Infinite Unknown

More than 14 million people in the east Africa region require urgent food aid due to drought and spiralling cereal and fuel prices, aid agencies say.

In an emergency appeal launched today, Oxfam warns that millions of people in Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Djibouti and Kenya are fast being pushed “towards severe hunger and destitution”. Earlier this week the UN said it needed £200m to avert a humanitarian disaster.

The hunger crisis is worse than the last regional emergency in 2006, when drought caused 11 million people to need assistance, because of the added impact of the global food price increases. Poor families are struggling to buy staples such as maize and wheat, which have more than doubled in price over the past 12 months.

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Sheikh flies Lamborghini 6,500 miles to Britain for oil change

His black-and-gold supercar costs £3,552 to service at an approved dealer – on top of the £20,000 to freight from Qatar to Britain. Source: Sun

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“In previous droughts most people on the margins found ways to cope,” said Peter Smerdon, of the World Food Programme. “But the simultaneous increase in food prices this time around means they are cutting down on meals and taking their kids out of school in order to try to get by. More people are falling over the edge.”

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Tags: Disaster, Drought, Environment, Ethiopia, famine, Food, Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food shortages, hunger, Kenya, poverty, Somalia, U.N., Uganda, World Food Programme

With little cash and import prices rocketing half the population faces starvation

In Cité Soleil, one of Port-au-Prince’s worst slums, making the clay-based food is a major income earner. Mud cakes are the only inflation-proof food available to Haiti’s poor. Photograph: David Levene

At first sight the business resembles a thriving pottery. In a dusty courtyard women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden under the Caribbean sun.

The craftsmanship is rough and the finished products are uneven. But customers do not object. This is Cité Soleil, Haiti’s most notorious slum, and these platters are not to hold food. They are food.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Environment, Food, Food Prices, Food Riots, Food shortages, Haiti, malnutrition, nutrition, Pregnancy, slums, starvation, U.N.

Here you will find all Top 25 Things Vanishing From America.

This series explores aspects of America that may soon be just a memory — some to be missed, some gladly left behind. From the least impactful to the most, here are 25 bits of vanishing America.

1. The Family Farm

My mother grew up on her family’s dairy farm in central Oregon, and when she was a child she was in 4-H — just like all the kids in her town. I’ve always admired her way with the “home arts” (she makes a mean jar of cucumber relish, and her embroidery festoons quilts for all my boys) so when I saw her 4-H ribbons I assumed that big purple one must have been for brownies, or jam. “Oh, that was for the pig I raised,” she said matter-of-factly.

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Tags: crops, Economy, Environment, famine, farmers, Food, Food Prices, Food Riots, Food shortages, USDA

At virtually every link in the nation’s food chain, the cost of oil is pushing expenses ever higher.

Retail bills for some food staples have risen at least 20 percent since 2006, and they probably will continue their upward march. A gallon of gasoline could cost $7 within the next two years, some analysts say.

“If you double the price of oil, I would assume that food would at least double, and it might be more because the cost of oil gets magnified in the food chain,” said Milt McGiffen, a vegetable specialist for the University of California cooperative extension in Riverside County.

SCOTT LINNETT / Union-Tribune Nancy Owens Renner of Ocean Beach expanded her backyard garden last winter in an effort to offset rising food and fuel prices. “I am thinking about how to maximize production in my yard,” Renner said.

By the numbers:
Price increases between May 2006 and May of this year:
53% – Eggs
25% – Bread
25% – Rice
19% – Milk
14% – Coffee
11% – Chicken
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Farmers are paying more money to fill their tractors with diesel for planting and harvesting. They also spend more for fertilizer, pesticides and plastic packaging, most of which are petroleum-based.

When the food is stored and processed, it takes a huge amount of energy, which is linked to the price of fossil fuels as well.

Then, products are shipped using diesel trucks and rail cars that are far costlier to run now than in years past.

The result is bigger and bigger food bills that are causing financial hardship for millions of Americans.

