Egypt: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7200037.stm

Haiti: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23965087/

Both: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7344892.stm

Bangladesh: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g7DFz2n2qmBIx-UVdGeBwG_vGfpw

I've also seen riots this year mentioned in Yemen, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, and Uzbekistan, but don't see the news articles in a cursory search.

Over the past few months, I've seen this repeatedly mentioned from several angles. I'd be interested to hear what Nydia knows about it. Nekko, didn't you say you're buying a farm soon? What have you learned about this stuff?


Is it the wheat fungus (http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/07bc26c73637bb94ba4ceff4067872a1.htm) killing too much of the supply?

The thing with the bees (I do not understand this at all)?

Bio-fuels stealing too much of the supply?

IP issues surrounding GMO crops screwing over too many small farmers (I know this has been a huge issue in India)?

I get the feeling that it's only a short term problem, caused by a perfect storm of several concurrent factors. However, it would be interesting to find out more, if anyone has been paying close attention to the issue(s).

Thoughts?

Ive been reading alot of about it usually buried in sundays paper. For the last few months. I know there have been a few countries Russia China Egypt suspending the sale of crops over seas to bolster storage and personal use. Or taxing exports to make it not worth it selling over seas.

Ill dig up some of the articles Ive read about it lately when I get back from appointments tonight. Costs of most crops have sky rocketed tripling or more in price over the last few years with further increases predicted its the first time in generations farmers are actually making money and looks to continue to be a profitable business again.

With some food manufactors paying bonuses and higher rates just to get farmers to plant some of the crops they need for manufactored foods. Ethanol is a big factor in it. But so is increased populations and more people over seas wanting to eat like americans. Countries where bread wasnt a staple the people now have a taste for it same with pasta ect.

Im still looking for land but have put off any purchase unless I get a steal until after the elections to see how the economy shakes out.

Will trade corn for oil.

Read a bit on the Bee's issue in various magazines.

Apparently there is a suspected virus wiping out the American Honey Bee. It's happening quickly and may have been going on longer than we know.

This will have far flung ramifications affections crops of fruits, honey and of course flowers.

Not sure how large of a role this plays, but I could see where it could be a part of the series of perfect events you speak of San.

Draughts, Bee's, Flooding, Ethanol demands, ect.. Its just a bad time at the moment. Less farm land...I know I still see a ton of Soybean and Corn fields driving across Wisconsin. Hopefully the ground will start to dry up some to the farmers can get the crops in, then it will get too dry.

Draughts

Beer?

I'm deathly ill at the moment and on a quick nap break from work, but I'll try to get a coherent response out to you this evening, Sanchek - the riots are a symptom of a confluence of factors intersecting to bring the growing food scarcity issue to a head and thus above the radar of the international media (it's not like a billion and a half people aren't starving worldwide at any given moment in time currently), but the elephant in the living room is, of course, overpopulation and the basic fact that agricultural intensification can't continue indefinitely (dead bees are the least of that problem :) ). More on some of the contributing causes when I get home from work this evening...

Regards,
Nydia

We make Miller to.....I thought that looked wierd...that would be d-r-o-u-g-h-t.

I just came back from Whole Foods,

That shrimps was right.

We make Miller to.....I thought that looked wierd...that would be d-r-o-u-g-h-t.

I just chalked it up to you being from Wisconsin with nothing but beer, cheese, and brats on your mind.

Beer?
Clearly he is referring to the hops shortage (http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/industries/retail/article/trouble-brewing-hops-shortage-slams-beer-makers_538996_7.html)!

previous third world countries with massive populations (india, china..) beginning to create a middle class that, while modest compared to first world middle class demands, are adopting "our" food habits, and thus are consuming a metric fuckton of food.

previous third world countries with massive populations (india, china..) beginning to create a middle class that, while modest compared to first world middle class demands, are adopting "our" food habits, and thus are consuming a metric fuckton of food.


