is not simply empty land,” says Michael Taylor, a policy specialist at the International Land Coalition. If land in Africa hasn’t been planted, he says, it’s probably for a reason. Maybe it’s used to graze livestock, or deliberately left fallow to prevent nutrient depletion and erosion.

There is an ongoing debate among experts about the extent of the global land-acquisition trend. By its nature the evidence is piecemeal and anecdotal, and many highly publicized investments have yet to actually materialize on the ground. The most serious attempt to quantify the land rush, spearheaded by the International Institute for Environment and Development, suggests that as of earlier this year, the Ethiopian government had approved deals totaling around 1.5 million acres, while the country’s investment agency reports that it has approved 815 foreign-financed agricultural projects since 2007, nearly doubling the number registered in the entire previous decade. But that’s far from a complete picture. While the details of a few arrangements have leaked out, like one Saudi consortium’s plans to spend $100 million to grow wheat, barley and rice, many others remain undisclosed, and Addis Ababa has been awash in rumors of Arab moneymen who supposedly rent planes, pick out fertile tracts and cut deals.

Of course, there have been scrambles for African land before. In the view of critics, the colonial legacy is what makes the large land deals so outrageous, and they warn of potentially calamitous consequences. “Wars have been fought over this,” says Devlin Kuyek, a researcher with Grain, an advocacy group that opposes large-scale agribusiness and has played a key role in bringing attention to what it calls the “global land grab.”

It wasn’t until Grain compiled a long list of such deals into a polemical report titled “Seized!” last October that experts really began to talk about a serious trend. Although deals were being brokered in disparate locales like Australia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Vietnam, the most controversial field of investment was clearly Africa. “When you started to get some hints about what was happening in these deals,” Kuyek says, “it was shocking.” Within a month, Grain’s warnings seemed to be vindicated when The Financial Times broke news that the South Korean conglomerate Daewoo Logistics had signed an agreement to take over about half of Madagascar’s arable land, paying nothing, with the intention of growing corn and palm oil for export. Popular protests broke out, helping to mobilize opposition to Madagascar’s already unpopular president, who was overthrown in a coup in March.

The episode illustrated the emotional volatility of the land issue and raised questions about the degree to which corrupt leaders might be profiting off the deals. Since then, there has been an international outcry. Legislators from the Philippines have called for an investigation into their government’s agreements with various investing nations, while Thailand’s leader has vowed to chase off any foreign land buyers.

But there’s more than one side to the argument. Development economists and African governments say that if a country like Ethiopia is ever going to feed itself, let alone wean itself from foreign aid, which totaled $2.4 billion in 2007, it will have to find some way of increasing the productivity of its agriculture. “We’ve been complaining for decades about the lack of investment in African agriculture,” says David Hallam, a trade expert at the Food and Agriculture Organization. Last fall, Paul Collier of Oxford University, an influential voice on issues of world poverty, published a provocative article in Foreign Affairs in which he argued that a “middle- and upper-class love affair with peasant agriculture” has clouded the African development debate with “romanticism.” Approvingly citing the example of Brazil — where masses of indigenous landholders were displaced in favor of large-scale farms — Collier concluded that “to ignore commercial agriculture as a force for rural development and enhanced food supply is surely ideological.”

In Ethiopia, Mohammed Al Amoudi and other foreign agricultural investors are putting Collier’s theory into practice. Near the southern town of Awassa, in a shadow of a soaring Rift Valley escarpment, sits a field of waving corn and a complex of domed greenhouses, looking pristine and alien against the natural backdrop. On an overcast July morning, dozens of laborers were at work preparing the ground for one of Al Amoudi’s latest enterprises: a commercial vegetable farm.

“For a grower, this is heaven on earth,” says Jan Prins, managing director of the subsidiary company that is running the venture for Al Amoudi. Originally from the Netherlands, Prins says he assumed that Ethiopia was arid but was surprised to learn when he came to the country that much of it was fertile, with diverse microclimates. The Awassa farm is one of four that Prins is getting up and running. Using computerized irrigation systems, the farms will grow tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, melons and other fresh produce, the vast majority of it to be shipped to Saudi Arabia and Dubai. Over time, he says, he hopes to expand into growing other crops, like wheat and barley, the latter of which can be used to feed camels.

