UN: World Food Stocks Dwindling Rapidly
December 18th, 2007If you look at the ongoing crises involved with food production, you see not just a perfect storm, but multiple perfect storms.
Via: International Herald Tribune:
In an “unforeseen and unprecedented” shift, the world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring to historic levels, the top food and agriculture official of the United Nations warned Monday.
The changes created “a very serious risk that fewer people will be able to get food,” particularly in the developing world, said Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
The agency’s food price index rose by more than 40 percent this year, compared with 9 percent the year before – a rate that was already unacceptable, he said. New figures show that the total cost of foodstuffs imported by the neediest countries rose 25 percent, to $107 million, in the last year.
At the same time, reserves of cereals are severely depleted, FAO records show. World wheat stores declined 11 percent this year, to the lowest level since 1980. That corresponds to 12 weeks of the world’s total consumption – much less than the average of 18 weeks consumption in storage during the period 2000-2005. There are only 8 weeks of corn left, down from 11 weeks in the earlier period.
Prices of wheat and oilseeds are at record highs, Diouf said Monday. Wheat prices have risen by $130 per ton, or 52 percent, since a year ago. U.S. wheat futures broke $10 a bushel for the first time Monday, the agricultural equivalent of $100 a barrel oil.
Diouf blamed a confluence of recent supply and demand factors for the crisis, and he predicted that those factors were here to stay. On the supply side, these include the early effects of global warming, which has decreased crop yields in some crucial places, and a shift away from farming for human consumption toward crops for biofuels and cattle feed. Demand for grain is increasing with the world population, and more is diverted to feed cattle as the population of upwardly mobile meat-eaters grows.
“We’re concerned that we are facing the perfect storm for the world’s hungry,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program, in a telephone interview. She said that her agency’s food procurement costs had gone up 50 percent in the past 5 years and that some poor people are being “priced out of the food market.”
To make matters worse, high oil prices have doubled shipping costs in the past year, putting enormous stress on poor nations that need to import food as well as the humanitarian agencies that provide it.
“You can debate why this is all happening, but what’s most important to us is that it’s a long-term trend, reversing decades of decreasing food prices,” Sheeran said.
I notice that one of your tags for this one is “Kill Off”, and I’m not so sure this is delibarate. The Green Revolution has been pushing the soils of the world very, very hard to produce more and more food all the time, and it makes sense to me that at some point, the productive soil of the world will start to show its exhaustion no matter how much petro-fertilizer with which we soak it, simply because the overall health of the soil is so compromised now. This is especially true when you factor in the early effects of climate-change.
Now might the world’s elite make sure the poorest get the very least possible of what food remains? That I can imagine as being very possible.
The Green Revolution was quite deliberate.
Whose think tank ideas and foundation investments were behind this “Green Revolution” icon that we’re all supposed to drop to our knees and worship for its benificence and generosity?
Many millions worldwide are wholly dependent on the fully globalized & industrialized food business, buying the mountain of nutrition-less processed crap they eat with variably worthy bits of paper.
Small farmers and the peasantry have been getting pushed in successive generational waves towards the urban centers, while globalizing aggrö-kulture drives ever-more land like an abusive husband. As the great conglomerates monetize and commodify an ever larger global footprint, local food production and small livestock have become an anachronism — something quaint and perhaps slightly eccentric — to a ever-growing number of people.
What is called a “green” revolution was actually an enclosure movement of sorts. A capitalist counter-revolution designed to steadily drive the peasants off the land and toward urban jobs. It is historically important, marking one of the first successful acts of modern corporate “green-washing”, putting traction to the principles of Bernays in a global way. The use of bent language to win the day has become de rigeur in the media-driven decades since. The great defense combines own the vast media conglomerates that own the newspapers and the radio stations that feed the newspeak to the global head. They serve up a Huxley cocktail with an Orwell twist and folks suck it right up, just like they knew we would.
