Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 6:48 pm Post subject: Re: Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe
Novus wrote:
We are one bad harvest away from total end of world chaos with a billion dead.
The bad harvest you speak of has already happened this year, across Asia. A region in India, Mizoram, was particularly hard hit by an infestation of rats.
One million face famine after rats feast on crops
Quote:
Crops including rice, maize and vegetables have been wiped out as flowering of bamboo in the region caused an explosion of rodent population," a report by ActionAid said.
Mizoram Agriculture Minister H. Rammawi said reports of rats destroying farmlands follow vast forests of bamboo bursting into flower in many parts of the state. "Bamboo flowering and the subsequent invasion by rats on granaries and paddy fields in the region is a phenomenon that signals an impending catastrophe or a famine," the minister said.
"Rats multiply at a very rapid pace after eating the protein-rich seeds that appear soon after bamboo flowering," Lalnithanga said. When the seeds are exhausted, armies of rats chomp their way through rice and potato crops and granaries, causing a famine.
Scientists have found that more baby rats survive when the bamboo has flowered as the adult male rats, which are known to eat their newborn offspring, tend to leave them alone when they have had their fill of fruit. As a result, litters of up to 13 rats survive and are ready to reproduce themselves within three months.
Aid agencies have said that most villagers are surviving on wild roots, yam and sweet potatoes. Conditions of widespread food shortage and hunger prevail in all eight districts of Mizoram, said a report by the international aid agency Actionaid. The Government is reluctant to accept that the situation is rapidly slipping out of its control. Mizoram needs about 15 million kilos (16,500 tons) of rice a month, but only about a fifth of that is available.
Gohain said: 'The crisis is unfolding and is going to get worse. We anticipate that if this continues we will see something terrible happening here.'
Joined: Oct 23, 2004 Posts: 5883 Location: New Jersey
Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 8:52 pm Post subject: Re: Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe
Quote:
Hunger. Strikes. Riots. The food crisis bites
Robin McKie and Heather Stewart
The Observer, Sunday April 13 2008
Across the world a crisis is unfolding at alarming speed. Climate change, China's increasing consumption and the dash for biofuels are causing food shortages and rocketing prices - sparking riots in cities from the Caribbean to the Far East. Robin McKie and Heather Stewart report on the millions facing starvation - and the growing threat to global security
It is a grim, unsettling story. Yet it is certainly not an exceptional one. Across the world, a food crisis is now unfolding with frightening speed. Hundreds of millions of men and women who, only a few months ago, were able to provide food for their families have found rocketing prices of wheat, rice and cooking oil have left them facing the imminent prospect of starvation. The spectre of catastrophe now looms over much of the planet.
Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 6:22 am Post subject: Re: Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe
Homesteader wrote:
Heard an interview this a.m. on NPR with the head of World Hunger or some such of the U.N. She listed three causes for the run-up in food prices: hi energy costs, global warming disruptions and turning food into fuel. She never mentioned overpopulation, loss of arable land or water scarcity.
Most people are very aggressively of the opinion that since people are not intrinsically bad, more people cannot intrinsically be bad. They blame failure of management for all failure to accommodate more people, no matter how many there are. If you press the point that there are natural limits on how many can be supported, you will be met with a "So what do you propose we do about it?" and since the answer is silence or "Nothing" with the implicit statement that billions will die, their reply is "Then what is the point saying it? Shut up."
You can tell I have had this conversation before, right?
Overpopulation is politically incorrect because of that implicit statement that billions of people have to die. It might be one of those concepts the human brain simply cannot wrap itself around. But I do not want to be an ass and I am comfortable with the fact that "global food crisis" is an adequate way for people to say "overpopulation" and interact with the problem without experiencing liberal guilt. So long as we are having the conversation on some level, it is something.
About 20,000 textile workers have clashed with police near Dhaka, Bangladesh's capital, demanding better wages to meet high food prices.
Workers from more than a dozen textile factories fought police on Saturday in Fatullah, 20km south of Dhaka.
Bangladesh police said that the protesters wrecked cars and buses and vandalised factories.
Shafiqul Islam, a police sub-inspector, said: "They became unruly demanding higher wages, saying their current wages don't even meet basic food needs."
Bhuiyan Mahbub Hasan, the local police chief, said that representatives of the military, labour and manufacturers would meet in an attempt to diffuse the unrest.
_________________ "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."
-Friedrich von Schiller
"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
John Kenneth Galbraith
Joined: Dec 25, 2005 Posts: 572 Location: Hillsboro, West Virginia
Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 4:32 pm Post subject: Re: Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe
This kind of thing has happened before. For example, 30000 years ago Cro-Magnon was outcompeting Neanderthal for food resources. Neanderthal couldn't comprehend the innovative Cro-Magnon hunting technologies, such as the manufacture of good ranged weapons, or his techniques, including the use of grassfires to stampede herds of bison into a box canyon. So Cro-Magnon got all the prizes, leaving Neanderthal with little or nothing. And here we are, we the European descendants of Cro-Magnon, in a world without Neanderthals or their descendants. This is a natural process, and it happens all the time in every family of living creature: genetic variation, speciation, struggle and replacement. If you'd rather be the replacer than the replaced, then think carefully, understand which team you're really on, and fight well.
Joined: Dec 28, 2005 Posts: 297 Location: Toronto, Ontario
Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 4:37 pm Post subject: Re: Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe
All of this makes me think we are very close to peak human population. Those rosy projections of us humming along to 9 billion people by midway through the century are looking completely unrealistic. Extrapolation doesn't work when you're dealing with a variable that faces limiting factors.
