As another week of panic, fear, high oil prices, and skyrocketing food prices begins, let’s see if we can discover one of the folks likely to profit from the world’s hunger.

Wow, that sounds much worse than I meant.

OK, so we’re on the hunt for a fertilizer profiteer.

Sorry. Just kidding!

What we want to find is the special Chinese fertilizer company that makes a product specifically tailored to the most popular brand of hybrid rice in China. I don’t know if we want to buy the company’s stock, but Ian Wyatt and the folks at Growth Report are getting my palms all itchy and causing my cheeks to flush with an upswell of greed. So we’re going to at least have a look.

Growth Report is, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, a growth-oriented newsletter — I’ve only written about them once before, and that was when they were touting Oilsands Quest back in May (as many others have before and since, including Jim Cramer on Friday, whose enthusiasm for the shares sent them up to new highs in pre-market trading Monday morning).

Anyway, we learn a few things about this stock — including a little lesson in the history of famine and food innovation in China, which is actually somewhat interesting (never let it be said that you can’t learn something from marketing copy … though unlike Reagan’s “trust, but verify” I’d just say “verify”).

The story we’re told is about hybrid rice, which was invented in China — largely by a man who is a national agri-celebrity in the Middle Kingdom: Dr. Yuan Longping.

Here’s the background story, in case you want that little history lesson: Read the rest of this entry »