The nations of the Persian Gulf are likely to see their populations increase by half by 2030, and already import 60 percent of their food. Self-sufficiency isn’t a viable option, as the Saudis have learned through bitter experience. In the 1970s, worries about the stability of the global food supply inspired the Saudi government to grow wheat through intensive irrigation. Between 1980 and 1999, according to a study by Elie Elhadj, a banker and historian, the Saudis pumped 300 billion cubic meters of water into their desert. By the early 1990s, the kingdom had managed to become the world’s sixth-largest wheat exporter. But then its leaders started paying attention to the warnings of environmentalists, who pointed out that irrigation was draining a nonreplenishable supply of underground freshwater. Saudi Arabia now plans to phase out wheat production by 2016, which is one reason it’s looking to other countries to fill its food needs.

“The rules of the game have changed,” says Saad Al Swatt, the chief executive of the Tabuk Agricultural Development Company, one of the kingdom’s largest farming concerns. Al Swatt’s company was one of those that met with Robert Zeigler about farming rice; he says that with government encouragement, he is looking at expanding into countries like Sudan, Ethiopia and Vietnam. “They have the land, they have the water, but unfortunately, they don’t have the system or sometimes the finance to have these large-scale agricultural projects.” Al Swatt says. “We wanted to export our experience and really develop those areas, to help people.”

About 10 percent of the more than 80 million people who live in Ethiopia suffer from chronic food shortages. This year, because of poor rains, the U.N. World Food Program warns that much of East Africa faces the threat of a famine, potentially the worst in almost two decades. Traditionally, the model for feeding the hungry in Africa has involved shipping in surpluses from the rest of the world in times of emergency, but governments that are trying to attract investment say that the new farms could provide a lasting, noncharitable solution. (“It’s better than begging,” one Ethiopian official recently told the African publication Business Daily.) Whatever the long-term justification, however, it looks bad politically for countries like Kenya and Ethiopia to be letting foreign investors use their land at a time when their people face the specter of mass starvation. And many experts wonder whether such governments will go through with the deals. Ethiopia, after all, was one of the countries that banned grain exports during the recent spike in world food prices. “The idea that one country would go to another country,” says Robert Zeigler, “and lease some land, and expect that the rice produced there would be made available to them if there’s a food crisis in that host country, is ludicrous.”

The hyperinflationary spiral that caused the world food crisis had multiple causes. The harvests in 2006 and 2007 were the worst of the decade, hedge funds and other players in the commodities markets appear to have driven up prices and government subsidies for biofuels encouraged farmers to grow crops that ended up as ethanol. But the environment and demography are more lasting issues, and experts predict that prices, which have declined since their peak, are likely to stabilize significantly above precrisis levels. This represents a danger to the developing world, where the poor spend between 50 and 80 percent of their income on food, but it may also present an opportunity. If one good thing has emerged from the crisis, it’s a growing awareness of Africa’s unrealized agricultural potential. Because where there are appetites, there are profits to be made.

In late June, several hundred farmers and investment bankers came together in Manhattan to survey the landscape at a conference on global agriculture investment. The food crisis has served as a catalyst for the sleepy agricultural sector, spurring financial firms like Goldman Sachs and BlackRock to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in overseas agricultural projects, so the mood was heady for business, though depressing for humanity. There much talk of Thomas Malthus, the 19th-century prophet of overpopulation and famine.

“Beware of 2020 and beyond, because we think there could be genuine food shortages by that period,” Susan Payne, the chief executive of Emergent Asset Management, told the audience during a talk on Africa’s agricultural potential. She showed a series of slides citing chilling statistics: grain stocks are at their lowest levels in 60 years; there were food riots in 15 countries in 2008; global warming is turning arable land into desert; freshwater is dwindling and China is draining its reserves; and the really big problem that contributes to all the others — the world’s population is growing by 80 million hungry people a year. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that in order to feed the world’s projected population in 2050 — some nine billion people — agricultural production needs to increase by an annual average of 1 percent. That means adding around 23 million tons of cereals to the world’s food supply next year, a little less than the total production of Australia in 2008.

