Speigel: Graph; food crises protests and restrictions

Source of image: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,grossbild-1149977-547198,00.html

The link only leads to the image Not the story.

The Image was published at the end of April

Food Crisis, Alarm bells ringing.

Food crises,

Over the last week, there has not been a major publication that has not featured the growing global food scarcities.

Compared to food, all other issues are irrelevant.

I can imagine large vehicles being attacked, because their fuel hunger is inflating the price of food, through biofuel’s grain requirements.

Democracy and capitalism, will have no significance, and society’s paid guards of soldiers and police will blur into humans.

Perhaps it will herald the end of centralisation and large conglomerates, maybe we will reenter the world of small communities.

Anyway the alarm bells are ringing everywhere, even with Global warming there are dissenters and different points of view. But about growing food shortages and a bleak outlook no one is arguing.

All our governments pronouncements will sound more and more empty.

The anger will be focused on Capitalism, from fertilisers degrading land quality, to factories polluting the water, to ‘exports’ taking the food away.

Holistic health practitioners have been arguing that eating foods when they are out of season that have come from far away is not healthy. It probably is not very efficient, Mono crops like bananas or whatever being grown for export.

We have just lived through a time of abundance with some curious political

cheer up, it’s end times.

Water shortages, Food scarcities, extreme weather, and insane wars, collapsing financial institutions. Suspensions of human rights and civil liberties.
If ever there were a time to be merry, it is now.
Anyone can laugh in good times.
Now we have to be strong and laugh in bad times.
Cheer up.

Food abundance is history

Food abundance is not true anymore for a variety of reasons, I made a posting 2 days ago .
It was the discovery after the second world war, that the ingredients for gun powder were useful as fertilizer  that started modern Industrialised agriculture.
Rice prices have gone up %50 in the last two weeks. Six countries have instituted export restrictions on rice: Already China, India, Egypt, Vietnam and Cambodia have imposed tariffs or export bans
Tony Karon speculates that food riots are  the missing link for the downfall of unpopular regimes. …”revolutions succeed precisely in that moment when the soldiers and policemen paid to defend the existing order look into the eyes of the enemy confronting them, on the streets, and they see themselves, their families and neighbors, and the states power to enforce its rule evaporates.”
And he is talking about Egypt.
Hell with capitalism flailing all over the place, maybe food shortages will cunjur up a new way, a new system of exchange. Free trade has its limits. And food supplies will be the first to be protected. The first to cause civil unrest, and that means people questioning the system.
Let us not forget, part of macrobiotic eating is; to eat food that is grown locally. It is healthier.
The EU is already reappraising its BIoFuel program.