THE FOOD CRISIS thread 08'

[Mech]

This thread is about the planned food scarcity, price gouging,...as well as how prices are being manipulated by both the market...and by the demand for Biofuels....that takes food out of the mouths of people.

[Mech]

US Food Riots Much
Closer Than You Think

From Robert Felix
Reprinted With Permission
IceAgeNow.com

10-23-7

Recently, I said "we'll be fighting in the streets for food long before we're buried in ice."
I say the same thing in my book Not by Fire but by Ice.

I just received an email from a reader that sums it up better than I did...


"I spent about thirty years working in commercial agribusiness. My main job was to purchase ingredients, mainly grain, for flour mills and animal feed mills. As a part of my job, I was forced to understand the US food supply system, its strengths and weaknesses. Over the years, I became aware of some things that nearly all Americans are completely unaware of. I am going to make a list of statements and then you will see where I'm going.

-- 1% of the US population grows all of the food for all Americans.

-- Nearly all Americans know essentially nothing about where the food they eat every day comes from. How it gets from the ground to them. And they don't want to know about it. It's cheap, as close as their local store, and of high quality. So no worries.

-- The bulk of the food we eat comes from grain. Although they raise a lot of fruits and vegetables in California, Arizona, Florida, Oregon and Washington, those things don't compose the main part of the average diet. Half of what a meat animal is raised on is grain so when you eat meat you are really eating grain. And, of course, we eat grain directly as bread, bagels, doughnuts, pasta, etc. Milk (and milk products like cheese) comes from cows that eat grain. A lot of grain. And the grain they eat is not produced where the cows are located.

-- The lion's share of grain produced in the US is done in a concentrated part of the US Midwest (Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri is the center of this area). The grain is moved to the coasts (where 70% of the population live) by only TWO (2) railroads.

-- Nothing is stored for very long in a supermarket. One day grain travels (by rail) from Kansas to Seattle to a flour mill. The next day the flour mill makes the flour and sends it to a bakery. The next day the bakery makes it into bread (and other baked things) and the next day it is at the store where it is purchased that day. Nobody stores anything. The grain is produced and stored in the Midwest and shipped daily in a single railroad pipeline to the rest of America where the people live.

-- Up until the 1980s there was a system that stored a lot of grain in elevators around the country. At one time, a whole year's harvest of grain was stored that way. But since taxpayers were paying to store it, certain urban politicians engineered the movement of that money from providing a safety net or backup for their own food supply in order to give the money to various other social welfare things. So now, nothing is stored. We produce what we consume each year and store practically none of it. There is no contingency plan.

Now for my take on what this means for us and what it has to do with the topic you are publicizing.

-- If a drought such as has lingered over other parts of the US where little grain is grown were to move over the grain-producing states in the Midwest where few people live, it
would seriously damage the food supply of the country and the apples of Washington, the lettuce of California, the grapefruit of Florida and the peanuts of Georgia won't make up the difference because grain is the staff of life and most of it is grown in the Midwest.

-- Americans are armed to the teeth. In LA people burned down their own neighborhoods to protest a court case.

-- In order for riots to break out the whole food supply doesn't have to be wiped out. It just has to be threatened sufficiently. When people realize their vulnerability and the fact that there is no short term solution to a severe enough drought in the Midwest they will have no clue as to what they should do. Other nations can't make up the difference because no other nation has a surplus of grain in good times let alone in times when they are having droughts and floods also. It takes two or three months to raise grain, yet people have to eat usually at least once a day, usually more than that.

--So, basically, we have in place a recipe for a disaster that will dwarf any other localized disasters imaginable. The important thing to note is that there is no solution for this event. There is no contingency plan for this. People living in certain parts of the US will fare better than others (which is another story) but those who live in big cities, where most of the US population live, are done for.

Anyway, I have no agenda of my own concerning this. I just thought I'd share it with someone who appears to have an idea of what might likely cause this scenario to occur. The only people who know about this are those who are involved in the production and distribution of the food supply and there are very, very few of them number-wise. And most of them haven't put two and two together yet, either.


* * *

When I asked the reader for permission to publish this,
I received this reply:

I'm not interested in notoriety about this. It's just something I know about.

It's likely too late for the government to do anything to prepare for such an event, so it probably won't do any good to try to lobby them for a solution. I guess if they hopped right on it they could store up enough grain to be ready but they won't. They're more concerned with urban political issues and helping (or invading -ed) other countries than they are about preserving the security of their own food supply. I guess the people who could make it happen have bunkers or something they can hide in when the 's' hits the fan.

[Mech]

April 08, 2008

Stuffed and Starved: As Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe, Raj Patel Details “The Hidden Battle for the World Food System”

Global food prices have risen dramatically, adding a new level of danger to the crisis of world hunger. In Africa, food riots have swept across the continent, with recent protests in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania and Senegal. In most of West Africa, the price of food has risen by 50 percent—in Sierra Leone, 300 percent. In the United States there has been a 41 percent surge in prices for wheat, corn, rice and other cereals over the past six months. We speak with Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.

www.democracynow.org/2008/4/8/stuffed_and_starved_as_food_riots

[Mech]

Brazil's Lula: food riots are wake-up call

* Reuters
* , Wednesday April 16 2008


By Raymond Colitt

BRASILIA, April 16 (Reuters) - Foods riots in Haiti and elsewhere are a wake-up call for the world to fight harder against poverty and reduce agricultural trade barriers, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Wednesday.
"It was necessary to watch dramatic scenes for the international community to wake up to the urgency of finding a definitive solution to the challenge of poverty," Lula said during a lunch with visiting Indian President Pratibha Patil.
Protests in Haiti over high prices for rice, beans and other staples ousted the government on Saturday.
Rising food prices showed that the world "was poorly equipped to face and solve the worst evil of our times," namely hunger, Lula said.
Food riots also underlined the need for an agreement in the so-called Doha round of global trade negotiations, Lula said. Rich countries need to reduce farms subsidies and trade barriers to allow poor countries to generate income with food exports, Lula said on Wednesday during a conference of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization in Brasilia.
Either the world solves the unfair trade system, or "every time there's unrest like in Haiti, we adopt emergency measures and send a little bit of food to temporarily ease hunger."
If Europe doesn't open its market to farm imports, "someone will have to assume the historic responsibility," Lula warned.
Across the globe, bread, milk and other foods have become more expensive, fueling inflation in some countries.
Patil, whose 3-day visit to Brazil was her first foreign trip since taking office last year, praised Lula's flagship social welfare program "Zero Hunger."
Experts blamed price increases on strong Asian demand, adverse climate in some producer countries and increased use of corn to produce fuel in the United States.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization warned this week during a conference in Brasilia that rising prices threatened to increase malnutrition in Latin America.
(For more stories on global food price rises, please see www.reuters.com/news/globalcoverage/agflation)

[Mech]

UN to step up food aid for Haiti following riots over prices

By CARLEY PETESCH – 1 day ago

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — United Nations programs will distribute 8,000 tons of food and other help for Haitians in coming days as part of efforts to confront unrest over rising prices that set off recent rioting, officials said Thursday.

U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas said food provided by the World Food Program will focus on children, pregnant women and nursing mothers in the north, west and central regions of Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Anger over surging food prices has threatened stability in the Caribbean nation, which has long been haunted by chronic hunger. Haitian lawmakers fired Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis over the rioting.

Mamadou Bah, spokesman for the U.N. country team in Haiti, said the 8,000 tons are available stock and will be distributed over the next two months starting Thursday.

The U.N. Children's Fund will double its child feeding program to combat malnutrition and spend some $1.6 million on water and sanitation projects in the northwest and Artibonite regions, Montas said.

Globally, food prices have risen 40 percent since mid-2007.

Haiti is particularly affected because it imports nearly all of its food, including more than 80 percent of its rice. Once productive farmland has been abandoned as farmers struggle to grow crops in soil devastated by erosion, deforestation, flooding and tropical storms.

Protests and looting in Port-au-Prince left at least seven dead last week, including a Nigerian officer in the 9,000-member U.N. peacekeeping force who was pulled from a car and killed Saturday. Three Sri Lankan peacekeepers were injured by gunfire early last week.

Brazilian members of the U.N. peacekeeping force distributed 14 tons of rice, beans, sugar and cooking oil to 1,500 families in the capital's sprawling Cite Soleil slum Tuesday.

The World Food Program and the U.N. mission in Haiti continue to support various projects aimed at creating jobs, Montas said. Some 2,500 Haitians are already employed by these projects which have a combined budget of $2.3 million, she said.
Hosted by Google
Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[Mech]

UN Director General: Food Riots Would Not Be A Surprise

EconomicsBriefing.com
Tuesday October 30, 2007

"If prices continue to rise, I would not be surprised if we began to see food riots,” said Jacques Diouf, director-general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The FAO’s food price index has risen to its highest level since it began in 1990. Wheat and milk prices reached a record high this summer while other agricultural commodities, such as corn and meat, are trading well above 1990s averages.

Rising food prices are likely to force developing countries to follow Russia’s example and impose retail price controls to avoid social unrest, according to Diouf.


Of course, since price controls will only cause shortages of food (Econ 101), it is not exactly clear how price controls will remove the potential for social unrest.

Note that little to nothing is said about the most important factor in rising food prices, United States encouraged, worldwide central bank monetary expansion.

www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2007/301007_b_Riots.htm

[Mech]

U.N. soldier killed in Haiti's riots over food

Senators fire PM over turmoil; rising price of rice led to crisis and cost cut

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24072532/

[Mech]

Haiti's government falls after food riots

Sat Apr 12, 2008 7:57pm EDT

By Joseph Guyler Delva and Jim Loney

www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1228245020080412?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews


PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Haiti's government fell on Saturday when senators fired the prime minister after more than a week of riots over food prices, ignoring a plan presented by the president to slash the cost of rice.