I'll give the media credit for their coverage when they acknowledge that Malthus was right.
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 12472 Location: zombie horde wonderland
Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 5:23 pm Post subject: Re: Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe
Jenab6 wrote:
If you'd rather be the replacer than the replaced, then think carefully, understand which team you're really on, and fight well.
"Oh, I think I'll choose to have surviving genes, even though I have no idea what those are, or if I even carry them! 'Cuz I'm on the Replacer Team!"
_________________ No original ideas are contained in this post.
Joined: Dec 25, 2005 Posts: 572 Location: Hillsboro, West Virginia
Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 8:00 pm Post subject: Re: Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe
Ludi wrote:
Meet your Replacer:
[image of possum baring fangs]
I doubt it. Still, the possum has the right idea. I could kill a possum with a long, sharp stick. I could break its back or skull with an ironwood truncheon. But he'd get in some good bites before I killed him, which makes me wonder whether other prey might be more profitably taken. If the possum were less inclined to fight, I'd be more inclined to eat him. He follows nature's wisdom, which remains wise even if he is not a particularly formidable animal. As he is, then, so let us be forever ready to bare our fangs and to use such weapons as we have to our own advantage.
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 12472 Location: zombie horde wonderland
Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 8:10 pm Post subject: Re: Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe
The 'possum has lived through more than one extinction. He will survive when Homo sapiens cannot. _________________ No original ideas are contained in this post.
Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 8:30 pm Post subject: Re: Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe
The Global Warming Cult hammered on the weak minded politicians until they bought into the ethanol will save the world BS. "Don't Eat That Elmer. That Is Horse crap." Now the unintended consequence is mass starvation in the 3rd World. How much more of Gores's bullshit will you swallow before you start thinking for yourself. Shut off all US and Canadian supplies of food right now to all Moslem and 3rd world countries. Feeding them our grain does not help. It only empowers corruption and cruelty. Let them learn to feed themselves. Or let them starve.
Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 12:15 pm Post subject: Re: Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe
deMolay wrote:
The Global Warming Cult hammered on the weak minded politicians until they bought into the ethanol will save the world BS. "Don't Eat That Elmer. That Is Horse crap." Now the unintended consequence is mass starvation in the 3rd World. How much more of Gores's bullshit will you swallow before you start thinking for yourself. Shut off all US and Canadian supplies of food right now to all Moslem and 3rd world countries. Feeding them our grain does not help. It only empowers corruption and cruelty. Let them learn to feed themselves. Or let them starve.
"Us or them" is so very quaint, especially coming from the nro. 1 non-self sufficient debt based insanely consumerist oil addict country.
Yes, closing your borders to all international trade as of now for both import and export would be the best US could do for the rest of the world, seriously.
Nobody never bothered to tell you that US is not only growing it's grain with imported oil and natural gas, it is also a net importer of food?
Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 1:34 pm Post subject: Re: Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe
Food crisis points to 'imminent massacre,' UN official says
Quote:
Paris - The recent crisis sparked by spiralling prices for basic foods such as rice and wheat is only the beginning of a long period of rioting and instability in many parts of the world, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Jean Ziegler said in an interview published Monday in the French daily Liberation. "We are heading for a very long period of rioting, conflicts (and) waves of uncontrollable regional instability marked by the despair of the most vulnerable populations," Ziegler said.
He blamed the crisis on "the indifference of the rulers of the world," and singled out the US support of bio-fuels for particularly harsh criticism.
"When a bio-fuel policy is launched in the United States, thanks to subsidies of 6 billion dollars, of bio-fuels that drains 138 tons of corn from the market, the foundation is laid for a crime against humanity to satisfy one's own thirst for fuel," Ziegler charged.
Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 1:52 pm Post subject: Re: Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe
Food riots to hit Manila soon?
Quote:
MANILA, Philippines, The intensifying rice and food crisis is the Philippines has raised speculations that food riots comparable if not greater in intensity to those in Haiti last week that resulted in the fall of the government, may soon hit Manila. This scenario is being discussed and debated among food experts and economic and political observers in and out of the capital region.
KMP national chair and former Anakpawis party list Rep. Rafael Mariano said widespread scarcity of cheap rice and other basic foodstuffs and the state's abandonment of the people's right to food, which provoked the poor people of Haiti to food riots, are present in the Philippine situation.
KMU chair Elmer Labog said with the low take-home pay received by Filipino workers as against the skyrocketing prices of rice and other basic needs, desperation may lead to food riots, which the government will surely regret in the coming days, unless meaningful and sweeping reforms are implemented to address the crisis.
In Manila, while Arroyo and her apologists in the executive and legislative branches of the government refused to hear the alarm bells, their current moves speak of their political preparations in dealing with the possibility of food riots across the country.
In the House of Representatives, a resolution authored by staunch allies of Arroyo has been filed to grant her emergency and dictatorial powers to address the rice crisis.
House Resolution 512 filed by La Union Rep. Thomas Dumpit Jr. allows the president to use drastic measures to confront the crisis to the extent of using the entire military and police force to stop food riots in the name of national security.
Ahead of the passage of this resolution, military and police armed with high-powered rifles have been deployed at National Food Authority rice-selling centers all over Manila to guard against protests or any kind of provocation and disruption that would spark food riots, an indication that the government will use state violence in case riots erupt.
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