Will the Agriculture Boom Last?

Its hard to imagine thinking back to the late 90s when the internet, technology and biotech stocks were all the rage that about a decade later the big movers would be in agriculture, energy, materials (precious metals) and until recently utilities. See my analysis of some of the top managers in the marketplace the top holdings being names such as Agrium, Monsanto, Caterpillar, ConocoPhillips, Anglogold and other more commodity type of plays.

We are seeing some managers that I really like such as Bruce Berkowitz at Fairholme having large positions in oil sands, many growth managers having the agriculture related names or some well renown value managers having large energy and uranium exposure. Interestingly, I have not as of yet seen the same flood of money by professional investors into the utility sector.

I thought I would spend just a minute or so talking about agriculture and then I would love to hear some comments from some readers. In the past year, the AIG Agriculture sub-index has registered a gain of 59% (keep in mind that the S&P 500 is actually down 5% in the same period) and has generated a 17% annualized return over the past three years. The key 3 reasons behind the agriculture boom in recent years in my opinion are:1) Ethanol 2) Falling dollar 3) Boom in the number of ETFs, ETNs and amounts invested in commodity instruments.

I recently spoke with several farmers that are good friends of mine in the Midwest and asked them about the boom in prices and they without exception said that ethanol has been the leading cause of the boom. In fact, it has now gotten to the point that farmers are burning their fields of wheats and grains and replacing it with corn to be used for ethanol production. What has happened is that all of this corn supply has been going into ethanol production instead of food and now we have less than typical supplies of several other agricultural items such as wheat, soybeans and even cotton to some degree.

I asked these farmers what they expect over the short and long term, to which they said they expect much of the same in the short term, and  that they will be continuing to focus on corn production (as this is still the most profitable area for them), but in the long term they do anticipate that either the Government will step in and reverse the ethanol requirements or consumers will say enough is enough and food price inflation is more concerning to us than increased oil prices.

I tend to believe what the farmers are saying and therefore my belief is that investors in the agricultural space may do well in the short run, but may have some significant bumps ahead in the intermediate to long term. The short term prices are also being helped by tremendous amounts of money that is being directed into agriculture and other commodities by institutional investors (read the recent CalPers news) as well as individual retail investors but I suspect this will slow over time and potentially even reverse when a correction takes place

Comments

[TexM3]

Don’t discount China India demand

[Cleveland]

Please take a look at "Canada in a Changing Climate 2007", which was released without any fanfare and one can figure out where food prices are headed over the long term.

[Hendrikus]

Look, I live in San Diego, and last summer I travelled across the breadth of the breadbasket of the USA, and all that I saw was corn, corn, corn. On my return trip in September, I choose to travel across the Canadian prairies, and guess what I saw there? You guessed it; corn, corn, corn. Yes, I saw a little wheat on my travels, but not enough to feed a family of three! I stopped in Iowa and Saskatchawan and asked several farmers why they were grown corn. Ethanol, they had resonated in unisance. I asked them what they intended to grow in 2008. Corn, they had resonated again. My question is, who is growing the wheat, oats, barley, and rice to feed the nations. Surely there will be a market in this agricultural commodity. If you couple this with the uncertainty of rain, I say that the wheat futures will reap huge profits for at least 2008. Any comments?

[fodi MD.]

The ethanol corn production is the biggest farce in the energy buisness , energy intensive, carbon intensive, food inflationary, government subsidized blunder.

[friedt]

Fidelity used to have a Food and Agri Fund (now renamed Consumer Staples) that I bought early and complained about bitterly to the manager for having too much money in tobacco stocks but very little in agricultural chemicals. Because the Fund didn't change, I started buying POT and other crop fertilizers on my own, along with irrigation equipment and pipes. I still don't know why the fund stayed with tobacco as long as it did and ignored not only fertiolizers but also genetic based agris like Monsanto, Dow, and Dupont.

On another matter, please note Brazil's Cosan (CZZ) as an agriculturural company benefitting from both demand and ethanol. Even the Argentinian agri co CRESY is doing well as is Florida's Alico. Why is TV and blog coverage limited to the best known stocks?

[SwampCotton]

I would think the agricultural commodites still have a way to go upward in price but with rather violent swings. I am long in DBA which deals with wheat, soybeans, corn, and sugar on an equal basis.

[sb-tiger]

Agri prices have shot up due to major famine and crop failure in Australia this year, a major wheat exporter. Unlikely Australia will have bad crop two yers in row.
Next is the corn/ethanol mess in US. US is a freemrket economy - the ethanol stupidity will ultimately stop.

