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Latest Food Crisis Brewing for Months
UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations, which is trying to reach out to nearly a billion undernourished people, some living in perpetual hunger, is anticipating another food crisis later this year.
And the signs of impending trouble have been there for some time.
The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned last week that world market prices for rice, wheat, sugar, barley and meat will remain high or register significant rises in 2011 - perhaps replicating the crisis of 2007-2008.
Rob Vos, director of development policy and analysis at the U.N.'s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), told IPS that higher food prices are already affecting many developing countries.
He said countries like India and a number of other East and South Asian countries are facing double-digit inflation, mainly caused by higher food prices - alongside higher energy prices.
In Bolivia, the higher prices for food in world markets recently forced the government to reduce consumer subsidies as these were running up the fiscal deficit too high.
The short-term implications are not only that the poor are especially heavily affected - and that more people could be pushed into poverty - but also that it will hamper the recovery in the countries facing higher inflation as consumers lose purchasing power, he noted.
Some central banks are moving to tighten monetary policy and governments are being forced to tighten fiscal policy, said Vos, who is also the U.N.'s chief economist.
Frederic Mousseau, policy director of the San Francisco-based Oakland Institute, told IPS that as early as last September, Mozambique experienced food riots over high bread prices.
Some 13 people were killed during a protest against the unaffordable price of bread, he told IPS.
"Food riots and civil unrest affected some 30 countries in 2008, and this can be repeated today since the situation has not changed in the last three years," said Mousseau, author of 'The High Food Price Challenge: A Review of Responses to Combat Hunger.' The most vulnerable countries are those which are the most dependent on food imports and the least able to handle high prices in international markets through public mechanism and public policy, he noted.
This concerns many of the poorest countries, with fewer resources, institutions and public mechanisms in place to support food production or subsidize the food, Mousseau said.
Late last year, there were protests over high school lunch prices in China and near-riots in Algeria over rising prices of flour, milk and sugar.
Algerians again took the streets last week to protest economic conditions, including food prices, ending with several deaths and hundreds of injuries. Unrest also erupted in neighboring Tunisia.
According to the FAO price index released last week, the price of a basket of cereals, oil seeds, dairy, meat and sugar has continued to rise for six consecutive months.
Abdolreza Abbassian, an FAO economist, was quoted by a London daily as saying: "We are entering danger territory."
Mousseau pointed out that food prices started increasing in 2010 following poor crops in Russia and Eastern Europe, partly due to the wild fires in the summer.
Now, the severe floods affecting Australia, the fourth- largest wheat exporter, are likely to hamper wheat production there and to push prices up even more, he predicted.
"Any other event, such as another climatic shock in another exporting country or a further increase in oil prices, will without any doubt boost prices up and make the situation worse than in 2008, and thus threaten the livelihoods of billions of people worldwide," he added.
Asked the reasons for the anticipated shortages, Mousseau said: "One cannot use the word shortage if you consider that more than one-third of the cereals produced in the world goes to animal feed and that a growing share of food production is going to agrofuels."
So there is no global shortage today, just as there was no shortage in 2007-2008.
The world actually produced 2,232 million tonnes of cereal in 2008, a historic all-time production record, Mousseau pointed out.
The global production level for 2010-2011 is slightly below the 2008 record, but with higher levels of global stocks.
As opposed to 2008, he said, when rice initially drove the global increase in cereal prices, in 2010-2011, it is wheat prices that first started to increase following poor crops in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Similar to 2008, the rise in food prices is a combination of different factors: a bad harvest in one part of the world brings pressure on the market, which sends signals to speculators, who start then to buy, which leads to further price increases.
The correlation between oil and food prices is once again obvious: as seen in 2008, current high oil prices make agrofuels more profitable and are therefore pushing more food crops into the ethanol and biodiesel plants, Mousseau said.
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45 Comments so far
Show AllDon't eat meat or dairy and this problem is solved, your health will improve, and veganism helps the environment. Stop yapping and do the right thing; its easy.
There are 2 parties to every commodities future transaction: for EVERY speculative buyer there is a hedging or speculative seller. There are NO net longs or shorts in futures transactions, so "speculators" do not affect prices. Food costs go up because of wasteful practices like meat and dairy production, soil erosion, rising input costs like fossil fuels and fertilizers, and population growth. We can not endlessly grow.