Sixteen of 17 senators at a special session voted against Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis, an ally President Rene Preval placed at the head of a coalition cabinet in June 2006 that was meant to unite

[Mech]

Food riots rock Yemen

By Bill Weinberg

www.inteldaily.com/?c=148&a=5876


(WW4 Report) -- Tanks have been deployed in parts of southern Yemen after a fifth day of angry protests by thousands of mostly young people. Youth are blocking roads and burning tires, and up to 100 have been arrested. In al-Dalea, two police station were torched, and military vehicles burned, while riot police fired into the air and used tanks against street barricades. In response, armed protesters threw up roadblocks on the main road between the capital, Sanaa, and the port of Aden, halting traffic.

[Mech]

www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/04/12/18492403.php

Even the United States is not immune from the potential for food shortages, food riots and food insecurity. We’re just blind to the possibility.
As Americans complain over high gasoline and food prices, many third world countries are experiencing food riots over price and scarcity of food. In some parts of the word rice is so expensive that it is transported in heavily guarded convoys and farmers guard their fields from thieves.

Food riots are becoming more common, as more land and crops are being diverted from the food chain by the world biofuels industry. According to an investment magazine, the crisis shows no signs of weakening. Food, the bread of life, is fast becoming the “gold” of the Twenty-first century.

Fatal food riots in Haiti. Violent food-price protests in Egypt and Ivory Coast. Rice so valuable it is transported in armoured convoys. Soldiers guarding fields and warehouses. Export bans to keep local populations from starving. (Globalinvestor.com)

The face of food security is rapidly changing around the world and there are no quick fixes experts say. What worries many is that food stockpiles are at historic lows. In the United States alone,
stockpiles of wheat hit a 60-year low in the United States as prices soared. Almost all other commodities, from rice and soybeans to sugar and corn, have posted triple-digit price increases in the past year or two. (Ibid)

Experts say the high prices will continue for years, putting billions of people at risk for malnutrition or starvation. World leaders continue to cast fearful eyes at the burgeoning bio-fuels industry, noting that the competition generated by the industrial biofuels industry and food agriculture is pushing up food prices and making it more profitable to grow fuel crops for industrialized countries than it is for big farmers in Third World countries to grow food for their own citizens.

What has put many world leaders on notice is the fact that this artificially generated food crisis has not yet peaked. As of this writing, no one knows when the situation will reach a crescendo, or to what extent this demand will affect food security and political stability in the world.
Many believe that the food crisis is in its infancy and they worry about increasing food-based political instability worldwide.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said this week he's worried that ethanol production is pushing up food prices everywhere, and he called for an urgent review of the issue. Economist Dr. Hazell has said that filling an SUV tank once with ethanol consumes more maize than the typical African eats in a year. (Ibid)

So far, Americans have been able to weather the storm. While rising fuel and food prices have generated grumbling from the populace and hand wringing from the politicians, this country has yet to experience the level of social unrest and rioting that high food prices have generated in other parts of the world.

In Haiti, ongoing instability and riots over food prices has led to the probable ousting of the nation’s Prime Minister. Newswires are reporting “A Haitian senator says that parliament has voted to dismiss Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis following deadly riots over rising food prices.” (Wire services)


A few analysts believe that the United States is on the verge of a major economic revolution, a process, which will change where we live, what we eat, and how we view agriculture. Looking at the rumbles from around the world we are already seeing wars over oil and energy resources, not to mention the violent eviction of traditional farmers in South America and other parts of the world by the industrialized bio-fuels industry.

The fight over finite land resources is slowly taking shape out of sight of most of the United States as agribusinesses lay claim to land around the world. Agro-conglomerates chase natives off tribal lands in South America, Indonesia and parts of the Far East at gunpoint. Murder over land continues in the Third World, as conglomerates move onto jungle and rain forest land, clearing acreage with slash and burn campaigns.

What was once climate producing tropical rain forest has become fields for sugar cane, corn and other biofuels. More profitable biofuel crops have now deprived the food chain of a large supply of corn and other crops, driving up the cost of corn-based food such as corn meal, tortillas, corn syrup and a hundred other crops and products which grace our tables at ever greater cost.

The food riots in Haiti are mirrored by riots in parts of Africa and Asia, sending shock waves throughout the Third World. According to a report from the United Nations, the 60 per cent price increase in the price of corn and feedstock over the past two years can be directly traced to the increased demand on corn and soybeans made by the biofuels industry. The United States, as the world’s largest exporter of corn, has diverted millions of pounds of corn and soybean crops to the growing biofuels industry, creating a market that makes fuel crops more profitable than food crops. National surpluses of grains have give way to increased demand for biofuels, driving up the price of corn and grains around the world. (World Bank)

Traditional food crops—rapeseed, maize (corn), palm and soybean are in demand by both food agriculture and the growing biofuels industry, creating an increased competition, which is driving up food costs by double digits, generating food riots around the world. Thai farmers and other farmers are now guarding rice crops, as skyrocketing grain prices are leading to crop theft and food riots around the world. According to international reports:

Rice farmers here (Thailand) are staying awake in shifts at night to guard their fields from thieves. In Peru, shortages of wheat flour are prompting the military to make bread with potato flour, a native crop. In Egypt, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso food riots have broken out in the past week. (Thoughtcriminal.org)

In Thailand and other rice and grain producing nations, food theft is rising. Crops are stolen directly from fields.

The reported thefts in five rice-growing provinces in central Thailand are the first signs of criminal activity in this region stemming from the sharpest global spike in commodity prices since the oil crisis in the mid-1970s. Across the world, higher food prices are triggering thefts and violence – both by people who can’t afford to eat and those who want to make an easy buck. (Ibid)

The United States produces 46% of the world’s biofuels, with Brazil coming in at a close second with 42%. (Biofuels: the Promise and the Risks). As a world leader in food exports, grain in particular, the United States has altered world grain markets by diverting grain into fuel production, thereby increasing demand for grains with a resultant rise in the price of the commodity because of demand. The ensuing market shortage has generated price increases in the world grain market, making food staples too expensive for much of the world’s poor to afford.

So far, Americans are mostly bystanders in the game, content to grumble at the gas pump and complain in the grocery aisles. As a “First World” nation, the United States so far has not been subject to the food riots, which we have seen in Haiti and other parts of the world. Americans have more per capita income than much of the world; hence the crisis of the Third World, so far, is inconvenience in the “First World” and in developed nations such as the United States.

That said, however, we must understand that this situation is not sustainable. While Americans do have more disposable income than the rest of the word, that income is not unlimited and our food supply is much more vulnerable than we think. When it comes to food security, both in terms of supply and accessibility, this country is much more vulnerable than we think.

As one retired grain salesman noted, most of the nation’s grain is moved around the country by just TWO railroads. Little is stored in the event of disaster and the whole system is extremely vulnerable. While we in the United States look at the food riots in other countries with a sense of disbelief, we are not immune. Under the right circumstances, we could be in the same boat. (Ibid)

In order for riots to break out the whole food supply doesn't have to be wiped out. It just has to be threatened sufficiently. When people realize their vulnerability and the fact that there is no short-term solution to a severe enough drought in the Midwest they will have no clue as to what they should do. Other nations can't make up the difference because no other nation has a surplus of grain in good times let alone in times when they are having droughts and floods also. (Robert Felix, “US Food Riots Much Closer than You Think”)

Critics say the US is currently too preoccupied with foreign excursions and oil to pay attention to food security, particularly how concentration of suppliers and processors threaten the food chain. The highly concentrated meat processing industry has generated millions of pounds of recalls this year. Outbreaks in e.coli and other food borne pathogens continue to haunt the headlines, as food prices rise around the world.

The concentration of food processing, cultivation and distribution into the hands of a few companies is wrecking havoc around the world. A Canadian reporter noted the connection between market concentration and price increases around the world:
In Mexico and most other countries, a handful of international companies is controlling more and more of the food production line—from growing crops to purchasing crops from farmers, to warehousing, processing and distribution.

Carlsen said investigations following the tortilla crisis found that huge stores of corn in warehouses had cut down the supply and led to a jump in prices. (Matthew Little, Epoch Times, “Food Prices Skyrocket Amidst Growing Shortages.”)

Food security, that is the availability and affordability of food, has been pushed aside by the War on Terror, and continues to lag behind our awareness, despite their being linked together in a dangerous dance of death, which has been created by the bio-fuels industry. Ultimately, the price of oil, depends on supply, demand and risk (War), and the price of food has now become dangerously linked to the energy market by the requirements of the fuel crop industry. We now are dealing with a ‘double whammy’ that is dangerously impeding our food supply.

Living in the “Breadbasket of the World,” it is hard for most Americans to even conceive of the idea that food could become scarce in this country. Few of us are paying attention to the close relationship between biofuel, grain crops and price inflation.

Think tank analyst Pat Mooney noted the close connection between corn and oil prices.

"The market place does now tie the price of a bushel of corn to the price of a barrel of crude and when it does that it means that poor people are going to lose out," said Mooney. (Ibid)

The world’s grain and food markets have been turned on their heads. Where once the price of fuel and oil-based fertilizers used to cultivate crops added to the cost of the crop, now the use of crops as fuel generates still another tier of demand on the world’s soils and crops.

With finite amounts of cropland, competition between fuel and food crops for land and economic resources, and unpredictable natural disasters, wars and pestilence waiting in the wings, our food supply is not as secure as we think it is.

Even the United States is not immune from the potential for food shortages, food riots and food insecurity. We’re just blind to the possibility.

