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Author Topic: Food price increases causing starvation
Doug
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 44

posted 31 January 2008 11:49 AM      Profile for Doug   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.

The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.


http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Haiti-Eating-Dirt.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=haiti&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Dirt cookies, anyone?


From: Toronto, Canada | Registered: Apr 2001  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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Babbler # 8273

posted 31 January 2008 12:06 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
The world produces more food than ever - enough to feed twice the global population. Yet, more people than ever suffer from hunger; and their numbers are rising. Today, 854 million people, most of them women and girls, are chronically hungry, up from 800 million in 1996. Another paradox: the majority of the world’s hungry people live in rural areas, where nearly all food is grown.
Source

quote:
The continuation of hunger in the modern world is not the result of an intractable problem thwarting our best efforts to feed people. Rather, agriculture in the capitalist world is directly concerned with profit and only indirectly with feeding people. Similarly, the organization of health care is directly an economic enterprise and is only secondarily influenced by people’s health needs. The irrationalities of a scientifically sophisticated world come not from failures of intelligence but from the persistence of capitalism, which as a byproduct also aborts human intelligence.
- The Dialectical Biologist, by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin (Harvard U.P., 1985)

From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
bliter
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Babbler # 14536

posted 31 January 2008 02:07 PM      Profile for bliter   Author's Homepage        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
M. Spector,

It occurred that the excellent Common Dreams article that you linked would have fitted equally well in the current thread on Abortion and the Earth.

On the ability of the earth to support more population, we simply can't ignore the matter of socially responsible distribution and the proven venality of Agribusiness.


From: delta | Registered: Sep 2007  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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Babbler # 8273

posted 31 January 2008 03:35 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by bliter:
It occurred that the excellent Common Dreams article that you linked would have fitted equally well in the current thread on Abortion and the Earth.
You mean to tell me you've actually managed to figure out what the topic of that thread is?

From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
bliter
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Babbler # 14536

posted 31 January 2008 05:11 PM      Profile for bliter   Author's Homepage        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
It's being reported today that over a million Iraqis have been killed since that country was invaded in 2003.

Considering the trillions of dollars U.S. taxpayers have been burdened with to accomplish that, one can't help visualizing other directions that money might have gone to resolve, or lessen, many of the world's social problems that we discuss today - including agriculture and food distribution.


From: delta | Registered: Sep 2007  |  IP: Logged

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