Well said, Speculate. This is also true for countries like India where meat consumption was not that much in the past, whereas meat and dairy consumption has increased in recent years, putting pressure on farmland and water use for competing requirements. This in a country that is already losing farmland and water to industrial, commercial and new residential development!
You don't know what you are talking about. It's been said that for every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it's wrong. Yours is no exception to this principle.
The Problem is not meat-eaters. The Problem is Fossil-Fuel Powered Capitalist Industrial Civilization. And the good news is that the problem is the solution. The bad news is lots of people are going to die in the process. The Ecosystem might be able to retain enough resiliency to recover to the extent that humans will be able to survive.
The problem is not going to be solved when we all listen to self-righteous vegans like you, the problem will be solved either a)When a critical mass of people overthrow the Capitalist System and replace it with a system that doesn't require infinite growth to sustain constant growth in capital accumulation, or b)when Capitalism Collapses (a process well under way) from the unsupportable debts built up by 40-odd years of financialization of the Economy, at which point people unite to create a sustainable system.
Oh, and by the way the idea that speculators can't affect food commodity prices is about as silly an idea I've ever heard. A freshman Econ student could refute that in one paragraph.
There's lots of money out there looking for someplace to grow. Commodities are the current bandwagon. While there are some good fundamental reasons for the current price rises, greed always causes commodity prices to overshoot on the way up, and often to fall too far on the way down. Capitalism is the best economic success story the world has ever seen. It's not going away any time soon. It needs a strong social safety net and a citizenry that says 'no' to evil excesses.
You don't know what you are talking about either.
Tertiary wealth exceeds primary and secondary wealth by orders of magnitude. Growth is a dead letter. Ecological pressures on economic activity and the destabilization resulting from climate and other negative feedback mechanisms will only intensify. Resource scarcity, particularly in the form of fossil fuels, but also in essential minerals will continue to increasingly strangle economic growth. The burdens of Empire will continue to drain the vitality of the global Capitalist Hegemon: The US. And around the world the gross inequalities and the destruction of ecosystems and cultures are profoundly undermining the legitimacy of the Capitalist System. Revolution may come last to the US, but it is coming. The fact that USans don't have the slightest clue that a mighty storm is gathering should come as no surprise. I don't expect you to understand, hell, you've been brainwashed your whole life to think inside the Capitalist Box.
The nature of capitalism leads to a pattern of social relations that specifically undermine a social safety net and a citizenry that says no to evil excesses. Look around the world and tell me what you see.
Much of what you say is obviously true, but growth can take many forms and does not have to be overly resource intensive. Look at Scandinavian capitalism, for instance. It works reasonably well and has a good social safety net. If we're smart (big if) we will move closer to that model.
Why do you even NEED growth for its own sake? All you need is a good standard of living that includes a healthy, stress-free life, derived from good, healthy food, clean water, a clean environment and a friendly society. I mean, I clearly don't know about you, but that's all I need, and to me, it sounds like a reasonable wish list. "Capital" or "money" is ALWAYS a claim on real resources and labor, and I don't see how it is possible to have endless growth in a world of finite resources that has already seen so much destruction.
I don't know what you mean by "growth can take many forms and does not have to be overly resource intensive." You mean, like the so-called "knowledge economy"? And what happens to the money so earned? That would still lay claim on stuff produced in a brick-and-mortar economy, on labor, on land, water and other resources.
Any economy needs to grow only to the extent of supplying real needs, whereas the current model relies partly on creating artificial needs so that the economy can "grow". It does that because it's also driven by human ego that doesn't know how much exactly it needs in order to be happy or satisfied. Those who have a lock on primary resources far beyond what they can realistically consume in their lifetime are forcing others to carry out more destruction simply to meet their basic needs. That's what money that was not earned by honest labor does.
Some of us humans have a need to learn, to create, build. Hopefully we'll get better at recycling, using mostly sustainable practices, etc. The time may come when instead of having myriad gadgets for this and that, we may have one or two super gadgets that do a huge number of amazing things. Microwave ovens save a lot of energy, for instance. We no longer have to cut down forests to re-heat our coffee or warm-up dinner. As we get better at building things, we won't have to replace stuff as often. I don't know about you, but for a lot of purchases, I check on a company's products reliability. Whether money was "earned by honest labor" or not, matters little when it comes to people's decisions on what to buy. One's buying decisions get real complicated by emotions, needs, subconscious...
