Global Food Crisis Worst In A Generation, World's Poor Suffer Most

he globe's worst food crisis in a generation emerged as a blip on the big boards and computer screens of America's great grain exchanges. At first, it seemed like little more than a bout of bad weather.

In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect -- one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry, even cause American executives at Sam's Club to restrict sales of large bags of rice.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[JohnKemp]

Well, another day of the greenies feeling good about themselves while the poorest of the poor starve to death & the very poor have their meager savings & incomes strtched even further.

American liberalism; the greatest threat facing the world today.

[RedWolverine]

Okay!!?? And all this resulted from subsidizing farmers and ethanol. So will the Left get behind limited government? Of course not...it is a religion.

[Justtellthetruth]

SIZE of government should be dictated by the needs of the populace as a whole. If your a pirate, you would like to see no government at all, because it does nothing but slow down your business.

If your a normal citizen, with a family and hopes for their future in a stable and prosperous society, then naturally, you might want MORE government than a pirate, or a drug dealer, or even a very large corporation.

I agree ethanol is a bust, that it fails on every measure, and in fact contributes significantly to the currnet food crisis. But we ought to be subsidizing the solar industry, which WILL work, and in relatively short order. A massive infusion of tax incentives would really help on a variety of levels. It addresses our energy needs, our need to cut carbon, and it serves our national security by lessening our reliance on foreign oil.

If you think that those corn subsidys are only the work of dems or liberals, you are sorely misinformed, but the need to find alternaive fuels is more pressing now than ever before.

[browndog2]

If you're a normal citizen you arm yourself against pirates and drug dealers to counter the threat. You can't sue the Government for not protecting you when you're dead. To the point, a gallon of oil packs more energy than anything else to date. I feel energy storage is the key. Pack a lighning strike into a battery. Ever feel the power of a wave?

My two cents.

[MidSection]

Be a "green" global warming leftwing nut.....................starve a child instead.

[esquire07]

Millions starving, and Americans FAT as ever. Karma will balance everything out.... in the next few years the gluttons of the world will pay a dear price.

[Kman2]

You forgot to mention millions starving with overfed, fat Americans driving gas hog SUVs to the ethanol store (liquor store) while blaming farmers and Cargill for their plight of high food prices and high gas prices. uff.

[hydenorhare]

This is one award difficult to put on Al Gore's mantel.
Maybe just a framed copy of the photo at the top of this page.

[Emmagoldmanbabe]

Why is this story below the "time travel" image of what Obama may look like in four years?

It's obscene how little attention this is getting in the US. Anyone remember Mad Max?

[andyboy]

Emma,

Time must stand still now for 2 out of every 4 years while the candidates campaign. This allows unrelenting gridlock to choke the life out of our country.

By the time the next President gets settled in it'll be time to start running again.

This is why Hillary is actually quite correct when she ridicules Barack for all of his change rhetoric.

Ain't nothing changin' sweetie. Except for the worse.

[grn1]

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger believes that energy companies need to help develop alternatives to fossil fuels and has pledged $40 million on top of $30 million in state bonds toward the construction of a Berkeley science facility dedicated to the Energy Biosciences Institute.
Schwarzenegger and Chu are right that energy companies need to be part of the solution. But their participation should not come at the price of Berkeley's academic integrity and the open scientific process, which the university has long embraced. Otherwise, the state could wind up adopting expensive, new energy alternatives that appear environmentally friendly and boost corporate profits, but fail to significantly reduce carbon emissions or slow climate change.
Berkeley has been down this road before. In 1998, Berkeley signed a five-year, $25-million agreement with Novartis, a Swiss-based pharmaceutical company and a producer of genetically modified crops. The deal allowed Novartis to pay for one-third of the research budget of an academic department; it also granted the company licensing rights to nearly all the department's most valuable inventions.
This controversial alliance led Berkeley to pay for an external academic team from Michigan State University to study the Novartis arrangement at the request of Berkeley's faculty senate. The study did not uncover any overt manipulation of the academic research, but it concluded that the Novartis alliance was "outside the mainstream" of academic-industry relationships and badly tarnished the university's perceived independence on issues ranging from genetically modified agriculture to the environment.

[sleeperd]

The jig is up for you left-wing libs. You are directly responsible for the two major crises facing this country - and now the world.

You and that bloated global warming buffoon algore have precipitated a food panic with your ignorant ethanol scam...and you have prevented us from drilling the voluminous oil deposits that we have right here in this country.

It's only a matter of time before the public catches up with you.

[RedWolverine]

I could not agree with you more sleeprd.

