Greetings from a soggy, but very colorful Midwest, USA. It rained a good part of the weekend in the central Midwest, and we even had a brief burst of hail in the Chicago area.

Two topics on tap for today - a new term that I learned and an overview of market reaction to last week's USDA reports.

One of my colleagues in the UK forwarded me an email about Ecocide. I hadn't heard the term before and didn't really know what it meant. I could gather "eco" = environment and anything with "ocide" never has a happy ending. So I Googled it to learn more.

Ecocide is the extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished.

In March 2010, lawyer/barrister Polly Higgins proposed to the United Nations that Ecocide be made the fifth Crime Against Peace. Ecocide is already an international crime during wartime - it is a crime to "intentionally launch an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause…widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment…"

So what is it really? Ecocide is ecosystem damage and destruction. A few examples:

• Large-scale land use change that causes the direct destruction of habitats - as is the case with deforestation in most tropical rainforests
• Significant pollution whether deliberate or incidental - such as oil dumping and spills
• Open cast mining where entire landscapes are removed - as is the case with oil sands and some coal and gold mining

For more information on Ecocide, check out EradicatingEcocide.com. There's a video of Ms. Higgins speaking, and I'd encourage you to take a look. It offers her perspective on the topic and what is needed to make a global change.

On to last week's market reports…

The reports indicated that the corn crop did not drop as much as expected and exports were decreased too. However, US ending stocks dropped overall and are barely pipeline requirements. Further, global coarse grain stocks decreased significantly more than expected, sending corn futures up, up, up.

USDA raised soybean acreage and yield from previous reports. However, estimated usage was also increased more than expected, which evened out the jump in supply for just a slight gain ending stocks.

Wheat stocks were neutral globally but above expectations for the US. Big initial gains tied to the surge in corn futures early in the week fizzled out by end of the week.

Cotton futures were pounded lower when USDA raised projected ending stocks by 300,000 bales. This was just the opposite of the 300,000 bale decrease that trade expected.

Also, according to Doane Advisory Services, attention is building on ominous weather forecasts for the 2013 crop outlook in the US Northern Plains and Canada where it's becoming quite dry and a warmer-than-normal and drier-than-normal winter may limit critical spring snowmelt soil moisture recharging.

Have a great week!