[Peace-discuss] "Food Riots Erupt Worldwide" and analysis

Tue Apr 29 21:55:01 CDT 2008

Dear AWARE,
    The food riots are the tip of the iceberg, pun intended.  Dr. Hansen of 
NASA GISS, along with a calvalcade of the world's top cryospheric scientists, 
already believe that the Artic will be free of summer sea ice by as early as 
2013-2015 and that we already face a very high likelihood that we will lose 
all of Greenland's ice sheet and face five meter sea rise in the next few 
decades....  The global environmental crisis is quickly starting to spiral out 
of control, and the War on Terror has prevented us from seeing the real 
problem: "terraism."


----------------------  Original Message:  ---------------------
From:    Stuart Levy <slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To:      peace-discuss at anti-war.net
Subject: [Peace-discuss] "Food Riots Erupt Worldwide" and analysis
Date:    Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:57:19 +0000

> Some commentary passed along by Ken Salo to the CUCPJ Discuss list...
> 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 1:42 PM, Mandi Smallhorne <mandiwrite at icon.co.za> wrote:
>  > Food Riots Erupt Worldwide
>  >
>  >  By Anuradha Mittal, AlterNet. Posted April 25, 2008.
>  >
>  > Food riots are erupting all over the world.
> <snip>
>  > As a result, food riots erupted in Egypt, Guinea, Haiti, Indonesia,
>  > Mauritania, Mexico, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
> <snip>
>  >  Analysts have pointed to some obvious causes, such as increased
>  >  demand from China and India, whose economies are booming.
>  > Rising fuel and fertilizer costs, increased use of bio-fuels and
>  > climate change have all played a part.
> <snip>
>  > Over the last few decades, the United States, the World Bank
>  > and the International Monetary Fund have used their leverage
>  > to impose devastating policies on developing countries. By
>  > requiring countries to open up their agriculture market to giant
>  > multinational companies, by insisting that countries dismantle
>  > their marketing boards and by persuading them to specialize
>  > in exportable cash crops such as coffee, cocoa, cotton and
>  > even flowers, they have driven the poorest countries into
>  > a downward spiral.
>  >
>  >  In the last thirty years, developing countries that used to be
>  > self-sufficient in food have turned into large food importers.
> <snip>
>  > First, it is essential to have safety nets and public distribution
>  > systems put in place. Donor countries should provide more aid
>  > immediately to support government efforts in poor countries
>  > and respond to appeals from U.N. agencies, which are
>  > desperately seeking $500 million by May 1.
>  >
>  > Second, we should help affected countries develop their
>  > agricultural sectors to feed more of their own people and
>  > decrease their dependence on food imports. We should
>  > promote production and consumption of local crops raised
>  > by small, sustainable farms instead of growing cash crops
>  > for western markets. And we should support a country's
>  > effort to manage stocks and pricing so as to limit the
>  > volatility of food prices.
> 
> The diagnosis is correct, but the prescription won't work.
> 
> The North won't give up its energy-intensive ways of life, and the
> South will continue to emulate them, so climate change cannot be
> stopped -- ii will only accelerate.
> 
> Agriculture, once abandoned, cannot be quickly restored: the
> destruction of agriculture that once made food self-sufficiency
> possible and its replacement by imports of agribusiness products over
> the last several decades has already changed work and residential
> patterns of the South dramatically, dispossessing, displacing, and
> urbanizing people, creating enormous slums, and pushing people into
> informal sectors.
> 
> The supply-side squeeze will continue:
> 
> (1) Underinvestment:
> 
> (a) Exploration and production: capital and technology are in the
> jealous hands of multinationals of the North that have difficulty
> finding oil reserves that yield high profits at low costs; the
> governments of the South that own the best oil reserves are faced with
> rising domestic energy consumption that they have long subsidized, and
> many of them also lack capital and technology necessary to increase
> outputs (the Southern governments, especially populist ones, need oil
> profits to subsidize the populace's immediate consumption overall, not
> just energy consumption, build public infrastructure, and so on, which
> subtracts from their ability to invest back into oil; and
> multinationals of the North deny them access to the best technology);
> 
> (b) Refining: deregulation and privatization in many countries and
> environmentalism in some countries have led to inadequate refining
> capacity.
> 
> (2) War: conflicts -- the empire and/or its clients versus often
> Islamist guerrillas -- will continue to disrupt production and supply,
> from Iraq to Nigeria.
> 
> (3) Sanctions: the empire covets oil producer countries that are not
> run by its clients and targets them for regime change -- from Iran to
> Burma to Sudan -- leading to underinvestment.
> 
> (4) Labor conflicts: higher prices and tighter capacities strengthens
> workers' hands.
> 
> Unless something like a great depression curtails world oil demand
> drastically, it is likely that oil prices will stay high and volatile
> in the near future, pushing up food prices.
> 
> Both structural (urbanization and lumpenization) and conjunctural
> (higher oil and food prices) factors in many countries will resemble
> the combination that led to Iran's Islamic Revolution.  I bet a lot of
> governments will be toppled.
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
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