The author is an activist/writer/public speaker based in the Midwest. She has written articles on the mortgage crisis, land theft, mis-education of ethnic youth and food security. Books include:
Land, Legacy and Lynching: Building a future for Black America, and Urban Asylum: Politics, Lunatics and the Refrigerator Woman.


www.Lulu.com/davis4000_2000

[Mech]

Riots, Strikes & Protests - The Great Global Grain Wars

The Sovereign Society Offshore - A Letter

April 5, 2008

By Erika Nolan, Executive Director

In the past year, riots broke out in 12 different countries. We've also seen street protests in Jakarta. Strikes in Italy. Unprecedented government controls in 20 different countries.

And over what? Oppressive government? Long work hours? Inequality?

No. It's much more basic than that. They're rioting and protesting because they can no longer afford to eat with these skyrocketing food costs.

And it's no wonder. In the last six months alone, the basics people live on have surged dramatically in price. Corn prices have jumped 51%. Barley has soared 38%. Oats, 53%. Wheat, 56%. And rice - the mainstay of diets in emerging countries home to over 3 billion - shot up a devastating 67%!

You may not have heard the hungry protesters or seen the riots - yet - but I'm guessing you've felt this uncomfortable inflationary squeeze in your grocery bills.

Here in the U.S., you now have to fork over another 32% more for a loaf of bread than you did just three years ago. A carton of eggs costs you 50% more since this time last year. And overall your food bills have climbed 5% since 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

[Mech]

They're Going to Sell Your Food

J. Michael Stevens Group
April 15, 2008

By Steve Shenk

The UN World Food Program is asking for $1 billion - $500 million of which they want paid by May 1st. This is to come from developed nations, including the United States, to help with the starvation in under-developed countries. Surely, no one would argue with the humanitarian need to feed the starving Third World countries.

Every country in the world is experiencing food shortages and runaway food prices. So you have to ask yourself, "Where are they going to get the $1 billion worth of food to buy?"

Remember, we are entering the third year of this worldwide famine. The UN has declared a world-wide food emergency.

Third World starvation is terrible, but it's not just "them." Unfortunately, the United States itself has started to starve. We have rationing and ridiculous cost increases of wheat flour (the source for spaghetti, noodles, macaroni, etc.- the basic food of the poor among us). With the bees disappearing in the United States, pollination of fruits, vegetables and nuts isn't happening. Corn shortages will cause severe rationing before the next crop comes in. This means livestock feed will be in very short supply effecting meat, poultry and dairy products.

The United States has been importing 30% to 40% of its food. Countries we are importing from have shut down exports to us to save the food for their own people.

Remember, every country in the world is experiencing food shortages and runaway food prices. So again you have to ask yourself, "Where are they going to get the $1 billion worth of food to buy?"

There is only one developed country that will not shut down exports of food to protect its people. That's the United States. The reason is that our food supply is controlled by international agri-corps. These multi-national food companies will gladly sell our American food to the UN (paid for with your American dollars.)

The bottom line is this - you must realize that the United States of America has 30% less food than what it takes to feed our own population on any given day. Please understand that in all probability these global food organizations will use America's money to buy what's left of your food.

Our middle and upper income families will enter a never before imagined terror for their own ability to survive when food in the next few months becomes tremendously expensive and ultimately a black marketed commodity. It will make no difference how prosperous or poor an individual is. In the near future the measure of wealth will not be the mansion on the hill with a basement vault full of guns and gold. True wealth will be a supply of food to last three to five years.

Your job is to do your research and decide what the worldwide, and particularly the United States, famine means to you. Check on world and American food availability. When the UN declares an emergency, you have to believe that the famine is no longer recoverable.

When the mass media is forced to report the famine, you can be sure of two things:

1. They will first point to problems outside the United States to distract us from our own rising levels of food shortages.
2. You will shortly see heart-wrenching examples of world organization planes and trucks feeding the starving people of these undeveloped countries. But be more concerned with what you aren't shown. You won't see the other people in those countries left to starve (they weren't fortunate enough to be "selected" for the photo op.)

But even more important is the fact that those of you who can still just barely afford food (clean or not), will never be told how fast food is disappearing in America until the riots break out.

But then, of course, this all could be the ravings of a paranoid, overheated, foolish brain.

The genetically altered crops could be eliminated worldwide and those remaining could be required to carry pharmaceutical disclaimers. (For example: immune deficiency diseases, cancer, diabetes, heart failure, impotence, Alzheimer's, Morgellon's Disease, hypertension, etc.)

The bees could miraculously regenerate and pollinate this year's crop bringing back two thirds of the food we eat every day.

The thousands of farmers paid not to grow crops could instantaneously bypass the three to five years, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment costs, needed to get immediately back into production. (Of course, the last generation of farm kids would have to be pulled back from their city jobs because grandma and grandpa are too old to ride the tractors.)

Fuel prices could be dropped to an "honest" profit over cost. Then truckers could make a decent living hauling our food and farmers could afford to plant.

The worldwide famine where the planet didn't produce as much food as the population ate the last two years is now entering its third growing season with less water and fewer crops planted. We could hope to see media headlines in a month or two declaring, "We were just kidding about all this food scarcity stuff. We just wanted to scare you."

The countries that we import food from could apologize for shutting off exports and, even though they don't have enough food for themselves, they could share with us just because they like Americans.

Investors could sell back water rights in land over aquifers to return them to public rather than private use and control.

The Doomsday Seeds Vault in Norway could be permanently sealed. It wouldn't be needed if farmers worldwide were given back (heritage) seeds to plant year after year, never having to buy seed again.

Yes, this whole mess could get miraculously turned around in the next couple of months. Food prices could drop to where even the poor in the US could afford their spaghetti. And it could be that we will never see a food riot or a bread line with no bread on American soil.

Do your research and place your bet on what you think will happen.

Is it better to have what you don't need or need what you don't have?

What's in Your Cupboard?

[Mech]

Global food crisis looms as Asia's rice bowl empties and world price soars


By Raju Gopalakrishnan in Manila

THE crisis over rice showed no signs of easing yesterday as the price of the world's benchmark jumped 10 per cent in just one week, fanning fears that millions across Asia will struggle to afford their staple food.

In a clear sign of the strain on output after major exporters began to curb exports earlier this year, a tender from the Philippines, the world's top importer, attracted offers to sell only about two-thirds of the half a million tonnes it sought.

In Bangkok, Thai 100 per cent B grade white rice, considered the world's benchmark, hit $950 (£482) per tonne, three times its price at the start of 2007.

"There's been a popular misconception that the world can produce as much food as it likes. Well, it obviously can't. And Asia can't feed itself at the moment," Gerry Lawson, the chairman of Sunrice, a major Australian rice producer, said.

Increased food demand from rapidly developing countries, such as China and India, the use of biofuels, high oil prices, global stocks at 25-year lows and market speculation are all blamed for pushing prices of staples such as rice to record highs around the globe.

The unprecedented surge, which some analysts said is going to continue, posed a growing threat to regional governments worried about the prospect of hoarding and social unrest.

Governments in top producer countries, such as Thailand and the No2 exporter, Vietnam, are urging farmers to grow extra crops, although it will be several months before the additional supply hits the market.

Meanwhile, demand from other big importers, such as Iran, which is expected to try to buy up to one million tonnes of Thai rice this year, will keep the upward pressure on prices.

The Philippines is the hardest hit of the Asian nations in the current crisis – although secretive North Korea is likely to be in a worse position.

As a measure of the seriousness of the problem, Manila has temporarily halted conversion of agricultural land for property development, hoping to ring-fence paddy fields to meet the food needs of the country's 88 million people.

Soldiers guard sales of subsidised rice by the state National Food Authority, and the government has filed charges against 13 people suspected of hoarding.

The global turmoil is such that the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, yesterday said the United States hopes to announce fresh steps to alleviate food shortages around the globe. "The rapid rise in global food prices is an urgent concern," she said.

Soaring rice prices have come as fears about tight world supplies led governments to hoard and ignited protests in places like Haiti, where five died in food riots last week.

"You've been drawing down the world stocks since 2000. You're down to the bottom of the barrel," said Ed Taylor, an analyst with Firstgrain.com.

The US government projects world stocks of rice to be 77 million tonnes by 1 August, the start of the new marketing year. That is up slightly on a year ago, based on projections for a five million tonne rise in world production. But world stocks will still be 48 per cent below 2000.

This season's world production could also still be hurt by the weather, leaving countries in need of imports at a time when many countries are already holding back on exports. India and Vietnam have banned exports.

India shut off the supply valve in October, when it banned exports of non-basmati rice to its Asian neighbours. Thailand stepped in to fill the gap, but soon found that it, too, was running short of rice.

In times of grain shortages, the world typically turns to the US, but US rice stocks have been cut in half the past two years. Rice acreage is being diverted to soaring corn, wheat and soybeans.

In 2007, the US produced only about six million tonnes of rice, out of total world production of 425 million tonnes.

"It's just a drop in the bucket," Mr Taylor said. "We don't have anywhere near enough quantity to bail anybody out."

Bob Papanos, the head of The Rice Trader, a weekly rice marketing publication, underscored the point. "We've had declining stocks, declining stocks-to-use ratios for the last 15 years," he said. "It all came together and slapped the world in the face."

The United Nations' World Food Programme said on Tuesday that the price it pays for rice to supply food donations jumped to $780 a tonne from about $460 a tonne at the beginning of March – just after it made an emergency appeal for an extra $500 million.

Rice could be even more volatile, since governments in many nations – including across Asia's "rice bowl" – consider rice a national security priority.

What makes rice supply/demand special is that almost all of the crop is consumed where it is grown.

Only 6 per cent of world rice is exported, compared with 17 per cent for wheat, the other main food grain.

VIETNAM

VIETNAM is among the better placed Asian countries – it is at least able to supply its own domestic needs.