Then there’s the energy vector, where the real beast lays in wait, as Kevin very frequently (and accurately) points out. Energy and money at root are each forms of power, and if you control their flows you hold great leverage. Clean green fascism is in the details. Marines with solar-powered field radio packs and multi-fuel Hummers that burn bio-diesel. Strict burning regulations in the homeland, limiting the ability to heat one’s home with local cellulose stocks. Fostering ongoing and increasing dependence in all but the most stubborn and anachronistic folks.
All the fancy new technology is being developed with direct or funneled military dollars, as has pretty much always been the case with bleeding edge technology. The metaphor cuts both ways. The latest batteries will show up in the Blackwater guys radio equipment before it will free anyone from dependence on the pay-as-you-go grid. Bet on it.
What part of the grand design aren’t you seeing?
The beef eaters will drive their corn-fed cars to the mall to buy big-screen TVs to watch the rice eaters die on the 10 o’clock news. If it wasn’t for Cryptogon I wouldn’t get any real news.
Peregrino said: “If it wasn’t for Cryptogon I wouldn’t get any real news.”
That’s precisely why it’s important to fund these rare sources of “real news”.
If it wasn’t for the “Green (mean) Revolution” the world wouldn’t be carrying anywhere near the population it does, which would be a good thing. The PTB must have expected a population explosion, nature provides ample examples, so they must have wanted it. To what end, knowing we would have far too many people on board at some point & measures would have to be taken to control it ? The labour of everyone is worth far more than they are paid & this is how the PTB evcentually become so filthy rich – we give them our time/labour in return for, mostly, especially in Asia, a risible amount of money. So, did the PTB reason that more people equals more wealth for themselves & who gives a toss if we have “euthanize” huge swathes of the population. Only, as we screw our environment it is screwed for everyone, no matter who or how you own. For example, DU has the potential really screw huge parts of the Middle East & the Balkans not to mention parts the Med & southern Europe. Wealth does not confer immunity. I have to conclude that while the PTB may have wanted things to move in a particular direction there have been plenty of diversions on the way that they didn’t want and that human greed & venality play as much a part as anything else.
Miraculux,
I love your essays – but today you are way over my learning curve. Who is Bernay?
There is a LOT of the GRAND DESIGN you write of that I’m not seeing. I grow ALOT of my own food, preserve and store it. I have a wood stove, and am with “luck” in a part of the U.S. where I could burn plastic wrap for heat and no one would care less (unless it was me that was their neighbor)because people very rarely come out of their houses anymore unless its to drive off to some unseen location. Church perhaps? Walmart? I dunno. Its difficult to see the community I grew up in dying off because the elders are getting more elderly and their children are scattered to destinations in the U.S. unknown.
Perhaps I am experiencing the beginnings of the Long Emergencey that Kunstler writes about but I don’t know. It is very unsettling to have some long time friends and neighbors aging. Putting their properties up for sale, Mafia like gangsters buying up property when you know that they are not solvent, wondering where the hell their money is coming from. It is certainly weird stuff.
Totally off topic, tomorrow is the 24th anniversary of my sister Cindy dying of cancer caused by asbestos inhalation. Oh happy day. Anyways, since that date I have ceased to be a Catholic (I don’t believe)and am more closely related to pagan beliefs (I am a dirt digger after all and think more often than not that the Catholic church ripped off the high holy days of earth to coincide with their “religion.)” God, after all, is a concept and me, you or anyone else should be good enough, smart enough, or whatever else to believe what we want to as to about who, what, him or her the Deus is.
I do believe however, that there is a deus ex machina – a god that intervenes at times. The grand Lord of Karma if you will allow me that. T here is a hard reign about to fall. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but it will fall. We may not see justice come to the perpetrators in our lifetimes, but Oh the house of Bush and all that cleave to it will be the stories passed on as to what not to do for generations. Of that I am sure. The times ahead, I believe, will certainly wreak havoc in all places on this big blue marble we live on.
Meanwhile, the high holy days of those who hold to the natural world are just ahead.
The Winter Solstice on the 22nd, the Full Cold Moon on the 23rd (Farmers Almanac).
Someone once told me in the depths of my despair that it is in the winter where we sow the seed thoughts of the things we want to grow in the year to come.
This person was not a gardener.
