Global Food Crisis - Speculation!

This is truly unbelievable...

Multinationals make billions in profit out of growing global food crisis

Speculators blamed for driving up price of basic foods as 100 million face severe hunger

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 4 May 2008

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.

The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution.

The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (£275m) to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn.

Cargill's net earnings soared by 86 per cent from $553m to $1.030bn over the same three months. And Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from $363m to $517m. The operating profit of its grains merchandising and handling operations jumped 16-fold from $21m to $341m.

Similarly, the Mosaic Company, one of the world's largest fertiliser companies, saw its income for the three months ending 29 February rise more than 12-fold, from $42.2m to $520.8m, on the back of a shortage of fertiliser. The prices of some kinds of fertiliser have more than tripled over the past year as demand has outstripped supply. As a result, plans to increase harvests in developing countries have been hit hard.

Read the whole article.

The US-Colombia "fair" trade agreement

The US-Colombia Unfair Trade Agreement: Just Say No!

With Congress back in session, the Bush Administration is pushing hard to pass another trade agreement based on the failed NAFTA model, this time with Colombia. The Administration is in a race against public opinion, which is quickly turning against the kind of neoliberal trade deals that have worsened poverty and inequality in every country where they have been implemented and led to a massive loss of jobs in the United States. The proposed Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Colombia promises more of the same. The deal will also strengthen Colombia's government, which is responsible for severe human rights violations.

With more and more people—in Latin America and in the US—becoming aware of the repercussions of unfair trade rules, MADRE has urged its members to take action and to let their Congressional representatives know that a vote for this trade agreement is a vote for:

1. Worsening Rural Poverty and Hunger

The FTA cuts tariffs on food imported from the US but benefits only the few Colombian farmers who export to the US. Moreover, the deal bars the Colombian government from subsidizing farmers, while large-scale US corn and rice growers enjoy billions in subsidies. These double standards guarantee that US agribusiness can undersell Colombian farmers, who will face bankruptcy as a result. Many of Colombia's small-holder farmers are women and Indigenous Peoples who are losing their livelihoods and being forced off their lands.

2. Fueling Armed Conflict and Drug Trafficking

The intertwined crises of poverty, landlessness and inequality are at the root of Colombia's 50-year armed conflict. The FTA will further concentrate wealth in the hands of a few while worsening poverty for millions of people. Many Colombian farmers, whose livelihoods will be destroyed by the FTA, will be compelled to cultivate coca (the raw material for producing cocaine) to earn a living.

Continuing a trend begun in the wake of 9-11, the US has cast the FTA as a matter of its "national security," and the Colombian government has followed suit by treating anyone opposed to the deal as a terrorist. Colombia's workers, Afro-Colombians and Indigenous Peoples have taken a clear position against the FTA. Their peaceful protests have been met with severe repression, including murder.

3. Repressing Labor Rights

Colombia is already the world's deadliest country for trade unionists, with more than 2,000 labor activists killed since 1991. The FTA does not require Colombia to meet international core labor standards; it merely calls on the government to abide by its own weak labor laws. Without enforceable labor protections, the trade deal will put more workers at risk. US workers' power to negotiate better wages will also be weakened by a deal that allows corporations operating in Colombia to keep labor costs down through sheer violence.

4. Exacerbating Climate Change and Threatening Biodiversity

The FTA will increase logging in the Colombian Amazon, weakening the rainforest's capacity to stabilize the Earth's climate. Under provisions sought by the US, corporations that have bought the rights to a country’s forests, fishing waters, mineral deposits or oil reserves can totally deplete these resources, with grave consequences to ecosystems and the many species that inhabit them. Small-scale farmers and Indigenous Peoples who depend directly on these natural resources will be the first people to suffer.