“Africa is the final frontier,” Payne told me after the conference. “It’s the one continent that remains relatively unexploited.” Emergent’s African Agricultural Land Fund, started last year, is investing several hundred million dollars into commercial farms around the continent. Africa may be known for decrepit infrastructure and corrupt governments — problems that are being steadily alleviated, Payne argues — but land and labor come so cheaply there that she calculates the risks are worthwhile.

The payoffs could be immense. In a country like Ethiopia, farmers put in backbreaking effort, but they yield about a third as much wheat per acre as do Europe, China or Chile. Even modest interventions could start to close this gap. One small example: the black soil I saw throughout the Great Rift region. Known as vertisol, it’s a product of volcanic activity and possesses the nutrients to produce enormous harvests. Because of its high clay content, however, it becomes sticky and waterlogged during the rainy season, which makes it very difficult to plow by traditional methods. With the addition of advanced implements, improved seeds and fertilizer, you can double the amount of wheat it yields. Ethiopia, like all of Africa, is full of such opportunities, which is one reason the World Bank says that investing in agriculture is one of the most effective ways to speed economic development on the continent.

Yet agriculture has historically been a tiny item in foreign-aid budgets. For years, governments, private foundations and donor institutions like the World Bank have been urging African governments to fill the spending gap with private investment. Now, at the very moment a world food crisis has come along, creating the perhaps fleeting possibility of an influx of capital into African agriculture, some of the same organizations are sending conflicting messages. The Food and Agriculture Organization, for instance, co-sponsored a report calling for a major expansion of commercial agriculture in Africa, but the organization’s director-general has simultaneously been warning of the “neocolonial” dangers of land deals. “We’re making them feel that it’s sinful,” says Mafa Chipeta, a Malawian who oversees Ethiopia and the rest of eastern Africa for the organization. “Why are we not saying, here is an opportunity?”

One focus of agricultural investment in Ethiopia is the region of Gambella, near the border with Sudan. The World Bank says it has more than four million acres of irrigable land. “It’s emerald green, the whole place is fertile and they have only 200,000 people down there,” says Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, head of an Indian commercial farming company. Earlier this year, Karuturi signed an agreement with the government to lease close to 800,000 acres on which he will grow rice, wheat and sugar cane, among other crops. Karuturi told me he doesn’t have to export the food to make money; there’s plenty of profit potential in the East African market. He has flown in John Deere tractors, agricultural experts from Texas A&M and commercial farmers from Mississippi to help him get things going. He says he’s raising $100 million in capital from private equity firms for the first phase of the project, which he estimates will ultimately cost well over a billion dollars. “Recently, I saw a lot of articles . . . where they referred to me as a food pirate,” Karuturi says. “This whole thing is so elitist, it’s ridiculous. They want Africa to remain poor.”

But the argument against enormous land concessions needn’t be based solely on appeals to human rights, environmental warnings or romanticism. It’s possible to be a believer in development without endorsing Paul Collier’s view that the small landholders stand in its way. In fact, there’s a whole school of economic thought that says that Collier is wrong, that big is not necessarily better in agriculture — and that the land deals therefore might be unwise not because they’re wrong but because they’re unprofitable. A recent World Bank study found that large-scale export agriculture in Africa has succeeded only with plantation crops like sugar and tea or in ventures that were propped up by extreme government subsidies, during colonialism or during the apartheid era in South Africa.

This record of failure is one reason that the government of Qatar, in addressing its food-security concerns, has chosen to concentrate on investing in existing agribusinesses rather than just acquiring land. That’s just one of many ways to invest in farming without removing the African farmers. On a bright Rift Valley afternoon, I went to see another option, a cooperative scheme under which a group of around 300 Ethiopians, working plots of 4 to 10 acres, were getting into export agriculture. During the European winter, they grew green beans for the Dutch market. The rest of the year, they cultivated corn and other crops for local consumption. The land had been irrigated with the help of a nonprofit organization and an Ethiopian commercial farmer named Tsegaye Abebe, who brought all the produce to market.

