Dismantle Civilisation

A terrifying article from Alternet.

Meanwhile, overfishing has created some 150 “dead zones” — oxygen-free patches of ocean that can sustain no life — around the world: Some of these patches, Grescoe tells us forebodingly, “are now as large as Ireland.” In search of seafloor-dwelling species such as the trendy monkfish — long ignored, then popularized singlehandedly by Julia Child in 1979 — bottom-trawls weighing more than 26,000 pounds each rake and flatten wildlife-rich undersea peaks, leaving a paved-looking flatness in their wake. Oh, and a large percentage of coral reefs worldwide are dying or already dead. Oh, and those bluefin tuna and halibut steaks you like? Say it with me: Mercury. Those jumbo fried shrimp battened on pesticides and antibiotics in bacteria-riddled Chinese farms, their decomposing flesh treated with borax? How’s your health insurance?

It is happening right this minute but not quite right before our eyes. This is exactly the sort of thing our species prefers not to think about. What kind of catastrophe is it? Take your pick. Ecological. Medical.

If we wanted to, we could bombard our readers with stories such as this. Corporate industrial civilisation is bad news for the planet. In this culture environments and habitats are destroyed for short term economic gain.

“This kind of attitude lies at the heart of the problems facing the oceans,” he seethes. “It is the ongoing plunder of the seas, done in the name of keeping a boat afloat for another season, and multiplied a hundred thousand times in all the ports of the world …. If this were still the age of inexhaustible cod mountains and endless salmon rivers, such a display of spirit might be admirable. It is the essence of the indomitable, short-sighted, buck-passing Atlantic fisherman: an independent, almost lordly working-class hero, romanticized to death in our culture. As long as there is a single jellyfish left in the ocean, he will be ready to go out and catch it.” And jellyfish, down at the foot of the food chain, will be the last edible species out there in a not-too-distant future when our great-grandchildren, Grescoe half-jokes, will eat “peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches” and “jellyfish and chips.”

Peanut butter, only if they are able to grow peanuts where they live. And jellyfish? Only if they live near the coast (as the seas rise more of us will be near the coast!).

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Michel Chossudovsky points out in this article that the present food ‘crisis’ is the result of economic restructuring and investor speculation, exacerbating problems created by climate change, poverty and 
other factors causing reduced supplies.

The media has casually misled public opinion on the causes of these price hikes, focusing almost exclusively on issues of costs of production, climate and other factors which result in reduced supply and which might contribute to boosting the price of food staples. While these factors may come into play, they are of limited relevance in explaining the impressive and dramatic surge in commodity prices.

Spiraling food prices are in large part the result of market manipulation. They are largely attributable to speculative trade on the commodity markets. Grain prices are boosted artificially by large scale speculative operations on the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges. It is worth noting that in 2007, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), merged with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), forming the largest Worldwide entity dealing in commodity trade including a wide range of speculative instruments (options, options on futures, index funds, etc).

Speculative trade in wheat, rice or corn, can occur without the occurrence of real commodity transactions. The institutions speculating in the grain market are not necessarily involved in the actual selling or delivery of grain.

The transactions may use commodity index funds which are bets on the general upward or downward movement of commodity prices. A “put option” is a bet that the price will go down, a “call option” is a bet that the price will go up. Through concerted manipulation, institutional traders and financial institutions make the price go up and then place their bets on an upward movement in the price of a particular commodity.

Speculation generates market volatility. In turn, the resulting instability encourages further speculative activity.

Profits are made when the price goes up. Conversely, if the speculator is short-selling the market, money will be made when the price collapses.

This recent speculative surge in food prices has been conducive to a Worldwide process of famine formation on an unprecedented scale.

The richest 200 people have about as much money as 40% of the worlds population. The rich have manipulated the markets, regulations and the food system, to push more people into dependency on the economic system.

Since the 1980s, grain markets have been deregulated under the supervision of the World Bank and US/EU grain surpluses are used systematically to destroy the peasantry and destabilize national food agriculture. In this regard, World Bank lending requires the lifting of trade barriers on imported agricultural staples, leading to the dumping of US/EU grain surpluses onto local market. These and other measures have spearheaded local agricultural producers into bankruptcy.

A “free market” in grain –imposed by the IMF and the World Bank– destroys the peasant economy and undermines “food security”. Malawi and Zimbabwe were once prosperous grain surplus countries, Rwanda was virtually self-sufficient in food until 1990 when the IMF ordered the dumping of EU and US grain surpluses on the domestic market precipitating small farmers into bankruptcy. In 1991-92, famine had hit Kenya, East Africa’s most successful bread-basket economy. The Nairobi government had been previously placed on a black list for not having obeyed IMF prescriptions. The deregulation of the grain market had been demanded as one of the conditions for the rescheduling of Nairobi’s external debt with the Paris Club of official creditors. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, Second Edition, Montreal 2003)

Throughout Africa, as well as in Southeast Asia and Latin America, the pattern of “sectoral adjustment” in agriculture under the custody of the Bretton Woods institutions has been unequivocally towards the destruction of food security. Dependency vis-à-vis the world market has been reinforced leading to a boost in commercial grain imports as well as an increase in the influx of “food aid”.

