Global food crisis quotes -- read 'em and weep
The following quotes were gleaned from one NY Times article today. I was going to post them in "Quotes" but then I thought they would be more visible as a blog post. I think they deserve to be seen and reflected upon. Here's a global phenomenon, a catastrophe in the making, and it exists outside the range of our political discourse.
No candidate makes the connection that here's a common cause for all humanity, located where climate change, tight oil supplies, water shortages, and food shortages intersect and interact. Talk about a Moral Equivalent to War and a replacement for the Global War on Terror. What an opportunity to approach our "enemies" in peace.
If we only had "the will and vision". The problem is that many people do -- it's the institutional dominance of money and power that keeps humans' political will and vision limited to a narrow range of "realistic" options.
I read these quoted words and think of all the Biblical texts about widows and orphans, the feeding of the multitudes, and what are treated. in effect and ineffectually, as just the pious platitudes of the Beatitudes. Read 'em and weep:
Haitian consumer of mud-cooking oil-and-sugar patties sold at street stalls: “It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt. It makes your stomach quiet down.”
Haitian father, talking about his children: "They look at me and say, 'Papa, I'm hungry' and I have to look away. It's humiliating and it makes you angry."
Haitian 29-year-old mother of five: "Take one. You pick. Just feed them."
Haitian political activist on rioting in Port-au-Prince: “Why were we surprised? When something is coming your way all the way from Burkina Faso you should see it coming. What we had was like a can of gasoline that the government left for someone to light a match to it.”
25-year-old Egyptian tomato vendor: “We can’t even find food. May God take the guy I have in mind” (said with hands raised toward the sky, referring to President Mubarak).
Egyptian pensioner: “If all the people rise, then the government will resolve this. But everyone has to rise together. People get scared. But we will all have to rise together.”
Indonesian agricultural advisor: "The biggest concern is food riots. It has happened in the past and can happen again.”
World Food Program analyst, talking about riots in Senegal: "Why are these riots happening? The human instinct is to survive, and people are going to do no matter what to survive. And if you’re hungry you get angry quicker.”
Activist in Niger, who had helped organized protests in 2005: "As a result of that experience the government created a cabinet-level ministry to deal with the high cost of living. So when prices went up this year the government acted quickly to remove tariffs on rice, which everyone eats. That quick action has kept people from taking to the streets.”
El Salvador's President Elias Antonio Saca: “This is a perfect storm. How long can we withstand the situation? We have to feed our people, and commodities are becoming scarce. This scandalous storm might become a hurricane that could upset not only our economies but also the stability of our countries."
US economist/UN adviser Jeffrey Sachs: "It's the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years. It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”
Source: New York Times, "Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger": April 18, 2008
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Oh! I always thought...
That the government pushed production of ethanol because Iowa is the first state to hold a primary caucus. No?
Since I live in the big city, my county, by law, must add ethanol into every gallon of gasoline. I could tell when this law went into effect, several years ago, because my miles per gallon average just tanked. (okay, yeah, that was an intentional pun) This has never made sense to me, to put something in the gas that LOWERS the mpg rate.
But I just assumed the connection between Iowa's timing of it's primary caucuses and Iowa's production of corn was what led to ethanol being added to my gas. I'm still not convinced that has nothing to do with it. But we need to move this ethanol idea back to the "needs work" pile and try some other gas-saving plans. Cuz this one doesn't save any gas and has created chaos, both foreign and domestic, in the food market.
Yes...
There is just something very strange about driving on food, unless it's used cooking oil. What I don't understand is that the technology exists to run engines off of grease and cooking oil from restaurants, yet we'd rather use corn?!?!?
Of course, our overconsumption needs a deeper look to. I love steak. Love. Love. Love. But with the amount of grain it takes to produce one juicy NY Strip, how many people could be fed instead?
Grain/beef ratios
Snippets from a 2002 article, The Case Against Meat and from some other rummaging around the web:
A 10-acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn, but only 2 producing cattle.
It takes 4.8 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of beef.
It takes 2,500-6,000 pounds of water to produce 1 pound of beef.
It takes 60 pounds of water to grow one pound of wheat. (And water is in increasingly short supply.)
Beef production alone uses more water than is consumed in growing the nation’s entire fruit and vegetable crop. (In his book The Food Revolution, author John Robbins estimates that “you’d save more water by not eating a pound of California beef than you would by not showering for an entire year.”)
A British vegetarian group figures that the UK, with 56 million people, could support a population of 250 million on an all-vegetable diet.
