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TechnoratiAs a child I was told to clean my plate because there were people starving in China. It seemed silly. How would getting sick help hungry Chinese? That was in the 1950s, the heart of the green revolution.
After college I was ready to farm as one of the green revolutionaries. I was ready to feed the world and open the cornucopia to everyone. Now, 40 years later, I admit I was wrong -- high-tech agriculture wasn't the answer. There is still plenty of hunger in the world, and it looks like our daily bread could get a lot more expensive.
In 1974 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that by 1980 "not a single child should go to bed hungry."
When the U.N. General Assembly opened the Second United Nations Development Decade in 1980, it set 2000 as the new deadline for eliminating hunger.
In 2000 the U.N. set 2015 as the target date for completion of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals -- eight goals that respond to the world's main development challenges. The first of these is, you guessed it, ending extreme poverty and hunger.
In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated 854 million people or 12.6 percent of the world's population was undernourished.
An abundance of food is something we take for granted, but we have money. Collectively as a nation, food has always been there, and we could buy whatever we wanted. What if that changed? What if food became really scarce and really expensive? Could it happen? It has already started.
* Total world stocks of all grains are close to their lowest level in 30 years.
* USDA predicts wheat surpluses to be the smallest in 60 years.
* A virulent strain of wheat rust that can reduce yields to zero is spreading worldwide.
* Wheat prices have risen well over 50 percent from a year ago.
* The FAO cites 37 countries as facing a food crisis due to rising prices.
Food price is dependent on the price and availability of grain. Since 1960 the world grain harvest has tripled, and the world population has doubled. So why isn't there more grain available at a lower price? Why have the prices jumped?
I can see what's gone wrong from my front door. Beyond my wheat, pasture and hayfields, I see two crops, genetically engineered corn and soy -- two of the most widely grown crops in the world. Government subsidies encourage planting more corn and soy while companies like Monsanto deliver their package of GE seed and herbicides. Government works in partnership with industry to establish an agricultural system that places more value on commodity crops than food crops. It's the neo-green revolution.
Too many acres growing corn and soy for animal feed and agrofuels, too few growing wheat, rice, millet and vegetables for people. With grain stocks low, record food prices and more people slipping into poverty daily, droughts, floods or water shortages could trigger faster and more devastating shifts in world food supplies. We could, in the near future, experience food shortages and increased hunger in this country as well.
Jacques Diouf, head of the FAO, has admitted that the best way to feed poor countries is to let them grow their own food locally -- food sovereignty. International agencies and governments need to revisit their agricultural policies and allow people to feed themselves by using farming practices and crops they have developed and passed on through the generations.
Monsanto's GE seeds and chemicals have not, nor will they ever, make more food available at a lower price. The neo-green revolution is failing. We need to prioritize grain for people, not for cattle or cars. Unless we act, we will face food shortages, and our daily bread will not come cheaply.
Jim Goodman is a farmer in Wonewoc and a policy fellow for the Food and Society Fellows Program.
© 2008 Capital Newspapers
33 Comments so far
Show AllOf course Governor Schwarzenegger Vetoed the Industrial Hemp Bill but North Dakota allows it with a license.
There is a lot of enlightening stuff about hemp products and uses even on youtube (for those who don't want to take the time to research and read) some of them are even entertaining. But this is a serious subject and we need to get informed.
Industrial Hemp...here is a very good explanation of some of the benefits by an Assembly member Mark Leno (D-SF) talks about his bill for industrial hemp farming in California
( of course Governor Schwarzenegger Vetoed the Industrial Hemp Bill)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6000419893575227988&q=&hl=en
Why do you think I was staying away as well. I would like to see Common Dreams limit the length of a posting to 100 words and the number of postings to 30. Quick points that get you view across and not this name calling. See I just 47.
whatever4:
Hemp is a great solution, as a farmer I am looking into a crop I can make more money off. Farming as some people who post on this site feel it is a charity and I should grow crops to feed the worlds hungry. NO I grow what ever I can make money off to pay bills.
I am working on a little invention that isn't real new but never been put to the public. You can heat your home during the day for pennies. Working on the night time sollutions as that requires more work and money to test.
MR 0
You type what ever the hell you want. These people who have self appointed themselves above the rest can get stuffed. I may not agree with what you say all the time and you may not agree with me but you still the right to type it here or anywhere you like.
TWY and the rest still waiting for your answer?