Much is said about China-India demand - both countires are not only self sufficient but are actually exporters of food.

So the Agri boom will be short lived - like so many commodity booms.

[Jake2]

Too much anecdotal so-called evidence here (read, opinion), including the comments, and not enough hard headed analysis. Just the facts, please: bushels and pecks, hectares, open mouths to feed . . . etc.

[semuren]

"Much is said about China-India demand - both countires [sic] are not only self sufficient but are actually exporters of food. "

I think sb-tiger's statement above is misleading if not just wrong. Below are some news clipping dealing with China's ag imports form the USA.


www.iht.com/articles/2...

"Chinese soybean imports, mostly from the United States and Brazil, have almost doubled since 2003-04. Imports from January to July rose 2.6 percent to 16.9 million tons, with 7.8 million tons coming from America, according to customs data. The United States is the world's largest producer." ---Bloomberg News Published: August 22, 2007


"China, the world's largest soybean importer, gets 60% of its soybean supplies from overseas, mostly from the U.S., Argentina and Brazil." ---DOW JONES NEWSWIRES August 22, 2007 9:12 a.m.

www.ers.usda.gov/Publi...

This USDA report is a bit old [1996], but it give some perspective when evaluating claims that China is not a food importer.

"By the year 2005, China will be a net importer of 32 million tons of grain annually, as the country’s demand for grain continues to outpace domestic supplies. That’s according to The Future of China’s Grain Market, a new report from USDA’s Economic Research Service. The United States, as a major grain exporter, has a vital interest in China’s grain import demand.

China has a large agricultural sector and is a major grain producer. China has participated in the international grain trade both as a buyer and a seller. However, it is doubtful that China’s farmers will be able to keep pace with population increases and growing domestic demand for feed grains to produce meat, eggs, and milk products.

In the last two decades, China’s grain trade with the United States and the rest of the world expanded dramatically. Since 1993, China has shifted from net exports of 7.5 million tons of grain to net imports of 15.5 million tons. China’s grain self-sufficiency is likely to decrease from 95 to 91 percent in the next decade. China’s Academy of Science has estimated that grain imports could reach 45 million tons per year, 13 million tons above USDA projections.

The Chinese economy is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years, with the an annual growth rate projected at 8.8 percent from 1996 to 2000. The rate of growth is then expected to slow to about 7.5 percent annually during 2001-2005. Per capita incomes are expected to rise accordingly, which will drive consumer demand for grain and livestock products.

Most of China’s arable land is already under cultivation, and additional land can be brought into production only at high cost. Because economic expansion is taking some of China’s farmland, it is likely that the total area sown to grains will decline in the next decade.

China’s grain yields have considerable potential to increase, with high-yielding seed varieties, better fertilizers, and more efficient use of irrigation water and pesticides.

The volume of U.S. grain exports to China has been volatile during the last 20 years, peaking at 9 million tons (63 percent of Chinese grain imports) in the early 1980’s. As recently as 3 years ago, China had net exports of 7.5 million tons of grain.

U.S. sales of all farm products to China has also been volatile, increasing from less than $400 million in 1993 to more than $2.5 billion in 1995. "

news.xinhuanet.com/eng...

"BEIJING, Jan. 6 (Xinhua) -- China bought from abroad 1.29 million tons of grain (including rice, wheat and maize, excluding soy beans) in the first 10 months of 2007, a decline of 58.6 percent from the same period of the previous year.

Customs sources said the arrivals were valued at 420 million U.S. dollars, down 39.4 percent.

The sources ascribed the import reduction to narrowed gap between supply and demand at home and price hikes on world grain markets.

A decrease in grain yield worldwide caused by unfavorable weather and growing demand for cereals used for bio-fuel production conspired toward continuous price hikes.

Between January and October, barley imports were valued at 278.6 U.S. dollars per ton on average, a rise of 49.4 percent on the same period of 2006, rice and paddy imports were priced at 456.6 dollars per ton on average, up 18.1 percent.

The mounting prices dampened domestic demand for imports, which was also driven down by more grain output at home, the sources said.

Meanwhile, shipping charges also went up internationally, which also gave rise to cost of grain import, the sources added.

According to customs data, Australia, Canada and Thailand accounted for 90.3 percent of China's grain imports in the first 10 months of 2007.

From January to October, China bought 457,000 tons of grain from Australia, down 74 percent, 356,000 tons from Canada, down 24.4 percent, and 351,000 tons from Thailand, down 36.1 percent."

news.xinhuanet.com/zhe...