As a breeze riffled through a tall field of corn, a group of farmers, wearing sandals made from old tires, told me the arrangement, while not perfect, was beneficial in the most crucial respect: they weren’t toiling for someone else. Not far away, a Pakistani investor had taken over a government cattle ranch, once an area free for grazing, and had put fences and trenches in place to keep out the local livestock. The Ethiopians who worked there were miserable.

The farmers had heard rumors that foreign investors were eyeing still more Ethiopian land. Imam Gemedo Tilago, a 78-year-old cloaked in a white cotton shawl, shook his finger, vowing that Allah would not allow the community to remain passive. But that was a problem for the future, and the farmers had more grounded concerns. I noticed, driving down the rural paths that led to this farm, that the earth looked parched in places, and the cattle were showing their ribs through their dull brown hides. The worried farmers told me that this year, the seasonal rains were late in coming to the Rift Valley. If they didn’t arrive soon, there’d be hunger.

Andrew Rice is a contributing writer and the author of “The Teeth May Smile But the Heart Does Not Forget,” about a Ugandan murder trial.

The Case for Ag and H2O

We’ve often discussed the deflation in wants/inflation in needs trade. Marc Faber interviewed on Bloomberg the other day discussed how, when governments print endless money, inflation will show up somewhere -he mentioned Hong Kong real estate as an example, but that was before Wall Street bonuses were announced. For the full interview click here. In this research report, Passport Capital walks through the argument for ag and (by our interpretation from their argument) water (i.e. needs). For the full report: The Case For Agriculture From Hedge Fund Passport Capital.

Position limits – have we learned nothing?

I can’t put my finger on it, but I know it’s all related. Writing about it definitely helps clarify, but then again, it makes me more flabergasted. I’m speak of the direction our policy – on multiple fronts - is headed.

From healthcare to contract law to trading, policy makers seem to believe that government and bureaucracies are the best allocators of resources, best sources of price discovery, and most efficient providers of services, while at the same time believing that increased regulation can encourage wage growth, competitiveness, and productivity. For fun, here’s an article, sent by a friend on the impact of some of these policies: http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson071809.html.

Today, I won’t go into healthcare (although for those interested, there’s an interesting interview with Daniel Palestrant, CEO of Sermo, an online physician’s community, about the fact that the AMA is not accurately representing the doctors of this country: http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1196233131&play=1. I spoke to Daniel and the interview doesn’t do their research justice, and his attack on Howard Dean only scratched the surface of the hypocracy of the current leadership.) Instead, I’ll mention that the current debates on The Hill about speculative limits in commodities scare me. In the 1970′s, with inflation running rampant, the Nixon administration, in its misdirected brilliance, decided to place price controls on everything from meat to lumber. Well, the small time players got hurt and the guys who were smarter went around the price controls and played in the futures markets. Now, we have a new administration thinking they need to control prices and better yet, control volatility. Well, someone should point out that speculators play on both sides; they provide better liquidity, more price discovery, and smaller spreads. Without speculators, hedgers wouldn’t be able to trade and everyone from small time farmers to large conglomerates like General Mills would face increased costs of business. In and of itself, more players do not lead to increased volatility – quite the contrary.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story//spotlight-on-goldman-as-commodities-hearings-begin-2009-07-28

So GS is on the hotseat again, this time for being too large a player in the hedging space. But that’s what they do. They provide an investment opportunity to pension plans and institutional players and then hedge. Should you place speculative limits? Fine, but let’s define speculation and hedging differently. Not all natural hedgers are pure hedgers. For example, many oil companies and airlines and producers take speculative risk beyond the positions their hedging. Same is true for “speculators”, some of whom are actually hedging different risks in their portfolios. The definitions, in my opinion, actually become so nuanced and convoluted as to be virtually irrelevant. I wish someone from GS would get up and say that and more importantly that someone in DC would listen.