5. Subordinating National Sovereignty to Corporations

By allowing corporations to sue governments for passing laws that could reduce profits, the FTA erodes Colombia's prerogative to regulate foreign investment and undermines citizens' chances of improving health, safety and environmental laws. In anticipation of the FTA, the US pressed Colombia to pass a law that would expropriate land from Indigenous and Afro-Colombians and allow multinational corporations to gain control of millions of hectares of rainforest. The forestry law was part of a series of constitutional "reforms" undertaken to meet the conditions of a US trade agreement. In January 2008, Colombian civil society won an important victory: the forestry law was struck down as a violation of Indigenous rights. Had the FTA already been in place, US corporations would now be allowed to sue the Colombian government for "lost future profits."

6. Deteriorating Public Health

By extending patent rights on medicines produced in the US, the FTA hinders the use of far cheaper generic drugs and puts life-saving medicines out of reach for millions of Colombians. Women, who are over-represented among the poor and primarily responsible for caring for sick family members, are particularly harmed by this provision.

7. Loss of Vital Public Services

The FTA requires the Colombian government to sell off critical public services, including water, healthcare and education. Elsewhere in Latin America, this kind of privatization has resulted in sharp rate increases by new corporate owners that deny millions of people access to essential services. Women are hardest hit because it is most often their responsibility to meet their families' needs for such basic services.

8. Harming Indigenous Women

The FTA would enable corporations to exploit Indigenous Peoples’ traditional knowledge by allowing companies to patent seeds, plants, animals and certain medical procedures developed and used by Indigenous women over centuries. Under the FTA, Indigenous women could lose access to important medicinal plants and agricultural seeds unless they pay royalties to patent holders. Indigenous women’s role as the protectors of their community’s natural resources and traditional knowledge would be eroded, threatening Indigenous cultures and women’s status within the community.

There Are Viable Alternatives to Free Trade Agreements

Despite more than a decade of failed NAFTA-style trade deals, the US continues to insist that its trading partners adhere to rigid neoliberal economic policies. But Latin America’s social movements are articulating viable alternatives for regulating trade and economic integration in ways that benefit women, families, communities and the environment. The women of MADRE’s sister organizations in Colombia and throughout Latin America affirm the need for Fair Trade Agreements that:

1. Are negotiated through democratic processes with effective participation from communities that will be impacted, including women’s organizations.


2. Ensure that life-sustaining resources such as water, food staples and medicinal plants are guaranteed to all people and not reduced to commodities.


3. Ensure that access to basic services, including health care, housing, education, water and sanitation, are recognized as human rights that governments are obligated—and empowered—to protect.


4. Institute the region’s highest, rather than lowest, standards for labor rights and health, safety and environmental protections.


5. Adopt principles of “fair trade,” including social security and development assistance programs that protect small farmers and workers and that recognize the economic value of women’s unpaid labor in the household.


6. Require foreign investors to contribute to the economic development of the communities where they have a presence.


7. Promote policies that respect local cultures and collective Indigenous rights and that preserve traditional agricultural techniques and biodiversity in agriculture and nature.


8. Recognize the links between economic growth, environmental sustainability and building peace.




source: MADRE

Videos worth contemplating

These videos are part of a movie called Baraka. The word Baraka means "blessing" in several languages; watching this film, the viewer is blessed with a dazzling barrage of images that transcend language. Filmed in 24 countries and set to an ever-changing global soundtrack, the movie draws some surprising connections between various peoples and the spaces they inhabit, whether that space is a lonely mountaintop or a crowded cigarette factory.

See more clips here.

The Story of Stuff

The Story of Stuff will take you on a provocative tour of our consumer-driven culture — from resource extraction to iPod incineration — exposing the real costs of our use-it and lose-it approach to stuff.

The movie is just the beginning of the story. Watch it, learn more and get involved here: www.StoryofStuff.com

Global Food Crisis - what can I do?

Warning: This article may challenge your lifestyle.