The link just above is to "The Grain Issue in China [2002]." Saying it is a bit of a polemical, for party-state grain self-sufficiency,is an understatement, but even it has to admit the existence of a grain imports.

This is not my area of expertise, so I do not have good data for Chinese (let alone Indian) agricultural imports, but it would be very nice is someone who does have such data would post it.

[semuren]

Here is an article that give a more comprehensive picture of the ag situation in China and its relation to imports.

ipsnews.net/news.asp?i...

ECONOMY-CHINA: Staring At Grain Imports
By Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Feb 26 (IPS) - With global food prices on an upward spiral, China is facing renewed fears that its growing demand for grain to feed the world’s largest population may lead to imports from international markets, driving prices higher and spurring further food inflation.

The resurging "threat of China’s food security" may have induced more fatigue than alarm if it was not coming at a time of unprecedented scarcity of arable land, which is increasingly being converted to grow biofuels, and because of fresh challenges posed by global warming.

With its natural constraints -- it has to feed a fifth of the world’s population with less than one-seventh of the global farmland -- and its surging demand, China finds itself in the middle of a raucous debate about the future of global food security.

Since United States environmentalist Lester Brown stirred public imagination in 1995 with his apocalyptic predictions of China’s rising food hunger, the country has fought recurrent accusations that its demand may prove catastrophic by swamping world grain markets and causing food shortages in impoverished developing countries.

Delivering bumper harvests and shunning large imports have so far been the preferred ways for Chinese officials to demonstrate the country’s determination to continue with its long-term policy of self-sufficiency. The trend of increased annual harvests has run uninterrupted since 2004, clocking in more than 500 million tons of grain in 2007, including rice, wheat, corn and soybean.

"China is not a precipitator of the mounting increase in global wheat prices, but an important stabilising factor for it," Ding Shengjun, an official with the State Administration of Grain said in Beijing last week, responding to speculations that grain may follow the upward trajectory of oil. China’s unquenchable thirst for oil has been one of the main factors behind the surge of oil towards the sensitive 100 US dollars a barrel mark.

"The trend in China -- year-on-year grain output increases, a balanced supply-demand market, improved reserves and mild structural grain price increases -- is in sharp contrast with the global downturn in grain output and reserves," Ding said.

He went on to suggest that Beijing has tolerated small quantities of grain imports to diversity its domestic food supply while remaining largely self-sufficient.

Nevertheless, Chinese analysts have grown uneasy about the country’s increasing dependence on imports to satisfy demand for soybeans. Driven by its growing demand for meat in recent years, the country has emerged as the world’s biggest importer of soybeans and vegetable oil.

Before 1995 China was a net exporter of soybeans but in 2007 China imported more than 30 million tonnes of the commodity, which it uses mainly for animal feed. The demand reflects the country’s dietary changes resulting from greater prosperity in cities and towns where people these days consume more meat.

But the Chinese diet’s shift towards more meat has also boosted grain consumption, raising expectations that the country may be soon forced to import corn too. It takes four kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of meat.

"I believe there is an ongoing soybean crisis, which is now affecting China’s entire food security and may even prove dangerous to the equilibrium of the whole economy," says agricultural market watcher Liu Chaoyang.

"Because of the country’s excessive dependence on imports for soybeans, China’s self-sufficiency rate is no longer the mandated 95 per cent but somewhere around 90 per cent."

To promote self-sufficiency, Beijing has done away with a policy spanning two thousands years of collecting grain tax from the peasants and has resolved to provide farmers with more subsidised fertilisers and seeds.

Reacting to rising global prices and inflation worries at home, China also raised export taxes and imposed export quotas on a range of grains and flour in December. Nevertheless, China’s inflation -- driven by food prices surges, is running at its highest in 11 years. China’s consumer prices in January surged 7.1 percent from a year earlier.

The food situation has been exacerbated by devastating snowstorms in January that have killed farm animals and damaged crops across a large part of the country. Partly because of the storms, China’s food prices in 2008 have risen 18 percent, higher than the 13 percent increase of grain commodities in Indonesia and Pakistan, and well above the 10 per cent increase in South America and other developing countries.

The scourge of high prices and natural disasters occurs at a time of rapid loss of arable land, prompting some Chinese analysts to speak of the "global scramble for farmland".

While Beijing is said to control the amount of cropland taken over to produce biofuels, in the last decade the country has lost 5.5 percent of its arable land to desertification and industrial expansion.

