Captial and Crisis editor Chris Mayer says a new plot line is unfolding in the agriculture boom.

“It begins with the fact that there are fewer and fewer options these days for importers looking for large quantities of high-quality grains. But it speaks more to a deeper issue: an emerging shortage in fertile soil.” In a nutshell: we’re running out of good dirt.

This means that farmland is becoming a strategic asset… and one that is likely rise in value as the crisis in fertile soil plays out.

This from Chris in Whiskey and Gunpowder:

Fertile soil — good dirt — may become more important to land values than oil or minerals in the ground. Some say it is already a strategic asset on par with oil. As Lennart Bage, president of a U.N. fund for agricultural development says, “Now fertile land with access to water has become a strategic asset.”

Doubtful? Consider rising export restrictions around the globe, which act as a sort of fence keeping the goods within borders.

India curbs exports on rice. The Ukraine halts wheat shipments altogether. The number of grain-exporting regions has dwindled, like the vanishing buffalo herds. Before World War II, only Europe imported grain. South America, as recently as the 1930s, produced twice as much grain as North America. The old Soviet Union, for all its faults, exported grain. Africa was self-sufficient.

Today, only three major grain exporters remain: North America, Australia and New Zealand.

No surprise, then, to find faith in the global food supply at generational lows. So begins the scramble to secure farmland.

Saudi Arabia, for example, is particularly at the mercy of the winds of global agriculture. It has little ability to produce its own food. The kingdom, reports the Financial Times, “is scouring the globe for fertile lands in a search that has taken Saudi officials to Sudan, Ukraine, Pakistan and Thailand.” Saudi Arabia’s quest is not one it pursues alone. There are many hunters.

The UAE has also been looking to lock down acreage in Sudan and Kazakhstan. Libya is looking to lease farms in the Ukraine. South Korea has been poking around in Mongolia. Even China is exploring investing in farmland in Southeast Asia. While China has plenty of cultivable land, it does not have a lot of water.

“This is a new trend within the global food crisis,” says Joachim von Braun, the director of the International Food Policy Research Institute. “The dominant force today is security of food supplies.” Food prices reflect this crimp in supply.

The mainstream press focuses on issues such as population, dietary shifts and the impact of biofuels. One thing that doesn’t get talked about much may be the most important thing of all: A growing shortage of quality topsoil. Call it the topsoil crisis.

Quality soil is loose, clumpy, filled with air pockets and teeming with life. It’s a complex microecosystem all its own. On average, the planet has little more than THREE feet of topsoil spread over its surface. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer calls it “the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food.”

The problem is that we’re losing it faster than we can replace it. And replacing it isn’t easy. It grows back an inch or two over hundreds of years.

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Read more on Grains at Wikinvest

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