Greg R, I was trying to keep it simple - by pointing out what I deemed as the "essentials" for a good life. And though I didn't say so explicitly, also implied how capitalism and its obsession with growth is depriving many people of these essentials. I did not say I was against technology per se, or progress or making use of scientific knowledge in making our lives comfortable or any of that. Nor even implied.
What really matters is the overall cost of technology and progress and whether such progress is achieved in an ethical and justifiable manner and whether the model adopted is sustainable or even replicable. Various societies had always developed different technologies to meet their needs, but that could also be built and maintained using materials mostly from the local ecosystem or obtained through trade that was non-coercive.
It can be argued that much of the "industrial revolution" was made possible only because of the conquest of the "New World" and the use of slave labor and even the profits from slave trade at one point in time. Such a progress was neither ethical nor justifiable nor would have been possible for the whole world to adopt. If a society had developed a microwave oven in the normal course of its evolution and progress, without so much brutality and waste and without involving so much toxicity and other health hazards and by an entity (a company) that does not depend on huge volumes of production and continued growth in order to make such a gadget affordable to the ordinary household, then I'm all for it. The true cost of the microwave oven is much more than what you pay at the store, in that sense.
Have you seen the inside of a modern technology development environment? It's crazy. Achieving progress is only incidental, though it is the stated goal. The main goal is to gain that teeny weeny edge over the competitor through new features and "increased efficiency". And then there is the manufacturing process. Crazy calculations that involve the market size, production rates, break-even point and all that take place, so as to maximize the profits from dumping all these gadgets and "fuel efficient" cars, and what have you, all before a deadline, and that is for ***this year***. The same thing will repeat next year. And the next year. Somewhere in all this, designers will have to make sure they have incorporated "planned obsolescence", so they can keep selling more junk and more spare parts. And the marketing mechanism has to make sure that replacement parts and batteries are so expensive that a consumer will be forced to think about buying a new gadget - with all the advertising for the new and improved i-Junk bombarding his senses.
And I haven't even touched on the capitalist masters sitting on top of all this, who through a combination of violence, coercion, clever tricks such as the creation of funny money, etc., have a stranglehold on the resources, the manufacturing, distribution and advertising, so that many times real technological progress is actually stymied, if it would threaten their obscene profits. To them it matters not if you buy brand-A or brand-B as they will be shareholders in both companies as they fight it out. There are all kinds of externalities passed on to the society and nature so as to absorb the waste and harm that is produced as a result of all this, and future generations be damned, as far as these people are concerned.
I have trouble seeing all this as progress or desirable or the best model possible. Those who benefit from this model will have trouble questioning it.
We're just humans. The "best model possible" is likely impossible.
But I thought you said "Some of us humans have a need to learn, to create, build"? How about adding the word "intelligently" at the end of that list?
With all this "progress", the gasoline engine in most cars is still only under 35% efficient and the vehicle efficiency is under 20%, and every time people apply the brake, all that kinetic energy is simply wasted away through friction and into heat. Just lost, after building up all that momentum! And this happens so many times in a day for the average commuter. It has taken a hundred years just to put regenerative braking in cars and these electrics and hybrids are not even mainstream or even close.
There is plenty of evidence that capitalist greed has in fact killed certain innovations and has made the overall system extremely inefficient - efficiency here defined as the ratio of output to its corresponding input. I think many people recognize that the current model is not just faulty and fraudulent (because it passes on so many externalities without paying the cost), it is also dangerously unsustainable, especially considering the amount of funny money in circulation.
Adding the word "intelligently" would have seemed a touch arrogant by applying it to humans. The "externalities" of emotions and uncertainties keeps humans making unusual choices. Capitalist externalities and economic societal stratification are two serious problems that unfortunately need constant vigilance. This should be one of the main reasons why we write here at CD. Too often I find my self defending capitalism against those who seem to want to destroy it. I do not see a better alternative that would work with humans involved. World-wide Scandinavian capitalism is the best I can imagine.
I used the word "intelligently" carefully and deliberately. Maybe I should have added the disclaimer that "intelligence" as I meant it has nothing to do with being clever or the arrogance that comes with some specialized knowledge in one area. And this intelligence, again, as I meant it, is not yours or mine - it's from nature. And when we are conscious that we too are part of nature (how can it be otherwise?) and observe with curiosity and ask with humility, nature can teach us quite a bit. So being intelligent goes hand in hand with some humility and respect for nature and its limits.