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Tags: Economy, farmers, Food, Food Prices, Food shortages, Oil, Oil Prices

“Production has been halved to 300 kilos (661 pounds) per 1,000 square meters (250 acres), even in well-irrigated parts of the region, as rainfall declined to one-fortieth of normal levels, Referans daily said on Wednesday, citing farmers and farming associations.”

The government has selected 35 of its 81 provinces as eligible for financial assistance, Erdogan said. Farmers who have lost more than 30 percent of their harvest to drought can claim assistance and also postpone any agricultural loan payments by a year, he added. Continue reading »

Tags: bankruptcy, climate change, Drought, earth changes, Environment, farmers, Food, Food Prices, Food shortages, Global Warming, Government, livestock, Turkey

“But, realistically, all ordinary people can do today is try to survive, perhaps by working with friends and neighbors in planting food and living within the underground economy. At least people might not then have to starve to death, because hard as it is to believe that “it could happen here,” widespread famine in the U.S. seems a real possibility over the next several years. Nations take such risks when they allow capitalist agribusiness to destroy local agriculture.”

With the economic news of the week of July 14-the continuing crisis among mortgage lenders, the onset of bank failures, the announced downsizing of General Motors, the slide of the Dow-Jones below 11,000-we are seeing the ongoing collapse of the U.S. economy.

Even the super-rich are becoming nervous as cries for an emergency suspension of short selling ring out.

What is really taking place, however, is that the producing economy of working men and women is being crushed by the overall debt burden on households, businesses, and governments that could reach $70 trillion by 2010. The financial system, including mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is bankrupt, as the debts it is based on cannot be repaid.

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Tags: Alan Greenspan, Bank of England, bankruptcy, bubble, crash, debt, Economy, famine, Fannie Mae, Fed, Federal Reserve, financial crisis, financial system, Food Prices, Food shortages, Freddie Mac, Freemasonry, George Bush, Government, Henry Kissinger, Iraq, Middle East, Nazi Germany, Oil, U.S.

According to the World Bank’s top economist, Don Mitchell, biofuels had been responsible for three-quarters of the 140 per cent rise in world food prices between 2002 and 2008. It was this that last October prompted Jean Ziegler, the UN’s “special rapporteur on the right to food”, to comment that biofuels could only bring “more hunger to the poor people of the world” and were a “crime against humanity”.
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Yellow peril: while Britain’s farmers are encouraged to turn their fields over to rapeseed for biofuels, the world food crisis has driven people in Ethiopia to the brink of starvation

Rarely in political history can there have been such a rapid and dramatic reversal of a received wisdom as we have seen in the past 18 months over biofuels - the cropping of living plants, such as soya beans, wheat and sugar cane, to generate energy.

Two years ago biofuels were still being hailed as a dream solution to what was seen as one of the most urgent problems confronting mankind - our dependence on fossil fuels, which are not only finite but seemed to be threatening the world with the catastrophe of global warming.

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Tags: Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, biofuel, Economy, Environment, EU, Food, Food Prices, Food shortages, George Bush, Government, Politics, U.N., U.S.

Life is hard for wheat and livestock farmers in the south, as they face a possible third year of nearly no rain.

July 12, 2008 POOCHERA, AUSTRALIA — Glen Phillips kneels down, scoops up a handful of dirt and squashes it in his fist to test whether the soil in this dry patch of the Australian Outback is ready to take a crop of wheat.

“It should clump together when you squeeze,” says Phillips, whose family has lived off the land on the edge of the Great Australian Bight since 1949. “That’s how you know it’s good to plant, it’s moist enough to hold the roots.”

He opens his hand and the earth sifts dustily between his fingers. Phillips looks up, lifts his hat slightly and squints into an empty blue sky with no sign of rain.

“We’ll plant anyway,” he says. “We don’t have a choice.”

Australia is suffering one of its worst droughts on record, hurting wheat farming just as the world faces a food crisis. Australia is usually the world’s third or fourth-largest exporter of wheat. But exports dropped 46% from 2005 to 2006, then fell 24% last year.