Agricultural producers were encouraged to abandon food farming and switch into “high value” export crops. often to the detriment of food self-sufficiency. The high value products as well as the cash crops for export were supported by World Bank loans.

Famines in the age of globalization are the result of policy. Famine is not the consequence of a scarcity of food but in fact quite the opposite: global food surpluses are used to destabilize agricultural production in developing countries.

We’ve all been fed the lie of ‘the american dream’, forced to sell our time/labour for cash, to be part of the system that centralises power and control into the hands of a few.

Coinciding with the establishment the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, another important historical change has occurred in the structure of global agriculture.

Under the articles of agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO)), the food giants will have unrestricted freedom to enter the seeds markets of developing countries. The acquisition of exclusive “intellectual property rights” over plant varieties by international agro-industrial interests, also favors the destruction of bio-diversity.

Acting on behalf of a handful of biotech conglomerates, GMO seeds have been imposed on farmers, often in the context of “food aid programs”. In Ethiopia, for instance, kits of GMO seeds were handed out to impoverished farmers with a view to rehabilitating agricultural production in the wake of a major drought . The GMO seeds were planted, yielding a harvest. But then the farmer came to realize that the GMO seeds could not be replanted without paying royalties to Monsanto, Arch Daniel Midland et al. Then, the farmers discovered that the seeds would harvest only if they used the farm inputs including the fertilizer, insecticide and herbicide, produced and distributed by the biotech agribusiness companies. Entire peasant economies were locked into the grip of the agribusiness conglomerates.

With the widespread adoption of GMO seeds, a major transition has occurred in the structure and history of settled agriculture since its inception 10,000 years ago.

The reproduction of seeds at the village level in local nurseries has been disrupted by the use of genetically modified seeds. The agricultural cycle, which enables farmers to store their organic seeds and plant them to reap the next harvest has been broken. This destructive pattern – invariably resulting in famine – is replicated in country after country leading to the Worldwide demise of the peasant economy.

The creation of terminator genes and breeding of food plants that cannot be replanted is a truly evil act. Allowing these companies to dominate our food supply, concentrating on a handful of varieties on a global scale is planetary suicide. Diversity is a life saver when crops fail, as is the ability to save seed from this years crop to plant next year.

Michel Chossudovsky is the author of ‘The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order’ available from Global Research.

In this new and expanded edition of Chossudovsky’s international best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty.

This book is a skilful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically.

In this new enlarged edition –which includes ten new chapters and a new introduction– the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate downsizing and trade liberalisation.

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The Role of Speculators in the Global Food Crisis

By Beat Balzli and Frank Hornig

Biofuels and global warming have been blamed for shortages driving up the price of food, and both trends have played their role. The planet’s grain reserves are almost empty for a number of reasons, including global population growth and greater prosperity in some countries like India. Feed corn is in short supply because industrialized nations have used it for ethanol. Droughts — in Australia, for example — have devastated rice and wheat harvests. Wheat reserves worldwide are only sufficient right now to cover about 60 days of demand.

This helps to explain why commodity prices have rallied since early 2006, with the price of rice ballooning 217 percent, wheat 136 percent, corn 125 percent and soybeans 107 percent.

But classic supply and demand theory offers only a partial explanation. Sudden price hikes since last January have been alarming. The UN estimates that at least $500 million (€312 million) in immediate aid will be needed by May 1 to avoid serious famines. Agricultural scientists at the world body’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have presented a report on the world food crisis. And criticism is growing that hedge funds, index funds, pension funds and investment banks bear part of the blame.

Obvious really. Allowing our food supply to be manipulated by investors is insane – a few people are getting very rich speculating on the price of food, while millions starve. This is capitalism doing what it is best at.

But now speculators are taking advantage of this mechanism. They can buy futures contracts for wheat, for example, at a low price, betting that the price will go up. If the price of the grain rises by the agreed delivery date, they profit.

Some experts now believe these investors have taken over the market, buying futures at unprecedented levels and driving up short-term prices. Since last August, this mechanism has led to a doubling in the price of rice — including the 500,000 tons that the Philippine government plans to buy in early May to address its own shortage.

Greg Warner has worked in the grain wholesaling business for more than two decades. His office sits a block away from the Chicago Futures Exchange. He’s an analyst with the firm AgResource, and he says what is happening now in the wheat market is unprecedented.

“What we normally have is a predictable group of sellers and buyers — mainly farmers and silo operators,” he says. But the landscape has changed since the influx of large index funds. Fund managers seek to maximize their profits using futures contracts, and prices, says Warner, “keep climbing up and up.”