The words "Global Food Crisis" are everywhere you look - in the news, in blogs, on TV (I'm guessing here, I don't have a TV). What does it mean? In case you've been living in a cave, here's a brief summary (thanks Avaaz):

Have you noticed food costing more when you shop? Here's why -- we're plunging headlong into a world food crisis. Rocketing prices are squeezing billions and triggering food riots from Bangladesh to South Africa. Aid agencies say 100 million more people are at risk of starvation right now. In Sierra Leone alone the price of a bag of rice has doubled. Fears of inflation stalk the whole world, and the worst could be yet to come. The prices of staple foods like wheat, corn and rice have almost doubled, and the crisis is slipping out of control -- so we're calling for immediate action on emergency food aid, speculation and biofuels policy, while asking forthcoming summits to tackle deeper problems of investment and trade. The global food crisis touches and connects us all, creating a tsunami of hunger for the poor and damaging economies and squeezing citizens in the rich world too. becoming unaffordable for 90% of citizens.

In layman's terms: more people are starving because we are running out of grains. This problem is exacerbated by bad weather, an astounding gap in people's access to food (rich vs. poor), and horrible management of natural resources.

What do I mean? There are two problems here that not everyone is talking about: bio-fuels, which are getting some attention, and meat-based diets.

Bio-fuels are fuels made out of food, in short. Using corn or soybeans or grains, you can create fuel that will power an automobile, etc. Bio-fuels are not to be confused with using Waste Vegetable Oil as fuel, which is where you go to a restaurant, get used fuel, filter it, and put it in a diesel engine. Bio-fuels are hailed to be our saving grace from oil dependency and pollution, but largely really mean less available food for people, and are not really that much cleaner. Here's an excerpt from a National Geographic Article:

Corn requires large doses of herbicide and nitrogen fertilizer and can cause more soil erosion than any other crop. And producing corn ethanol consumes just about as much fossil fuel as the ethanol itself replaces. Biodiesel from soybeans fares only slightly better. Environmentalists also fear that rising prices for both crops will push farmers to plow up some 35 million acres (14 million hectares) of marginal farmland now set aside for soil and wildlife conservation, potentially releasing even more carbon bound in the fallow fields. The process also gives off large amounts of carbon dioxide, and that's where ethanol's green label starts to brown. Most ethanol plants burn natural gas or, increasingly, coal to create the steam that drives the distillation, adding fossil- fuel emissions to the carbon dioxide emitted by the yeast. Growing the corn also requires nitrogen fertilizer, made with natural gas, and heavy use of diesel farm machinery. Some studies of the energy balance of corn ethanol—the amount of fossil energy needed to make ethanol versus the energy it produces—suggest that ethanol is a loser's game, requiring more carbon-emitting fossil fuel than it displaces. Others give it a slight advantage. But however the accounting is done, corn ethanol is no greenhouse panacea.

Possibly in the future, there will be a more environmentally friendly way of producing bio-fuels, but it still doesn't mean that we're not burning food for fuel. In a country like the United States where most people can't imagine what a famine would be like, bio-fuels seem to be a plausible answer. But in the majority of the world, using something you could eat to run a car (which itself is a huge privelage) is ludicrous.

More ludicrous is that in many of these countries that need every grain they can get, grains are exported as food for livestock, or used in-country to feed animals, but the price of meat is out of reach for the poor. This brings me to my second point, the meat-based diet as a contributor to the global food crisis.

Some info from GoVeg.com

Would you ever open your refrigerator, pull out 16 plates of pasta and toss them in the trash, and then eat just one plate of food? How about leveling 55 square feet of rain forest for a single meal or dumping 2,500 gallons of water down the drain? Of course you wouldn't. But if you're eating chicken, fish, turkey, pork, or beef, that's what you're doing—wasting resources and destroying our environment. Animals raised for food expend the vast majority of the calories that they are fed simply existing, just as we do. We feed more than 70 percent of the grains and cereals we grow to farmed animals, and almost all of those calories go into simply keeping the animals alive, not making them grow. Only a small fraction of the calories consumed by farmed animals are actually converted into the meat that people eat. A major 2006 report by the United Nations summarized the devastation caused by the meat industry. Raising animals for food, the report said, is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale ….”

