Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Food Crisis Finally Frontpage News

Whooee! Well friends an' foes, if you been payin' much attention to what's been happenin' around the world, the food crisis won't be much of a surprise. But, dangitall, I ain't seein' hardly squat in the Pergressive Boogeysphere about the food crisis. Now, I try to be a paragon of netiquette and I don't go all caps shoutin' very often. In fact, I never went all caps before but I am now.

24,000 PEOPLE STARVE TO DEATH EVERY DAY. ONE PERSON STARVES TO DEATH EVERY 5 SECONDS. THE CURRENT FOOD CRISIS MEANS THIS IS GOING TO GET A LOT WORSE VERY SOON.

Maybe your mind's been occupied with other stuff. The in-and-out scheme's been gettin' a lotta pixelplay in the boogs. Diane Finley's trouble with bikers an' tobacco farmers an' the Russian mob and immigrant advocacy groups an' Mohawk warriors is stirrin' up some interest. A lotta Canajun boogers got their eyeballs peeled on the bigass Merkin election and ol' Hillary an' Barack Obama. The TTC and Tyendinaga been gettin' some ink, too.

It ain't just the boogers who ain't been payin' attention. The North American main street media (MSM) been givin' the food crisis issue short shrift. Today, I was a little bit heartened to see that the Globe online edition is playin' a food crisis story as it's top item.

Maybe we ain't seein' much about it on accounta we'd all be feelin' a little guilty when we're crammin' a Tmmy's Venetian Creme into our gapin' gobs. It'd be tough enjoyin' a juicy steak if the dang blogs an' TV an' newspapers an' magazines was all tellin' how every 5 seconds some poor bastard keels over dead on accounta they ain't got enough food in their belly. It'd tough to enjoy the most basic of human need: food. So, we look the other way.

I reckon most of us don't wannna know about starvation because we'd quit enjoyin' our dinner. Too bad. Pretty soon, we ain't gonna have any choice. The food crisis is destabilizing governments. Desperately hungry people are bein' recruited to armed militias, gangs and terrorist cells with the lure of a daily meal.

One of the dumbest things about the food crisis is the fact that it would be so cheap to offset the current catastrophe. The UN World Food Program sez it needs a paltry $755 million bucks to stave off the immediate hunger of about 100 million people. That's about the same amount the Merkins spend each and every day over in EyeRack.

$755 million also about what Canada spends every 8 months, or so, in Afghanistan. Thing is, Afghanistan's one of the places where the food crisis is hittin' hardest. Since the warlords got all the farmland tied up growin' opium poppies, they ain't able to scratch out a meager subsistence like they was before we liberated 'em.

Today, I'm callin' on the fellers an' gals in the Canajun boogeysphere to start payin' attention to the food crisis. There's plenty o' stuff we can do the help the pore dirt-eatin' hordes but this boog story's long enough and I'm plannin' to keep the story alive by frequent boogin'. I gotta save some stuff fer tomorrow. I ain't worried that the issue will fade away by then.

Would you like fries with that?

JimBobby

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess my Keebler elves story about fat lazy Americans cutting back on cookies doesn't really count. I hope y' ain't sore at me for it.

I'll answer the call for a food shortage blog burst in the next couple of days - you're absolutely right, it's hugely important and there has been little to no attention paid.

JimBobby said...

"I hope y' ain't sore at me for it. "

'Course not. The only thing that's got the MSM in NA to pay any attention, at all, has been the price of groceries. Anything that raises awareness is welcome.

JB

Anonymous said...

JimBobby, starvation is non partisan, people can't make points or win arguments because we all agree it's bad. As proBlogs is mostly political I think we need an aggregator For Earth Blogs, Doom Blogs, or the end of our fat cushy lives Blogs. What the Blog awards revealed to me was our little political corner is not where most bloggers live and we need to find a bigger audience.

Solving starvation means the West must sacrifice our car fetish, our meat eating, some of our tax money, and while we like to talk tough our willingness to sacrifice is something else as a poll this week showed about peoples attitudes to sacrificing for the environment. Most only will do something if there is a cost advantage.

In the end our ability to breed like rodents will destroy us and the expectation that when they "get rich like us" they will have smaller families, and all will be well is naive. As they gain wealth the few will consume what the many use to consume. Look at our life styles.

We do need to help as much as we can now, but in the long term aid must be contingent on family planning to soften the big crash when peak oil kills the agricultural green revolution powered by oil.

The loss of fuel, fertilizers and pesticides is going to bring average yields down by the middle of next decade. We need to reeducate the world on farming by hand with little external imputs, we need to supply the world with non patented open polinated seeds, even in the west we need to return at least 10% of the population to the land and drastically curb our meat consumption.

I'm even questioning immigration of purely environmental grounds. If a country breeds past it's carrying capacity we are only making it worse by taking excess population from abroad. Immigration creates more room to breed where they originated from and increases population/consumption in their new home country.

These people often end up moving from an existence that uses less than a barel of oil a year to become, lazy, glutonous, fuel burning us. We bestow our blessings on those we choose to allow into our country but in the same motion we curse those left behind to live in our filth and compete with our glutony.

While this is neither PC nor warm and fuzzy it is reality and I'm torn by it.

The excepted model of both continual economic and population growth must end but none will admit it!

JimBobby said...

Good comment, GAB. The Malthusian argument is gaining strength. Remember ZPG?

Rapid population growth over the past century has just begun to outpace agricultural production. It has not yet surpassed agricultural capacity but some serious planning and creative methodology needs to be employed if we hope to feed 9 billion.

Latest population figures are starting to indicate a leveling off of this extremely rapid growth. Too little, too late.

While I agree that ProgBlogs is mainly political, I also think this food crisis is largely political as is the struggle for savin' ol' Mother Earth.

I think the fact that there is no single bogeyman to blame for the food crisis stops it from gaining traction, like yer sayin'. If we could say it was all the fault of Harper or Bush or Monsanto or ADM or the Chicago Grain Market or meat-eating Asians or obese fast-food addicts or car-addicts or dumbass ethanol subsidies or procreatin' peons, then we could point the finger of blame and make some political hay. Hmmm... it IS the fault of all those factors.

Nah!I don't mean to disparage the pergressive boogin' community. Generally, I don't find it a good debate technique to pick on an opponent for something they haven't said. I don't consider the ProgBloggers as debate opponents, though. I'm hopin' to get a few more of us rallyin' around the cause.

JB

Pale said...

I think that Green assassin, you yourself Jimbobby, Prole and I at ACR, and maybe a small handful of others have even attempted to address this issue.


But hey. Colbert mentioned it last night too....Its bad when the Newz appears on a "comedy" show before the big netwerks.

Scott in Montreal said...

GAB, JB, lots of nail on the head hitting, you two. My old prof, Scott Eastham would say the problem is with the concept of capitalism and its requirement for constant growth; the fact that there is a finite sum of resources from which to derive that growth dictates an inevitable end point to the system's lifespan.

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