Author
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Topic: Food price increases causing starvation
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Doug
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 44
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posted 31 January 2008 11:49 AM
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
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M. Spector
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 8273
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posted 31 January 2008 12:06 PM
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
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