But the world's third-largest exporter of rice has already imposed a 22 per cent cut in the amount of the crop it is willing to put on world markets – thus making life more difficult for its traditional customers, such as the Philippines.

Farmers in Vietnam say they have planted a special variety of rice for their summer crop, hoping that 7.8 million tons will hit the international market in mid-June, a month earlier than normal.

This rush to feed the market is not particularly a humanitarian one – with prices as high as they are, a Vietnamese farmer can make a good profit, enough to send a child to university or improve their agricultural equipment.

PHILIPPINES

THE Philippines is the world's biggest importer of rice and has been most exposed to a leap in international prices.

"I do not see any food riots in the Philippines," the defence secretary, Gilberto Teodoro, told reporters this week. "We don't see any immediate threats to national security, whether caused by this rice crisis or otherwise."

The president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, said an action plan to prevent rice shortages includes securing rice imports, proper distribution and cracking down on hoarders and price manipulators. The government has temporarily halted the conversion of agricultural lands for development, amid concerns it needs to ring-fence its paddy fields to meet a growing demand for rice.

Unmilled rice production in the Philippines is expected to reach 17 million tonnes this year, from 16.24 million tonnes in 2007, but the increase in output is not enough to keep pace with rapid popul
ation growth, one of the highest in the region.

INDONESIA

INDONESIA, the world's most populous Muslim country, has said it expects to be able to feed its more than 230 million people this year. Yet it is not unaffected by the rise in rice prices – inflation, related to the global price surge is hitting all manner of consumer products.

This week Indonesia became the latest country to impose controls on rice exports.

BANGLADESH

BANGLADESH is one of Asia's most overpopulated countries and one of the the poorest. It is particularly vulnerable to rises in the price of its staple, rice.

Hundreds of poor families are now surviving on one meal a day, and spending 70-80 per cent of their budget on food.

More than half a million Bangladeshi troops were yesterday ordered to eat potatoes in an attempt to ease the impact of surging prices.


The full article contains 1275 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
Last Updated: 17 April 2008 10:22 PM

[Mech]

Sticker Shock in the Organic Aisles


By ANDREW MARTIN and KIM SEVERSON
Published: April 18, 2008

Shoppers have long been willing to pay a premium for organic food. But how much is too much?

At Doug Hartkopf's dairy farm in Albion, Me., high feed costs forced a switch to conventional methods. "It was something we had to do," he said.

Prices are rising for organic food, which typically costs 20 percent to 100 percent more than a conventional counterpart.

Rising prices for organic groceries are prompting some consumers to question their devotion to food produced without pesticides, chemical fertilizers or antibiotics. In some parts of the country, a loaf of organic bread can cost $4.50, a pound of pasta has hit $3, and organic milk is closing in on $7 a gallon.

“The prices have gotten ridiculous,” said Brenda Czarnik, who was shopping recently at a food cooperative in St. Paul.

Food prices in general have been rising, but organic food lagged somewhat behind last year because of a temporary glut of organic milk and other factors. Some grocery chains adopted private-label organic products, which are cheaper than brand products, while others hesitated to raise already high organic prices.

In recent months, however, these factors have been giving way to cost pressures in the industry. On grocery shelves across the nation, sharp price increases are taking hold.

“It’s probably the most dynamic and volatile time I’ve seen in 25 years,” said Gary Hirshberg, chief executive of Stonyfield Farm, an organic dairy business. “It’s extremely difficult to predict where it’s going.”

Organic prices are rising for many of the same reasons affecting conventional food prices: higher fuel costs, rising demand and a tight supply of the grains needed for animal feed and bakery items. In fact, demand for organic wheat, soybeans and corn is so great that farmers are receiving unheard-of prices.

But people who have to buy organic grain, from bakers and pasta makers to chicken and dairy farmers, say they are struggling to maintain profit margins, even though shoppers are paying more. The price of organic animal feed is so high that some dairy farmers have abandoned organic farming methods and others are pushing retailers to raise prices more aggressively. Several organic manufacturers worry that sales may slow as consumers cut back.

Perry Abbenante, global grocery coordinator for Whole Foods Market, said sales were strong and customer counts were up. He said it might be too soon to know how consumers would react to higher organic prices, particularly in dairy.

“Man, $6.99 for a gallon of milk is pushing it,” he said. “We have to be very careful about not pricing organics out of the market.”

Over all, grocery prices have increased about 5 percent over the last year, though some staples like conventional eggs jumped 30 percent and milk, 13 percent, according to the Consumer Price Index. That government index does not break out prices for organic food.

Organic manufacturers and retailers said prices began increasing last fall but were only now starting to spike significantly in some parts of the country. Organic milk prices declined slightly last year.

Eric Newman, vice president for sales at Organic Valley, a farmers’ cooperative that sells mostly dairy products, said a half gallon of milk cost $3.49, on average, in 2007 while a gallon cost about $6. He said he expected the average price of a half gallon to exceed $4 in the months to come, while a gallon could cost more than $7.

The average retail price for Eggland’s Best Organic eggs in 2007 ranged from $3.79 to $4.29, company officials said. So far this year, the range has risen to $4.59 to $4.99.

Organic food is typically 20 percent to 100 percent more expensive than a conventional counterpart; the gap has narrowed in recent years as discount retailers like Wal-Mart have offered organics and more private-label organic products have become available, according to the industry.

Americans spent $16.7 billion on organic food and beverages in 2006, a 126 percent increase in just five years, according to the Organic Trade Association, an industry trade group. Organic sales account for about 2.8 percent of food and beverage sales in the United States, the group says.

The United States had 4.1 million acres of organic farmland in 2005, triple the amount in 1997, according to the Department of Agriculture, which regulates the organic industry. But farmers and grain buyers say the growth of new organic acreage has slowed, falling short of rising demand and causing organic grain prices to soar.

That is partly because prices for conventional corn, soybeans and wheat are at or near records, so there is less incentive for farmers to switch to organic crops; making the switch requires a three-year transition and piles of paperwork.

[Mech]

(continued).....

There has been no new surge of land going into organic,” said Lynn Clarkson, who buys organic grain as president of Clarkson Grain in central Illinois. “We are having to compete with this ethanol juggernaut,” he added, referring to the growing use of field corn for fuel.

Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an environmental research organization, said conventional dairy and grain prices were so high that they were nearly rivaling prices that organic farmers receive. Organic farmers normally earn a hefty premium for raising livestock and crops without chemical fertilizer, pesticides or antibiotics.

“We may be seeing over the next few years a turnaround, where organic agriculture contracts in this country,” he said. The price of organic grain has also jumped because hundreds of dairy farmers rushed to complete their transition to organic production last year, before more stringent government regulations took effect. The influx created a temporary glut of organic milk, which suppressed prices last year, but also added to the demand — and the price — for organic animal feed. In addition, a drought last year in the Upper Midwest caused relatively poor yields for some organic crops.

Doug Hartkopf, a dairy farmer in Albion, Me., said the high feed costs forced him to stop farming organically in December.

“Instead of paying $3,000 a month, I was paying $7,000,” he said. “It was a very tough decision. It was something we had to do.”

In all, at least 25 dairy farmers in the Northeast have retired early or stopped farming organically in the last six months, said Ed Maltby, executive director of the Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance. He predicted that the shifts would continue unless farmers received a price increase of about 25 percent from milk processors.

The high grain prices are squeezing more than just organic dairy farmers.

“In the last three months or four months, everyone along the chain in organic food is not making their margins,” said Bob Eberly, president of Eberly Poultry in Stevens, Pa. The cost of raising poultry has increased 16 percent in the last six months, but he said his prices had increased only 7 percent.

“In the next month or so, our customers are going to see a significant price increase,” he said. “We just have to do it.”

Some organic bakeries, meanwhile, say they, too, are struggling to pay for organic flour and grains.

Michael Girkout, president of the Alvarado Street Bakery in Petaluma, Calif., said the farmers who supply his organic grain refused to honor a two-year contract in November and demanded a steep price increase.

“They said they could not afford to sell it to us at the price they agreed to two years ago,” said Mr. Girkout, who said he had little choice but to comply given the limited supply. He raised his prices for a loaf of bread 17 percent last year, he said.

Of course, the rising price of organic feed has another side. While organic livestock farmers are struggling, farmers who grow organic grain are being paid more than ever.

Organic corn is selling for $10 a bushel, organic soybeans for about $20 a bushel, and organic wheat is priced as high as $22 a bushel, all of them at least double the price of two years ago, said Oren Holle, a grain farmer in Kansas and president of an organic farmers’ cooperative.

“It is unprecedented,” Mr. Holle said. “Nobody saw these kind of market prices coming.”

Even with those prices, though, people in the industry say fewer farmers are starting the arduous transition to organic production because they can get record prices for conventional grain. Droughts, a growing global middle class and rising demand for biofuels produced from crops are putting heavy pressure on the world’s food system, sending prices up everywhere.

In the organic industry, the question is how shoppers will react to rising prices. “It will not be at all unusual for a mom to say, ‘No matter what, I am going to buy organic milk, but you know what, I don’t need to buy the organic cold cereal because I don’t see the value in it as much,’ ” said Laurie Demeritt, president of the Hartman Group, a market research firm specializing in health and wellness research.

At the Mississippi Market Natural Foods Co-op in St. Paul, Shaun Hainey, 26, said he had quit smoking and cut back on drinking and “superfluous recreational spending, like going skiing.” But he and his wife, Cassandra Hainey, have not cut back on organic food.

“We don’t foresee a price level at which we’d stop shopping organic,” he said.

But Scott Cordes, a 33-year-old budget analyst for the city of St. Paul, has found the high prices hard to bear. He now buys conventional 1 percent milk for $4.09 rather than spending $6.99 on a gallon of organic milk. Still, he does not expect to forgo organic foods altogether.