Well then we need to get them back to eating those bowls of white rice with maggots....we can send Karl Rove over and call it the "Living Protein Program" and that way the people will think they have it good and then we can get all of the food that they would otherwise have eaten.

Once we get them on that we can then start the worlds first and largest maggot manufacturing plant and hence control this new commodity. Once again manufacturing can return to US soil.

I think I mentioned it in another thread some time back, but most of the corn fields in the area I deliver mail to lost huge portions of their crops last year due to the weather problems; essentially it was getting plowed under for the most part, as it was not viable for anything.

Speaking of: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24127314/

Apparently there is a suspected virus wiping out the American Honey Bee. It's happening quickly and may have been going on longer than we know.I've seen the same stories, but so far I haven't seen any conclusive evidence other than scare articles in the mainstream rags. I've seen a couple of news bits from bee keepers claiming that their hives are fine, and the trouble has come from mistreating the insects and shipping them around from field to field instead of allowing the hives to develop in a healthy, single location. Unfortunately I don't know enough about bees to tell the difference between articles.

I fully expect the "first world" to be dropping to 3rd world food staples within the next 50 years. Fortunately America is actually a really, really good place to grow stuff if we'd stop fucking around with corn and agriculture is one of the only creators of real wealth.

It will be funny hearing the whining and crying as people have to actually work for a living again.

Well frankly living in the part of PA I live in I am happy to see fewer and fewer cornfields turn into subdivisions recently. There for a while it was like every corn field was destined to be a new sub. It's slowed down now and I smell more poo in the air which means stuff is being planted.

This is the first I have heard of any shortages anywhere. I hate our media.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24127314/

Well, I'm still sick, but now I'm procrastinating some heavy labor, so it seemed like a good time to write :).

The *current* global food crisis has been both slow and quick in building; slow in that yes, it is linked to continued population pressure (we're adding a Mexico to the world population every year, and world reserves of staple grains have been dropping for over a decade), but more immediately to three major factors: climate change (principally desertification in the Middle East, Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, and most notably the wheat belt in Australia), cropland being diverted to biofuel production (the EU, in a surprise turnaround this year, is considering not only dropping the upcoming 10% biofuel in gasoline requirement, citing not only the diversion of food cropland to biofuel production, but that the massive amounts of fertilizers these crops require produces more pollution than they save), and monoculture and other agricultural intensification-related diseases (wheat rust, colony collapse disorder, etc). CCD, which is real by the way, was an inevitable risk/vulnerability generated by the use of the pesticides necessary for the massive scale crop monoculture in California killing off the native pollinators, necessitating that pollinators be brought in from outside, and thus themselves 'farmed' in intensive operations.

In addition, as someone else mentioned, diversion of cropland to provide feed for animals to be slaughtered for meat for the relatively wealthy also contributes to the shortage; cattle are particularly poor protein converters, requiring 64 pounds of plant protein to produce one pound of cow, not to mention the land and other resources necessary to raise the cows on directly :). It hardly seems fair for us to wag our tongues about the destruction of the South American rainforest when that land which is clearcut, converted to farm or ranchland, and laterizes to concrete in a few years, is done so in order to provide us with cheap Big Macs, and as more of the 1.3 billion in China and the 1 billion in India become wealthy due to their economic expansion, they are starting to want their Big Macs (or the equivalent thereof) too :).

War and displacement have also contributed to the food crisis, most notably in Iraq and Africa; people in a war zone aren't farming, and particularly in tropical areas with marginal soils, this may mean permanent loss of the farmland to laterization (desertification and famine, along with overpopulation, have been the fuse and spark that have set off much of the war in both Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa over the last decade and a half; even with HIV and communicable and parasitic diseases, as well as war taking their toll, some of these countries *still* have population doubling times of 17-25 years. Think about the pressure that puts on the fabric of society, when *twice* the amount of everything has to be produced from land that is desertifying, becoming salinized from irrigation, and which people are killing each other with machetes over.

