FEED YOUR PEOPLE
Addressing the Leaders at Davos this week: Shortages & Food Riots - FEED YOUR PEOPLE – Hunger is the prospect for many
According to many scientists and even the UNs own matrixes of information, fully Half of the world’s population could face severe food shortages by the first half of this century as rising food prices already strain the bottom of the Pyramid. If you travle around the world’s less visited development forgotten equatorial zones, you’ll see that the people already starving in large parts of the world. People have reduced their two bowls of food per day diet to one bowl of food. While the West enjoys prosperity and worries about banking systems being well oiled with Trillions, to avoid seizing and the machinery grinding, the equatorial zones of the world already are facing reduced food diets and possible starvation. All this will be excacerbated in the near term and enlarge it’s effects around the tropical zones too. The poorest of the poor will be affected first as they are today because the markets have already figured this out and factored the huge increases in the most important food staples. The food prices for those most important items for the poorest people’s diet have already tripled. Those increases, adjusted for inflation are the largest we’ve seen in the last century. If this is not a clear signal for the people in Leadership and the conferees to Davos WEF this wek to wake up, then there is something seriously disconnected with the leaders eating Cake and chocolates at the top of the magic mountain. The important humanitarian goal of world leadership is to allow access to the strategic food reserves that are abundant and rotting away in government silos. Allow the effect of a food supply so just to lower the prices of the important staples. If these indications for action aren’t heeded like a clarion call, then I don’t know why they call themselves leaders, and not just fondue eaters.
The sky is falling in for the poorest people. As a matter of fact the sky has already caved in when you experienc the most expensive rice prices ever, the most expensive maize and grain prices…
There is a far more important compelling reason for the government’s intervention in the lowering of the staple food prices by increasing the trickle down of the food storaged supplies; and thus saving the food supplies from the black market prices, than saving any bank or banking system.
Additionally the severe Climate Change and the rising temperatures take their toll on farmers’ crops, around the tropical belts as many scientists have warned with good science to back them up. Harvests are continually decreasing worldwide for the poorest countries.
Harvests of staple food crops such as rice and maize could fall by between 20% and 40% as a result of higher temperatures during the growing season in the tropics and subtropics. Warmer temperatures in those zones also are expected to increase the risk of drought, further reducing crops, according to a new study.
The worst of the food shortages are expected to hit the poor, densely inhabited regions of the equatorial belt, where demand for food already is soaring because of a rapid growth in population.
A study published in the American journal Science found there was a 90% chance that by the end of this century, the coolest temperatures in the tropics during the crop-growing season would exceed the hottest temperatures recorded between 1900 and 2006.
More temperate regions such as Europe could expect to see previous record temperatures become the norm by 2100.
“The stress on global food production from temperatures alone is going to be huge, and that doesn’t take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures,” said David Battisti, at the University of Washington, in Seattle who led the study.
Battisti and Rosamond Naylor, at Stanford University in California, combined climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and historical examples of the impact of heat waves on agriculture and found severe food shortages were likely to become more common.
Among the periods they examined was the record heat wave across western Europe in 2003, which killed an estimated 52,000 people and also cut yields of wheat and fodder by a third. In 1972, a prolonged hot summer in south-east Ukraine and south-west Russia saw temperatures rise by between two and four degrees Celsius above the norm, driving down wheat and coarse grain yields for the whole of the then Soviet Union by 13%. The disruption affected the global cereal market for two years.
Naylor, who is director of the food security and the environment programme at Stanford, said the study emphasised the need for countries to invest in adapting to a changing climate. To develop new crops to withstand higher temperatures could take decades, she added.
“When we looked at our historical examples, there were ways to address the problem within a given year,” Naylor said. “People could always turn somewhere else to find food. But in the future there’s not going to be any place to turn unless we rethink our food supplies.”
The tropics and subtropics — which stretch from the southern United States to northern Argentina and southern Brazil, from northern India and southern China to southern Australia, and cover all of Africa — are currently home to three billion people. Future temperature rises are expected to have a greater impact in the tropics because the crops grown there are less resilient to changes in climate.
According to the study, many local populations now live on less than US$1 a day and depend on agriculture. The need for food is due to become more urgent as populations are expected to nearly double by the end of the century.
“When all the signs point in the same negative direction you pretty much know what’s going to happen,” Battisti said. “You’re talking about hundreds of millions of additional people looking for food because they won’t be able to find it where they find it now.
“You can let it happen and painfully adapt, or you can plan for it. You could also mitigate climate change impacts and not let it happen in the first place, but we’re not doing a very good job of that.”
Naylor added: “We have to be rethinking agriculture systems as a whole — not only thinking about new varieties of crops, but also recognising that many people will just move out of agriculture, and even move from the lands where they live now.”
In many countries, a combination of poor farming practices and deforestation, exacerbated by climate change, may steadily degrade soil fertility, leaving vast areas unsuitable for crops or grazing. In 2007, scientists warned that poor soil fertility meant a global food crisis was likely in the next half-century.
I believe the crisis already started with the increased prices of food staples. It is the responsibility of the EU and the US leaders and the world’s Governments to follow the Chinese example and establish Ministries of Food. Governmental Food Policy for your own people and the People of the world is far too important to be left to the markets and the oligopolistic companies alone. Because much like the market crashes we experience now the biggest market crash is the crash of the food production. Soaring food prices coupled with lower food production represent a great famine on the world. Macro economically speaking and in the face of it, the food shortages and high prices are the opposite of a crash and an opportunity for many companies and financiers to profit…but you can see where this excess lead us in the bank crashes. It is a far more important priority for the governments to address by not relying simply on the exuberant marketplace to regulate food prices and production but to take a page from the play book of the great driver Mao and guarantee all his people their two full bowls of uncooked rice per day. He fed his people and the Chinese will still be able to do this for their one billion folks. I doubt the rest of the world’s leaders will be so lucky, simply because they are not prepared. Nor do they have a ministry of Rice…
Real leaders need to step in and manage economically the strategic food reserves as a benevolent parent, to lower global prices of staples and avert widespread malnutrition, starvation and the attendant population shifts. But they ave to have a Ministry level Policy for this linked and in cooperation with the UN so it would be a global Food policy initiative to avert catastrophe.
That should be Priority number one for the Leaders assembled in Davos this week.
PS: Don’t forget the environment too as they are and as we all are interconnected.