“You have to weigh the type of food you want,” he said. “I’ll only go so far to save money.”

[Mech]

Who Is Responsible for the
World Food Shortage

www.larouchepub.com/other/1995/2249_food_intro.html


Introduction

by Marcia Merry Baker

This week's cover photo, showing corn piled on the ground, out in the open, near Minnesota grain elevators, is representative of the disintegration of the food supply system the world over. While the U.S. Midwest corn and soybean harvests were coming in this fall, the U.S. rail freight system broke down. After years of financial mergers, asset stripping, and rail track removal, such companies as Union Pacific, which are considered to be financial "successes," failed miserably on the economic front, and could not even supply engines to move the grain cars. Millions of bushels of grain are sitting, rotting on the ground.

This grain transport breakdown is but one recent example of breakdown in the food supply in what is considered the most food-secure nation in the world, and illustrates the fact that "natural disasters"—bad weather, floods, droughts—are not the cause of the world's food crises. These examples, and equivalent situations all around the world, are "unnatural" disasters, caused by years of takedown of agriculture infrastructure under wrong policies and assumptions, in particular, serving the interests of private financial and commodities control circles, centered mostly in London.

The worldwide food crisis is measurable in the decline of grains, of all types, produced per capita yearly. To provide every person with a daily diet of their preference, with sufficient calories and nutrients, would require well over 3 billion tons of grain produced annually. But as of around 1990, less than 1.9 billion tons were being produced yearly, and since then, world annual production has declined.

An estimated 800 million people are suffering from some degree of malnutrition. Besides the nearly continentwide food supply crisis in Africa, there are other locations, such as Russia and former Soviet bloc nations, plunged into crisis. Even under the Soviet command economy, Russia's annual grain production averaged 100 million tons. But output has fallen each year since 1991, to only around 65 million tons this year.
No paradox

What does the international community say? Officially, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and sister U.N. agencies—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the World Trade Organization (WTO)—blame hunger on "poverty."

The FAO gala conference in Quebec City in October, for the FAO's 50th anniversary, celebrated the fact that world tonnages of food have increased over five decades, but lamented that 800 million people don't have enough to eat—a "paradox," according to the conference speakers. But most of the 100 or more agriculture ministers present knew better.

The last 25-30 years have seen a consistent decline of agriculture output potential in almost all countries. Necessary ratios of infrastructure (water, transport, electricity) and inputs (chemicals, mechanization, quality seeds and stock) have fallen, to the point where output per capita is sharply declining.

At mid-century, after World War II, there were mobilizations to improve agriculture output potential on every continent.

* In western Europe, the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) of the European Community saw spectacular rises in agriculture productivity.

* In Africa, the wave of newly independent nations, such as Sudan (1956), made technology-based agriculture the keystone of national development plans. The "Atoms for Peace" movement backed such designs as the continental electrification of Africa, and the provision of nuclear-power-based energy grids in Egypt, Iran, and other countries.

* In North America, plans were drawn up for the North American Water and Power Alliance (Nawapa), which would divert river runoff from flowing into the Arctic Ocean, southward. The Mexico College of Engineers produced plans for sister hydraulic projects.

* In Eurasia, blasting was started on Siberian water diversion projects to channel flow southward from the Ob and Irtysh watersheds, to relieve the endangered Aral Sea Basin.

* Development of the Mekong River in Southeast Asia, and improvements in the Indian subcontinent, were outlined.

But by 1975, most of these projects were shelved. In the eyes of today's "countercultured" generation, they have receded into the mists of science fiction, if they've heard of these projects at all.

Over the 1970s, the shift was made to "post-industrial" policies, casino economics (speculation, derivatives), and free trade demands, enforced by the IMF Bretton Woods system. And now that financial system itself is in the process of blowout. The food crisis is the evidence.

Dozens of nations, once self-sufficient in many food staples, have been forced into food import dependency over the past 30 years. And now, neither the food stocks, nor the financing, exists for their food supplies. The GATT launched the "Uruguay Round" for free trade in 1986, under the slogan, "One World, One Market," which culminated in the creation in 1995 of the World Trade Organization. But the cupboard of the "World Market" is bare.

Nevertheless, in 1996, the U.N. plans another World Food Summit, on the theme of "food security," while millions more people go hungry.

Behind the scenes, the private financial interests served by the U.N., IMF, and other Bretton Woods agencies, are making sweeping moves to acquire food stocks for hoarding, and to take controlling positions in food commodities production, processing, and shipping.

This is the last phase of an era of food-as-a-weapon politics, officially ushered in in 1974, when then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (now Sir Henry KCMG) gave the keynote speech at the Rome World Food Conference, the predecessor to the 1996 Food Summit. In 1974, Kissinger publicly talked of food security, while privately he worked to use food control as a weapon against a target list of nations.
Name the names

In this Special Report, we have assembled the documentation required to understand the crisis situation in depth, in order to intervene, and reverse it.

We provide:

1. the statistical overview of the past 30 years of forcing food import dependency on nations;

2. the record of Henry Kissinger and the use of food control as a weapon;

3. the names of the companies and individuals who make up the financial and commodities cartels controlling food supply lines.

These reviews are not the usual representation of today's food crisis. The "common-sense" reasons for food shortages that you usually hear—bad weather, backwardness, civil strife, etc.—are all wrong.

Worse, the "authorities" on food and agriculture who are usually presented by the media, will tell you specific lies that have been pre-approved for public consumption by the financial and commodities cartel interests that created and continue to back such bogus authorities. For example, Lester Brown, of Worldwatch Institute, who spoke at the U.N. FAO 50th anniversary, is constantly in the media, charging that the world's population has outstripped the world's resources base, and demanding that population be cut because it cannot be fed. We supply the pedigree of Lester Brown, and other hired hands of the food cartels, so you know where the lies are coming from.
Emergency measures required

The information below (with more to come in follow-up reports in 1996), has been assembled in order to spur the mobilization for emergency financial and economic measures to deal with food shortages and the overall physical economic breakdown.

Several rear-guard actions were launched in 1995. They are well motivated, but they will not do the job. A bill is before Congress, sponsored by Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and others, to create a special commission to investigate control over the U.S. food supply by a "concentration" of processors. An Agriculture Department investigation is under way of the monopolistic actions of IBP, the Nebraska-based, London-associated, largest meat processor in the world. The Justice Department Anti-Trust Division has grand juries working on international price-fixing charges against the London-associated cartel companies Cargill Inc., ADM, Tate & Lyle (A.E. Staley), and CPC.

But dealing with the famine-scale food crisis, and financial disintegration, requires more than prosecution of isolated acts of wrongdoing, or mere "bigness." Read on, to find out what every citizen needs to know to do the right thing.

[Mech]

Using food as a weapon is as old as the siege but today’s barbarians have upped the anté by several orders of magnitude.


“…There are only two possible ways in which a world of 10 billion people can be averted. Either the current birth rates must come down more quickly. Or the current death rates must go up. There is no other way. There are, of course, many ways in which the death rates can go up. In a thermonuclear age, war can accomplish it very quickly and decisively. Famine and disease are nature’s ancient checks on population growth, and neither one has disappeared from the scene … To put it simply: Excessive population growth is the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of most of the societies in the developing world.” — Speech to the Club of Rome by Robert McNamara, Oct. 2, 1979

“Overpopulation and rapid demographic growth of Mexico is already today one of the major threats to the national security of the United States. Unless the U.S.-Mexico border is sealed, we will be up to our necks in Mexicans for whom we cannot find jobs.” —Robert McNamara, then World Bank president, March 19, 1982

McNamara’s thinly veiled genocidal utterances took place over thirty years ago, echoing the wealthy and the privileged’s fear of the ’great unwashed’ when ‘over-population’ was the buzzword. So not much has changed has it, we’re hearing the same, tired old messages being rolled out once again by the ruling elites and their spin doctors. McNamara’s cries of fear about being up to his neck in Mexicans is exactly same as the current bogey doing the rounds in Europe, only now they’re Africans.

Thus the current explosions in Haiti, Eygpt, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere over the rocketing price of basic foodstuffs such as cooking oil and rice prompted the BBC to describe them as first and foremost “a potential threat to Western security” (BBC News 24, 13 April, 2008), never mind the threat to human life, but then it reveals exactly where the BBC’s head is at, protecting the status quo.

To add insult to injury, the crétin Gordon Brown has the damn nerve to say,

“Rising food prices threaten to roll back progress we have made in recent years on development. For the first time in decades, the number of people facing hunger is growing.”

Progress? What planet does our glorious leader live on? Standards of living have been falling for everybody (except the rich who, as a consequence, have just gotten even richer by stealing even more from the poor), since the 1970s when the ‘neo-liberal’ agenda was initiated and not only have the poorest been the hardest hit but we’ve seen millions of the formerly ‘middle classes’ dumped unceremoniously back where they ‘belong’, with the poor. Social status doesn’t put food on the table. So much for the capitalist ‘good life’.

These are the facts: real wages in the US have fallen since the 1970s. It’s reckoned that around 40 million Americans now live under the ‘official’ poverty level, but at least they can still eat something, not so the millions of people in the so-called developing world who already immiserated by so-called free trade, have been hit with a double whammy, nay, a quintuple whammy.

Whammy #1: ‘Free Trade’

The poor countries of the world have been ‘persuaded’ that growing food for export so as to earn foreign currency which they then have to use to buy imported food (guess where from?), is better than growing food in their back yard. And to make sure they live up to their end of the ‘bargain’, under WTO ‘rules’ they get punished if they try to control imports.

Countries grew their own food which not only fed them but also created employment, now grow food and things like flowers, for export in order to ‘earn’ the precious dollar which obviously they have to spend on importing the food they once grew. Worse, the subsidized food imports wipe out what remains of indigenous agriculture, it simply can’t compete. What an insane setup! It only makes sense when you realize that the managers who setup this ‘deal’ work for BIg Business, they call the shots. If it were a ‘Mafia’ deal it would be called criminal extortion.