I saw Malse's comment on R vs K reproduction in the other thread, and one thing that has to be kept in mind is that in countries where extra hands to till a field or engage in other subsistence labor still yields a net economic gain (even in some of the cruellest vicious cycles imaginable), people will still have large families - it usually takes a two-generation 'reality check' (complete collapse/failure of the previous strategy) for behavior to actually change as the failed cultural paradigm is abandoned and a new one adopted.

Der Spiegel has published a number of interesting articles both about the global food crisis and the controversy over biofuels over the last week; while they (the EU, and specifically Germany) don't appreciate being held by the short hairs by Russia for their gas and oil, neither do they like seeing their own food prices go through the roof as wheat and barley fields are converted to rapeseed for biofuels (the brewers, particularly, are griping :) ). As you may know, much of the instability and unrest surrounding Mexico's presidential election last year was tied to distress over rising corn prices; corn prices rose 80% in the first six months of 2007 (due largely to diversion into biofuel production), and in a country which both subsists on corn and is a net importer, there were major peasant protests and sit-ins in both Mexico City and Oaxaca lasting several months which received relatively little attention outside of that country.

On the issue of agricultural intensification, monoculture, and major crop (and pollinator) diseases:
Agricultural intensification and monoculture, while originally introduced for the sake of increased efficiency and profits, have become, in the face of continued population growth, both a necessary and dangerous double-edged sword; lack of genetic diversity in crops means that when a disease takes out a given strain of wheat, or rice, or tomatoes, it does *massive* damage because the same few strains are used worldwide and we have lost much of our reservoir of genetic diversity in many major crop plants - and in addition monoculture puts plants at higher risk for disease and infestation for numerous reasons. In addition, these specialized high yield strains that were the product of the first (and now second) Green Revolution require much more in the way of fertilizer, water in most cases (something also under pressure due to population growth and pollution), and take a lot out of the soils, contributing to desertification - meaning they aren't sustainable for any length of time in marginal environments or feasible by impoverished people. Think about the thread you guys were discussing a while back about the oil fields in the Dakotas - sure, you can get crops out of the ground, but the energy investment of getting food crops out of marginal soils outweighs the yield, and in addition may permanently decrease the potential productivity of that environment. As the population continues to grow and more marginal farmland is pushed into production (people have a bad habit of wanting to put housing on prime arable land that surrounds the city that was founded there in the first place because of its abundant resources ;) ), expect more and more of a rub here.

Various approaches are being undertaken to try to combat the problems introduced by large scale monoculture farming, including developing seed libraries of heirloom species, multicrop 'layered' farming (requires slower and more careful tending and harvest, driving up prices), and of course genetically engineering crop plants for increased drought tolerance, disease and pesticide hardiness, etc, but these are bandaids which ignore the elephants in the living room of overpopulation and high impact usage. In short, I don't see the current food crisis as easing any time soon, and I think it is going to force a major rethinking/strategy change with regard to our own agricultural policy. and practices as the poor *here* begin to suffer from price rises on staples.

One last comment on our own agricultural policy and the somewhat false sense of security that we as Americans have knowing that we live on some of the choicest and most productive arable land in the world; consider parts of the world that are also blessed with fertile land and yet suffer massive poverty and starvation despite easily being able to feed themselves *if* they grew staple crops. Why do you think they grow export non-crops like roses or coffee (just an example) in the South American breadbasket and highlands? Because someone who has more money than the people who live there pay more money for the roses than the locals can pay for corn or wheat. We should be mindful of this when we think in terms of our own status as the world's largest debtor nation, and consider that this is not without consequences for our own very basic security...

Regards,
Nydia

Jusqu'ici tout va bien,
Mais l'important ça n'est pas la chute,
C'est l'atterrissage.

Up to here everything is alright,
But the important isn't the fall,
it's the landing.

And damn the ground is close.

Nice post Nydia!