He’s calculated that financial investors now hold the rights to two complete annual harvests of a type of grain traded in Chicago called “soft red winter wheat.”

Wagner is stunned by such developments. He sees them as evidence that capitalism is literally consuming itself.

A recent post from Little Blog in the Woods is calling us all to ACT now. The media is pretty much ignoring the role that speculation in the food markets is having on the price of foodstuffs. We can change this, if enough people draw attention to the immoral activities of investors, making huge profits from betting that food will increase in price (and therefore pushing up those prices).

So. For the first time, I’m going to ask the readers of this blog to DO something. For us all.

Many of the causes of the world food crisis are beyond our immediate reach; we can’t fix global warming this morning.

But one cause is NOT beyond reach. It’s HUGE- and virtually UNRECOGNIZED.

It’s Food “Investment” – otherwise known as- SPECULATION.

Blog reader DC sent in a comment with this link; International Herald Tribune. Even some insiders know it.

The politically engaged population of the US – and the WORLD – does not know it’s there; and do not know that potentially- it could be OUTLAWED. Next week.

It could. Life-critical resources have always been protected from speculation (theoretically!) – it’s an absolute obscenity to sell water to people dying of thirst- the whole species feels that way.

That’s the anger we need to stir; and this post has been written as an introduction to the situation.

So: PLEASE DO THIS:

Do you have a blog? Link to this post. Write about it. Spread it to other blogs. Tell them to read the previous several posts here, too.

In 15 minutes: Email this post to 10 of your contacts who may think as you do. Ask them to pass it on.

Email this post to your legislators; if you know some, personally, send it personally, and ask to talk to them about launching legislation.

Do you have friends in hungry countries? Email them this post- ask them to pass it on. Get them to put it in the hands of their government.

Get this post to your pastor, rabbi, or imam- ask them to turn it into a sermon- and get your congregation RILED.

Do you have contacts in universities? Get this post to activist groups on campuses- get them to work on… DEMONSTRATIONS. There should be THOUSANDS marching down Wall Street, with banners saying-

“MURDERERS!!”

Please join us in bringing this obscene situation into the spotlight. Access to food is a human right, and rich investors should not be allowed to profit from the misery of other people. The internet is a great medium for enabling ordinary people to spread information – do you have a blog or a website? Please publish something about the role speculation is having on world food prices. Spread the word.

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Article on Alternet, by Raj Patel.

Raj, talk about coffee.

The price of coffee is absolutely a function of the way the food system works today. If you look at the path that coffee takes from the field to our cups, you will see that the farmers get paid a pittance. The processors get paid a little bit more, sort of twenty, thirty cents a kilo. The grain exporters get paid a little bit more, sort of fifty, sixty cents a kilo. But by the time it gets processed and turned into instant coffee, it’s nearer $30 a kilo. And the people who make the most money out of that process are the coffee processors, the big international coffee traders, companies like Nestle, for example. And that’s indicative of the way the food system works in general.

I mean, if you imagine a sort of hourglass, at the top there are the millions of farmers who grow the food that we eat, and at the bottom there are billions of us consumers, and in the middle there are just a handful of corporations that mediate between the people who grow our food and us. And those corporations, in many cases — it’s usually four corporations controlling more than 50 percent of the market. I mean, in tea, for example, one company, Unilever, controls 90 percent of the market.

Now, when you’re in that position of market power, you’re able to do a great deal. First, you’re able to drive prices down for farmers. And of course the irony there is that farmers and farm workers are the poorest people on the planet. So you’re paying the poorest people on the planet the least. And then you’re processing the food so that what we end up with is food that is rich in salts and fats and sugars, food that tends to make us want to buy more, food that makes us obese. And that’s why you’re having a situation where there are six billion people in the world, a billion of whom are now overweight.

Raj Patel is the author of ‘Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System’.

Soy. Can you talk about soy?

Soy is the ingredient — I mean, it’s weird. It’s the perfect crop in so many ways. It’s rich in proteins. It’s great for the soil. It’s really robust. But because the way that we grow soy is through industrial agriculture and monoculture, that process of growing it takes these biological virtues and turns them into social ills. Soy is now in three-quarters of everything — of processed foods on the supermarket shelves and in almost everything that the fast-food industry brings us. Now, soy is — and it’s in these foods because it’s very flexible. It can be used as a vegetable oil. It can be used as an emulsifier. It can be used as an additive in meat, for example.

But the trouble is, of course, that a lot of the soy that’s grown in the world comes from Brazil. Brazil is, by some measures, the world’s largest soy exporter. And those soy plantations have been encroaching on the Brazilian cerrado and also on the rainforest. Soy farmers are going into the rainforest, chopping it down and growing soy. And worse yet, Brazil is home to, according to the International Labour Organization, home to 50,000 slaves, slaves who work on soy plantations, and also the majority work in biofuels plantations and sugarcane plantations. And it’s through the exploitation of these people that we’re able to have cheap meat, that we’re able to have these sort of food additives that shave a couple of cents off the price of our food. So, yeah, I mean, that — soy becomes emblematic of everything that’s wrong about the way we produce food and offers hope about the way we might reconnect to food in a different way.