Growing all the crops to feed farmed animals requires massive amounts of water and land—in fact, nearly half of the water and 80 percent of the agricultural land in the United States are used to raise animals for food. Our taste for meat is also taking a toll on our supply of fuel and other nonrenewable resources—about one-third of the raw materials used in America each year is consumed by the farmed animal industry. Farmed animals produce about 130 times as much excrement as the entire human population of the United States, and since factory farms don't have sewage treatment systems as our cities and towns do, this concentrated slop ends up polluting our water, destroying our topsoil, and contaminating our air. Eating meat produces 100 percent of this waste—about 86,000 pounds per second! Give up animal products, and you'll be responsible for none of it.


From the Green Left:

The shift to grain-fed livestock is being driven by the wealthy nations' demands for fat-marbled meat. Currently, 70% of the US's entire grain crop is fed to livestock. Furthermore, two thirds of all the grain exported by the US goes to feed livestock rather than people. In the countries of the European Community, 57% of grain is fed to livestock. Brazil, a major producer of beef for the North American markets, now feeds 55% of its grain to livestock. Worldwide, between 1988-1990, humans consumed 822 million tonnes of grain, while livestock consumed 642 million tonnes. (New Internationalist, May, 1995).

More than half of Latin America's beef production is exported, with the rest priced beyond the range of most. From 1960 to 1980, beef exports from El Salvador increased more than 600%. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of small farmers were pushed off their land. Today, 72% of all Salvadoran infants are underfed. In Guatemala 75% of children under five years of age are undernourished, while much of the land and other resources for food production is given over to producing meat. Yet every year Guatemala exports 20 million kilos of meat to the United States. Robbins suggests that "If Americans reduced their meat consumption by 10%, enough grain would be saved to feed 60 million people ... about the number of people worldwide who die of hunger-related disease every year. Of course, this doesn't mean world hunger would be solved simply if Americans ate 10% less meat, there are obviously enormous economic, social, and political realities to be faced."


"The elimination of beef will be accompanied by an ecological renaissance, a grand restoration of nature on every continent ... Countless species of plants, insects and animals will be granted a reprieve from what once appeared to be a sure death at the hands of cattle ranchers and multinational corporations." Current agricultural practices are unsustainable. The planet is losing 24 million tons of top soil every year and the biologically productive land area is shrinking. Acid rain, soil erosion, ozone layer depletion, air pollution, the extinction of species, water loss, and many other environmental degradations are steadily decreasing the world's food producing capacity.

As you can see, our insistence on eating meat is a recipe for disaster for the majority of the world. A meat based diet requires 7 times more land than a plant based diet (more info). As the globalization of Western culture continues, more people in more countries are moving to an animal based diet, which is using up even more resources. There are no longer any reasons to cling to a meat based diet; a plant based diet has been proven to be better for your health, the environment, and the global community as a whole. Plant based diets free up valuable resources, among them water, (droughts have been a major issue leading up to the current crisis) and are better for the health of the soil.

As for bio-fuels, a more plausible solution to oil dependency would be to reduce consumption. This means: using public transportation or your bicycle, not driving to somewhere you could easily walk to, not flying short distances, carpooling, driving in a way that conserves fuel, buying local produce, etc. It's interesting that even as in recent years much talk of "reducing dependency on foreign oil" has been heard, people have been buying gas-guzzling SUVs. It's time to connect the dots! A car in itself is not as fuel efficient as public transportation, and more people with less fuel-efficient cars = higher dependency on oil.

We need to take responsibility for what's happening. Many of the problems are due to bad policy, but there is A LOT that we can do as individuals to make a positive change in the world. Making conscious decisions is the most important thing that we can do - we have to realize that nowhere is an island anymore, and the choices we make have global repercussions.