>>“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” - Albert Einstein<<
>>Greg R wrote: "There's lots of money out there looking for someplace to grow."<<
You mean, looking for more suckers whose labor can be exploited and looking for more resources to be exploited? The "lots of money" that was NOT earned by honest labor and not grown by frugal saving is at the root of the current crisis, and is a result of much conquest, fraud, coercion and outright violence.
We all have our point of view. You see exploitation everywhere. Do you realize that the poorest nations of the planet (mainly African), today have similar life expectancies as the richest nations of the world 200 years ago? When it comes to money, everything is 'true.' It's good. It's bad. It's everything in between.
Yes, we all have our point of view. I can, for example, very well conclude from your anecdote that the richest nations have just managed to conquer and control enough land and resources that would allow them to have a much larger ecological footprint than those in poor countries. Larger ecological footprint, larger consumption of fossil fuels and greater capacity to exploit resources and other people's labor can indeed result in increased life expectancy.
Who can tell what the conditions would be like in Europe if due to some different historical circumstances that the "New World" was never conquered and if everyone in Africa and Asia had been alert and aware of the agenda of the men arriving on ships from Europe? Then Europeans would have had to trade like everyone else was doing, that is, with surplus production in their own lands and buying surplus production from elsewhere. No stealing of massive capital like what took place in the last 500 years and no funny money created by central banks, and you might very well be seeing a different picture. Of course we may never have the computer and the internet, but big deal, really! :)
Yes, and we might never have had the research to realize how many go blind from lack of vitamin A for instance or never developed drugs to eliminate polio and a hoard of other horrors. POV.
CommonSenseParty, allow me to start my post with your first line, if I may:
It's you that doesn't know what you are talking about.
Can a 4-acre plot of farmland can support a meat-eating family - even a small family of 4 people - that eats meat like westerners do today? Let's say that this family has to get ALL of its food supply from this said 4-acre land. Any food that they have to get from outside will have to be in exchange for something that's surplus from their own 4-acre plot. Let's say that this farmland exists in a climate that allows growing grains, vegetables, fruits, and of course grass. In fact, Those who claim that meat eating at present levels can be sustained without fossil fuels or continuous clearing of forests are simply not used to dealing with such numbers or they dream of a world with a drastically reduced human population so they can continue with their current eating habits and lifestyle. In contrast, a vegan family can live, not just survive, but live healthily from the same area of land with food to spare, AND with no fossil fuel-based inputs for growing food.
Much of the forests in western Europe were gone - cut down - by the end of the 16th century, for various purposes, including livestock grazing - even before "Fossil-Fuel Powered Capitalist Industrial Civilization" came about. Without taking over three full continents (the Americas and Australia) and parts elsewhere, I can guarantee that people will not be able to eat so much meat - fossil fuels or not.
Much of the animal feed that's fed to livestock goes into simply keeping them alive as they grow and put on bulk - to supply their daily calorie requirements, for their bones, hides, etc., with a significant portion excreted too. What you get from a fully grown cow at the end of a 2-year period is only about 500 pounds of boneless meat - after consuming all that feed and water. 21 months to 2 years is about the earliest that most factory farms slaughter them; free range and grass-fed cows take longer to put on bulk because grass is not that "rich" compared to the carefully created formula developed by the meat industry to make their cows grow fast, and cows in the open "waste" a lot more energy by moving around, burning more calories, and so take longer and need to eat more to put on the same level of bulk as in factory farms. So, technically, factory farms are actually more efficient in converting primary resources to meat. So all the talk about grass-fed beef is just a lot of hot air that does not take reality into account.
How much animals need to eat and how much they excrete before being slaughtered, that is, to put on a certain amount of bulk, does NOT depend on whether they are raised by a capitalist or a socialist. They are still going to need animal feed and the land, water and nutrients to grow, which, if used to grow food for a largely vegan population, can be used more efficiently while making the switch to an all-organic farming that much easier.
I know some will be itching to talk about population. But just keep in mind, whether it's 1 billion or 6 billion, people still need to eat, and how much land and water will be needed for a meat-heavy diet vs. a largely vegan diet can still be compared. Any day, any time. I also know that the only way that defenders of a meat-based diet can argue is by introducing all kinds of extraneous factors, while neglecting major inputs such as water. Yes, grass-fed cows need water too, and the government has for long subsidized the ranchers on this count even after the ranchers acquired their ranches for a song (and a few bullets) in the first place.
you miss the point. You don't even understand the importance of grazing animals to a healthy grassland ecosystem. Human civilization and the ways we fuck up the ecosystem are the problem. You can peddle your vegan exceptionalism to someone with more ignorance.