For myself, I think that being a person who reads this web site means that inadvertantly, I am one of the few now, hopefully many later who will sow the new seed thoughts for the world we want to come.
May the god/dess bless. I’m falling asleep at the wheel as I write this so better go.
Thank you Eileen.
The fellow you need to study up on is Edward Bernays, and if you find the subject intriguing, continue on to Ivy Lee. From there, I believe you’ll be able to find your way on your own.
The subject matter is sociological. Bernays was responsible for much of the early development and understanding of social — and by extension political and economic — control via the intelligent application of specific media forms and communication techniques. Basically, how to play with the mass mind, to drive the cultural conversation, and to define the social boundaries. The modern megalithic media has subsumed all but the fringes. Places like this.
How much longer we’ll have easy access to sites like Cryptogon is even a fair question to ponder at this stage of the game. At least we’ll know for certain that there are others out there, and the stories we tell those that follow us will become the stories told in the windy ruins of great cities by feral children who all look a little too much like Mel Gibson.
I’ll leave off my own rambling now with a small discursive fragment, with what I like to think of as the universe offering up a semantic “tell” of sorts. My first name, Douglas, literally translated in its most likely dialect of origin (Celtic) means “of the dark water” or similar. The capitol city of the Isle of Man. Douglas. Invading Vikings named the capitol of Ireland, “dubh-linh”. Meaning black or dark water. Dub-lin. Doug-las.
Every time I read a story about that infamous private military contractor Blackwater, surely in reference to something semantically connected to me, I find myself wondering if I’m going against my own intrinsic nature playing for the underdog, going against the flow.
I made an excellent soldier, when I wanted to, in what I like to refer to as a previous life. Being around skiers and climbers in the mountains literally from birth mant I already knew to how to handle myself in the backcountry. I learned a great deal from my marine PMI, who was actually once a member of the US Olympic squad. Shot 228/250 on my first 200/300/500 qualification, on a windy afternoon in the coastal hills of Southern California.
But I could never go there. I could sell them my body and keep my mind to myself, but I could never sell them my soul, no matter how hard I tried. Then I began to truly grow up.
@Miraculix
`What is called a “green†revolution was actually an enclosure movement of sorts.’
That is one of the most evocative metaphors I’ve heard for a while. For those who are unaware of Enclosure, it is worth looking up.
The “Green Revolution†is an Enclosure Movement in fact. It has succeeded in appropriating long established social and cultural practices, as well as traditional farming methods, as well as “vernacular†technology (in the same sense as vernacular architecture), enclosing agriculture as practiced for millennia. Now enclosed by fertiliser, pesticide, and herbicide the game may very well be over. Once terminator technology is finally released, and I have no doubt it will, we’re surely finished.
For yet another deeply disturbing accomplishment, see:
“Doomsday Seed Vault” in the Arctic – by F. William Engdahl – 2007-12-04
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7529
I am embarrassed to say that I was not familiar with the term “enclosure” (as it’s being used in this thread), so I looked it up on (the infamous) wikipedia, and this was my favorite line: “Marxist and neo-Marxist historians argue that rich landowners used their control of state processes to appropriate public land for their private benefit.” This describes, of course, what the elites have been doing with all forms of wealth, the process accelerating under Reagan and approaching light-speed under W.
I agree with most of your analysis, djc, but I disagree with your assertion that the PTB failed to realize that they’re screwing themselves right along with everyone else. Barring a truly global environmental catastrophe — like a global nuclear war — there will always be places on earth that will remain “more habitable”, and there you will find, in the end, the wealthiest and the most powerful, after they have decided that they have squeezed all they can out of the masses. FWIW, I think that they also understand that the bigger the population, the easier it is to develop the technology they will eventually live on. They will pull the plug when our still relatively free society has created the things that they want, and the worker bees — at least, 90% or so of them — are no longer needed. I think we’re getting close to that point.
I certainly have no problem visualizing the Green Revolution as something the PTB designed and employed to enhance their power and control. But as djc pointed out, even the PTB are answerable to the Law of Unintended Consequences (not to mention the Law of Karma).