Oh, now that I'm a bit less delirious:

I've in recent years become somewhat fascinated by the American love affair with corn; as you probably know, high fructose corn syrup replaced cane and beet sugars in soft drinks just over 20 years ago now, and indeed, it's hard to find any food product made in the US (save meat) that *doesn't* have corn in it. In Mexico, it's *the* staple foodstuff and regarded with religious reverence despite the fact that corn grows poorly even in their more fertile soils (and thus they're required to import 50% of what they consume) due to the fact that it's a massive nitrogen hog, which brings me to my next point.

Corn, as far as staple grains go, is a poor economic investment *unless* its planting is subsidized or prices for it are high - it costs nearly twice as much to raise per acre as soybeans, for example, while providing a much poorer quality (incomplete) protein; and growing it requires much heavier fertilizer use and crop rotation with alfalfa or another nitrogen fixer because of what it takes out of the soil, whereas soybeans actually improve soil fertility as they fix their own nitrogen. While the topic of agricultural subsidies is perhaps best left for another thread, I just thought I'd add (somewhat tongue in cheek) that this is part of Corn's nefarious attempts to take over the world: (hopefully this picture comes out :) )

Regards,
Nydia

Even back in the mid 80's many farmers would rotate their crops (corn as well as others) with Soybeans for that exact reason Nyn. Rotating with peanuts as folks do in the south just isn't possible.

I'll tell you one flat truth about this old Hoosiers love for Corn over soybeans.

Taste, soybeans blech.

A man has to enjoy his dinner not merely survive it!

/hijack on)

Indeed, too bad for you Yankees that you can't grow the goober :). There's nothing like some fresh boiled green peanuts right out of the steaming vat of brine from that stand at the side of the road... (/swoon memory) Boiled peanuts and grits (corn ;) ) are two of the best things (insert Supreme Being here) ever gave the South...

Since you brought up peanuts (and thus by extension peanut butter, which is how most Americans encounter the blessed legume), take a look at your friendly jar of peanut butter sometime, and more specifically, at the ingredient label. Chances are, unless you've bought an organic or 'natural' brand, that lovely peanut oil has been siphoned off and used for other purposes, to be replaced with, you guessed it, corn, palm, or rapeseed oil (which might be listed on the label by type but are more commonly merely listed by the obscuring 'hydrogenated vegetable oil' (which describes the process they used to resaturate that fat and make it creamy). We do strange things to food these days in order to maximize profits, and food adulteration is something else I could go on about, but alas I'm about to have to get ready to hop a plane...

Regards,
Nydia

Actually when I buy peanut butter I specifically check to make sure I get one that has natural peanut oil in it.

Men's Health Magazine clued me into that one last year. Trying to get legumes/nuts and such much more involved in my diet.

Stop me before I post again!

I was just checking the job postings from The Chronicle of Higher Education, to find a very interesting German listing from a private foundation for a 1 million euro (1.5 million dollar) research grant being offered for a young researcher doing innovative research in the following fields:

1) competing claims on land use
such as issues emerging from the conflict between cultivating bioenergy crops and nutrition crops and its impact on food security, soil degradation and biodiversity; and

2) agriculture and health
such as issues relating to undernutrition, food- and water-borne diseases, illnesses from lifestock such as avian flu, but also the effects of occupational health risks and HIV/AIDS on agriculture.

They're offering the grant for use in conjunction with any German university or research institute of the applicants choice - so there's a measurable amount of interest, at least across the pond, in the issue of future food security...

Oh, one last little case in point with regard to controlling one's own fate with regard to what one's food-producing land is used for:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7330466.stm

For the click-impaired, it's an analysis of the current farm protests going on in Argentina. There are a lot of factors contributing to them, (the large operations are protesting an increase in taxes to pay for infrastructure, among other things), but one of the more interesting factors in the controversy is the conversion of land use from cattle ranching to soybean production:

And 95% of the crop is exported, much of it to China where they know what to do with it.

But the crop is so profitable that beef farmers are increasingly turning to growing it, diminishing the supply of meat.