[grn1]

Why the lies sleeperd? Many in this administration have, are or will be in the pockets of monsanto. Who benefits most from biofuels? Biotechs? Five hundred million dollars is a lot of money " especially for a public university. When the giant oil company BP announced Feb. 1 that it had chosen the University of California, Berkeley, to lead the largest academic-industry research consortium in U.S. history, University of California officials appeared giddy.
If the deal is approved, BP, formerly known as British Petroleum, will give $500 million over 10 years to create a multidisciplinary Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley. Berkeley would partner with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to establish the institute devoted to researching biofuels " fuels derived from plants and other organisms. HMMM OTHER ORGANISMS?The proponents of the BP alliance are motivated by noble goals. Many are world-renowned scientists, who feel an urgent need to tackle the problem of global warming and are eager to secure research funding. In a Berkeley online interview, Steven Chu, a Noble Prize winner who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, explains: "Partnering with BP we will have the resources to actually carry out some of the things we want to do in order to help save the world."

[sleeperd]

"Globull Warming" has turned into a 4 BILLION dollar a year industry. It has corrupted science and is now corrupting the world's food supply.

algore is in the process of making millions with his phony carbon-credit scheme.

But the people who have made the most off it are the sell-out "scientists" who have sold their souls for the billions in government and corporate grants which ultimately comes from -say it with me now-the citizen taxpayers of this country who are financing this scam.

[Hallucinocynic]

Actually, the "green" industry will ultimately become a trillion dollar a year industry and will reinvigorate a moribund fossil-fuel fed economy. Only blindered conservatives - the type that continued to invest in buggy whips in the early 20th century - will keep buying into the notion that fossil fuel reserves are limitless and that there's enough arable land to grow food for an ever increasing population.

Those who decry the green movement - and it IS becoming a cliche - are those who, basically, have no intellectual capacity to weigh new sources of energy and are those who are least prepared to survive in a changing landscape.

And anybody who believes that a Prius 'destroys' the environment is laughably inept at making a reasonable argument (although an argument could be made that ANY machine is destructive to the environment). These are the antithetical Chicken Littles who insist that there's nothing to worry about, who - as long as their own larder is stocked - believe that there are no crises in the world except those created by those nasty liberals.

[lastams]

How obscene is it that while facing a World food crisis, we continue to pay wealthy landowners billions of dollars TO NOT GROW FOOD.
This week the Congress is scheduled to debate (and quickly pass) a continuation of the Farm Bill through 2012. In 2005 alone, when pretax farm profits were at a near-record $72 billion, the federal government handed out more than $25 billion in aid, almost 50 percent more than the amount it pays to families receiving welfare.
The largest annual subsidy, called direct and countercyclical payments, is given to farmers regardless of what crops they grow " or whether they grow anything at all. The Washington Post found that, since 2001, at least $1.3 billion was paid to landowners who had planted nothing since 2000.
The current Farm Bill expires May 2nd, this Saturday, and its" renewal has received no real opposition from either Party. In fact Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has added a provision which will extend Farm subsidies to race horses.
Race horses!
In a world faced with starvation, this bill more than any other highlights the warped priorities of our leaders and their complete indifference to the needs of society as a whole.
Strange, how the media has paid it so very little attention.

[MourningDude]

I've been pointing this out for months. Liberals go into paroxysms over Big Oil subsidies, while huge agricultural companies are paid NOT to grow food! Libs would be marching in the streets if we were paying oil companies not to pump oil...

It truly boggles the mind.

[Kman2]

Strange that this website recently complained that farmers were not interested in conservation by wanting to get out of the conservation reserve program (CRP). This is the same program that HuffPOsters complain about as a subsidy to the wealthy landowners to not grow food. Which way ya want it? I have CRP land. So tell me, am I green conservationist or some rich greedy land owner. Which one is it? I am confused. To top it off, I am an absentee farm landlord as well.
Ever wonder why so many farmers are so independant when it comes to politics? I am hated by the both left wing (I am a greedy land baron) and the right wing (green environmentalist egghead). Come to think of it, that's probably ok.

[RedWolverine]

Thank you. NO SUBSIDIES OF ANY KIND WILL SOLVE THE PROBLEM OVERNIGHT.

[PierreLeClerke]

ENERGY ! ENERGY ! ENERGY !
Not one thing that you touch during the course of your life with only one exception, the earth itself, is not directly impacted by the price of ENERGY!
The 500% + rise in the price, not the cost of ENERGY in the past 7.5 years is unbridled greed covered in blood of Soldiers and Innocents. This shift in assets from the tables of the multitudes to the blood socked hands of the Oil/weapons barons has directly impacted the price to cultivate and deliver every food stock on this planet. Civilization has never seen such a coordinated cabal so blind with greed that they neither see nor care that the total impact once realized, will be their downfall and destruction as well. There will be no corner of the earth that will escape from this imbalance.

[likeicare]

And, as usual, the dynamic duo of Bush & Cheney will do abso-fucking-lutely nothing about it -- unless there is an obscene amount of money to be made off of it (by their best buddies, of course), or it threatens rich people (you know, those pesky little things called "revolutions" that tend to upset the very wealthy b/c their maids and gardeners show up at the gates with pitchforks).

Then, and only then, will action be taken!

Reminds me of Poe's, "Mask of the Red Death." The rich barracade themselves in a castle to party while the rest of humanity is devoured by disease, only to have death invade their defenses and ultimately destroy them, too.

