The credit crisis was the first boot. Is this the second?

Or just the second horseman, of War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death?

in the USA to the prospect of mass starvation to be an outgrowth of the "gospel of prosperity" discussions we (among others) were having a few months back.
People are apathetic about the un-Christian Furriners starving, and even the Christians get short shrift, with the blame falling on their careless ways and corrupt governments. It's their fault, their fate, for not accepting Jesus Christ into their lives as their personal Saviour....or not accepting Him in the 'correct' way.

-5.75,-4.05
"We're all fucked. It helps to remember that." --George Carlin

Is there any doubt about what will happen?

Thank you for this post. That is the key issue: Are we going to engage fully in a culture of life or go down the tired old path of the current "Culture of Death?"

You can constantly turn that phrase...

Are oil prices murder?;
Are health policies murder?;
Are preemptive wars murder?;
Are environmental policies murder?

It continues and we'll continue to look like savages, stumbling zombies with ill intent, nihilists of the worst order until we face issues from an existential point of view.

High food prices are a long predicted consequence of high oil prices.

Fertilizer is made from natural gas, the price of which tracks oil closely. In developed nations that supply the bulk of the world's food surplus, oil is required to run farm machinery. And then, food is bulky - it costs a lot to ship it around the world.

There's no evil capitalistic conspiracy to starve people here (other than dumping to destroy local industry and obtain a monopoly). The price of oil (a basic source of energy) has increased 500% in the last 5 years. The consequences of this are only just beginning.

by Michael Pollan

NYT

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only problem lurking behind the “why bother” question. Let’s say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

A sense of personal virtue, you might suggest, somewhat sheepishly. But what good is that when virtue itself is quickly becoming a term of derision? And not just on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal or on the lips of the vice president, who famously dismissed energy conservation as a “sign of personal virtue.” No, even in the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet “virtuous,” when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue — a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue — became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment — buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore — should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.

And even if in the face of this derision I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently suggested that in certain cases under certain conditions, produce from places as far away as New Zealand might account for less carbon than comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was co-written by a representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I’ve got to consider not only “food miles” but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I’ll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out.

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

much more at the link

I did inhale.

The value of the dollar has dropped by 1/2 over the past 6-7 years, right? So $110/bbl now is the same as $55/bbl 6 years ago. So the price of oil in the "Euroyen" has risen 5x since $10/bbl in 2000. Am I counting this right?

So, outside the US, are food prices still just following oil, or is there something else going on?

“The Playboy reader invites a female acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” - Hugh Hefner

of grain between supply and demand over time is one lost life. It is a sobering thought.

Rice has eight weeks of supply left, and the real harvests don't come in until August and September. Australia used to cover this period, but they are bone dry.

Do the math. May-June. Eight weeks are up.
What do people eat in Asia in July?? This is no insignificant number. It's over 2.7 billion people left hungry for more than 30 days. Some places, like China, have locked in their supply. But what about the Philipines or Thailand?

titled, Technology to Feed the World

According to science, the technology is already available, it just needs changing.

People, especially in western countries where food is plentiful, could contribute by growing as much of their own as possible ... this is my third year growing produce using an intensive method (Square Foot Gardening). Yep...isn't much, but at least trying brings me a level of comfort that I'm not just a consumer. The other good thing about attempting to grow your own garden is, it helps to acquaint me with some of the difficulties farmers must encounter. But I do have the luxury of when my crops fail of driving to store--sadly, millions can't.

A very good piece in my not-so-humble opinion. dhfjr.

By Martin Hutichinson

The credit crisis has taken an ugly turn, with a number of countries banning rice exports, causing the price of the staple to soar above US$1,000 per tonne, treble its level a year ago. Politically and economically, the world has moved decisively in the direction of protectionism and seems likely to continue further along the protectionist path. It's worth looking at what this trend may entail and how we might minimize its costs.

The most damaging aspect of the current burst of protectionism is the refusal by countries supplying food staples to export to their usual customers; this could actually make people starve.

read much more at the link

Asia Times

I did inhale.

Los Angeles Times, By Bruce Wallace, April 23

MANILA -- It is in the heaving slums of Asia, amid sagging tin shacks and streets afloat with waste, that the soaring global price for rice hits hardest.

Until last week, Imelda Torreras had been able to count on peddling small bags of rice to her neighbors in the putrid streets of Manila's Tondo district, a way to supplement her family's meager income as garbage brokers.