How have we been hoodwinked into allowing a few corporations to own and control the food supply of billions of people? Anyone who has ever grown any food will tell you that there is a huge difference between something freshly picked from the garden, and the sorry excuse for food sold in supermarkets. Industrial food makes us ill, wastes water and energy, requires pesticides and fertilisers that poison the soil and water, and centralises power in the hands of a few directors and shareholders of huge faceless corporations. Think about what you eat, and the implications – and of course, what will you be eating as oil runs out?

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Whatever your feelings about the invasion of Iraq or American foreign policy generally, this movie will shock you. From day one in Iraq the Bush administration has ignored advisors, cut corners, and done everything possible to alienate and anger the Iraqi population.

The first film of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq’s descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality and anarchy, NO END IN SIGHT is a jaw-dropping, insider’s tale of wholesale incompetence, recklessness and venality. Based on over 200 hours of footage, the film provides a candid retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials such as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine (in charge of Baghdad during the Spring of 2003), Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, and General Jay Garner (in charge of the occupation of Iraq through May 2003) as well as Iraqi civilians, American soldiers, and prominent analysts. NO END IN SIGHT examines the manner in which the principal errors of U.S. policy – the use of insufficient troop levels, allowing the looting of Baghdad, the purging of professionals from the Iraqi government, and the disbanding of the Iraqi military – largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today. How did a group of men with little or no military experience, knowledge of the Arab world or personal experience in Iraq come to make such flagrantly debilitating decisions? NO END IN SIGHT dissects the people, issues and facts behind the Bush Administration’s decisions and their consequences on the ground to provide a powerful look into how arrogance and ignorance turned a military victory into a seemingly endless and deepening nightmare of a war.

Or, perhaps, this is exactly how Bush and his buddies wanted it to play out. Chaos for the people of Iraq as an excuse for the US troops to stay there, while US/UK corporations make millions from the rebuilding of the country and Iraq’s oil is well and truly in the control of the USA. Can the US/UK governments really be that incompetent , or is it all part of the plan?