The lesson is, if you ignore a problem, it usually comes back to bite you in the ass, big time!

[RedWolverine]

What do you mean do nothing about it. This is caused by them trying to do something about Global Warming, so they subsidize ethanol!! Stop this nonsense.

[loki]

But the American way is ignore the facts and the truth. To insist we are most wonderful and greatest country on the face of the earth and totally dismiss anything and everything in the rest of the world so we feel that we are the special ones. The ones who are making the rest of the world better by making them envy us and want to emulate us.
What a blind , stupid closed society we are.

[IronMikeHouston]

I don't think America is responsible for countries not be able to feed themselves. People starve in Africa because they don't grow food. I go to the grocery stores and noticed food prices are affecting my food budget and yes it does hurt.

I'm not sure that the person who wrote this story, if he or she did any research. How did the wheat price spike last summer influence Sam's restricting rice sells this year? Now that is the real story in my opinion.

[PrdAmerican]

Perhaps if we had dealt with the oil issue 30 years ago instead of getting into Iranian Contra dealings, blue dresses, everything Bush/Cheney and all the other crap, we would be in a little different place right now.....we've gone through something like 8 elections and 4 presidents only to be sitting here in the world with our pants around our ankles, twiddling our thumbs and bickering about how to get ourselves out of this garbage heap we have put ourselves in....repug or lib, there is no denying the catastrophe that is at the end of this tunnel if we don't do something now. Ehtanol is not the answer, it is yet another band-aid that has a negative ripple effect...the fact is, without ethanol, we'd probably be looking at even higher gas prices than we are now....it all comes down to the same fact...the oil is going bye-bye, a proven fact that we have known for decades.

[loki]

If you recall, it was Jimmy Carter who embraced the need for alternative fuel and conservation of energy. Once Reagan took over it was back to gas guzzlers and " what oil problem?" There were huge profits to be made, and the republican battle cry was then, and still is today, " damn the people and the world, we deserve to make more money" The only time you will ever see a republican doing the correct thing for the country, for humans in general, or for the environment is if they either see massive profits in it, or they are back into a corner and see no other way out. They have proved this over and over and over again.

[Gasparilla]

The reason we have the fuel standards we have now is because of Carter and a Democratic Congress. They took effect during Reagan, but he did not support them. The auto industry claimed during the Carter administration it would be too expensive and take too much time to raise the standards, but when they were forced to, they did.

[MourningDude]

It's time to bring back the 55 mph speed limit. It would reduce our oil consumption significantly OVERNIGHT.

Where's the leadership on this issue? As far as I know, nobody important in Washington has even suggested this, let alone made it a national issue.

[CountryBeforeParty]

Honest question and concern here...

When they first spoke about ethanol, I thought the idea was that farmer's could use the farmland that they were being paid not to grow food on, by the government. Therefore, the food supply would not be touched, barely at worst.

I guess I was wrong.

[Kalima]

It is always the poor who suffer the most, while some in richer countries throw out day old
food, when there are so many starving around the world.

[Hallucinocynic]

The chickens are coming home to roost.

[Marioth]

Just saw Rev Wright's speech to the Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner in Detroit. It was a powerful speech, a real call to awareness.

Watching the Fox reaction, it will be difficult to get any purchase on this speech. It was brilliant. Geraldo was fixated on Eupbonics, but one senses his heart wasn't in it.

It must really sour Geraldo's milk that McCain barely inspires a trip to the toilet.

FInd the speech if you can. It was great!

Pax,
M.

[uheardme]

The brother can preach.

[loki]

Dont worry, I am sure the Hillarybots will twist it, tear it up, re-write it so they can sling it and spin it against Obama.

[Hallucinocynic]

Just watched a few minutes of it. Can be seen at:

www.hiphopmusic.com/2008/04/rev_wright_naacp_speech_video.html

I liked his take on the media "[I'm] not divisive...descriptive!"

Truly hope he's right about the coming change.

[realtalk]

It must be so hard for people to live in an area of their country where the soil quality does not allow for them to plant food. I know that if they could get out of that situation they would, but when the earth you live on does not provide for a way for agriculture to flourish, it is a terrible situation. I can imagine the despair they must feel when they know that they do not have, and cannot afford the transportation to relocate. Maybe the best help is two fold. First, getting the more economically secure countries on the African continent, to help relocate people to areas of the continent which offers betters environmental conditions to support agriculture. The UN could also be involved in the relocation, and immigration negotiations for people to move from country to country, from areas of the continent which do not allow for agriculture growth, to more prosperous, and agricultural viable areas, and countries on the African continent.

[nyquist27]

you sound like a very kind person, but there is no way this would ever happen, the main source of food problems is the civil and military strife on the continent, these countries and their peoples at best have nothing in common and at worst are mortal enemies, they would have a far easier time relocating to the USA. A person would think that even if relocation were the answer it would fall on the much weathier and resource rich first worlder to welcome the refugees