TWY GP and the rest
As a farmer I am still waiting for one of you to tell me what I can grow on MY land. Solutions???? I have also posted this a few times, how many will sit down tonight to a nice dinner, order a pizza have something to drink. Then with pizza covered fingers post something on CD or other web sites saying how bad things are and this person or that should not posts things that don't help. HA HA HA. Who the hell are YOU to tell people what they can say or not. This web site and others are nothing but a venting zone. The election will come and go and nothing will be changed but fewer jobs, higher prices and 12 months after the election there will still be troops in Iraq.
THe only person who has said something is the person who talks about HEMP all the time, and he is right it is a great crop to grow.
greenspark and iammyself:
I actually feel bad that the poster has said he would leave. My hope is that he just takes a pause. I've seen his posts in other articles and they're not all bee-in-the-bonnet bad: nay, some of them I rather agree with. I just don't tolerate the type of straw man arguments and childish taunting that the nerve this article struck in him caused him to unleash.
Mr. Obvious, I'd like to lift a quote from the poster above: "Come back when you're serious about the problem." It is a problem, and it needs serious discussion. Dismissing any subgroup of concerned people is inherently stupid, whether they are ecologists, environmentalists, organic farmers, careless (or careful) consumers, or staunch Green Revolution holdovers. My opinion after reading many of your comments is that you could be a valuable part of the solution.
Gee, wouldn't it be great if we had a crop we could grow for next to nothing, in virtually any environment, that could feed people? Wouldn't it be a blessing if it didn't drain the soil, didn't need fertilizers or pesticides as much as other crops and was drought tolerant? The ideal miracle plant would be as nutritious as soy and could provide other products too? Like oil maybe, or paper?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp
"Hemp is cultivated virtually everywhere in the world except for the United States, "
"Hemp seed also contains 20% complete and highly-digestible protein,[9] 1/3 as edestin protein and 2/3 as albumins. Its high quality amino acid composition is closer to "complete" sources of proteins (meat, milk, eggs) than all other oil seeds except quinoa and soy.[10]"
Sorry folks, until I hear some (any) discussion of using Hemp, I can't believe anyone actually cares about the food shortage issue. The solution is out there. It's only ignorance holding back progress on this issue.
Like always, stupidity kills. Watch the people starve, and keep telling yourselves you ever really cared. Convince yourselves, and pat yourselves on the back for your many, myriad of brilliant ideas. Discuss and distribute your bleeding hearts. Make us believe you care. That's what really counts.
And ignore the man behind the curtain.
I'm just saying. Come back when you're serious about the problem. So far, it's just something to talk about. Like the weather. People will laugh out loud at the idea of using hemp, right? Too crazy, trying new and radical ideas to SAVE people from STARVING. Makes me sick. Okay, now flame on, have a good time, etc etc etc drug warriors.
FACT...The beef industry is a 12 month a year operation.
I keep hearing people saying growing crops for the beef industry. Cows need food in the winter when they can't be range fed. Millions of burgers and gallons of milk are sold everyday around the world. How many this summer will cook burgers at a party of for dinner? If you are against beef and not going to walk the walk then don't talk the talk.
**************
Non farmers stop telling me what the hell I can grow on MY land OK? Being a farmer is not a charity I have bills to pay as well. If you want to control farming and what can be grown what type of Gov is that called again????
Slowly but surely agri-business spin is being exposed.
Congratulations to all the good folks who research the topics of sustainable and organic agriculture, and counter the spin put out by corporate trolls.
The is enough food by most accounts, it is things like the uniform agriculture act that impacts how food is grown and traded. In Jamica, farmers were pouring milk down the drains because of corporate competition and they couldn't sell it.
Mr. Obvious said: "Sounds like the author doesn't know that people eat corn and soybeans? If high yields of grains are the problem, then I guess lower yields must be the solution to world hunger?"
I think the problem is that corn and soybeans can lead to 'monopolistic' control of food. They can be grown (esp. with huge American subsidies) rapidly and inexpensively, effectively outcompeting locally grown produce in developing nations. So those food sources wither away, unable to compete. Then, corn and soybeans come dear and overpriced, when the rest of the world is so dependent on them (remind anyone of our oil-addiction?). Its American farmers trying to pull an OPEC on the rest of the world.
First time poster, long time reader.
Thank you iammyself for saying to M.O. (a deliberate acronomycal slip-of-the-keyboard) what needed to be said after his insipid dismissal of what thewonderingyou so brilliantly articulated (and thank you thewonderingyou, too...)
M.O. is obviously a TROLL.
Now, can we get back to the topic--Food shortages--And stop pretending corporations need to be defended from us activists? Can I stop gagging on that waste of our time by M.O.?