You have just proved my point, and you are not the first to do so. I had said:
>>"...the only way that defenders of a meat-based diet can argue is by introducing all kinds of extraneous factors, while neglecting major inputs such as water."<<
OK, what exactly in my post indicates that I "don't understand the importance of grazing animals to a healthy grassland ecosystem"?
BTW, "a healthy grassland ecosystem" needs not just grazing animals, but natural predators too. And guess who killed most of the natural predators in the grasslands?
You vegans don't understand the nature of Capitalist resource exploitation. The whole planet could convert to veganism and it would change very little. The vast majority of the resources saved would merely be used for some other activity in the endless pursuit of capital accumulation.
Your whole line of reasoning is false.
CommonSenseParty, you are clearly mixing issues here, in your desperation to validate your meat eating habit. So, when exactly would you say that this "capitalist resource exploitation" started? I mean, approximately? I have been reading, off and on, about how forests were lost in Europe at various points in time. If, instead of "capitalism", you use "empires", you may be closer to historical reality. But that would still not be the whole picture.
Livestock grazing for wool production and increased beef consumption (first by the aristocrats, then gradually by the whole population), deforestation, Enclosure Movement, conquest of land in the "New World", slaughter of the natives, land grabbing by the ranchers, massive subsidies for the meat industry, exploitation of labor under inhumane conditions - these are ALL related. And at the root of it all is a serious disconnect with nature - which clearly originated in the "Old World" and found its way to the "New World", only to become more deepseated. Yes, modern capitalism made the destruction that much larger and faster, but blaming it all on capitalism with the implication that present level of meat consumption can somehow continue under a different system without similar levels of resource consumption is a form of denial.
All I can say to you is to PLEASE look up information on vegan diet and find out for yourself about the resources needed, the lies that have been peddled by the meat and dairy industry, FDA, etc., and do yourself a favor by giving a vegan or a vegetarian diet a try. Of course, you'll be doing a favor more than to yourself - but why don't you just start with yourself? I know vegans can sometimes make meat-eaters defensive. But the problem viewed from the other side is that vegans are tired of all the lies and misinformation and having to be too careful so as not to offend anyone and all that. But don't let that stop you from finding out the truth of the matter, one way or the other. Peace!
I don't argue with you that people can feed themselves on less land if they eat only veggies, legumes and grains. That's not what this is about. You vegans seem to think that your morally superior choice is the answer to all the world's major problems. It isn't. The nature of our food system is important, but it is only a subsystem of the economic system. Food scarcity would occur whether we were a planet of vegetarians or not, based on the nature of the capitalist system which operates for profit not to deliver food to everyone- scarcity is part of the internal logic of the system
Your solution is akin to the laws passed in the US limiting/ending the importation of African Slaves as way to end the system of Slavery. It doesn't address the functions of the larger system.
Watch the following video on how large numbers of grazing animals are necessary to maintain the health of grasslands and the water. None of which precludes the consumption of some meat.
http://vimeo.com/8239427
On 4 acres of fertile soil with adequate rainfall, 4 people can eat meat every day, easily, though chickens or rabbits would be far more efficient than cattle, and "like Americans" would certainly not be the way to manage this.
Should human population continue to grow as it has, we will quickly outstrip the productive capacity of the planet, but we have not -- not if we regard "productive capacity" as what could happen were resources efficiently used and equitably distributed.
Of course, neither condition is true.
And, of course, many people will object to the idea that they should not have children because someone likes hamburgers.
Imagine that.
But certainly there is a balance of how many or how much animal life and how many or how much plant life any given ecosystem can support. At some point, one comes down to a decision about which of a pair of similar organisms can fill a given niche.
So -- chickens or people, people or chickens? Does anyone out there have a preference?
Although a commendable idea I doubt if you can change our diet habits or the trend in developing countries. Making ethanol or other bio fuels artificially profitable through government subsidies is the root cause of this problem. Feeding cars before people is just plain wrong.
"speculators do not effect prices" they are the vulchers seeking wealth from suffering. Ambulance chasers do not cause accidents. They simply illustrate the greed inherant in capitalism.