It's estimated that 90% of US and European grain consumption is indirect, via meat, so we consume about 2,000 pounds of grain per capita. In 1999, rural Chinese consumed a little less than 550 pounds of grain per capita.
Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer estimates that reducing meat production by just 10 percent in the U.S. would free enough grain to feed 60 million people.
Then there are environmental issues:
More than a third of all raw materials and fossil fuels consumed in the U.S. are used in animal production.
Producing a single hamburger patty uses enough fuel to drive 20 miles and causes the loss of five times its weight in topsoil.
According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), livestock raised for food produce 130 times the excrement of the human population.
The Union of Concerned Scientists points out that 20 tons of livestock manure is produced annually for every U.S. household.
The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska dumped 12 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound, but the relatively unknown 1995 New River hog waste spill in North Carolina poured 25 million gallons of excrement and urine into the water, killing an estimated 10 to 14 million fish and closing 364,000 acres of coastal shellfishing beds.
Hog waste spills have caused the rapid spread of a virulent microbe called Pfiesteria piscicida, which has killed a billion fish in North Carolina alone.
Because of deforestation to create grazing land, each vegetarian saves an acre of trees per year.
“We definitely take up more environmental space when we eat meat,” says Barbara Bramble of the National Wildlife Federation. “I think it’s consistent with environmental values to eat lower on the food chain.”
The "Case Against Meat" article also goes into health issues, if you want to feel worse about eating meat.
I'm transitioning to a predominantly vegetarian diet. I still put milk in my coffee and don't make a fuss when someone serves me animal products, which I will then eat in very small quantities. I'm trying it out for health reasons. And I have the example of one of my granddaughters, age 9, who a year ago announced that she wasn't going to eat animals anymore. And she's held to it -- though my daughter recently has played on her fondness for smoked salmon to induce her to eat some fish occasionally. But it's getting harder to find non-toxic fish -- and the wild salmon supplies are going way down.
Edit function didn't work for me
(I'm using Safari on an iMac.)
I wanted to add these two bits to the Beef/grain ratio post:
After the first line about the 10-acre farm:
Another direct answer to your question is from Diet For a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappé who wrote about imagining sitting down to an eight-ounce steak. “Then imagine the room filled with 45 to 50 people with empty bowls in front of them. For the ‘feed cost’ of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a full cup of cooked cereal grains.”
After the 1999 Chinese grain consumption:
"(M)eat consumption is reaching an all-time high around the world, quadrupling in the last 50 years. There are 20 billion head of livestock taking up space on the Earth, more than triple the number of people. According to the Worldwatch Institute, global livestock population has increased 60 percent since 1961, and the number of fowl being raised for human dinner tables has nearly quadrupled in the same time period, from 4.2 billion to 15.7 billion. U.S. beef and pork consumption has tripled since 1970, during which time it has more than doubled in Asia."
re: Hunger and Bio-fuel
Jim,
Much rethinking about bio-fuels has been going on. There's been a lot of debunking of corn ethanol, and in general 'progressive' alternate technology people and environmentalists are writing reports and articles against it. Most of what I've seen written in defense of ethanol has come from corporate or corporate-linked sources.
A good source for the negative arguments, which includes arguments I hadn't heard before, is The False Promise of Bio-Fuels, put out by two respected left think-tanks, the Institute for Policy Studies (which has been around since 1963) and the International Forum on Globalization (which got started in 1993).
The URL is http://www.ifg.org/pdf/biofuels.pdf
The questions that they set out to answer are:
-Does ethanol production actually result in significantly more energy available to do work than the energy required to produce it?
-What impact does the use of corn for ethanol have on the supply and cost of food?
-Is there sufficient water available to produce ethanol on a large scale?
-What is the impact of ethanol production on soil fertility?
-What is the impact of ethanol production on forests?
-Does ethanol reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants?
-What is the impact of ethanol production on the poor and on indigenous peoples?
-Does ethanol production make economic sense?
Their conclusions, stated in their introduction, are negative on all these points:
"The final truth is that corn-produced ethanol, and many of the other agrofuel varieties are leading us down a path of unsustainability as they continue to impact fragile ecosystems, threaten biodiversity, concentrate corporate power and increase inequities in rural communities. These surely offer no magic bullets to solve our problems, and may, in the end, bring more harm than good, as compared with likely alternatives like wind, solar, small scale hydro, and wave. Future reports in this series will look
more closely at those energy options."
Hunger and Bio-fuel
Thanks for these quotes, Bill. I understand that part of the reason of food shortages is that bio-fuels have become more popular as oil prices have escalated, thus raising the price of some food staples.
Do we need to re-think bio-fuel as an alternative to oil?