http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/ 

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I am referring a lot of callers to review some of the data found on this blog, and therefore, am going to state some things here that might be “old ground” for regular readers, but need to put refreshed near the top of this blog. It is my opinion that the “trigger events” leading up to global food shortages have now occurred. There are many reasons for this, but I base this opinion on the news articles now being reported around the world. Even the U.S. media if finally, if belatedly getting on board. It is also my opinion that this situation is far more extreme then most people can rightly imagine. I say “rightly” because there is nothing in their experience that would tell them otherwise. In short, based on all of the information I have attempted to assimilate, we are facing famine in many parts of the world and food shortages and unbelievably high prices in America. This situation is beginning to take notice in the public eye and is causing a huge upsurge in demand for food products. Not only food, but survival gear of all types, candles, seeds, solar power, fuel storage and anything and everything else you can think of. This panic alone has caused every supplier in the country to be overwhelmed with orders. Personally, I have updated my shipping times page at least three or maybe even four times in the last week alone. Presently, we are over 1 month out on all products and longer on some products, such as Alpine Aire. Every cannery in the country has been overwhelmed, most are sold out and are scrambling for new supplies. This is not uncommon for this industry. We ship out many tons of food per week as an industry, I don’t have the exact figures, but it’s quite a lot. Even so, there are only a handful of canneries like my suppliers in the entire country. We cannot handle even 1% of the population. We cannot handle even 1/10 of 1% of the population if they were all to order. This is unfortunate, but true. Many of us have been in this business for a very long time, my main supplier has been doing this for over 50 years for example. Me, over 13 years now. I’ve “seen this before”, but because of the news on global food supplies, resource depletion, energy stocks, fuel stocks, increased population and global resource demands that are spiraling clear out of site — I’ve never seen it like this. Nor do I ever expect to see it like this again. In other words — this is the ‘event’ all have been wondering about and some of us have been waiting for. We are now in a permanent downard resource depletion spiral of gargantuan proportions. The world news has reported that without record breaking crops every single year from here on out we are facing famine. This is not my opinion, this is the assessment of researchers and scientists. More research and scientific reports have been pouring in all of last year and this year. Few Americans seem to be aware of their significance. Global climate change is real, the world will be ice free in Arctic in just a few more years, this will cause gigantic and massive crop failures all over the world, low land flooding, sea level rises and huge number of global refugees pouring forth from inundated lands. Increased hurricane severity, drought and even flooding in many areas is also anticipated by scientist and climatologists. This is already happening, I cannot stress this enough. In addition, the energy crisis is quite severe and getting worse. Not a single significant discovery of oil has been found to my knowledge that will last more then six months at the present world consumption rates. Food = oil, and all the energy and fertilizer inputs in-between. Without cheap energy, we will never produce even a fraction of the food we produce today. This all by itself, discounting the effects of climate change, have doomed our future chances of survival by a very huge percentage. As a guess, at least 50% of all human life on earth will suffer quite dramatically as our energy supplies become increasingly scarce and expensive and our ability to produce food plummets. This will mostly affect the developed countries in various and sundry ways. Our modern agriculture industry is already suffering under these conditions. Some farmers cannot afford the fertilizers due to it’s high costs. Much of our existing farmland has been plowed under to make room for biofuel crops. These crops, like corn, is being converted into bioethanol for our automobiles. This has caused a huge upsurge in price and global food shortages, along with food riots in some countries. In addition, countries like China and India have increased their demand rather significantly for food products and energy. Their populations dwarf the United States many times over. This and all these other conditions has helped contribute to the wildly fluctuating food prices on the world markets. By now, you should have noticed that you are paying about twice as much for food in the supermarket as you did one or two years ago. Not every single product has doubled, but it will. It will because it is all a downstream output of cheap energy, which is no longer cheap and not easily replaced. Not a single alternative energy source “discovery” or invention has the capability to produce the cheap and abundant energy that petroleum offered. Despite the hype and so-called ‘promises’ we’ve all seen, you should take special notice of the fact that none of them have come to market in ways which are even remotely impacting our global energy consumption. Most alternative energy efforts are actually bogus, mostly smoke and mirrors and they do not remotely come close to paying for themselves in reasonable time frames. Investigative articles and research on this blog and in magazines such as Mother Earth News, Backwoods Home and others have revealed that converting to solar or wind energy has payback times in decades. Not everyone believes this, so do your own research and convince yourself. The point is — we do not have any other cheap, plentiful resources to convert to energy. Not sunshine, not wind, not methane hydrates, not nuclear, not anything. This will all mean the energy — and all of its downstream ‘outputs’ will cost more and more and more as time goes on. Many countries are already going dark — and I mean “lights out” as their powerplants shut down for a lack of fuel. The fuel they use is natural gas, coal and petroleum. They simply cannot find nor buy the fuel that they need to keep their power on. This situation is growing around the world. In addition to this, we have many other factors in the world now taking place. Global resource depletion is severe and getting worse as populations keep growing. Our fisheries are in collapse in most if not all locations around the world, our levels of pollution, acidification and debris that we are causing in the world’s oceans is unbelievably bad. There are continental sized trash heaps now floating in the Pacific Ocean for example. Coral reefs and mangrove forest, home to the breeding ground for many fish species are in a state of collapse throughout most of the world. We have overfished and depleted most of the wild ‘table fish’ stocks throughout the world. Ocean trawlers, in demand for global food supplies, are literally scraping the bottom of the ocean ‘barrel’ in attempts to meet world demand for fish products, going farther and farther out and are now found in some of the deep parts of the oceans, having already scrapped clean everything else. Over 40% of the world depends on the worlds oceans for protein sources. There is absolutely no doubt that this cannot continue as fisheries collapse. Moreover, attempts at aquaculture to meet world food demand has actually hurt the world’s wild fish populations and is contributing to the depletion of game fish throughout the world. It gets worse. Topsoil losses are already severe throughout the world and the cause for flooding, mudslides and reduced crop losses. Without the heavy application of fertilizers, a petroleum based product, current crop productions are simply not possible. Top soil depletion and salinization (salts) is already the cause in countries like Australia for significantly reduced harvest. Other countries are actually dealing with starvation as a result. Drought is also now found throughout 1/3 of the entire globe and is also behind much of the severe food production drops. Drought is caused by many factors, including global climate change as our ice caps melt. Drought and the lack of fresh water will ultimately be the #1 factor facing most of humanity as our planet warms up. The IPCC has constantly changed its estimates time and time again as it scrambles to record and update its data on global climate change. What was expected to take 100 years is now thought to take as little as 10. We are in serious, serious trouble and I’ve not even covered all of the factors and effects yet. There’s more. Sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic is melting at an unbelievable rate. This is causing huge amounts of fresh water to dump into the oceans changing it’s chemical composition and makeup. Greenland and other sources, such as the glaciers found all over the world are fast disappearing at unbelievable rates. Gigantic sized “moulins” the size of Niagra Falls have opened up in the ice, dumping huge quantities of water into the ocean and below the