Posts Tagged ‘Famine’
Mountain House #10 Cans
May 7, 2009Lesotho – Make a Keyhole Garden
April 1, 2009Catastrophic Fall in 2009 Global Food Production
February 16, 2009by Eric deCarbonnel
After reading about the droughts in two major agricultural countries, China and Argentina, I decided to research the extent other food producing nations were also experiencing droughts. This project ended up taking a lot longer than I thought. 2009 looks to be a humanitarian disaster around much of the world
To understand the depth of the food Catastrophe that faces the world this year, consider the graphic below depicting countries by USD value of their agricultural output, as of 2006.
Now, consider the same graphic with the countries experiencing droughts highlighted.
The countries that make up two thirds of the world’s agricultural output are experiencing drought conditions. Whether you watch a video of the drought in China, Australia, Africa, South America, or the US , the scene will be the same: misery, ruined crop, and dying cattle.
The Looming Food Crisis
December 16, 2008We have heard plenty about the dangers of peak oil, global warming, banking meltdowns, and global pandemics, but the most critical crisis of all, that of food, looms largely unnoticed.
When we have thought about a food crisis it has usually been in terms of there not being enough food. But in recent times a new specter has raised its head. The food is there, but the price of food is rising so fast that the world’s poor can no longer afford it. They can no longer afford the most basic commodity of life.
In the last three years, the global food prices have doubled. The fastest rises have been in the staple cereals. In the last year (2007), the price of corn went up by 30%, rice by 74%, soya by 87%, and wheat by 130%. The people most hit by such increases are the world’s poor. Some have to spend 80% of their income on food. What happens when they have to pay even more? The answer is beginning to hit the news—food riots in Haiti, strikes and protests in Egypt, 30 million in Bangladesh at risk of starvation.
There are several reasons for the rise in food prices. The most basic is supply and demand. Increasing numbers to feed without similar increases in supply, pushes up prices. Higher oil prices mean higher food production costs—farm equipment, fertilizers (which are predominanty oil-derived), and transport. Droughts in major wheat producing areas such as Australia and Kazakhstan have had a major impact on supply. As growing numbers in India and China rise out of poverty, diets change. Hundreds of millions of people are wanting to eat more meat and dairy products; yet producing one pound of beef takes ten pounds of grain, forcing the price of staple foods even higher.
| Rising food prices are the first global impact of peak oil—the inevitable rise in oil prices that occurs once increased demand for oil overtakes the capacity to increase supply. |
Added to these, there is the crazy idea of alleviating global warming by growing biofuels. Leaving aside the question of whether this does or does not result in a net reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide, every hectare of farmland given over to growing biofuels, is a hectare not growing food. (The grain needed to fill the tank of an SUV with bio-ethanol would feed a person for one year.) To think that growing food for cars should take precedent over growing food for people shows just how crazy some people have become. Those governments, such as the USA and UK, who have jumped on the biofuel bandwagon are about to have a very rude awakening as the food crisis begins to take center stage.
What can be done? The factors pushing food prices higher are here to stay (for a good while at least). The impact on the world’s poor (and soon, the not so poor) will increase. More and more people will not be able to afford to eat, or not afford much else. Instead of rising out of poverty they will sink back in. Increasingly, the problem will be seen as economic; the food is there, it just costs too much.
We are heading inexorably towards a time when the nations of the developed countries will have to subsidize the food of the world’s poor. Right wing conservatives in the US balk at the idea of social welfare in their own country, and without large numbers dying of starvation in the USA they can get away with that, but when the world’s media shows food price riots across the world, and people starving by the millions, attitudes will begin to shift. The laissez-faire free market ideology that lies beneath rising food prices will have to be overridden. In its place—as far as food goes at least—we will have to move towards a form of global social welfare. Anathema as that may be to some.
Food Clock
Online counter of principal foodstuffs produced.
For more detailed analysis of the food crisis, see:
Monthly Review: The World Food Crisis Sources and Solutions
Laklar Online: Food Crisis – Capitalism to Blame
Farmer in Chief, by Michael Pollan
October 21, 2008Thursday 09 October 2008
by: Michael Pollan, The New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/101708EA
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Dear Mr. President-Elect,
It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration – the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact – so easy to overlook these past few years – that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.
Flourishing In Crisis 