Something to ponder on Black Friday, the day after we stuffed our faces

from al jazeera...

With more than one billion people around the world considered overweight, why are so many others still starving and struggling to fill their plates?

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The BIG fear - when food is unavailable at any price

so, if you've got money - lots of it - whaddaya gonna do...? why, buy up farm land from poor people and impoverished countries, folks so desperate for money they're practically willing to give it away, and lock it up for yourself... lovely, eh...?

A variety of factors — some transitory, like the spike in food prices, and others intractable, like global population growth and water scarcity — have created a market for farmland, as rich but resource-deprived nations in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere seek to outsource their food production to places where fields are cheap and abundant.

[...]

Foreign investors — some of them representing governments, some of them private interests — are promising to construct infrastructure, bring new technologies, create jobs and boost the productivity of underused land so that it not only feeds overseas markets but also feeds more Africans. (More than a third of the continent’s population is malnourished.) They’ve found that impoverished governments are often only too welcoming, offering land at giveaway prices. A few transactions have received significant publicity, like Kenya’s deal to lease nearly 100,000 acres to the Qatari government in return for financing a new port, or South Korea’s agreement to develop almost 400 square miles in Tanzania. But many other land deals, of near-unprecedented size, have been sealed with little fanfare.

Investors who are taking part in the land rush say they are confronting a primal fear, a situation in which food is unavailable at any price.

it's simple... when you've got more money than god, you just buy the means of production...

“When some governments stop exporting rice or wheat, it becomes a real, serious problem for people that don’t have full self-sufficiency,” said Al Arabi Mohammed Hamdi, an economic adviser to the Arab Authority for Agricultural Investment and Development. Sitting in his office in Dubai, overlooking the cargo-laden wooden boats moored along the city’s creek, Hamdi told me his view, that the only way to assure food security is to control the means of production.

[...]

“There is no problem about money,” Hamdi said. “It’s about where and how.”

the problem with the super-rich elites, particularly those from the gulf states and saudi arabia, is that they honestly believe that money is the answer to everything... unfortunately, so far, they're proving they're right... meanwhile, the rest of us are left to suck hind tit...

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Terrible news for those who need to eat in Afghanistan

from an independent source...

A UN spokesman for WFO stated in a press conference that they have stopped food aid in Afghanistan due to attacks launched by the Taliban militants against logistic convoys in Paktika, Ghazni and Maydan Wardak provinces. He added that last week Taliban militants attacked a convoy of fifty-four trucks carrying logistic supplies and they have stolen a truck laden by approximately forty-five tones of food supplies.

as if the afghan people need any more bad news...

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Afghanistan - what's happening with the food crisis in a REALLY poor country

i see nothing but trouble ahead for nations around the world as the poor are increasingly unable to afford to feed themselves and their families... a man with an empty stomach, negligible income, with many hungry mouths to feed, who is confronted every day with ever-rising food prices, will, in short order, become a very angry man, and rightly so...

here's the scenario in afghanistan, a scenario i only have to step outside the gate of the project compound to experience...

As the global food crisis deepens, bringing inflation and shortages to many countries, Afghanistan -- already facing a protracted drought, entrenched rural poverty and an ongoing conflict with Islamist insurgents -- finds itself battling the added threat of hunger.

For generations, Afghans have depended on cheap, plentiful bread as their main staple. The country's principal crop is wheat, and its farmers produce more than 5 million tons in a good year. Although that is not enough to feed the entire population, wheat can usually be trucked in from neighboring Pakistan.

Since February, however, a combination of local drought and regional shortages has driven the price of flour here to once-unimaginable levels -- as much as $50 for a 40-pound sack. Pakistan, also worried about how to feed 160 million-plus people, has closed its borders to food exports, as have a number of other largely agricultural countries anxious to stave off domestic hardship and political unrest.

So far, Afghan authorities and international charities have prevented the wheat flour shortage here from reaching crisis proportions by finding emergency sources. The government has trucked in tons of flour from Kazakhstan, and the U.N. World Food Program has raised money to import 85,000 tons from major wheat-producing countries such as Canada and Australia.

In addition, enterprising smugglers have continued to bring in truck after truck piled with sacks of flour from Pakistan. Sacks are said to cross the border surreptitiously on donkey-back, via bribery at official crossing spots and buried deep inside cargo trucks carrying Afghan refugees and their belongings back home.

i don't think anybody, even a lot of the better off people here in kabul, realizes just how potentially explosive this situation is...

