In between the reports of economic downturn, recession, depression and the usual banality of the mainstream media, more and more reports are appearing related to food problems. Worlwide grain harvests are down, grain stocks are at an all time low, poor people are struggling to buy food – some are blaming their governments and protesting/rioting, governments are restricting food exports, the west is using food as biofuels (outpricing those who simply seek to eat), and petrol prices are skyrocketing, pushing the price of practically everything up, up, up.
Because the media is almost entirely owned and controlled by those who gain the most from the status quo, you still have to be paying pretty close attention to notice that there is even a problem, but the news is filtering through. Globalisation and the centralisation of the world’s food and seed supply may be a stupid idea, making a few people very rich and powerful, while engineering a world where most of us are reduced to consumers with little or no control over our food supply, but unfortunately those same few people also own and control most of the news media.
A recent counterpunch article tells us of rioting in Haiti, Egypt and potentially 33 other countries, as well as touching on the plight of poor US citizens.
But just as agribusiness wiped out small U.S. farmers in the 1980s, it has repeated this pattern around the world ever since. As global justice activist Vandana Shiva wrote in 2006, in India “without market regulation agribusiness corporations will make profits selling costly seeds, buying cheap farm produce, and locking farmers in debt. This has been the process by which the small family farmer has disappeared in U.S.A, Argentina, Europe.”
Another article, ‘not so quiet food riots’ from the daily reckoning, talks about food price increases and riots.
The big problem with inflation is that people get low blood sugar when they are hungry, and soon their moods turn sour. I know this for a fact because if breakfast or brunch or lunch or coffee break or dinner or any snack is five minutes late, I involuntarily turn into a screaming monster from hell demanding to know who stole my food and vowing bloody revenge. I can only imagine the anger when hunger is caused because someone can’t afford to buy food!
This “inability to buy food” is one of the problems with inflation, and that ugliness is now here, as we read from Bloomberg.com that “The World Bank in Washington says 33 nations from Mexico to Yemen may face ‘social unrest’ after food and energy costs increased for six straight years.” Hahaha! No kidding?
Even the NY Times is talking about the world food crisis (under ‘opinion’), suggesting that biofuels are a bad idea.
Washington provides a subsidy of 51 cents a gallon to ethanol blenders and slaps a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on imports. In the European Union, most countries exempt biofuels from some gas taxes and slap an average tariff equal to more than 70 cents a gallon of imported ethanol. There are several reasons to put an end to these interventions. At best, corn ethanol delivers only a small reduction in greenhouse gases compared with gasoline. And it could make things far worse if it leads to more farming in forests and grasslands. Rising food prices provide an urgent argument to nix ethanol’s supports.
Commondreams.org talks about global hunger hotspots, and has some analysis of the causes:
“What is not being mentioned is that in the last few decades liberalisation of agriculture, dismantling of state-run institutions like marketing boards, and specialisation of developing countries in exportable cash crops such as coffee, cocoa, cotton, and even flowers has been encouraged by international financial institutions backed by rich countries like the United States, and also by the European Union,” she pointed out.
Mittal said these reforms have driven the poorest countries into a downward spiral. “Removal of tariff barriers has allowed a handful of Northern countries to capture Third World markets by dumping heavily subsidised commodities while undermining local food production,” she said.
The Wall St Journal, again under ‘opinion’ attempts to look at the situation, but does not recognise the huge impact that climate change is having on harvests.
And the New York Times tells us that ‘Finance Ministers Emphasize Food Crisis Over Credit Crisis‘ – at least someone is paying attention!
The world’s economic ministers declared on Sunday that shortages and skyrocketing prices for food posed a potentially greater threat to economic and political stability than the turmoil in capital markets.
The ministers, conferring in the shadow of a slumping American economy that threatens to pull down the economies of other countries, turned their attention to the food crisis and called on the wealthiest countries to fulfill pledges to help prevent starvation and disorder in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Things are pretty damn bad in many parts of the world, and getting worse – it is imperative that we start accepting that the days of cheap abundant fuel are over (we cant afford to keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, and polluting/poisoning our world anyway) and each and every one of us start changing our lives. Forget supermarkets – start learning how to grow veg, co-operate with your neighbours, and preserve your produce for the winter months. Lets face it – we have been conned into dependency, and encouraged to overshoot the earths carrying capacity by many times. A lot of people are going to die. Its a fact, hard to swallow, but fact. But our actions now will define what kind of future the survivors and our decendants will live in.
Biofuels, bigger monoculture farms, and all the rest of the rubbish sold to us as solutions so we can carry on living wasteful, toxic lifestyles as wage slaves, are not the answer. Local solutions, to local problems, local people providing their local needs in a responsible way with local resources.
What are you doing? We’d love to here from you, and share your ideas and your local projects with our readers. Many people are no doubt, after reading this website, very scared for the future – if you are taking practical action in your community, drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you any news or information to help inspire others to start making a better world.