ice itself. There is a very real possibility that entire sections of glacier the size of entire states could be floated right off into the ocean. In some place, the glaciers are already gone, forcing entire villages and towns to relocate in an effort to find drinking water. The same is occurring now in the Antarctic too. Huge near continental size ice shelves are cracking and breaking off from the Antarctic ice sheet. The rate at which this is happening is very frightening to climatologist because it signals an irreversible trend that bodes serious danger for all life on earth. This fresh water “dump” is contributing to the global climate change in several ways. The natural currents found in the oceans themselves are changing or even stopping. England for example is facing the effect of the North Atlantic current (thermholine) right now as its climate changes. Plankton are dying in huge numbers, a absolutely critical food element at the very bottom of the food chain. All life in the ocean is dependent upon this. Jellyfish are dramatically increasing as they take over new niches in the ocean sea life as natural predators are eliminated. The salinity of the oceans are changing, taking with it everything we’ve come to know and rely upon as the world’s ice continues to melt. Ice also causes an albedo effect (reflection), less ice means less reflection and the planet heats up even more. Also, frozen in the Siberian permafrost is methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas. Just a few degrees more of warming will cause billions and billions of tons of greenhouse gas to “burp” out into the atmosphere, a exceedingly dangerous tipping point that will push our planet headlong into accelerated and irreversible warming. The Amazon rain forest is in severe peril from over-logging and the practice of slash and burn to open up farmland. Huge tracts of land (80,000 acres per day) are being wiped out to grow “temporary crops” that deplete the soil in less then 3 years, irreversibly depleting the soil and leaving a dry savanna behind. As the lungs of the Earth, the loss of the most critical biohabitat on the planet will have absolutely huge effects on all life on earth, including us. Rain forest contain most of the worlds species of all life forms and help clean the air, absorbing gases like carbon dioxide and create oxygen. Without the world’s rain forests – we will all die. It is my opinion, and that of many other world renown and respected scientist and researchers, that we have already passed many tipping points. In other words, it will only get worse, as we and our children deal with all of these effects. IN fact, it is expected to get much, much worse. How much worse? We are already facing the near-extinction of human life on planet Earth. Within the next 100 years, billions of humans will die by other then natural causes. Most will die violent deaths or die by slow starvation, dehydration, disease, pandemics or war. This is exactly what the Pentagon has predicted in a secret report suppressed by the Bush Administration. Already, the world’s military powers and their governments are orchestrating themselves to commandeer the world’s remaining resources. This is exactly what the U.S. did in Iraq and exactly what is now occurring in the Arctic. The demand for energy, food, water, soil and a habitable climate will be (and already is) so great that nations will war against other nations as they fight over the scraps that are now left. We have entered into a time where we have consumed too much, too quickly and created anthropogenic climate change (human caused) and it is neither reversible, or stoppable at this point. We utterly failed to listen to the warning that were given decades back, and now it really is too late. Even the so-called Green movement or sustainability movement cannot stop this. It’s simply not possible anymore because of the tipping points we have already passed on population, pollution, energy, resource destruction, resource consumption and global climate change. These things are all our fault, they were caused by humans. There are other factors at work such as increased solar energy from the sun, but these have been broadly discounted as being the only factors that have caused the effects I have described. Almost everything now happening today can be directly attributed to human activity on Earth. In essence, life as we know it is actually over. From this point on, we will decline. The meaning and the significance of this statement ought to be as well understood as we can allow. We have killed the planet as we knew it and what we have required and needed to sustain ourselves. We could have lived here indefinitely, but we didn’t. In the process, we have overpopulated the world with billions and billions of people that we can no longer feed, no longer provide enough medicine to, no longer properly clothe, house or even protect. It simply is not possible or desirable for us to go on doing what we’ve done before, because this is in fact, the root cause of all of these problems. Starvation and war are already a way of life in many third-world countries. Most Americans have grown up and become accustomed to this, never really realizing exactly why this has happened. At the very core of these conflicts, is resource depletion. Humans demanded too much, too soon and have suffered as a result. There are many other factors of course, but they all trace to a source issue and that issue is how humans have behaved on and towards this planet we call home. Where we are at today, and how we got there, and what we can do about any of it is the real issue. It is my opinion that we can do little about any of it because the tipping points described above and their causes are now decades old. This is not something that “just happened” or happened even recently, this is something that was caused decades back, but it has taken this long for these effects to show themselves with our present levels of severity. Our present “effects” are almost totally unknown, but we can easily see how they could be worse since there are now so many more of us (at least 2 – 3 times the number). This also means that the future effects will be significantly worse, which is exactly what is being predicted by climate scientists, research analysts and even investigative efforts by the Pentagon and many other sources. All of the “above” has been based upon published data and reports and none of it is hearsay or wild speculation. Many Americans have never heard such things and many that do, simply do not believe them, or do not want to. There is very high levels of rampant and ridiculous denial taking place because what this all signifies is that life on Earth as we know it is over. This is all true. It is over and we are about to find this out. Denial does not make any of this go away. Denial only means that you choose death over life, because that is what is really at issue here — your life. The planetary effects are already underway and unstoppable, immutable and utterly indifferent to your denial. The only thing you can change is yourself and what you alone are willing to do about it. It is my opinion that there is indeed, very little that you can do. Underlying all of these issues is the human-centric that does not want to change. Even if you change, would it be enough? In a word — No, most definitely not. Like voting, your one vote doesn’t even matter, making you simply a part of something that is much, much bigger then yourself. A lifestyle change now will not change the outcome I have described. But irregardless of this, if you intend to survive this coming catastrophe, you will still need to change. It is the only option any of us have. Therefore, I suggest you seriously consider these things with the utmost urgency. This is not “news” to some people, but it may indeed be news to you. Normal reactions are anger, denial, numbness and apathy. This is, believe it or not, part of the process of you assimilating this information. I suggest you don’t stay in any one stage too long, because you do not have time to dink around with this. You need time to assimilate, but you also need time to do what you can, while you still can. Either you will resign yourself to this message, or you will discard it out of hand. The choice is yours. Resignation means that you can now move forward in your life and start figuring out what you intend to do about it. No rescue or plan is forthcoming from the powers-that-be (government) despite the empty promises and rhetoric they are all known for. This is something you alone are going to be responsible for, and it is entirely up to you and nobody else what you intend to do about it. The mainstream media is only reporting a fraction of this news. This is unfortunate, but true. The American media is one of the most highly controlled and censored news sources on Earth. You can use the Internet to dig for information on all of these points if you like, or you can simply read all the sources linked on this and other blogs. Whatever you do, get information and get it now. You can choose to resign yourself to your future fate, or you can choose to take responsibility for your life. I cannot sum this up any other way. I have attempted to keep this blog entry short so that you will read it — and take actions for your life. The choice is yours. There is a tremendous amount of information on this site to help you out. Read it.

