Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees that there are huge peanut surpluses projected for this year. This news adds to concerns of peanut farmers around the country. Why? Because there are 215,000 tons of peanuts from last year still sitting in government warehouses.

That is a pretty staggering number. 215,000 tons of peanuts sitting in storage around the country. It is like we had a strategic peanut reserve and didn’t even know it. (Perhaps it is a lingering program from the Carter Administration.)

So it looks like this year US farmers will raise and harvest 2,300,000 tons of peanuts. Add to that number the surplus from last year and you get 2,513,000 tons of peanuts. In the average year Americans eat 1,600,000 tons of peanuts. According to the article another 300,000 to400,000 tons are exported. Which leaves us with nearly 500,000 tons of surplus peanuts for next year.

Our federal government and its oft illogical farm subsidies policy seems in part to blame. The United States guarantees that it will buy farmer’s peanuts at a fixed rate of no less than $335 per ton.

One suspects that this means that after peanut farmers are finished supplying Planters and other nut companies with their nuts, and after more peanuts are sold to brokers for sale overseas; then the government steps in and buys the surfeit peanuts.

Now from this article your Maximum Leader has learned that the posted price per ton for peanuts is $337. Only two dollars difference between the government buy price and the open market price. But later in the article it says that US peanuts are being sold at $895 per metric ton in Europe. That $895 figure is high compared to $695 per ton from Argentina and $725 per ton from China.

Setting aside the logical question of why a European would want to eat peanuts from Argentina and China when American peanuts are available, why are US peanuts so expensive? If one adjusts for the difference between an English (or Short) ton and a Metric ton (1 English ton = .907 Metric ton) that means that US peanuts are still selling in Europe for nearly 260% of the price of the same peanut in US markets.

Now your Maximum Leader doesn’t mind “sticking it” to the Europeans (except for the British, Poles, Italians, Hungarians, and Czechs), but getting them for 260% of market price? That is a little much. (Unless you’re French, German, Belgian, or Spanish.)

Why is this? It makes no sense. What does make sense it that we just flood the world market with cheap US peanuts. Argentina and China be damned!

Perhaps exchanging cheap peanuts for agreement on foreign policy issues would make the Europeans love us again. If not, they would at least get fat on peanuts.

And one little post script to this post… If the Government needs to dispose of some peanuts your Maximum Leader knows a small farmer, a small holder if you will, who has some pigs who could stand a little fattening up on peanuts in the months leading up to their slaughter… Just sayin’

Carry on.