Thank you, a vegan diet is one of the few things we can actually do in our everyday lives to help. Even if you only ate meat once a week it would make a huge difference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_meat_production
look, let me make something
abundantly clear for people
who are so bereft of activities
they feel like they gotta comment on mine.
first of all being a vegetarian should
never be associated with being
a revolutionary or being open-minded.
that's a dietary choice.
if someone wants to proliferate the
type of ignorance we're supposed to
be fighting by thinking that,
you're just fucking yourself.
i don't go around promoting
beef and poetry shoving it in
people's faces.
i don't castigate people for not
eating steak sandwiches;
and i would never diss someone
for being a fucking broccoli-head,
or living off of radishes,
or eating grass or tofu.
i like a lot of vegan cuisine.
but the illogicality of expecting
everyone to adopt their particular
idea of what being healthy is
is just preposterous.
i've seen some of you herbivores;
and if you want to argue health,
y'all need to eat some kind of supplement
because some of y'all are so skinny
that it's disgusting.
Immortal -
Alcyon, you're better than that.
BuDMaD3MeWiSeR, according to your logic,
being a capitalist is a choice
and so is being
a religious fundamentalist,
and just as legitimate.
Being a vegan or a vegetarian
is MUCH MORE than a dietary choice
and someone's "particular idea of being healthy".
It is about what our dietary choice does
to the rest of the world,
and what it did historically,
first by driving out the peasants from their land
so the rich could eat their steak,
and then by giving them one more reason
and motivation to conquer other lands
and even more reason to buy up land
when people were fleeing a deadly Famine
and more reason when ranchers rounded up
acres and millions of acres
all so people can eat their steak and burgers.
Being a vegan or a vegetarian
is to stop a historical blunder.
Even more than that, it's choosing
to use a fairer share
of this Earth and its water
to feed this stomach of ours.
It is deciding to live simply
so others may simply live.
I can see you're in denial,
but that's ok, because we all are at some point.
And I know what I wrote doesn't rhyme,
but neither did yours and I ain't got the time.
(At least I didn't call mine "poetry" :)
You contradicted yourself.
"Being a vegan or a vegetarian
is MUCH MORE than a dietary choice"
Then you say..
"Being a vegan or a vegetarian
is to stop a historical blunder.
Even more than that, it's choosing
to use a fairer share"
At the end the day you are making a choice.
Point, Bud.
Images on CD today of Black people in agony are beginning to strike me as some sort of pornography. I understand they are supposed to inspire empathy. However, I feel compelled to challenge this old fashioned tactic of the advertising industry to inspire interest.
It's called "hunger porn". Here's an excerpt from Paul Theroux's 'Dark Star Safari':
---
Even the most prosperous towns in this part of Kenya had the bright signboards and relief agencies, the offices and supply depots of people doling out advice and food and condoms. The merchandise of the gang of virtue. This was true in Kericho, its large leafy tea estate softening its green hills and valleys. Maybe such places attracted missionaries and aid workers because they were so pleasant to live in. Maybe communications were better here than in the remote bush. Whenever I saw a town that looked tidy and habitable I saw the evidence of foreign charities: Oxfam, Project Hope, the Hunger Project, Food for Africa, SOS Children's Village, Caritas, and many other with saintly names and a new white Land Rover or Land Cruiser parked in front.
As this was a coffee growing area, any of these vehicles could have belonged to the satirical figure of Dickens's Mrs. Jellyby and her African project. She had said, "We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha."
Mine is not a complaint, merely an observation, because hearing horror stories about uneducated starving Africans, most Americans or Europeans become indignant and say, "Why doesn't someone do something about it?"
Much was apparently being done—more than I had ever imagined. Since the Kenya government cared so little about the well-being of its people, concerns such as health and education had been taken up by sympathetic foreigners. The charities were well established. Between the Bata shoe store and the local Indian shop you would find the office of World Vision or Save the Children—"Blurred Vision" and "Shave the Children" to the cynics. These organizations had grown out of disaster relief agencies but had become multinational institutions, permanent fixtures of welfare and services.
I wondered, really wondered, why this was all a foreign effort, why Africans were not involved in helping themselves. And also, since I had been a volunteer teacher myself, why, after forty years, had so little progress been made?
An entire library of worthy books describe at best the uselessness, at worst the serious harm, brought about by aid agencies. Some of the books are personal accounts, others are scientific and scholarly. The findings are the same.