Of course, we in the West with our wealth subsidize the production of food, so the poor of the planet get hit with a whammy within a whammy. Not having the resources to subsidize their own food production, as the cost of importing food rises but not the price they get for exporting food to us, they are truly caught between a rock and a barren place.

And it’s the same IMF and World Bank policies which created the latest crisis to hit the poor of our planet, that are responsible for creating such an unequal relationship in the first place.

Whammy #2: Energy

And of course to grow all these crops for export needs lots of energy and lots of water, and lots of fertilizer, and lots of pesticides, all of which must be bought with precious foreign currency (and until recently, only dollars would be accepted). With oil now selling at over $113 a barrel, the cost of producing anything has shot through the roof. The winners: The Big Oil Cartels. No need to tell you who the losers are.

But the actual cost of producing the oil hasn’t risen much at all, the entire responsibility for these increases has to be placed where it belongs, on the commodities speculators and the Big Five oilcos. In other words, on all those grimy gamblers in investment corps and pension fund managers. It’s the system.

Whammy #3: ‘Bio-fuels’

The latest addition to the armoury of food used as a weapon and perhaps the most obvious example to date, is converting production from food staples to so-called bio-fuels.

For rather than us just using less energy, we buy it from the poor of the planet in the form of ‘bio-fuels’. Brilliant isn’t it. What poor country needs to produce ethanol? It has no possible use except perhaps to make moonshine.

But we knew that this would happen and everybody told our cretinous, criminal leaders what would happen. They’re too busy producing wheat for export to feed all those damn cows, cows that we turn into hamburgers for our consumption, but now, instead of producing wheat for export to make burgers, we’re producing ethanol to put in our automobiles. Either way it’s madness!

And in any case, as a leaked EU report shows, bio-fuels do nothing to halt the production of greenhouse gases (they may even increase it), the entire ‘bio-fuels’ thing is one gigantic scam, largely to do with what is the most profitable crop to grow (see ‘Industry asks for biofuels policy U-turn).

Whammy #4: Water

Fact: It takes 1,000-2,000 litres of water to produce 1 kilo of wheat

Fact: It takes 10,000-13,000 litres of water to produce 1 kilo of meat (Source: FAO)

And guess what gets produced the most, largely for Western consumption—burgers. And not surprisingly, the ‘neo-liberal’ agenda has seen the enforced privatization of water across the planet along with other key resources formerly held in communal ownership.

Whammy #5: Climate Change

Predictably, climate change impacts on those least able to deal with it, the poor. And lest we forget, the majority of the planet’s population are poor. The connectedness between everything must surely be apparent to you, the reader, the fact that messing up the biosphere the way we have been doing for the past two hundred years reverberates throughout the planet. And our political elites call themselves civilized!

Meanwhile, back in the land of the powerful, we’re busy planning for endless war in order to preserve our privilege, so even as our glorious leaders pontificate on about this or that crisis facing us, they’re spending billions on developing robots to shit bombs on the planet’s poor from a comfortable armchair some distance from the scene of the ‘action’.

[Mech]

Biofuels under attack as world food prices soar

by Marlowe Hood Sun Apr 20, 5:36 AM ET

PARIS (AFP) - Hailed until only months ago as a silver bullet in the fight against global warming, biofuels are now accused of snatching food out of the mouths of the poor.


Billions have been poured into developing sugar- and grain-based ethanol and biodiesel to help wean rich economies from their addiction to carbon-belching fossil fuels.

Heading the rush are the United States, Brazil and Canada, which are eagerly transforming corn, wheat, soy beans and sugar cane into cleaner-burning fuel, and the European Union (EU) is to launch its own ambitious programme.

But as soaring prices for staples bring more of the planet's most vulnerable people face-to-face with starvation, the image of biofuels has suddenly changed from climate saviour to a horribly misguided experiment.

On Friday, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said biofuels "posed a real moral problem" and called for a moratorium on using food crops to power cars, trucks and buses.

The vital problem of global warming "has to be balanced with the fact that there are people who are going to starve to death," said Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

"Producing biofuels is a crime against humanity," the UN's special rapporteur for the right to food, Jean Ziegler of Switzerland, said earlier.

Biofuels may still be in their infancy but they are growing rapidly, with annual production leaping by double-digit percentages.

In a speech on Wednesday that set down a target for reducing US carbon emissions, George W. Bush pointed to legislation requiring US producers to supply at least 36 billion gallons (136 billion litres) of renewable fuel by 2020.

In 2007, 20 percent of grain -- 81 million tonnes -- produced in the United States was used to make ethanol, according to US think tank the Earth Policy Institute, which predicts that the percentage will jump to nearly a quarter this year.

"We are looking at a five-fold increase in renewable fuel," Bush's top climate change advisor, Jim Connaughton, said in Paris on Thursday at a meeting of the world's major greenhouse-gas polluters.

But more than half of that legislatively-mandated production would come from "second-generation" biofuels made from non-food sources such as switchgrass and wood byproducts, he said.

The EU's and the Brazilian delegates in Paris contested the link between biofuels and the world food crisis.

"This is highly exaggerated," Sergio Serra, Brazil's ambassador for climate change, told AFP.

"There is no real relation of cause and effect between the expansion of the production of biofuels and the raising of food prices. At least it is not happening in Brazil."

EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said experts would report back by the end of May on how to guarantee that Europe's planned biofuel boost would not impinge on the environment or the poor.

"There are a lot of concerns about social impacts, rising food prices and environment issues, and for all those reasons we want to insist on sustainability criteria in our legislation," he said.

Defenders of biofuels say food shortfalls have multiple causes, including a growing appetite for meat among the burgeoning middle class in China and India.

On average, it takes more than four kilos (eight pounds) of grain to produce one kilo (two pounds) of pork, and two kilos (four pounds) of grain to yield a kilo (two pounds) of beef.

Climate change may well be a contributing factor.

Some scientists fear rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns may be worsening water scarcity in key agriculture areas such Australia's wheat belt, and rice-growing deltas may be hit by saline intrusion from rising seas.

In addition, the surging cost of oil has had an indirect impact on many poor people, adding to the pinch caused by rising food prices.



****


UMMMMMMMM...........


WHAT ABOUT HEMP FUEL?

IDIOTS.....HEMP WOULD PROVIDE MORE THAN ENOUGH FUEL TO SUPPLY EVERY AMERICAN...EASY TO GROW IN POOR SOILS AND ALL OF US COULD GROW IT.

DUMB ASSES.

[Mech]

'Perfect storm' food crisis grips globe

By Marc Lacey

in Port-au-Prince, Haiti

HUNGER smashed in the front gate of Haiti's presidential palace. Hunger poured on to the streets, burning tyres and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country's prime minister packing.
Haiti's hunger, that has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, rising by as much as 45% since the end of 2006 and turning staples such as beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

Saint Louis Meriska's children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said: "They look at me and say 'Papa, I'm hungry', and I have to look away. It's humiliating and it makes you angry."

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.

In Cairo, Egypt, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

"It's the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years," said Jeffrey D Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. "It's a big deal and it's obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there's more political fallout to come."

Indeed, as it hits developing nations, the spike in commodity prices has pitted the world's poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations' farm and environmental policies. But experts say there are few quick fixes to a crisis tied to so many factors, from strong demand for food from emerging economies such as China's to rising oil prices to the diversion of food resources to make biofuels.

There are no scripts on how to handle the crisis either. In Asia, governments are putting in place measures to limit hoarding of rice after some shoppers panicked at price increases and bought up everything they could.

Even in Thailand, which produces 10 million more tons of rice than it consumes and is the world's largest rice exporter, supermarkets have put up signs limiting the amount of rice shoppers are allowed to buy.

But there is also plenty of nervousness and confusion about how best to proceed and how bad the impact may be, particularly as already strapped governments struggle to keep up their food subsidies.

"This is a perfect storm," President Elias Antonio Saca of El Salvador said last week at the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Cancun, Mexico.

"How long can we withstand the situation? We have to feed our people, and commodities are becoming scarce. This scandalous storm might become a hurricane that could upset not only our economies but also the stability of our countries."

In Asia, if Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi of Malaysia steps down, which is looking increasingly likely amid postelection turmoil within his party, he may be that region's first high-profile political casualty of fuel and food price inflation.

In Indonesia, fearing protests, the government has revised its 2008 budget, increasing the amount it will spend on food subsidies by about $280m.

"The biggest concern is food riots," said HS Dillon, a former adviser to Indonesia's Ministry of Agriculture. Referring to small but widespread protests touched off by a rise in soybean prices in January, he said: "It has happened in the past and can happen again."

The Philippine government has started selling subsidised rice at military bases to ensure soldiers and their families have a sufficient supply of cheap grain, while other supplies are being stockpiled for the poorest members of society.

Last month in Senegal, one of Africa's oldest and most stable democracies, police in riot gear beat and used tear gas against people protesting over high food prices and later raided a television station that broadcast images of the event.

Many Senegalese have expressed anger at President Abdoulaye Wade for spending lavishly on roads and hotels for an Islamic summit meeting last month while many people are unable to afford rice or fish.

The rising prices are altering menus, and not for the better. In India, people are scrimping on milk for their children. Daily bowls of dahl are getting thinner, as a bag of lentils is stretched across a few more meals.

In Cairo's Hafziyah Street, peddlers selling food from behind wood carts bark out their prices. But few customers can afford their fish or chicken. Food prices have doubled in two months.

Ahmed Abul Gheit, 25, sat on a wooden chair by his own pile of rotting tomatoes. "We can't even find food," he said, looking over at his friend Sobhy Abdullah, 50. Then, raising his hands toward the sky as if in prayer, he said: "May God take the guy I have in mind."