"The one's with an ounce of logic leave quickly, and you have convinced me to do the same."
Promise?
thewonderingyou - If I read all the crap at links posted on this site, I would barf. Try being a little more susinct and less vague. I have never seen such a bunch of cultish, ignorant folks as some of the posters here. The one's with an ounce of logic leave quickly, and you have convinced me to do the same. Enjoy talking to yourselves. We need change, but you are part of the reason that we never get it. True activists would be far more successful if you were not on our side. You simply discredit any valid argumants for change by spouting dribble.
Buy food and ship it to the poor in 3rd world countries. Raise food and pay to ship it to the poor in 3rd world countries.
Mr. "Obvious," I think you need to insert the letters "l" and "i" somewhere in your handle. The location should be...obvious. Or just spare us all the subterfuge and change it to Hannity or Limbaugh.
You lack the reserve to think more than a micron deep before trashing someone's comments with argument tricks that are quite--wait for it--obviously lowbrow fallacies that any philosophy 101 course would expose. To wit? Your opening salvo in this thread.
The trashing itself is often hardly worth the movement of the wheel on a scroll-mouse, as in your combined response to JaneM and Galen.
And if you can sit there and type comments in one browser page, you have little excuse for your lack of sufficient curiosity to explore [on your own] the ramifications of enforcing US patent protections on developing nations. "Before I look at this..."?!? No, Mister. After you look at it. After you grow a gram of curiosity and maybe a femtogram of humility at what might be your own "seem to think" and "sounds like the author doesn't know" and "sit on your fat ass" issues.
Sorry. I tried. But I suffer the incurious poorly, and the rude even less so. 我完了.
Esteban Bartlett - You seem to think that poor people that subsist on the land should just be released in a "natural" habitat like a wild animal. You sit on your fat ass and punch keys on the computer and write that native peoples should continue to exist as subsistance farmers using ancient methods. You try it! You blame the corporations. Why don't you raise food and pay to ship it to the poor in 3rd world countries. We are to blame, not some faceless corporation. We have the means to buy this food and to ship it to the poor, but we would rather blaim someone else. Its so easy to blame someone else. Corporations only exist if people buy their products. This sounds like the war on drugs. Go after the producers. Never mind the demand side of things.
The Malthusian Religion always blames living people as the problem...
...and they always name the cure as dead ones.
Of course this Anglican Priest injected this neuvo religion onto the world but why don't we the atheists calling for him and his followers to keep their mouth shut?
Either we are all created equal with the inalienable right to life...OR..we are all unequal with no right to live whatsoever.
Is it worth trying to provide accurate analysis here? What the author of this article is referring to is the nature of the agricultural model that industrialization and corporate power has created, one in which food has been commodified, that is subject to market forces dominated by corporations. GMO corn as grown for feed or ethanol is not fit to be eaten, by the way. The kind of maize varieties that have been grown for food, for tortillas, tamales, corn bread and corn on the cob, open pollinated, locally saved, adapted to microclimates and variable weather conditions, these have been lost in many cases. Here in KY we are saving such a traditional variety.
The main bogus argument used to justify this system: that traditional agriculture cannot feed the world's population. A bogus lie. Consider the logic: If most of the world's hungry are rural people, what does this say? It says that rural peoples have been systematically disenfranchised, have too little land, have little governmental support, no longer control the policies that could support and protect their local agricultural markets. Thus you have the reality of corporate-style agricultural surpluses wiping out local markets the world over. This happened first most critically to Mexico under NAFTA, driving 2 million Mexican farmers from their small and medium sized holdings. Then when the price suddenly jumped up, due to ethanol in part but also in Mexico due to speculation and hoarding by Cargill corporation that came to control ports and warehouses and distributioin systems, then you have Tortilla riots due to the rise in food prices. Now this is spreading throughout the world, as prices for wheat and rice climb due to high demand in general for grains, much of it for animal factories or ethanol.
Friends, it is the structure of this economy, the merciless control exerted by supranational corporatiions, and the vertical and horizontal integration of those virtual monopolies. Family farmers have lost control of their food economies, and in times of price shocks, mass hunger is the inevitable result. People are hungry not because there is not enough food, but because of structural impoverishment. To solve this problem, therefore, the corporations need to be controled by democratic forces from below taking over and restoring the proper functions of government, to govern for the benefit of the majority.
Don't listen to spokespersons from the World Bank, the Farm Bureau, the IMF, or other talking heads from the very institutions that have led us to this tragic moment: asking for their advice at times like these is truly asking the fox to guard the henhouse.
jstevens April 16th, 2008 2:39 pm
I'm glad to see others mentioning overpopulation. Your second item, waste is certainly a consequence of human activity and exacerbated by overpopulation and the general concensus is that climate destabilization is a consequence of overpopulation, too.
