“4/10/2008, 3:54pm EST”
Time Magazine:
Add this to the list of items that could seriously threaten world peace: food. …
The forecast is grim. Governments might quell the protests, but bringing down food prices could take at least a decade, food analysts say. One reason: billions of people are buying ever-greater quantities of food — especially in booming China and India, where many have stopped growing their own food and now have the cash to buy a lot more of it. Increasing meat consumption, for example, has helped drive up demand for grain, and with it the price.
There are other problems too. The spike in oil prices, which hit $103 per barrel in recent days, has pushed up fertilizer prices, as well as the cost of trucking food from farms to local markets and shipping it abroad. Then there is climate change. Harvests have been seriously disrupted by freak weather, including prolonged droughts in Australia and southern Africa, floods in West Africa, and this past winter’s deep frost in China and record-breaking warmth in northern Europe.
The strains are producing cracks, and the cracks are becoming fissures. And even those who notice the turmoil, and can at least predict the short-term ramifications, have no idea that their mindset is the root cause of it all. As long as we believe (falsely) that human life is more valuable than all other life, we will continue to make the planet bear the burdens of our behavior — until it can bear no more — and in the meantime we will feel some of the ramifications of our inevitable dependency upon this planet.
There is no painless way out of the situation we have created, but there are more and less painful ways to deal with it. We can change now, or we can be forced to change later. The longer we wait, the greater the pain of this transition will be to all species, including our own.
Add this to the list of items that could seriously threaten world peace: food.
Ironically, food is not a new addition to the “list of items that could seriously threaten world peace.” Food is exactly what has threatened world peace since dominionist agricultural began to spread throughout human culture some 10-12 thousand years ago. By taking the land for themselves and their interests alone, thereby perpetuating their own population beyond natural controls to the detriment and suffering of all other life, human animals have ensured that there would be no peace.
UPDATE: The response of the capitalists to food scarcity?
As always in a crisis, there are winners. The creeping fear that the world might actually run short of food — no longer simply the stuff of sci-fi movies — has led speculators to pour billions into commodities, further accelerating price rises.
Never leave home without it.