Most of its exports go to the Middle East and Southeast Asia to make bread and cereals, but the fall in supply has led to soaring prices. A ton of Australian wheat costs $367, compared with $258 in early 2007, an increase poorer countries can ill afford.

Related articles:

- Worsening Drought Threatens Australia’s “Food Bowl”
- Drought devastates Iraq’s wheat crops
- Floods may boost world food prices for years
- Floods wipe out US crops
- The Best Farmland in the U.S. Is Flooded; Most Americans Are Too Stupid to Panic
- The Price Of Food: 2007 - 2008
- The U.S. Has No Remaining Grain Reserves
- Nine meals from anarchy - how Britain is facing a very real food crisis
- Time to Stockpile Food?
- Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.
- UN alert: One-fourth of world’s wheat at risk from new fungus
- THE FOUR HORSEMEN APPROACH - FAMINE IS IN THE AIR
- Philippines: Food Shortage Looms - Arroyo Adviser

“When they pay high prices, they pass on an increase to their poorest people, who can no longer afford it,” says Kunhamboo Kannan, director of agriculture, environment and natural resources at the Asian Development Bank. “Just look at Egypt.” Riots over rising bread prices and shortages have led to at least 10 deaths there this year.

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Tags: Australia, climate change, corn, Drought, earth changes, Environment, Food, Food Prices, Food shortages, Global Warming, Grain, rice, wheat

An agricultural region that produces over 40 percent of Australia’s fruit, vegetables, and grain is seriously threatened by the country’s ongoing drought, which has been developing into a crisis over the last decade. Scientists say that the two mighty rivers that irrigate the Murray-Darling Basin (an area the size of France and Germany combined) received the lowest amount of replenishing autumn rain since record-keeping began over a century ago.

Neil Plummer, acting head of the National Climate Centre, described rainfall during the southern hemisphere autumn as “an absolute shocker”, and said: “I’m gasping for good news”. Wendy Craik, chief executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, said the river system’s condition was “critical… tending towards flatlining”. She added: “We have got it on life support” [The Independent].

Related articles:
- Drought devastates Iraq’s wheat crops
- Floods may boost world food prices for years
- Floods wipe out US crops
- The Best Farmland in the U.S. Is Flooded; Most Americans Are Too Stupid to Panic
- The Price Of Food: 2007 - 2008
- The U.S. Has No Remaining Grain Reserves
- Nine meals from anarchy - how Britain is facing a very real food crisis
- Time to Stockpile Food?
- Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.
- UN alert: One-fourth of world’s wheat at risk from new fungus
- THE FOUR HORSEMEN APPROACH - FAMINE IS IN THE AIR
- Philippines: Food Shortage Looms - Arroyo Adviser

The degrading ecosystem may cause strife between farmers and environmentalists, as the government has said it might be forced to compulsorily acquire water from irrigators, a move that would anger and devastate farm families [The Daily Telegraph]. Conservationists say the mandatory water buy-backs are necessary to protect the wetland habitat of native birds, turtles and fish.

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Tags: Australia, climate change, Drought, earth changes, Environment, Food, Food Prices, Food shortages, Global Warming, Grain, wheat

China has said it must urgently step up the development of genetically modified crops as it faces mounting challenges to feed its 1.3 billion people due to shrinking arable land and climate change.

Newly-approved plans aim to cultivate high-yielding and pest-resistant genetically modified species, the State Council, or cabinet, said in a statement posted on its website late Wednesday

At a meeting chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao, Chinese leaders said the plans were “of strategic significance” in the country’s drive to make its agricultural sector more efficient and competitive internationally, the statement said.

“Departments must fully understand the importance and urgency of this significant project, further improve the programme and waste no time to carry it out,” it said.

It gave no details on which crops should be developed, but analysts said the plans were likely to focus on developing genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, including corn and rice.

China has become a major producer of genetically modified cotton and vegetables such as peppers and tomatoes, but it has yet to begin large-scale production of genetically modified rice, corn and soybeans.

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Tags: China, climate change, corn, cotton, Food, Food shortages, Genetically Modified Organisms, GMO, rice, soybeans, water