The "food shortage" will occur even if we stick on all the band-aids we can find trying to eke out the supply and to redistribute what we have, but eventually the quasi-exponential increase in population will bring us back to square one ... starvation, the natural control. Far better for humanity to take control of its own fertility and reduce the global population (one child per family for a couple of generations) to a level that is sustainable.
Another article that dances all around the main problems behind food shortages--overpopulation, waste, and climate destabilization.
I can't find the answer, but I wonder how many tons of food ( grapes, grain, corn etc.) is used to make alcoholic beverages. We could apply all of the same criticisms to this use of food stuffs that are being applied to the use of food for ethanol.
Think how much beer and wine and whiskey production is raising commodities prices; yet no one is writing article like that. The typical article places most of the blame for starvation on biofuels.
HOLY CORPORATE WELFARE !!!
The forces of evil that Batman and Robin confronted paled in comparison to the big corporations; they are the forces of evil that brought you the housing bubble and now bring you a huge food and energy crisis.
The corporations couldn't have done it without the US President, Federal Reserve, Courts and Congress giving them a license to steal that will result in destruction that goes way beyond Gotham.
thewonderingyou - Before I look at this, are you simply saying that we require Iraq to respect patents? If so, how do you go from this to saying that they need to buy GM crops? They can plant all the non-GM crops that they want. Just like you don't need to pay for GPS in a car unless you want to buy that option.
Mr. Obvious,
The reference is to Bremer's Order 81, part of a gift package he left for the Iraqis before he bailed three years ago. You can read it at http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20040426_CPAORD_81_Patents_Law.... if you like. It's 27 pages of legal mumbo-jumbo, but just in case you don't spot the "obvious," the section in there for protecting patents sets up basically the same situation that allowed Monsanto to f$#^ over the Indian rural farmers this past decade.
Before you come back and say "oh, there's nothing in there that says Iraqi farmers are being forced to use Monsanto seeds!" take a moment to actually look for the obvious, instead of offering the type of quip (still not sure if it was in character or out of character) that you opened with in this series of comments.
Amazing how no one is advocating the end of burning food in our gas tanks!
"No No No…We can't do that! We spent all that time and money brainwas…er…CONVINCING the decadent American slobs to embrace this so we can blame ADM and agribusiness (and GWB) for all the woes of the world!"
Pop quiz! Who was the last president to advocate the wholesale destruction of crops?
Hint: It wasn't a Republican!
JaneM and Galen - I guess its OK to spread rumors if its just a faceless corporation. You don't want to confuse anyone with facts. Kinda like poking sticks into the lion cage, its Ok to as long as there are bars protecting you and you have a long stick. And you wonder why no one takes you seriously. Did you ever talk to a farmer who uses GM crops? Did a farmer ever tell you he or she was forced to buy them? Most corn and bean farmers in the US plant GM crops, you should be able to find at least one to talk to.
Mr. O- Forcing farmers to use GMO crops is Monsanto/Cargill SOP.
JaneM - Where did you get this rumor from?
I read that we are forcing Iraqi farmers to use GE seeds - and to pay dearly for them. This also means they cannot save their seed for the following year's crop. What will this do to our food in the long run?
War, Famine, pestilence and death. The Neo `merican morality play. But what then should we expect when the patriarchal god of the goat herds has slain the Cosmic Serpent and driven the Goddess of Agriculture to the mountain top? The cruel migratory plunder of one's neighbors no longer works in a global economy. We ARE our neighbors!
ebishirl - What commodity crops are they refering to in the quote below, that are not food crops?
"Government works in partnership with industry to establish an agricultural system that places more value on commodity crops than food crops."
These commodity crops are the food crops of the poor. Just not fat Americans.
I agree that biofuels and too much demand for meat is environmentally damaging, especially due to increased land in agriculture.
The devil is in the details, Mr. Obvious. Read this part again: "Too many acres growing corn and soy for animal feed and agrofuels."
The problem is subsidies and heavy meat consumption that encourage growing more food for livestock and cars, rather than for people. Couple that with the other problems cited in Goodman's article -- low stocks, virulent wheat rust, high prices (and I'll add the growing instability caused by climate change) -- and the threat of increased hunger around the world is very real.
Sounds like the author doesn't know that people eat corn and soybeans? If high yields of grains are the problem, then I guess lower yields must be the solution to world hunger?