Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “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, 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....

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 recently revised its 2008 budget, increasing the amount it will spend on food subsidies by about $280 million.

“The biggest concern is food riots,” said H.S. 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 human instinct is to survive, and people are going to do no matter what to survive. And if you’re hungry you get angry quicker.”

Real solutions will take years. Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself. Outside investment is the key, although that requires stability, not the sort of widespread looting and violence that the Haitian foot riots have fostered.

Meanwhile, most of the poorest of the poor suffer silently, too weak for activism or too busy raising the next generation of hungry. In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité 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.”

An extract from today's New York Times.

As the globe falls deeper into crisis it is time we all went on a war footing.

We need to ration our food and energy so that the rich don't squander food and energy.

How bad does it have to get before we are willing to use less energy?

How many children will die before we decide to reduce our meat intake?

All the nay sayers on peak oil, climate change, overpopulation, and the food crisis must be getting some idea of the problems we are now facing.

We should put a premium on maximising our food production. If globalisation means anything it should mean that all humans have a right to an adequate food supply. That is a basic human right.

Bring home the troops; put them to work on growing food and building alternate energy supplies. We can change. For all those who profess a believe in a God surely this is the moral thing to do.

Why should we grow grapes for wine or barley for beer when kids are not getting an adequate meal?

Change will come either peacefully or at the point of the gun. You choose.

John Pratt: "Kevin Rudd says the cause of the global problems we are currently facing is simply "Mispricing". To me that means a catastrophic failure of the free market system. When pricing determines who lives or who dies we cannot let the "free market" determine the outcome."

Cleary you wish to make a Monsanto shareholder like me richer (great Canuck company btw), so who am I to try and stop you?

Of course you do understand who will be the regulator of the new world food order, don't you? That'll be the largest food exporter, and guess who that is?

I've told you guys since being on this board why Kyoto was a con - why it was only ever going to make the United States even more powerful going into the future. You simply cannot have high oil prices without that price being passed on to the final product.

The art of the great deal is in allowing the other party to believe they are the people getting the great deal.

Btw John McCain is probably the most anti fuel subsidy proponent around. He probably also sees the day of picking up a barrel of oil in return for a box of corn flakes.

Part of Kevin Rudd's speech when he took the podium at the Sydney Institute's annual dinner on Wednesday night:

"The world today faces three great and pressing crises. At the heart of all three is the same phenomenon - mispricing.

The problem of global warming is, essentially, one of the chronic and systemic mispricing of energy. The cost of oil and coal has never included its so-called externalities, which, in this case, include the destruction of the environment.

Now, the world looks to governments to correct this by setting a price for emitting carbon.

Second is the emerging problem of the world food crisis, an acute global problem which Australia has still failed to properly recognise. The World Bank's Bob Zoellick says food shortages now threaten the stability of 33 nations. The reason? One main cause is that vast quantities of food are being diverted from tables to make ethanol for fuel tanks. Why? Because governments in the rich countries are subsidising ethanol production. These governments have perverted the food market through this mispricing. India's Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram, calls this "a crime against humanity".

Third is the global credit crisis. Any commodity, if supplied free, will be abused and misused. The US Federal Reserve pushed the price of money to zero, after adjusting for inflation, for three years. The commodity was abused accordingly. As the Fed has returned interest rates to normal, the repricing has set off deep systemic instability.

In the first case, mispricing occurred because of the lack of government intervention. In the other two, the mispricing is the result of government intervention. There is no absolute answer here. The wisdom of governments is in knowing when to intervene in markets, and when not to. That is precisely the puzzle that Rudd now presents us with.

Rudd is not telling us anything new. He is, however, inviting us to help him find optimal answers.

(As reported by Peter Hartcher in this morning's SMH.)

Diverting food from tables to make ethanol for fuel tanks is called a "crime against humanity" by India's Finance Minister.

Kevin Rudd says the cause of the global problems we are currently facing is simply "Mispricing". To me that means a catastrophic failure of the free market system. When pricing determines who lives or who dies we cannot let the "free market" determine the outcome.

We have to come up with global systems to make sure we produce enough food to feed even the poorest among us. We should also make sure that any damage to the environment is factored into the cost of production of all goods. We also need to develop a global financial system that is well regulated and trusted by all who use it.

A complete rethink of our outdated global economic system is necessary.

To do less is worse than genocide.

John, one big issue is the feeding of grain stocks to intensively farmed animals, and as the taste for red meat increases in Asia that is only going to increase. The poor return one gets for feeding a tonne of grain to a lot fed animal is unsustainable.

It is not just about production, land use and water, it is also about value adding. And feeding grain to produce beef and pork is not value adding, it actually represents value loss - food value loss, that is.

What is worrying is that big money is being outlaid in the wheat belt in the hope of cashing in on the high grain prices. But as each day goes by without rain the risk of further enormous rural loss is increasing. A huge amount has already been outlaid. If this seasons crops fail, then the hoped for recovery by many farmers will simply evaporate. And there will be an even bigger grain shortage world wide. Some of the northern sorghum crops were very mediocre due to lack of finishing rains.

