Reader Crocodile Chuck highlighted an important post at Houses and Holes, an economics-oriented Australian blog. While Australia is reeling from the immediate impact, the broader impact of 2010-11 weather patterns may have much bigger ramifications for food and energy prices in Australia and abroad.

The post focuses on the possibility, increasingly endorsed by top meteorologists, that the heavy Australian rains are the result of a super La Niña, the last of which was seen in 1973-4,the time of the last severe flooding in Queensland. Super La Niñas are hugely disruptive to agricultural production and can have other nasty knock-on effects (some contend the 1917 La Niña helped spawn the 1918 influenza pandemic).

In this case, the damage of a super La Niña will not only increase food costs at a time when price rises and food scarcity are already a major concern, but will likely extend to energy prices as well. That one-two punch would be particularly devastating to China.

In Australia, fruit and vegetable prices are projected to increase 30% this year as a result of La Niña. And recall Australia is a major agricultural exporter, so production shortfalls there will hit other markets. Super La Niñas tend to impair food output overall. 2007-8 saw a borderline super La Niña, and we saw sharply higher food prices in the first half of that year. Note that the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that staples are already more costly than at any time in 2008.

Similarly, energy markets are already showing signs of supply pressure even before possible weather effects, namely, more and more intense hurricanes in the Gulf and Caribbean reducing oil output, in addition to the expected decline in coal shipments out of Australia.

The effects of adverse weather patterns will be amplified by bad policy choices. Jim Quinn has a solid post up on the disastrous ramifications of US ethanol policy. This program is absolutely hairbrained; it was roundly denounced in 2008 as being an environmentally costly and inefficient way to augment energy supplies. The only type of ethanol that is a net plus when all the environmental impacts are considered (water usage, effect of taking land out of food production on agricultural prices) is Brazilian sugar-based ethanol. But we’ve decided to impose a 54 cent tariff on that. As Quinn tells us:

The United States is the major player in the world corn market providing more than 50% of the world’s corn supply. In excess of 20% of our corn crop had been exported to other countries, but the government ethanol mandates have reduced the amount that is available to export. This year, the US will harvest approximately 12.5 million bushels of corn. More than 42% will be used to feed livestock in the US, another 40% will be used to produce government mandated ethanol fuel, 2% will be used for food products, and 16% is exported to other countries. Ending stocks are down 963 million bushels from last year. The stocks-to-use ratio is projected at 5.5%, the lowest since 1995/96 when it dropped to 5.0%. As you can see in the chart below, poor developing countries are most dependent on imports of corn from the US. Food as a percentage of income for peasants in developing countries in Africa and Southeast Asia exceeds 50%. When the price of corn rises 75% in one year, poor people starve…The 107 million tons of grain that went to U.S. ethanol distilleries in 2009 was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels… The amount of grain needed to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol just once can feed one person for an entire year. The average income of the owners of the world’s 940 million automobiles is at least ten times larger than that of the world’s 2 billion hungriest people. In the competition between cars and hungry people for the world’s harvest, the car is destined to win. In March 2008, a report commissioned by the Coalition for Balanced Food and Fuel Policy estimated that the bio-fuels mandates passed by Congress cost the U.S. economy more than $100 billion from 2006 to 2009. The report declared that “The policy favoring ethanol and other bio-fuels over food uses of grains and other crops acts as a regressive tax on the poor.” A 2008 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.) issued its report on bio-fuels that concluded: “Further development and expansion of the bio-fuels sector will contribute to higher food prices over the medium term and to food insecurity for the most vulnerable population groups in developing countries.” These forecasts are coming to fruition today.

The Houses and Holes post teases out the implications of higher fuel and food costs for China:

Amid dangerously accommodative monetary policy in the US and China, where the latter’s M2 money supply has surged by some 20% in the past year, inflation matters dearly. As Patrick Chovanec from Beijing’s Tsinghua University’s School of Economics points out, the recent fall in China’s CPI from 5.1% in November to 4.3% in December is a misleading indicator, due to the ultimately unsustainable retail food price crackdown and tepid cash rate measures. And as fellow expat academic, now securities strategist, Michael Pettis, writes this week, no lending quota – China’s de rigueur disinflationary measure – has yet to be set, much to everyone’s surprise. China is caught between fuelling an economy based on cheap exports and fixed investment with arguable social returns, and the commodity inflation that this development model drives. These concerns have been noticed by John Berthelsen and Benjamin Shobert, who respectively write that China faces grave social risks from food price inflation and food insecurity as a result of imbalanced economic policy, poor agricultural practices and the effects of climate change and deforestation. Shobert furthermore notes: “of the 13 major famines China has endured, six have been inexorably inter-related to political upheaval and conflict. China’s current leaders are aware of this part of their history,” he writes, “which is why the government’s stated goal of ‘95% self-sufficiency’ [in food supply] is deemed so critical.” As much as the mainstream press likes to focus on China’s stranglehold of rare earth materials, the real danger in an era of trade wars and rising commodity prices is China’s dearth of food and fuel supply. China’s policy reaction to these challenges will be the ultimate determinant of whether the New Year ends in growth or ends in recession… Following a Malthusian act of nature, highly combustible coal has been tossed onto the blaze of the world’s growing commodity inflation. And with La Nina still skipping coolly across the Pacific, more may be yet to come. It would indeed be the ultimate black swan if La Niña pushed Chinese inflation into a cycle-busting inflation spike.

Memories of food riots in developing economies in 2008 have largely vanished from the consciousness of most Americans. Yet have food riots in the Maghreb and some governments are already implementing emergency measures. Few seem to be factoring the risk of food shortages and resulting political instability into cheery forecasts for 2011.