While I'm all for greater efficiency in food production, if the food ends up both 1) being shipped out of the country and 2) the profits from said sales aren't used to benefit the population in other ways, this can't be a win for them in terms of their own stability...

Thanks Nydia.

Wonderful posts.

Definitely some.... Food for Thought... yuck yuck

What do you do Nydia? You know a lot :eek:

I hope this doesn't sound to naive, but at the grocery store why are the California strawberries always four times larger than the Florida strawberries? I buy the Florida ones because the California ones just seem so unnatural (and plus i'm from Florida :bdiamond)

http://ayonae.ro/showpost.php?p=136911&postcount=47

No wonder she knows alot. ;) (and she knows how to put it well!)

Problem solved: grow food on the moon.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7351437.stm

The world needs to manage the Oceans better. There has be something we could do with those that can support a lot of life, could be some sort of sea crop and of course some sort of tasty, fast growing fish.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

The world needs to manage the Oceans better. There has be something we could do with those that can support a lot of life, could be some sort of sea crop and of course some sort of tasty, fast growing fish.
Algae is probably going to be huge (like I think was mentioned in this thread previously). I was reading about a guy who developed a vertical growing system for algae, that allows a massive increase in how much can be grown in the same surface area.

Put some salt on it, pinch your nose, and close your eyes I guess!

well seaweed doesn't taste half bad when surrounding some rice and fish. I could see it happening.

The Time magazine with the Dalai Lama on the cover recently (forgot the issue number) had an interesting piece on Toyota, and what they are doing researching biofuels from non-food sources, like wood chips, to alleviate the stress on food supplies vs. energy supplies.

I hope this doesn't sound to naive, but at the grocery store why are the California strawberries always four times larger than the Florida strawberries?

Hey Oipunx!

The reason that the California (Driscoll) strawberries are so large has to do with the fact that they are a selectively bred octaploid - this meas that they've been engineered to have eight sets of chromosomes instead of the normal two that you, I, or most plants normally have. This causes them to have really large fleshy fruit, but the fruit is much less sweet than in natural strawberries.

One other interesting bit of trivia about strawberries is that their growth (of the fruit) is entirely dependent on hormone secretions from the seeds as the fruit is maturing. You can make some interesting fruit shapes by selectively removing a portion of the seeds...

I'm still on the road and haven't had time to really read over this thread, but will just quickly say that if we plan on being able to make heavy use of algae farming, we'd better stop acidifying the hell out of the oceans with all that plastic trash... ;)

Regards,
Nydia

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/21crop.html?ex=1366516800&en=65aeda9a674a2208&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Soaring food prices and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops.

I was just reading an article this weekend, about how GM crops were actually producing less than their natural alternatives in some cases. In other cases, the IP issues surrounding GM seeds have wiped out entire harvests for some farmers, and leave them with no way to rebuild their crop.

If anything, Monsanto & Co. are profiting from this mess, not helping.

I'd suggest reading Seeds of Deception sometime, if you have time.

/nod

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=arSRWU0yDL7M&refer=columnist_hassett

With the world population growing, and incomes rising, increased food production is necessary to maintain an acceptable level of basic human welfare. Since 2004, corn production available to individual consumers hasn't budged.

Article doesn't like ethanol subsidies at all. I'm inclined to agree.

We do really need to find a better course than ethanol. Greater reliance on beans as a food source instead of corn might also be wise, but it'd probably just result in an atmosphere destroying, globe heating fog of increased methane production.

Beans, beans, they're good for the heart, the more you eat, the more you...

Lord, no giving up corn as a food source!!!

Giving this old Hoosier nightmares I tell ya!

Hold Fandros down while I get the legumes!

I... will... not... give... up... my...popcorn

There are no good rhymes for eating corn...

Unless it involves Porn Akipt!!!