What I find hard to understand is why farmers are receiving $54 for whole lambs when in the supermarket yesterday I noticed lamb chops and cutlets were priced at $35 a kilo. And beef prices in the yards are very flat, but just take a look at the price of beef in the supermarket today. Rudd really needs to tackle this issue as a priority. I notice Woolworths boasting record profits yet again. It is bloody scandalous really.

I see also an emerging disaster food wise in North Korea with nearly a third of the population underfed.

There is also enormous food wastage in the western world. How to fix that I would not have a clue, but it is unforgivable that people in the world are starving while in other countries food is being thrown in the bin.

“The Israelis are growing fish in the desert, using brackish water from aquifers. They grow algae to feed the fish and then pump the water into lily ponds to help purify the water and then reuse the water to grow more crops. “

John, it's called aquaponics and has been used here for many years by sensible people. There are many in suburbia who understand the coming problems with food and grow their own food and fish inside their homes and flats. We use aquaponics for a lot of our fish and just about all our food, no chemicals, just good food.

I'm sad to say it's too late to make the huge changes necessary to alleviate the collapse of biodiversity and agriculture. For too long this country has been growing crops which are alien to the land, in the wrong places and at the wrong times. Now recovery is beyond our ability because of the current political and bureaucratic system. It would take at least 20 years to start turning the situation around even if the drought broke, which it will not until human destruction is completely stopped. As for water, all we have done is destroy the life lines of the country and used up the water reserves developed over thousands of years in less than 50. How anyone can see this as progress is beyond me, and when you look where political parties and their vested interests have placed us, you can see it's hopeless unless we get rid of the current system now.

Rudd the Dud's egocentric 2020 conference is already looking a farce as all they are doing is bringing the same old suspects who have caused these problem together for a free feast and ego trip. He has already decided what he wants and it is not what will fix things. If you have been reading the papers, politicians of all parties seem astounded that current polling states people see the environment as the biggest thing to be tackled, whilst all the political and elitist morons see is their economic returns and forget the rest. I'll be extremely interested to see what the supposed elite intellectuals have to say, I bet they pooh pah anything but their own meaningless garbage.

Overseas just about every country is experiencing the same food problems, yet I remember not long ago people on this forum condemning me for speaking out about this and saying the drought will break and the rivers will return to normal. They also advocated bigger and bigger farming of alien crops, stating it would work better than small farms. This is already being seen as fallacy: our biggest food growing areas are not under extreme pressure, they are dying from an incurable disease caused by human stupidity.

Nothing will come out of the 2020 conference, other than rhetoric, more committees, inquiries and more money to vested coal, oil and retail corporations. Our great government is giving many multinationals billions each year to prop them up at the expense of the future.

What can we do about this? Prepare, establish your own ability to grow and provide food. Fuel prices by the end of this year will be well over $2 per litre and maybe $3. I doubt people realise the real gravity of the situation. Food crops around the world are collapsing, the ecology is almost destroyed and what people have failed to realise and accept, biodiversity is what enables us to use the land in the first place. As we have destroyed that, by wiping out all the birds animals and insects which keep the natural world functioning, there is no solution, just finality for the world societies.

At the turn of this century we should have been well on the way to changing our approaches, established environmentally sensible transports, food, grain and fabric crops that can be grown in our harsh climate, decentralised and contained population growth. Sure it's raining heaps on the coasts, but people live there, and food is grown inland unlike years ago when much of it came from coastal farms and the inland was grazed.

The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to meet the needs of 20 million people around the world. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.

Ten thousand miles separate the mill’s hushed rows of oversized silos and sheds — beige, gray and now empty — from the riotous streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but a widening global crisis unites them.

The collapse of Australia’s rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months — increases that have led the world’s largest exporters to restrict exports severely, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

This article in the New York Times shows the important role Australian agriculture has in global food supplies.

So What’s the Problem ?
People have benefited unevenly from these yield increases across regions,
in part because of different institutional and policy environments.
This productivity increase has come at a cost: environmental sustainability
– soils, water, biodiversity, climate change

A slide show

An interesting program on Radio Nationals Bush Telegraph this morning. A group of Australian agricultural experts has been in Israel studying water management techniques. Interviewed on the program was Ben Fargher CEO of the National Farmers Federation and Professor Raymond Ison.

Israel is suffering from similar problems to Australia when it comes to water use. The Jordan River is almost dry and the Dead Sea is dropping by about one metre every year. One of the messages brought back is that we must use water more efficiently. We should phase out the use of spray irrigation and use underground drip systems. We must use agricultural methods that give us "more crop per drop." This may mean the demise of some crops but we must change our ways if we are to feed the world population.

The Israelis are growing fish in the desert, using brackish water from aquifers. They grow algae to feed the fish and then pump the water into lily ponds to help purify the water and then reuse the water to grow more crops.

We must develop systems that provide water securityr to cities, farmers and the environment.