Photo Source: Click hereIf you can stand the pop up ads on Time Magazine's website, there is an interesting article about the new faces of global hunger its implications. The rising prices of oil, the growing costs of CO2 reduction, the free market policies that have decimated many small farmers are adding up to a global famine. The agriculture stocks were leading on Wall Street a couple of weeks ago. "There's gold in them there hungry bellies" the market cried. So the stocks soared. The law of supply and demand. When a resource is scare and the demand is high (food) the price rises.
One reason food prices are going up because of GW's misguided policy of ethanol production from corn. Less corn to eat, the scarer the commodity. The scarcer the commodity, the higher the price of that commodity. But ethanol investors lost billions because there were a glut of investors flooding the market with capital to develop this new "green fuel." And so on and so on... Anyway, a couple of good links:
Amy Goodman's interview with a World Food expert and Time magazine.
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2 comments:
I've done a ton of research on corn as an alternative to other products. We manufacture bamboo, hemp and organic cotton t-shirts. What my research found was that corn is not a sustainable commodity. At the rate we are going, corn will be depleted within 10 years or less at the rate we are trying to replace other resources with it. I also recently read that bamboo is being farmed at a rate greater than they can sustain.
I don't know what the answer is, but putting all our hopes on just one product to reduce emissions and pollution is not practical. We need a variety of solutions that won't deplete any one resource.
Sincerely,
Dagny McKinley
www.onnotextiles.com
organic clothing
I haven't heard that we will run out in ten years. That's a scary thought. I worry that people will cut down rainforests to grow bamboo. I've heard that is happening in Brazil.
Thanks for the comment.
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