Abdullah nodded, knowing full well that the "guy" was President Hosni Mubarak.

It is the kind of talk that has prompted the government to treat its economic woes as a security threat, dispatching riot forces with a strict warning that anyone who takes to the streets will be dealt with harshly.

Niger does not need to be reminded that hungry citizens overthrow governments. Its first postcolonial president, Hamani Diori, was toppled amid allegations of rampant corruption in 1974 as millions starved during a drought.

More recently, in 2005, it was mass protests in Niamey, the Nigerian capital, that made the government sit up and take notice of that year's food crisis, which was caused by a complex mix of poor rains, locust infestation and market manipulation by traders.

"As a result of that experience the government created a Cabinet-level ministry to deal with the high cost of living," said Moustapha Kadi, an activist who helped organise marches in 2005. "So when prices went up this year, the government acted quickly to remove tariffs on rice, which everyone eats. That quick action has kept people from taking to the streets."

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically only consumed by the most destitute.

"It's salty and it has butter and you don't know you're eating dirt," said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. "It makes your stomach quiet down."

But the grumbling in Haiti these days is no longer confined to the stomach. It is now spray-painted on walls of the capital and shouted by demo
nstrators.

In recent days, President Rene Preval of Haiti – who has already seen his prime minister voted out – has patched together a response, using international aid money and price reductions by importers to cut the price of a sack of sugar by about 15%. He has also trimmed the salaries of some top officials. But those are considered temporary measures.

Meanwhile, most of the poorest of the poor suffer silently. In the sprawling slum of Haiti's Cite Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. "Take one," she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. "You pick. Just feed them."

[KNOWTHIS]

www2.nysun.com/article/74994

Food Rationing Confronts Breadbasket of the World

Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing. Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

[KNOWTHIS]

www.mindfully.org/GE/GE4/Pakistan-Threaten-Food-Security22dec02.htm

Controversial GM Foods may Threaten Food Security

With the population growth rate at 2.16 percent in 2002 as compared to 3.06 percent in 1981, Pakistan, it seems, has made some headway in birth control. But feeding 146 million people remains a formidable job. More so because the ability on the part of the state to ensure food for everybody irrespective of class appears to be at stake due to severe water logging, salinity, drought, scarcity of water and, an inequitable socio-economic system.

One wonders if the shortfall in food availability of basic food items is due to myopic policies on the part of planners or a result of structural changes brought about by leading financial institutions. This is a point to ponder because there have been instances when a food crisis was generated deliberately in order to open doors to genetically modified food (GM food), otherwise banned in Europe and Japan.

For instance, according to research conducted by the Institute for Food and Development Policy, an independent think tank based in California, "The US government has a twenty-year history of first generating hunger through macro-economic policy that, while selling itself as 'austere,' systematically enriches large corporations and impoverishes working families."

The report details how the World Bank and International Monetary Fund exacerbate famine through structural adjustments programs that force indebted nations to pay debt by cutting services for their citizens, exporting their crops, dismantling their crop reserves, and devaluing their currencies. While these mechanisms work to rob a country of its food sovereignty, it also aids US multinationals in prying open new markets for GM food.

"This grain cannot be sold to the EU or Japan because of their embargoes on genetically modified food for human consumption. The figures for US farm exports tell the story: US corn exports to the European Union shrank from $426 million in 1995 to $1 million in 1999," according to the report.

Does that mean that food shortage and famine are being artificially created in order to pave way for GM food? This is precisely what happened in Zambia, an impoverished nation, and the example provides food for thought for planners in Pakistan.

[KNOWTHIS]

www.infowars.com/?p=1621

Japan's hunger becomes a dire warning for other nations

Watanabe admits she could have chosen a better time to take up baking. This week, when the Tokyo housewife visited her local Ito-Yokado supermarket to buy butter to make a cake, she found the shelves bare.

"I went to another supermarket, and then another, and there was no butter at those either. Everywhere I went there were notices saying Japan has run out of butter. I couldn't believe it — this is the first time in my life I've wanted to try baking cakes and I can't get any butter," said the frustrated cook.

Japan's acute butter shortage, which has confounded bakeries, restaurants and now families across the country, is the latest unforeseen result of the global agricultural commodities crisis.

A sharp increase in the cost of imported cattle feed and a decline in milk imports, both of which are typically provided in large part by Australia, have prevented dairy farmers from keeping pace with demand.

While soaring food prices have triggered rioting among the starving millions of the third world, in wealthy Japan they have forced a pampered population to contemplate the shocking possibility of a long-term — perhaps permanent — reduction in the quality and quantity of its food.

[KNOWTHIS]

www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/exposed-the-great-gm-crops-myth-812179.html

Exposed: the great GM crops myth

Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.

The study – carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt – has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.

Professor Barney Gordon, of the university's department of agronomy, said he started the research – reported in the journal Better Crops – because many farmers who had changed over to the GM crop had "noticed that yields are not as high as expected even under optimal conditions". He added: "People were asking the question 'how come I don't get as high a yield as I used to?'"

He grew a Monsanto GM soybean and an almost identical conventional variety in the same field. The modified crop produced only 70 bushels of grain per acre, compared with 77 bushels from the non-GM one.

The GM crop – engineered to resist Monsanto's own weedkiller, Roundup – recovered only when he added extra manganese, leading to suggestions that the modification hindered the crop's take-up of the essential element from the soil. Even with the addition it brought the GM soya's yield to equal that of the conventional one, rather than surpassing it.

The new study confirms earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsanto GM soya produced 6 per cent less than its closest conventional relative, and 11 per cent less than the best non-GM soya available.

[KNOWTHIS]

The food crisis is being engineered by IMF world banks.

www.gregpalast.com/the-globalizer-who-came-in-from-the-cold/

The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are eye-popping - including how the IMF and US Treasury fixed the Russian elections

And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of documents marked, "confidential," "restricted," and "not otherwise (to be) disclosed without World Bank authorization."

Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a "Country Assistance Strategy." There's an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation, designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But according to insider Stiglitz, the Bank's staff 'investigation' consists of close inspection of a nation's 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a 'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for his 'voluntary' signature (I have a selection of these).

Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.

At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, "The IMF riot."

The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.

www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109B.html

The "economic therapy" imposed under IMF-World Bank jurisdiction is in large part responsible for triggering famine and social devastation in Ethiopia and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, wreaking the peasant economy and impoverishing millions of people.

With the complicity of branches of the US government, it has also opened the door for the appropriation of traditional seeds and landraces by US biotech corporations, which behind the scenes have been peddling the adoption of their own genetically modified seeds under the disguise of emergency aid and famine relief.

Moreover, under WTO rules, the agri-biotech conglomerates can manipulate market forces to their advantage as well as exact royalties from farmers. The WTO provides legitimacy to the food giants to dismantle State programmes including emergency grain stocks, seed banks, extension services and agricultural credit, etc.), plunder peasant economies and trigger the outbreak of periodic famines.

The Promise of the "Free Market"

In Ethiopia, a transitional government came into power in 1991 in the wake of a protracted and destructive civil war. After the pro-Soviet Dergue regime of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam was unseated, a multi-donor financed Emergency Recovery and Reconstruction Project (ERRP) was hastily put in place to deal with an external debt of close to 9 billion dollars that had accumulated during the Mengistu government. Ethiopia's outstanding debts with the Paris Club of official creditors were rescheduled in exchange for far-reaching macro-economic reforms. Upheld by US foreign policy, the usual doses of bitter IMF economic medicine were prescribed. Caught in the straightjacket of debt and structural adjustment, the new Transitional Government of Ethiopia (TGE), led by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) - largely formed from the Tigrean People's Liberation Front (PLF) - had committed itself to far-reaching "free market reforms", despite its leaders' Marxist leanings. Washington soon tagged Ethiopia alongside Uganda as Africa's post Cold War free market showpiece.

While social budgets were slashed under the structural adjustment programme (SAP), military expenditure - in part financed by the gush of fresh development loans - quadrupled since 1989.5 With Washington supporting both sides in the Eritrea-Ethiopia border war, US arms sales spiralled. The bounty was being shared between the arms manufacturers and the agribusiness conglomerates. In the post-Cold War era, the latter positioned themselves in the lucrative procurement of emergency aid to war-torn countries. With mounting military spending financed on borrowed money, almost half of Ethiopia's export revenues was earmarked to meet debt-servicing obligations.

A Policy Framework Paper (PFP) stipulating the precise changes to be carried out in Ethiopia had been carefully drafted in Washington by IMF and World Bank officials on behalf of the transitional government, and was forwarded to Addis Ababa for the signature of the Minister of Finance. The enforcement of severe austerity measures virtually foreclosed the possibility of a meaningful post-war reconstruction and the rebuilding of the country's shattered infrastructure. The creditors demanded trade liberalization and the full-scale privatization of public utilities, financial institutions, State farms and factories. Civil servants including teachers and health workers were fired, wages were frozen and the labor laws were rescinded to enable State enterprises "to shed their surplus workers". Meanwhile, corruption became rampant. State assets were auctioned off to foreign capital at bargain prices and Price Waterhouse Cooper was entrusted with the task of coordinating the sale of State property.

In turn, the reforms had led to the fracture of the federal fiscal system. Budget transfers to the State governments were slashed leaving the regions to their own devices. Supported by several donors, "regionalization" was heralded as a "devolution of powers from the federal to the regional governments". The Bretton Woods institutions knew exactly what they were doing. In the words of the IMF, "[the regions] capacity to deliver effective and efficient development interventions varies widely, as does their capacity for revenue collection".