Reprinted from Survival Acres blog. We are at the beginning of the end of ‘life as we know it’. As the above article states, there is nothing that we as individuals can do to avert the huge impending disaster. But the longer we live in denial, and attempt to continue with ‘business as usual’, the harder it will be on humans and the natural world. Organic self-sufficiency & local mutual aid is the only way to attempt to preserve our lives, communities and families. The global economic system is doing its utmost to make human life impossible on this planet – if we are lucky that economic system will implode (perhaps with a little help!), leaving us in peace to face the consequences of 100 years of industrial civilisation.
Please, do your research, realise that the corporate media cannot afford to tell the truth, and when you (as quickly as possible) have gotten over your rage, get busy. There is so much for most of us to learn and do.

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Water is the essence of life, sustaining every being on this planet. Without water, there would simply be no plants, no animals, and no people. But the global water supply isn’t just at risk, it’s already in crisis.

FLOW: For Love Of Water, a new film by Irena Salina, highlights the local intimacies of an emerging global catastrophe: African plumbers reconnect shantytown water pipes under cover of darkness to ensure a community’s survival; a Californian scientist forces awareness of shockingly toxic public water sources; a ‘Big Water’ CEO argues privatization is the wave of the future; a “Water Guru” in India sparks new community water initiatives in hundreds of villages; a Canadian author uncovers the corporate profiteering that drives global water business.

With an unflinching focus on politics, pollution and human rights, FLOW: For Love of Water ensures that the precarious relationship between humanity and water can no longer be ignored. While specifics of locality and issue may differ, the message is the same; water, and our future as a species, is quickly drying up. Armed with a thirst for survival, people around the world are fighting for their birthright; unless we instigate change, we face a world in which only those that can pay for their water will survive. FLOW: For Love of Water, is a catalyst for people everywhere: the time has come to turn the tide and we can’t wait any longer.

http://flowthefilm.com

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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)

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Worldwide, the prices of staple foods have been increasing drastically. Survival Acres has done some research on food price increases over the past 12 months:

The ranges listed below are price increase for the large container sizes (bags or buckets) from 2007 to 2008 (only 1 year):

Hard Red Wheat 58% – 76%
Hard White Wheat 58% – 85%
Corn Whole Yellow 42% – 82%
Alfalfa Sprout Seeds 31% – 48%
Great Northern 16% – 32%
Potato Slices 20% – 24%
Brown Rice 10% – 29%
White Rice 13% – 27%
Eggs Mix 29% – 33%
Rye 17% – 36%
Lentils 22% – 33%
Soy Beans 17% – 24%
Ezekiel Mix 20% – 24%
Pearl Barley 37%
Flax 44% – 54%
Golden Flax 18% – 28%
1 Year, 1 Person, 66 #10 cans 25%
1 Year Basic Food Storage, 13 SP Buckets 69%
All Purpose Flour 59% – 72%
Bakers Flour 54% – 65%
Unbleached Flour 59% – 72%
Whole Wheat Flour 59% – 88%
Apple Slices 44% – 51%
Banana Slices 19% – 27%
7 Grain Mix 32% – 45%
9 Grain Cracked Cereal 36% – 56%
Kamut 17% – 25%
Buttermilk Powder 42% – 53%
Instant Milk 44% – 96%
Regular non fat Milk 24% – 31%
Oats Groats 25%
Quick Rolled Oats 19% – 25%
Regular Rolled Oats 19% – 25%
Peas Split Green 23% – 35%
Peas Whole Green 25% – 30%
Peas Whole Green 25%
Popcorn 25% – 29%
Potato Completely Supreme 24% – 38%
Potato Dices 13% – 23%
Potato Flakes 17% – 26%
Potato Hashbrowns 28% – 41%
Potato Slices 20% – 25%

Original article here.