Now, the rocketing price of rice has pushed her out of the food business.

Customers used to paying 65 cents for a kilo of rice, or 2.2 pounds, have balked at increases that have pushed the price as high as 90 cents, a swift and devastating rise for the desperately poor.

"The price I was paying the wholesalers was rising so fast I couldn't increase my own prices fast enough to keep up," she said, sitting in the entrance to her home as neighborhood children tumbled in the mud around her. "People around here won't pay that kind of money for rice."

Sharp Price Hikes Leave Many Millions in Hunger

Washington Post, By Kevin Sullivan, April 23

LONDON -- More than 100 million people are being driven deeper into poverty by a "silent tsunami" of sharply rising food prices, which have sparked riots around the world and threaten U.N.-backed feeding programs for 20 million children, the top U.N. food official said Tuesday.

"This is the new face of hunger -- the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are," Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program (WFP), said at a London news conference. "The world's misery index is rising."

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, hosting Sheeran and other private and government experts at his 10 Downing Street offices, said the growing food crisis has pushed prices to their highest levels since 1945 and rivals the current global financial turmoil as a threat to world stability.

"Hunger is a moral challenge to each one of us as global citizens, but it is also a threat to the political and economic stability of poor nations around the world," Brown said, adding that 25,000 people a day are dying of conditions linked to hunger.

· Restaurants stockpile to guard against soaring cost
· Call to maintain exports as world food crisis grows

The Guardian, By Andrew Clark, Rory Carroll and Julian Borger, April 24

New York, Caracas - The global food crisis reached the United States yesterday as big retailers began to ration sales of rice in response to bulk purchases by customers alarmed by rocketing prices of staples.

Wal-Mart's cash and carry division, Sam's Club, announced it would sell a maximum of four bags of rice per person to prevent supplies from running short. Its decision followed sporadic caps placed on purchases of rice and flour by some store managers at a rival bulk chain, Costco, in parts of California.

The world price of rice has risen 68% since the start of 2008, but in some US shops the price has doubled in weeks.

Retail experts said there was little evidence of panic hoarding by the public but that restaurants and smaller retailers were buying up stocks at wholesalers in the expectation that the cost would go even higher. Shops said Filipino residents in the US were also making large purchases to send to relatives in the Philippines, where a shortage of supplies is causing concern.

"What you're seeing is people who buy in larger quantities, who have a restaurant or a corner store, stocking up because of media reports that prices could go higher," said Dave Heylen, a spokesman for the California Grocers Association.

In the poor regions of the world, a person lives essentially on about 4 lbs of grain per day. The rice harvest in 2007/2008 is coming in at a record 423 million metric tons. But food demand is at a record 424 million metric tons. That is 1,000,000 metric tons short, and there is essentially no reserve in this market except enough to fill the pipelines.

So 1,000,000 metric tons is 2.2 billion pounds. At 4 pounds per day, that is about 1,500 pounds per year to keep someone alive. 2.2 billion pounds divided by 1,500 pounds is equal to 1.5 million persons dependent on rice starving. It's no wonder the rhetoric has been so stark - Mass Murder, a Tsunami. The title of this thread is sadly accurate.

Next year is supposed to be worse because Thailand is in the midst of a severe drought that is affecting half their rice fields.

Washington Post, By Monte Reel, April 26

BUENOS AIRES, April 25 -- Inside a busy church hall early Friday morning, many of the 60 men waiting for a free breakfast tilted their heads upward to watch news flashes periodically scroll across a wall-mounted television.

"Government in Crisis . . . Minister of Economy Quits . . . Price of Food Increasing Worldwide . . . "

This country, in theory, should be protected from the global food crisis. Argentina's government touts steady economic growth, and in recent years the country has become a top exporter of the same grains, vegetable oils and beef that are now in such high demand.

But instead Argentina is becoming a symbol of the far-reaching effects of global food inflation. Like other developing countries that depend on agricultural exports, Argentina is struggling mightily to figure out how to protect local food sources without breaking the backbone of its economy.

"This country is in chaos right now," said José António Oliveira, 54, who said he has been eating at the church food kitchen in recent months because he can't afford food at today's escalating prices. "They tell us the economy is growing, but what's growing is hunger. The food kitchens are always full now because prices are going through the clouds."