"Nearly 14 years have passed since Lester Brown raised the alarm on China’s land constraints but his warning has not lost its validity," says Song Yanming, member of the China National Association of Grain Sector.

Analysts warn that although China has managed to maintain a balance of supply and demand in three of its main grain commodities – wheat, rice and corn, the increasing imports of soybeans can at any moment disrupt its fragile equilibrium.

Some agricultural experts have even suggested that China should use its ample foreign exchange reserves, which stand at more than 1.5 trillion US dollars, to buy soybeans on the international market and raise the domestic soybean reserves to 50 million tonnes -- an equivalent to a year of China’s national soybean consumption.

"We can’t allow the soybean crisis to become the Archimedes point that would pry the Chinese economy," Wan Xiaoxi, an agricultural analyst with China Southern Fund, wrote in the China Business News.


From this I think that we can see that soybeans are already a major import ag commodity here. And that grains such as wheat, rice and corn are imported. What I think is most worth not is how changes in diet in China are likely to play out. Soybeans fed to animals as people shift to eating more meat is mirrored in increases in dairy consumption. Chinese TV is now filled with ads for breakfast milk and bread. The products are thought of as Western, hip and healthy. While in North China people are already accustomed to eating wheat and corn (more the former than the latter) milk drinking is new and those cows have to eat something.

[semuren]

Another point worth mentioning is that social and political factors do not lend themselves to real increases in agricultural efficiency in China. There is a large excess population in rural areas who were kept from migrating to the cities during the Maoist period by a system of residence registration and related staples rationing. If you did not have a local residency permit you could not get local ration coupons and you had to buy them on the black market at a prohibitively high cost.

While the rationing is long since past, the result is that the cities are only now starting to be swamped by rural migrants. But even this movement is not going to clear rural villages in such a way as to make way for large scale commercial agriculture. Without that happening domestic agricultural production in China can only grow so much. What is more, land seizure issues in rural and peri-urban areas are one of the primary causes of social unrest today. This scares the party and a lot of the rhetoric of the new (Hu and Wen) leadership is about trying to at least appear to be concerned about rural dwellers and rural to urban migrants.

There are also the issues of climate and topography that limit the ability of China to really increase food production, despite the lingering political importance of the concept of food self-sufficiency.

The financial infrastructure in contemporary China, giving cheap capital to state-linked companies through negative real interest rates on deposits and politically directed bank lending, among other methods, creates an economic incentive to develop capital intensive industry. This, in turn, further adds to the already dire pollution and environmental degradation problems, and none of that bodes well for agriculture.

The political system also rewards official who can manage these sorts of high profile capital intensive industrial projects. It cannot do so for real, qualitative, improvements, in agriculture since those would involve getting rid of surplus rural population and instituting some sort of large scale commercial farming (if topography and environmental conditions even allowed for this).

Along these lines here is a very interesting quote:

hardassetsinvestor.com...


Ashmead Pringle (GreenHaven Commodities Service): “Seventy percent of the world’s fresh water goes to agriculture; it takes 1,000 tons of water to make a ton of grain and 18 tons to make a ton of steel. So the countries that are industrializing are likely to use their resources for industry and import their grain. The U.S. is going to be able, I think, to sell all they can grow for some period of time.”


This quote get at two points I am trying to make above: 1) The physical environment limits the potential for improvement in agricultural yields, here in terms of water which is VERY scarce in North China; and 2) the political economic system in China also limits improvement in agriculture. The performance of and official with a successful steel plan in his district will look good, while that of one who introduced large scale commercial agriculture and created the attendant social disruption among the rural population will not.

For anyone interested there is a nice survey in the economist this week that deals with some of these issues.

[surgcare]

I doubt the etanol /corn boom will stop for quit a while.The democrats passed this law and since it appears they wil control congress and the whitehouse its not likely they will admit a mistake and change directions .Also the republicans are too stupid to take advantage of this politically , so I predict this ethanol/corn boom will continue for quite some time .Also India ,China etc are consuming at increasng rates .

[Dan Weiss]

I agree that it looks unlikely to change in the short to even intermediate term although I think it would be a positive for the overall economy (non-commodity) if it were to be changed.

[semuren]

www.fas.usda.gov/oilse...

Above is a link that deals with, among other crops, soybeans. Recent year US exports are less then recent year China imports. Imagine that more of this type of data on other crops might be found by tweaking the above URL. Also, at least in terms of soybeans and other oilseeds India did did ot seem to be a major importer.