Why is food going up in price so much, and what should we expect?

Peak Oil. Civilisations industrial agriculture relies on oil on every level of the growing,
harvesting, processing & transport. So, obviously as peak oil hits and the price of oil increases, all energy intensive foods increase in price with it. And yet the mainstream media still rarely mentions peak oil, and most people in the west do not yet realise that their food and the whole supermarket shopping experience relies so much on oil. Peak oil, to many, implies increased prices at the petrol pump, not realising that we are heading into an era of peak everything.

Climate change & water shortages. Erratic weather and water supply difficulties have caused crop failures throughout the world. This is also driving up the price of foods, and leading to famine in several parts of the globe.

Here is a website listing some of the failures:

http://home.att.net/~thehessians/newcropreport.html 

Biofuels. Probably the craziest idea ever – ‘hey we are running out of petrol, lets use the worlds food to make buifuels!’. Western industrial countries are attempting to continue as ‘business as usual’ filling their petrol tanks with ethanol or biodeisel, leaving food shortages in many poorer regions. Some are calling biofuels genocide.

Last year, he said, US farmers distorted the world market for cereals by growing 14m tonnes, or 20% of the whole maize crop, for ethanol for vehicles. This took millions of hectares of land out of food production and nearly doubled the price of maize. Mr Bush this year called for steep rises in ethanol production as part of plans to reduce petrol demand by 20% by 2017.

Maize is a staple food in many countries which import from the US, including Japan, Egypt, and Mexico. US exports are 70% of the world total, and are used widely for animal feed. The shortages have disrupted livestock and poultry industries worldwide.

“The use of food as a source of fuel may have serious implications for the demand for food if the expansion of biofuels continues,” said a spokesman for the International Monetary Fund last week.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/03/food.climatechange

“I think that cheap food is history,” he says.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6481029.stm

http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/

Demand. There are simply too many people relying on industrial agriculture for their food. Cheap abundant energy in the form of petroleum has allowed the human population to overshoot. Conservative estimates are that, without oil, the planet at most can sustain 2 billion humans – obviously far fewer if they expect to consume resources at the rate that americans do. More and more people are being pushed off their land and subsistance agriculture, into cities. Turning self sufficient peasants into dependent consumers. This drive needs to be reversed and quickly.

The price of industrial food is unlikely to stop rising. People need to start switching from consumerism, and start producing food crops locally. Industrial food relies on only a handfull of crops, and only a few varieties of each. This is another disaster waiting to happen, and with changing climate patterns, serious diseases are more likely to attack the vast monocultures.
Permaculture and the diversity of crops it encourages is far more productive, safer from bugs and diseases, and far healthier. Even if you are wealthy enough to contiue buying your foods from the corporations, you will find that food grown organically and locally is far tastier & nutritious.

The present challenges to the global food industry opens up opportunities for widespread support for agroforestry, permaculture, city farms etc. The future will be pretty unpleasant, but if we dont get busy now to create a different society based on cooperation, localisation, direct democracy and small scale agriculture it will be even more unpleasant. Countries like Cuba and Venzuela are leading the way with land reform, a refusal to allow huge corporations to strip mine society and an emphasis on organic local agriculture.

In the near future it may be that if you dont have veg growing in your garden you simply 
wont be eating. This is how it is for many of the worlds poorest people (until they get forced off to make way for cash crop monocultures).

Famine in the West is a thought provoking book on the subject, available from here.

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It is hard to shock journalists and at the same time leave them in awe of the power of nature. A group returning from a helicopter trip flying over, then landing on, the Greenland ice cap at the time of maximum ice melt last month were shaken. One shrugged and said, “It is too late already.”What they were all talking about was the moulins, not one moulin but hundreds, possibly thousands. “Moulin” is a word I had only just become familiar with. It is the name for a giant hole in a glacier through which millions of gallons of melt water cascade through to the rock below. The water has the effect of lubricating the glaciers so they move at three times the rate that they did previously.

Some of these moulins in Greenland are so big that they run on the scale of Niagra Falls. The scientists who accompanied these journalists on the trip were almost as alarmed. That is pretty significant because they are world experts on ice and Greenland in particular.

http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3997

Some scientists are now predicting that seas may rise by up to 7 metres by 2013. And still the powers that be are seeking to continue with business as usual. This whole industrial civilisation needs to stop NOW. It impoverishes the lives of almost all it touches, turning human animals into wage slaves to the machine and nonhuman animals and forest, oceans, landscapes into ‘resources’ and then barren, dead wastelands….

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