Thanks for reading!

Starting Point

From a school's webpage:

"We define our teaching method as "Transformative Educaction," since it is created with the idea of making personal and social transformation possible. We say that each human being has, in their essence, something they ignore; existence itself is the manifestation of that ignorance. Nonetheless, life is the (only) possibility to get out of this predicament; education should be an element that contributes to existential understanding and comprehension."

My summary: existence is the manifestation of our lack of comprehension regarding our essence. Being alive is our only chance to understand our essence and never have to be born again. I am going to have to disagree completely.

Religions create dogmas and ideas and then pawn them off as absolute truths. The above philosophy (based on buddhism) supposedly is about becoming free in thought and action; yet the philosophy itself is establishing guidelines with which we are supposed to view and judge the world. We are alive. This is a predicament. We would not be alive if we understood the essence of being. So we must try to understand our essence in order to not have to keep being born.

What if I said - We are alive. This is a predicament. We would not suffer in this life if we did not have original sin. So we must try to maintain a belief in god in order to not suffer eternally - ?

I'm tired of every religion creating a starting point that says our existence is punishment. Does learning that not seem like something important in our formation and how we view things? Thinking that 1) we have to suffer and 2) it's our fault. Existence as our fault? Is a dog at fault? Or a chicken? Or a tree? What are they guilty for? But they suffer, and they exist! This establishing existence as something negative is bound to shape our worldview, how we interpret the things that happen to us, and ultimately, create confusion. We go through life cursing our days and our very existence, viewing it as a "problem," or a "punishment," even though we didn't DO anything.

It's all dogma, some of it is just better disguised.


I maintain that these things are not true:

1- The material world came first, and then later (and separately) man appeared.

Man is a result of evolution, the same evolution that created crustaceans and tornados. We are a natural product of the development of the cosmos, a species that came about and continues to morph, as does the entire Earth and all of existence. The Earth is not a static place, even though we are taught to view it as such. It is constantly changing. It did not exist first and then we appeared from some other dimension to "do something." This worldview separates us from the rest of the world, from everything that's around us, when in reality, our very cells are made up of the same materials as we see in our surroundings, and when we die, will become parts of cells of other organisms. That's why we go about completely dissconected and abusive of the rest of the world. We're part of this.


2 - Existence is "equal to" or a "result of" guilt.

Existence is. Guilt and being punished is a human concept, created to try and establish some kind of security and order in our societies. When a snail dries up on a sunny day and dies, do we say it is guilty? No, it's natural. We have arisen as a species as part of a natural process. The psychological suffering we endure during our lives is, indeed, due to a misunderstanding of the essence of life, but we are not being punished.


3 - Each person has a separate and unique "soul."

Each person has an "ego," a persona, a personality which is the result of a combination of their genes and their environment. We are convinced that we existed before we were born, but what, exactly, existed? Life is a current that flows beneath all of these physical bodies that we see, it alone is the constant - each person/personality is but an accumulation of their past.


4 - Reincarnation - where there is a definite, unchanging entity that remains intact throughout it's various "lives."

See number three. Personally, I think that reincarnation could originally have been used to mean the constant interchange of energy in the world; when you eat an apple, it dies and it becomes part of you, when you die, you are buried and become part of the soil, which then nurtures a tree, etc. I think that reincarnation then became used as an excuse to maintain a status quo in society; think caste system. It is the Eastern version of original sin - you are in the lowest class because you deserve to be there, I am in the highest class because I behaved in a past life. What does an amoeba have to do to move up in the system? But it is an excellent way to avoid uprisings from the lower class and assure privelages to the higher class, and remove any responsibility the higher class may have had towards the lower.



My point is (do I have one? maybe) - don't let dogmas influence and create your worldview. Don't even take what I say as truth. Be daring and forget everything you were taught, and go find out the truth for yourself.