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More perspective on Afghanistan: "Since the Americans came here, nothing is cheap"

i've been posting on various perspectives of kabul and afghanistan... here's another one that captures fairly well the experience of driving around the city of kabul...

Getting around in some parts of central Kabul is like driving inside trenches: two lanes of road between high walls made of modern versions of sandbags referred to by their brand name: "Hesco barriers." They consist of 4-foot-tall wire mesh containers lined with heavy plastic and filled with sand, gravel or dirt, all topped by concertina wire. Other streets have classic sandbag structures, high walls and/or concrete-like barricades. Every dozen yards along the roads are heavily armed guards -- dead serious, with sunglasses, earpieces and legs menacingly spread.

yes, it sounds formidable and it is... on the other hand, there are also some relatively nice, wide streets, lined with homes or shops, certainly not like what you would experience in the u.s., but not like what she is describing above either... for instance, here's a lovely sunset picture i took from the hotel on a hill overlooking kabul where two afghan friends took me to dinner on thursday evening...


Kabul, looking west at sunset,
with buildings of Kabul University
in the foreground

but there is no discounting the reality that many afghans are experiencing...

Hungry Afghans looking for their next meal eye bread scraps piled up like heaps of trash at a Kabul market as a vendor weighs out fistfuls of the stale crusts on a scale. A Pashtun woman waits with an empty plastic sack.

She isn't scavenging — she's paying for leftovers that in better times were sold for feeding to sheep and cows. The woman said her household of 14 people had to give up fresh bread a month ago as the price spiraled out of reach.

Rising global food prices have hit few places as hard as Afghanistan, where the cost of wheat flour has shot up 75 percent in three months, fueling anger against the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai. In the volatile south, officials fear it could boost recruitment for the Taliban insurgency.

[...]

The U.N. World Food Program, or WFP, warns that the situation for the poorest in Afghanistan is dire and deaths from malnutrition are likely to increase. Protests have broken out in at least one city.

Even middle-income professionals are struggling.

"People are not dying of starvation, per se, but that's very rare these days. Usually people die from diseases they never should have died from but their bodies are weakened by hunger," he said.

Even before the food crisis, U.N. data showed 54 percent of children under five in Afghanistan are stunted. An estimated 10,400 people die of nutritional deficiencies each year.

In two of the poorest provinces, Ghor and Badghis, communities are buckling under the double impact of the global food crisis and a drought that wiped out 70 percent of last year's crop, said Mary Kate MacIsaac of the aid group World Vision.

here's the quote of the day...

[A] Pashtun woman, who declined to give her name because of her conservative social code [said,] "Since the Americans came here, nothing is cheap."

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Hugo Chávez on the world food crisis - a "massacre" of the poor

and it ain't by chance either... it's by design...

Soaring food prices are a "massacre" of the world's poor and are creating a global nutritional crisis, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday, calling it a sign that capitalism is in decline.

His comments came only hours after the United Nations' World Food Program called more expensive food a "silent tsunami" that threatens to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger.

"It is a true massacre what is happening in the world," Chavez said in a televised speech, citing U.N. statistics about deaths caused by hunger and malnourishment.

"The problem is not the production of food ... it is the economic, social and political model of the world. The capitalist model is in crisis."

[...]

Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage, visiting Caracas to meet with Chavez and other allied leaders on Wednesday, accused developed countries of spurring food prices through biofuels.

"Developed countries want to feed the cars of the rich with food -- this is the irrational world we live in today," Lage said, echoing Chavez's frequent accusations that Washington's promotion of biofuel is boosting prices of staples like corn.

don't think for one single second that this wasn't planned...

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"Grain prices are rising to their equivalent level in oil" - more from Al Jazeera English on the food crisis

i just finished watching this al jazeera special, ... without a doubt, it's the clearest, most honest look i've yet seen at what's happening with grain, ethanol and the rapidly worsening global food crisis... i highly recommend watching both parts start to finish...

