A report from the NY Times states that Syria, Oman, Palestine, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia & Morrocco are all suffering from massive increases in the price of food.
Civil unrest, strikes and rioting are becoming widespread as basic food staples have
as much as doubled in the last few months.
“Now we have to choose: we either eat or stay warm. We can’t do both,” said Abdul Rahman Abdul Raheem, who works at a clothing shop in a mall in Amman and once dreamed of sending his children to private school. “We’re not really middle class anymore; we’re at the poverty level.”
And an article on financialsense.com tells us that ‘experts’ predict that the Global Food Shortages Could “Continue for Decades”.
• For decades, the industrialized world enjoyed the luxury of producing far more milk, butter and wheat than its citizens could consume. The surplus was exported or was destroyed. Some experts expect this luxury has now come to an end. Europe’s mountains of butter have been depleted, its grain silos emptied and its lakes of milk drained. “The era of overproduction is behind us,” says Stephane Delodder, an agricultural specialist with Rabobank in the Dutch city of Utrecht.
For the first time, we are seeing the emergence of a global agricultural market driven by the growing demand for grains and a scarcity of supply. Wheat inventories, for example, have reached a 30-year low. In one year inventories in the European Union have plummeted from 14 million to one million tons. The fact is that arable land cannot be increased at will. Over the past three decades, the amount of arable land worldwide has stagnated at about 1.5 billion hectares (3.7 billion acres).
Civilisation’s endgame is being played our throughout the world. Oil has peaked. Industrial agriculture has depleted and degraded soils, while enabling human numbers to overshoot the earth’s ability to sustain us. Forests have gone, 1000s of species have been made extinct, aquifers have been drained and poisoned. The big picture doesnt look good, and yet most people don’t seem to have even heard of peak oil, and climate change is still being disputed.
And most peak oil websites seem to be advising people to stockpile food, advice that is likely to make food supply problems worse. In the short term, stockpiling may save you some money, or even ensure that you and your loved ones have something to eat when the stores are empty. But stockpiling will not feed you in the longterm.
Consumerism’s days are numbered. Without cheap plentiful fuel it is impossible to be a consumer. It is now urgent that people stop acting like consumers, if they want to be able to eat. There is so much to do, so much in our lives that needs to change. We need to stop the corporations destroying our landbases, poisoning & wasting the land & water. We need to relearn how to rebuild soils, grow food, recreate communities. Many of us have lived our whole lives surrounded by lies, conditioned to follow orders and put money before everything else.
How bad does it need to get before you take action? How much will you take, until you start seeing capitalism and consumerism as the con-tricks they are?
• The pressures in global food markets have grown so intense that, for the first time in its history, the United Nation’s World Food Program is finding it hard to procure supplies of essential commodities. In particular, countries in the emerging world were now placing so many export controls on items such as wheat to conserve them for their own populations that they have refused to release supplies to the U.N. “We have never seen this before” according to senior officials at the World Economic Forum in Davos. (Financial Times)
