Follow-up: Argentine election results

i read a few articles on the election results which claimed that argentine voters were repudiating a center-left government... b.s... they were repudiating an incompetent, airhead, fashionista presidente who, with her ex-presidente husband, have systematically, in true argentine fashion, lined their own pockets while claiming to be on the side of the poor, a population that is steadily increasing while the rich - as usual - get richer...

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner lost power in Congress after voters angry at her handling of a farm strike, crime and a slowing economy favored opposition candidates in mid-term elections yesterday.

Fernandez acknowledged that a slate of candidates for the lower house led by her husband, former President Nestor Kirchner, was defeated in the bellwether province of Buenos Aires. She told reporters today that the government will have 35 seats in the 72-member senate and 107 lawmakers in the 257- member lower house, not counting allies from other blocs.

Fernandez, 56, relied on her coalition’s control of Congress to back an agenda that included nationalizing $24 billion in private pension funds and the country’s flagship airline, Aerolineas Argentinas SA. She angered many supporters when she tried to raise farm export taxes last year, provoking four months of road blockades and protests.

too bad, so sad, cristina... meanwhile, check out what you've done to your wonderful country...

Argentina faces having to import wheat

Argentina, which considers itself the world’s bread basket, faces having to import wheat next year after the worst planting season on record because of drought, lack of credit and government policies.

Argentine farmers are set to sow about 2.9m hectares with wheat, the smallest area since records started more than a century ago and down 30 per cent from last season’s 4.2m, according to estimates from the Buenos Aires grain exchange.

“Since records started in Argentina more than 100 years ago there is not a single season with a lower planted area,” said Esteban Copati, an agricultural analyst at the exchange. “The wheat-sowing season has started badly, on the wrong footing.”

what a crying shame...

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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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