Take your ears soak in water for about an hour. peel the husks back to the stalk but DO NOT shuck!
Wrap with bacon(applewood smoked preferred) pull the husks back up around your ears and tie in place. those little ties that come with garbage bags and we all save and never use work great for this.
Q along side your Johnsonvilles and favorite steaks. shuck, enjoy and call your cardiologist the next morning.
So in other words...Frakk Ethanol!

velvet you just made me hungry. I am going to have to try that corn and bacon this week.

Rep to Velvet for the scrumptious sounding corn recipee!!!

Rep to Velvet for the scrumptious sounding corn recipee!!!

Ditto!

http://www.kptm.com/Global/story.asp?S=8202003&nav=menu606_24_8_1

Surreal.

I'm proctoring an exam at the moment, but here are a couple of links to recent articles (off the BBC) describing the collapse of both wild and cultured bees both here and in the US; the varroa mite, a virus, a fungus, and some not yet explained phenomenon have all been implicated in decimating the bee population. This is already beginning to have, and could have catastrophic, effects on the food crop supply, as if we didn't have enough problems:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_islands/7360832.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7312358.stm

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if, in the absence of a clear biological agent for CCD in the US, either pesticides or GMO gene products were implicated, speaking of the other thread - one of the genes routinely spliced into fleshy food crops, including tomatoes and strawberries, is the gene for BT toxin (Clostridium botulinum, aka botulism toxin, aka Botox, a powerful neurotoxic peptide) - as a means to dissuade insect pests from eating their tender parts. This couldn't *possibly* have any unwanted side-effects, could it/ ;)

Regards,
Nydia

I've been reading about the added BT gene. That's the one that kills the monarch butterflies too, right?

The television national news as well as our local St Paul Pioneer Press paper have been all over the rice shortages the last few days. Apparently on our local level, people have been driving into the twin cities from out state and stocking up on 4-5 months worth of rice supplies (4-5 100 lb sacks), citing their fears of prices continuing to rise and supply drying up.

This thread touched on a lot of the problems. Developing countries like China and India can't produce enough to feed their population in a good year (and this year with the bees, droughts, etc. is a bad year), the American Dollar is down so commodity speculation is high causing prices to soar and people to stockpile, and as Velvet eluded people just eat too much. Half an ear of corn is a serving size and you need like 4 servings of vegetables and starches to each meat serving ... not to wrap a starch in a serving of meat ;) But in this country and others (even India and China are having a growing middle class) there's a ton of waste.

So we need this shortage. People need to conserve, get used to smaller quantites, maybe realize they can't afford to feed their 5 kids. We need to equalize with the planet that simply can't sustain as many people that live on it consuming at this rate.

Good points Kelraz but don't the countries like India and China need to realize they can't sustain 1 billion people populace? At what point are they to be held accountable for thier own gross excesses?

Didn't China push for those numbers by in large to support the worlds largest army? Now they can't feed them and it's only going to get worse ;(

What's the answer beyond our own conservation to feed countries that don't have to manage their own issues?

Good points Kelraz but don't the countries like India and China need to realize they can't sustain 1 billion people populace? At what point are they to be held accountable for thier own gross excesses?

Didn't China push for those numbers by in large to support the worlds largest army? Now they can't feed them and it's only going to get worse ;(

What's the answer beyond our own conservation to feed countries that don't have to manage their own issues?


I thought China has had a one child per family policy for almost a generation now.

China instituted their one-child per family policy in the early 90s IIRC, it's been batted around in various forms since the disaster of the "Great Leap Forward" in the 60s that left millions starving.

The world needs to manage the Oceans better. There has be something we could do with those that can support a lot of life, could be some sort of sea crop and of course some sort of tasty, fast growing fish.

Hate to point this out, but the salmon fisheries in Oregon and California have been closed to both commercial and recreational fishermen this summer. They've had very limited openings the past decade or so, this is the first shutdown.

That explains the high cost of Salmon this year ;(

Yeah, I am a huge salmon consumer, and have been watching the prices too.