In other words, the famine - itself in large part a product of the economic reforms imposed to the advantage of large corporations by the IMF, World Bank and the US Government - served to undermine Ethiopia's genetic diversity to the benefit of the biotech companies. With the weakening of the system of traditional exchange, village level seed banks were being replenished with commercial hi-bred and genetically modified seeds. In turn, the distribution of seeds to impoverished farmers had been integrated with the "food aid" programmes. WPF and USAID relief packages often include "donations" of seeds and fertiliser, thereby favouring the inroad of the agribusiness-biotech companies into Ethiopia's agricultural heartland. The emergency programs are not the "solution" but the "cause" of famine. By deliberately creating a dependency on GM seeds, they had set the stage for the outbreak of future famines.

This destructive pattern - invariably resulting in famine - is replicated throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. From the onslaught of the debt crisis of the early 1980s, the IMF-World Bank had set the stage for the demise of the peasant economy across the region with devastating results. Now, in Ethiopia, fifteen years after the last famine left nearly one million dead, hunger is once again stalking the land. This time, as eight million people face the risk of starvation, we know that it isn't just the weather that is to blame.

[KNOWTHIS]

Bio-fuels have become the IMF’s scapegoat and they’re using it as a political shield to deflect blame from themselves.

www.eux.tv/article.aspx?articleId=20118

IMF: biofuels undermine fight against poverty

The head of the International Monetary Fund this weekend warned that rising food prices, resulting from increased demand for biofuels, ares boosting inflation worldwide and are undermining the fight against poverty.

[KNOWTHIS]

The IMF continues to increase panic over their manufactured crisis.

news.monstersandcritics.com/business/news/article_1400561.php/Worst_ma
Worst may still be to come in food rioting, IMF head says (Roundup)

The worst of the instability and rioting caused by the skyrocketing cost of staple foods may yet come, International Monetary Fund (IMF) head Dominique Strauss-Kahn told a French radio station on Friday.

'The worst of the crisis may be before us,' Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister, told Europe 1 radio. 'Hundreds of millions of people will be affected.'

The IMF head also said that democratically elected governments may be toppled because of the crisis, even though they enacted correct policies.

Strauss-Kahn also invoked the possibility of regional warfare provoked by the rising cost of foods such as maize, rice and wheat.

'History is full of wars that began because of events like this,' he warned.

High staple-food prices recently sparked violence in several countries, including Egypt and Haiti.

[KNOWTHIS]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrynBzUpyag

World Bank creating poverty (BBC Newsnight)

IMF and World Bank meet in Washington - Greg Palast reports for BBC Television's Newsnight.
Three weeks ago James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, was supposed to appear on CNN, and he told CNN that if I showed up and they put me on the air he would not appear; he would remove all tapes of his interviews if Greg Palast were allowed on the air. And CNN did the courageous thing and yanked me out of the studio. Now we're going to find out why.
featuring:
Joseph Stiglitz(fmr chief economist World Bank)

[Mech]

Wall Street Warns Americans To Begin Stockpiling Food

Darryl Mason
Your New Reality
Thursday, April 24, 2008

The New York Times recently told its more wealthy readers to consider buying a rural cottage, or even log cabin, to ride out the water and food riots that militarised police forces are preparing and training for, and now Wall Street recommends its readers to begin stockpiling rice and cereals, not only to fend off hunger but as an investment opportunity

Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.

"Load up the pantry," says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street's top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. "I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn't going to happen here. But I don't know how the food companies can absorb higher costs."

The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They're all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.

You can't easily stock up on perishables like eggs or milk. But other products will keep. Among them: Dried pasta, rice, cereals, and cans of everything from tuna fish to fruit and vegetables. The kicker: You should also save money by buying them in bulk.

If this seems a stretch, ponder this: The emerging bull market in agricultural products is following in the footsteps of oil. A few years ago, many Americans hoped $2 gas was a temporary spike. Now it's the rosy memory of a bygone age.

The readers of the Wall Street Journal now know it's time to get busy stockpiling. For good reasons. Shortages of rice and other essentials are now being reported in American cities :

Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon : Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

"Where's the rice?" an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. "You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous."

"There have been so many stories about worldwide shortages that it encourages people to stock up. What most people don't realize is that supply chains have changed, so inventories are very short," Mr.Rawles , a former Army intelligence officer, said. "Even if people increased their purchasing by 20%, all the store shelves would be wiped out."

An anonymous high-tech professional writing on an investment Web site, Seeking Alpha, said he recently bought 10 50-pound bags of rice..."I am concerned that when the news of rice shortage spreads, there will be panic buying and the shelves will be empty in no time. I do not intend to cause a panic, and I am not speculating on rice to make profit. I am just hoarding some for my own consumption," he wrote.

The presidential Bush family's favourite newspaper, the Washington Times, notes the rapidly growing chaos and panic in American food industries, and the demented greed of Wall Street :

Farmers and food executives appealed fruitlessly to federal officials yesterday for regulatory steps to limit speculative buying that is helping to drive food prices higher. Meanwhile, some Americans are stocking up on staples such as rice, flour and oil in anticipation of high prices and shortages spreading from overseas.

Community Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)....regulators said high prices are mostly the result of soaring world demand for grains combined with high fuel prices and drought-induced shortages in many countries.

Costco and other grocery stores in California reported a run on rice, which has forced them to set limits on how many sacks of rice each customer can buy. Filipinos in Canada are scooping up all the rice they can find and shipping it to relatives in the Philippines, which is suffering a severe shortage that is leaving many people hungry.

While farmers here and abroad generally are benefiting from the high prices, even they have been burned by a tidal wave of investors and speculators pouring into the futures markets for corn, wheat, rice and other commodities and who are driving up prices in a way that makes it difficult for farmers to run their businesses.

U.S. wheat stocks are at the lowest levels in 60 years because worldwide consumption of wheat has exceeded production in six of the past eight years, said U.S. Agriculture Department chief economist GeraldBange . Adding to tight supplies was the back-to-back failure of two years of wheat crops caused by drought in Australia, a major wheat exporter, he said.

In addition, the diversion of one-third of the U.S. corn crop into making ethanol for vehicles has increased prices for corn and other staples such as soybeans and cotton as more acreage is set aside for ethanol production.

The upswing in prices has been exaggerated by the massive influx of investors and speculators seeking to profit from rising prices for corn, wheat, oil, gold and other commodities. Big Wall Street firms and hedge funds have taken huge positions in futures markets that once were dominated by relatively small operators such as farmers and grain-elevator owners.

Oil speculation helped drive the price of a barrel beyond $100, and now 'food speculators' are going to do the same for the food you need to buy to feed your family. And the government doesn't want to stop it happening.

Maybe they're hoping Monsanto with save the day, and bellies, of Americans with GM crops, but the 'miracle' of GM crops is turning out to be little more than clever marketing. Monsanto now admits their genetically modified crops do not actually produce higher yields of rice and grains. More food from less acreage is something they aspire to achieve, not something they can actually do yet.

Food prices will stay high simply because oil prices will never drop below $100 again. It will only ever increase, drop back a few dollars, then increase again. We're already being softened up by oil cartels and governments to expect $200 a barrel prices within the next few years.

When oil hits $150 a barrel, trucking and freight companies will start projecting big losses, and will reconsider whether it pays to service longer, less profitable routes to smaller urban population pockets. The sort of places that need nearly everything trucked in, but produce little to truck back out again. When the delivery trucks slow, or cease altogether, most supermarkets will be emptied of food within a few days.

Soaring food prices, and food shortages, are impacting across the world.

In Japan, people are trying to cope with the savage shock of shortages of staple foods, stunning rises in the price of rice and emptying supermarket shelves :

"I went to another supermarket, and then another, and there was no butter at those either. Everywhere I went there were notices saying Japan has run out of butter. I couldn't believe it.."

Japan's acute butter shortage, which has confounded bakeries, restaurants and now families across the country, is the latest unforeseen result of the global agricultural commodities crisis.

A sharp increase in the cost of imported cattle feed and a decline in milk imports, both of which are typically provided in large part by Australia, have prevented dairy farmers from keeping pace with demand.

While soaring food prices have triggered rioting among the starving millions of the third world, in wealthy Japan they have forced a pampered population to contemplate the shocking possibility of a long-term — perhaps permanent — reduction in the quality and quantity of its food.

The wealthy can only afford to buy the food that the poor cannot while that food is still available. When supplies run out, they too must either go without, grow their own or pay absurd prices for what was, only last year, so cheap.

How bad could global food shortages ultimately get? The lives of many hundreds of millions who have never known hunger before are threatened.

Will we be reduced to the pitiful state of Haitians, who have been driven by food shortages and extreme hunger to start eating the earth beneath their feet?

...the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar...

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

The age of cheap and plentiful food, at least from supermarkets, is clearly over.

All governments need to encourage backyard, and balcony, food gardens. Houses that will never sell and are decaying can be bulldozed to make way for community farms. There are at least two or three dozen villages in England returning to thispre-20th century method of feeding the people and bringing the community together.

For city dwellers, however, even those with balcony gardens crowded with carrots, tomatoes, herbs, salad greens and citrus trees, the food staples like milk, cooking oil, butter and wheat, however, will continue to grow only more expensive.

The psychological impact for most Americans of seeing food riots in their towns and cities will be immense, and destructive.

[Mech]

NOW...... is the time to pick up a few 50lb bags of rice before prices get ridiculous.

*****


May 6, 2008

Rice prices hit records amid Burmese disaster

Rhys Blakely, Bombay, and Leo Lewis, Asian Business Correspondent

The cyclone that has devastated Burma is not only set to push world rice prices higher but may have jeopardised the country’s long-term ability to feed its own population, Asian food experts say.

business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/consumer_goods/article3878749.ece

[Swamp Gas]

Also, Lentils, Dried Fruit, wheat berries, water, bee pollen, and spirulina