"Aid is not help" and "aid does not work" are two of the conclusions reached by Graham Hancock in his Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige and Corruption of the International Aid Business (1989), a well-researched account of wasted money. Much of Hancock's scorn is reserved for the dubious activities of the World Bank. "Aid projects are an end in themselves," Michael Maren writes in The Road to Hell: The Damaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (1997). One of Maren's targets is Save the Children, which he sees as a monumental boondoggle. Both writers report from experience, having spent many years in Third World countries on aid projects. While these writers are kinder to volunteers in disaster relief than to highly paid bureaucrats in institutional charities, both of them also assert that all aid is self-serving, large-scale famines are welcomed as a "growth opportunity," and the advertising to stimulate donations for charities is little more than "hunger porn".
"Here is a rule of thumb you can safely apply wherever you may wander in the Third World," Hancock writes. "If a project is funded by foreigners it will typically also be designed by foreigners and implemented by foreigners using foreign equipment procured in foreign markets."
As proof of that rule of thumb, the most salutary and least cited book about development in Africa is an Italian study, Guidelines for the Application of Labor-Intensive Technologies (1994). Revolutionary in its simplicity, it advocates the use of African labor to solve African problems. After describing the many social and economic advantages of employing local people, who would work with their hands to build dams, roads, sewer systems, and watercourses, the authors, Sergio Polizzotti and Daniele Fanciullacci, discuss the constraints imposed by donors. Donors specify that purchases of machinery have to be made in the donor country, or that bids be restricted to firms in the donor country, or that a time limit be placed on the scheme, which encourages the tendency toward large contracts and heavy spending on equipment." Labor-intensive projects are few in Africa because so much donor aid is self-interested.
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http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Star-Safari-Overland-Capetown/dp/0618446877
Also an interview of above mentioned Michael Maren:
http://www.netnomad.com/might.html
Dear m156:
Thank you for the iinformation. Experience of the real observers is so often ignored. Outside funding can never trump dignity and training.
Yes, but as they say if you teach someone to fish, you won't be able to peddle fish to them yourself.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/01/29/michael_dell_0_vladimir_putin_1
Just something to keep in mind the next time some do-gooder tries to take over your affairs (for your own good, of course).
You vegans don't understand the nature of Capitalist resource exploitation. The whole planet could convert to veganism and it would change very little. The vast majority of the resources saved would merely be used for some other activity in the endless pursuit of capital accumulation.
Your whole line of reasoning is false.
Actually the BIGGEST thing to do in everyday life to save the planet and ecology is not to drive! Some 20% of corn and food crops as mentioned in the above article is being converted to ethanol to drive our cars.
I do not eat meat myself although I do eat seafood because
it is lower on the food chain and would provide more food
to starving people on the planet.
There could be some sustainable meat eating on grass-fed
livestock as opposed to corn-fed beef.
But I do not fool myself that all I have to do to save the planet is not eat meat.
The whole auto monopolized air conditioned suburban sprawl
lifestyle with its 6 lane highways, multi-football field sized
parking lots, leaf blowers, riding gas lawn mowers, electric can openers etc etc is the biggest burden on the planet
wasting fossil fuels while churning out tons of greenhouse gases.
Besides reducing driving as much as possible another elementary thing to do is replace a gas powered lawn mower with the old-fashioned simple push mower.
The push mower takes no fuel, costs only the cost of an annual blade sharpening, makes little noise, causes zero pollution and actually because it is so light is as easy to
push as a gas mower.
To sustain this lifestyle the US is now literally "eating
its seed corn" to make fuel...
The supply of food isn't the problem. Unequality in distribution is.
Humanity needs a much stronger concensus on "fair".
The UN Human Rights charter was a start. Now on to practice it!
Sorry to be contentious, but...
the human body is not well adapted to process cereals, and many people find flour and rice hard to digest. We are biologically better suited to a diet of fruits and meat.
Humans became less healthy after cereals were cultivated and the hunter gatherer diet waned. The trouble is, cereals provide adequate and reliable, if hard to digest, protean, and have allowed the human population grow to eight billion.
I have never been fitter since I gave up farinaceous foods and rice, not to mention milk, which I hate and which makes me gag; a natural reflex in a weaned human.
Under no circumstances is eight billion humans on Earth sustainable, but in the meantime I will stick to my fruity, nutty, meaty, fishy diet.
Sorry folks.