Salmon and/or carp fishing already take place on a pretty large scale on all three coasts, and in pond operations, in the US; and has created with it a whole new set of problems associated with it. I'll see if I can find the links, but there have been at least two major cases of wild fish deaths in this year alone associated with intensive fish farming in coastal waters - aquaculture, like other types of intensive livestock raising operations, places the farmed animals at high risk of parasitic and other diseases associated with living in crowded conditions. The farmed animals are treated with antiparasitic and antifungal drugs to treat these, but when they come into contact with wild fish (as happens with salmon who migrate through/near these estuaries where the farming operations are taking place, and happened in both Scotland and Washington this year) they pass on the parasites, resulting in massive morbidity and mortality in wild fish stocks. This isn't either of the links I was looking for, it's a couple of years old, but here's an old (2005) link off the BBC that outlines the problem:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4391711.stm

In short, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and we attempt to push the carrying capacity of an area at our peril...

Also in the news this week, on the food shortages, there was a surface treatment of how the 'Green Revolution' in India has resulted not only in failure (the new strains require massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticide treatment in order to produce their high yields, as I've mentioned, which degrade the environment and aren't sustainable over the long run, not to mention aren't affordable to farmers in those areas), but in a massive rise in cancers in the region as the farmers have to apply more and more pesticide in order to combat the pests who are only behaving according to the dictates natural (or in this case artificial) selection has placed on them:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7366899.stm

Modern agricultural intensification, for the most part, is a bandaid that ultimately does more harm than good, a palliative that numbs the patient (the world's hungry human population) while keeping him unaware of the cancer (which in this case happens to be both sheer numbers and misuse) that is killing him (as well as harming the planet's natural health and carrying capacity). China and India were caught between a rock and a hard place with regard to this struggle, being both behind the eight ball with regard to the time bomb of their population momentum and facing a situation where, even *with* strict population controls, that train was going to take a long time to slow, and in the meantime they needed to feed their people. China seems to have understood the first part of that the problem that creates, but not the second (one has to do so without degrading current resources or you have a zero-sum (or worse) game).

Our approach to the impending food crisis should keep in mind what we are doing to our *future*, sustainable level of food production, as well as what we are going to put into our mouths today. Unfortunately, when people are desperate and starving, thoughts about tomorrow tend to fly out the window.

Regards,
Nydia

Just thought I'd let folks (and L2's student :) ) know that there were two very good articles posted on Der Spiegel today on global food issues. The first deals with how China, and to a lesser extent India, are turning large parts of the world's arable land (esp. in South America) into a giant soybean plantation (resulting in degredation and nonsustainable use of tropical farmland); the second deals with the how a vicious cycle of staple price rises/speculation is becoming progressively worse as staples become a foolproof investment.

Both contain some very interesting, erm, food for thought. The conversion of indigenous farm and ranchland to soybean plantation displaces and starves local farmers in South America and Africa (who can't pay what the Chinese can for the crops in the first place), while speculation (and worldwide markets resulting in foodstuffs going to the highest bidder) is resulting in both crop thefts and countries imposing bans on exports of staples in order to protect their food supply.

Articles here:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,550943,00.html

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,549187,00.html

Regards,
Nydia

China is also procuring land in other nations specifically Latin America in which to grow food. They are brokering "lease" agreements in these countries, I wonder if this is the same thing in your articles which I can't view from work apparently =\

I heard this on BBC radio yesterday.

Indeed, it would suit China well if as many people as possible were to emigrate. There are already 750,000 Chinese working in Africa today.
On top of everything that is scary about this food shortage (read : everything), isn't that the sour cherry on this cake of doom?

Even if african governments will happily welcome these new chinese overl..., erm, immigrees, won't african people get "a little" pissed off about this not-so subtle colonialisation 2.0?

erm, immigrees, won't african people get "a little" pissed off about this not-so subtle colonialisation 2.0?What will they do about it? Burn down the factories and mining facilities? Errr, yeah they will.

Africa the new China 2.0?

How can a billion Chinese be wrong?