People & Power - Food Shortages -20 Apr 08 - Part 1



People & Power - Food Shortages -20 Apr 08 - Part 2

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The world food crisis for dummies: food as a weapon

there really isn't any mystery to the rapidly-escalating global food crisis... just like endless war, it's all part of the plan of the global elites to make sure that they, and only they, remain in charge... since they have all the money imaginable, augmented by immense power, they will never have to worry about where their next meal will come from, and then, when all the great unwashed finally kill each other off over a cup of rice or die from starvation, the world will be an ever-so-much-nicer place for them to live...

amy goodman interviewing raj patel...

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

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

[I]n the past, it used to be that the people who were overweight were rich ... and the people who were hungry were poor. Today, hunger and obesity are both signs that people are unable to control their diets. They're unable to control, not in a sort of willpower way, but unable to control in terms of being able to access fresh fruits and vegetables, access food that is healthy. I mean, in the United States, for example, it's much harder for communities of poor people and people of color, in particular, to access fresh fruits and vegetables. In West Oakland, for example, near where I live, you have a situation where there's just one supermarket in West Oakland and dozens and dozens of liquor stores where there are no fresh fruits and vegetables, but there are these highly processed industrial foods. Now, that's a sign that in fact -- I mean, it would be wonderful for all of us to be able to access these fresh fruits and vegetables, but at the moment, particularly for people on low incomes, that's pretty tough to do. And so, the environments in which poor people find themselves and which are being built around poor people are more conducive to being overweight and to be unhealthy in the cities, and for poor people in the fields, those kinds of prices that come from the industrial food system are driving them out of business.

if that doesn't put it all in perspective for you, then try this...

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.

[...]

[I]t’s the economic and political policies of our governments in cahoots with Big Business that created the crisis in the first place (as it has all previous crises).

The ‘credit-crunch’ /is merely symptomatic of a sick system that needs to be replaced poste haste.

The issue is really quite simple, as long as we have ruling elites joined at the hip to Big Capital, running the show, they will never, not in a million years entertain the idea of doing away with the present economic system—which is the cause of all our miseries—and replacing it with a saner and more modest way of earning a buck, there’s too much at stake and for so few, dammit! Only we, the so-called people can do that, they won’t even begin to change things unless we either force them to or failing that, get rid of them.

didja get all that...? good...!

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Delta/Northwest, Berlusconi, Zimbabwe, and food riots: waking to a string of unpleasant news

where to start...

Delta Air Lines Inc. and Northwest Airlines Corp., squeezed by record high fuel prices and a slowing economy, are combining in a stock-swap deal that would create the world's biggest carrier.

my experience with one of the previous holders of the "world's biggest airline" title, united, tells me that no good will come of this...

and that's the least of the gloomy news...

the europeans couldn't believe we re-elected bush, and i can't believe the italians were stupid enough to re-elect this annoying, corrupt piece of offal...

Media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi won a decisive victory Monday in Italy's parliamentary election, setting the colorful conservative and staunch U.S. ally on course to his third stint as premier.

meanwhile, another totally corrupt, to-hell-with-the-people dictator desperately hangs on to power while the leaders of neighboring countries do nothing...

President Robert Mugabe's security forces fanned out across Zimbabwe Monday on the eve of a general strike called by the opposition after a judge threw out its bid to force the election results.

[...]

At Saturday's emergency summit in Lusaka, regional leaders discussed the post-election impasse long into the night, but they stopped short of criticising the Zimbabwean government or Mugabe.

Regional leaders have been chided for their traditional reluctance to speak out against 84-year-old Mugabe, seen by many as an elder statesman who still deserves respect for his role in winning Zimbabwe's independence.

Some three million Zimbabweans have fled to neighbouring countries in the wake of the country's economic collapse under Mugabe, who has ruled uninterrupted since independence from Britain in 1980.

A one-time regional model, Zimbabwe is now groaning under the impact of the world's highest rate of inflation while even basic food products such as bread and cooking oil are scarce.

and soaring food prices are having the predicted result across the globe, most notably, in a country that hasn't had any genuine good news in seemingly forever...

The good news is that there hasn't been a coup d'etat in Haiti in the wake of violent protests over increased food prices. However Saturday's vote by 16 of the country's 27 lawmakers to oust Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis means that the country is in the middle of a severe leadership crisis - and that Haiti's Head of State, President Rene Preval, is now politically impotent, bereft of his chief executive.

and here's what really, really hungry people look like, courtesy of spiegel...


Haiti


Pakistan


Philippines

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