Ulpian, what you have written about is only YOUR experience with diet. It does not apply to all of humanity as you have extrapolated. I can fill up more space here, but let me just refer you to an earlier post on this topic - as to why the human anatomy and physiology are way more closely related to herbivorous animals than to carnivores or even omnivores:
"UN to Hold Crisis Talks on Food Prices as Riots Hit Mozambique:
www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/09/04-1
Time stamp: Alcyon September 5th, 2010 6:10 am
This post contains a reference to:
"The Comparative Anatomy Of Eating" - by Milton R. Mills, M.D.
www.unwesen.de/pages/veganism/resources/the_comparative_anatomy_of_eating
and also at
www.vegsource.com/news/2009/11/the-comparative-anatomy-of-eating.html
Alcyon,
I can only state my own experience here, but I do know that I am not alone. The present western diet, which is now spreading like a cancer across the world, is making for a group of obese and very unhealthy people.
Veganism is a cranky fad I'm afraid, even if its exponents do have MD after their names, and it is no solution to any problem, except in the minds of those who worship at its altar.
We could all do with eating less, but better, but as long as we continue to breed as we are there's no point in bothering too much, since events will take charge anyway.
All I am doing is trying to make myself fitter in order to be in a better position to cope with the disaster when it comes. I haven't bred either, so my impact on the planet is far less than many others, who themselves are contributing to the population overload.
If we all used less, drove less, stopped buying junk we don't need and generally behaved decently the planet might last a bit longer; but we won't. To maintain this mad expansionist nightmare we are told to buy buy buy. It can't last and the cracks in the system are widening.
But as I said, I am trying to look after myself as best I can, and my impact on this planet, for a westerner, is light.
Alcyon,
Are you growing some of your own food? It's the best place to start to survive the Brave New World.
lysisfilms, I wanted to do that many years ago. I was totally blown away by an all-day seminar I attended in 1993, on permaculture. Someone gave me the book by Bill Mollison and for a few months after that, it seemed like that was my "calling", lol. Anyway, who knows, I might still take it up.
Just do it. If you only have a window, grow a couple of herbs.
Ulpian, you write an honest and frank post - for the most part anyway, when you say "I am trying to look after myself as best I can", with as little an impact on the planet as YOU can think of. That is fine, and I appreciate that. But then you couldn't resist making the statement,
>>"Veganism is a cranky fad I'm afraid, even if its exponents do have MD after their names, and it is no solution to any problem, except in the minds of those who worship at its altar"<<
could you?
How can you say it is NO SOLUTION to ANY PROBLEM when the numbers are there for all to see as to what it takes to produce meat and dairy - whether in the "traditional" manner or in a factory farm? You are also clearly not aware of the history of beef consumption in Europe and its role in the Enclosure Movement, during the Irish Potato Famine, during the colonization of the Americas and all that. I highly recommend to anyone interested in a different take on history this book by Jeremy Rifkin:
"Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture".
There is this concept and a measure called the "ecological footprint" put forth by a Canadian researcher and his grad student at the UBC in the 1990's that seeks to quantify the impact of our actions and choices by converting it to the land area (some recent calculations also involve the ocean area). The calculations are pretty rigorous and hard to refute - especially since the assumptions and the data used are made explicit, to account for various soil types in the different regions of the world. Carbon footprint is a subset, and the CO2 emissions are converted into the forest area that would be needed to absorb a given amount of CO2 in a year.
This article mentions the Food and Agriculture Organization. There is an FAO report that came out in 2006 called "Livestock's Long Shadow - Environmental Issues and Options" that actually lays out the case that the meat industry is a VERY LARGE contributor of GHG emissions that simply cannot be ignored.
The book "The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health" by T. Colin Campbell makes a compelling case as to why cutting out meat and dairy from the diet is important in not only preventing various diseases (including some forms of cancer) and health problems, but it can also help reverse existing health problems. How can this be rejected as just another "cranky fad"? You've got to be kidding.
While you as an individual may have a small footprint despite your eating meat, you CANNOT make that as a generalization and certainly cannot make the statement that being a vegan "is no solution to any problem". That would be totally absurd, to say the least.
You are grasping at straws when you try to convince people about what they eat affecting the planet. People will eat what they want to. Even when it puts them in danger of death. I was a nutrition counselor for 30 years, have a family history of heart trouble, and can eat 6 strips of bacon in a NY minute. Local farm pork of course...
There are two guaranteed money making ventures on this planet: food and water.
And guess who all is attempting to control every stinkin' bit of it? Whorporates.
So go figure out who they are and get a move on. Millions will die before you get the work done. Billions are going to die because you won't lift a finger, just hang out here and bitch...or eat tofu.