On Demand
Going Hungry
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times, discusses his latest column on the worldwide food crisis.
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Part of this is apparently due to a new focus on ethanol. Unfortunately, the production of these foods that are converted to biofuels is heavily dependent on petroleum anyway. Instead of simply extracting the oil from the ground and burning it, we're putting it into the ground to grow the crops, run the farm equipment, ship and then finally process the product. The growth of the crops also requires more farmland which means more carbon emissions.
Our agricultural system is broken, and this has only made it worse.
Why are you leaving out the US?! Have you seen the increase in prices at the supermarkets over the past few months? It may not affect YOU the decent-salaried and better, but we who live on limited incomes feel it quite a bit. To the decent-salaried and better may just be flip and notice an increase and be annoyed by it but we on limited incomes are more than annoyed we're being strangled. Prices have been going up world-wide, so the media report, and it has affected US as well. Last month there were strong protests also in Italy over rise in wheat inter alia, and that's not a developing country.
Well, more middle-class is good, no doubt but it's the growth of population that is NOT good people have to practice more birth control. When you have religious institutions pushing people to have more children they are a part of the increasing population growth and those affected are usually the poor.
In the light of Hillary's strategist fall, great opposition to the Free-Trade Agreement in Latin American nations, particularly Colombia, stem from the fact that American agricultural products would flood the food market of these countries, and their native-produced food will become more unaffordable. This in turn is fostering RIOTS and civil unrest in countries from Mexico to Argentina.
How much of what is going on has to do with hedge funds and apocalyptic speculation? Certainly, the oil markets have been experiencing some of this.
I've noticed a near universal increase in the slice of pizza across the city. When I ask the pizzerias why, they say mostly a 2-fold increase in the price of flour.
Obviously this is less pressing than the price increase in countries where these riots break out, but is there any chance of those below the poverty-line in the U.S. going hungry?
Is there any connection between the increase in food prices and the fact that farmers are being pressured to use patented seeds?
In my native Indonesia, the raising demand for soy is affecting the poorest of the poor who rely on soy bean cakes as their main source of protein and calories. Here in Greenwich, people are using soy based insulation for their giant McMansions, even though soy based it's more expensive it's considered "green" and eco-friendly.
I'm living in Buenos Aires... Argentina is definitely suffering some ongoing issues with food supply. In the past few weeks we've had a farmers' strike resulting in no beef and no milk on the shelves of grocery stores here in the capital, and there have been big protests in the street because of these issues.
The ongoing problem has been runaway inflation in food prices, and Argentina's farmers are exporting more and more of their produce to the United States and other countries where people can pay higher prices for produce, leaving less and less food available for domestic consumption, and higher and higher food prices here.
Mr K.
Do you think that the financial crisis, as well as the food shortages can put our country as close to
the beginning of the DEPRESSION as we were in the early 1930's?
I fear we are headed for a major depression.
Robert Reich says the only measurement we have for a depression is that unemployment would be close to 25%...
Your thoughts?
Mark Brown
Michael Pollan in his book Omnivore's Dilemma does an excellent job of exploring this issue - particularly how it is linked to corn and soy dependence in our industrial food economy. I think you should reach out to him to follow up on this segment - as it is a very important issue and his research is very worthwhile.
Dose commodities speculation play a role in higher global food prices?
How about worrying about NYers who are going hungry for once instead of the whole world?
Imagine that! People in NYC making $12 - $15 an hour because there are no well paying jobs in nyc are suffering and we don't care about that but we care about India and Haiti.
Take of people here in your home country first!!!!
are remittances sent to developing countries decreasing farming activities there.
Another reason for energy conservation instead of biofuels, and an excellent example of the law of unintended consequences...
High prices of food worldwide are directly tied to American free-trades pushed by corporations looking to become richer and more dominant. Free trade agreements are BAD for emerging countries whose UNSUBSIDIZED agricultural production can not compete with the US subsidized corpo-produced products. US Free-Trade Agreements only ensure that the signing countries can depend on America's food supply to the detriment of native populations.
Let's have a Ven diagram exercise:
1. Draw a cirlce around corn-growing states,
2. Draw a corcle around Coal producing states,
3. Draw a cirlce around swing (voter) states.
Then asourself why we pander to ethanol and the (stupid) "clean coal" interests.
then ask yourself why my typing is so poor.
Brian,
Krugmann mentioned at the end of his segment that the thing most needed [like THIS MONTH] was monetary funding... What about a show on informing the public about reliable funds to contribute funds to? I myself, hearing that interview would be ready to log on to a website and donate, but which one is safe and reliable to contribute to. I think your research team and the educational influence of your show could be hugely helpful on a grass roots level to this cause.
I can't help but notice that the food shortages are mostly in non-democratic and controlled economies-from North Korea (what else is new) to Venezuela(newly minted socialist economy) to Zimbabwe. SO YOU INTERVIEW PAUL KRUGMAN WHO CAN'T HELP BUT WANT TO INTERVENE IN THE AMERICAN ECONOMY IN A BIG WAY BUT THE WORLD'S AS WELL.
It is unfair to say that "we were sold a bill of goods on ethanol." Environmentalists have said all along, that CORN ethanol was not a good route. This was a politically expedient way for politicians and agribusiness to cash in, literally and figuratively, on the good public interest in environmental crisis. A focus on ethanol from cellulose, the waste material of crops, is the true goal and has been all along. This would only bolster food farmers' financial situation by paying them for the waste that is a byproduct of food production, not diverting food to vehicles. Listen to the scientists, listen to the experts. Not the windbags capitalizing on the news cycle.
Brian
the food riots have been going on for more than a year in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc
NYTimes ran the story on Sat Jan 19 below the fold! I guess that was a slow newsday.
I am glad you're covering it now. But, it needs a lot more in-depth deconstruction!
I agree about the ven diagrams. We need a global interactive map that shows how interrelated we have all become so that we are not confused and surprised about this any longer.
let them eat cake!
Let's ask the Pope, Chief Rabbis, Ayatollahs, the LDS President and other pro-natalists to cut back on population growth.
In Dale Pfeiffer says in his 2006 book "Eating Fossil Fuels" that the world's upcoming declining oil and gas production will drive two-thirds of the world's 6 billion to starvation by 2100. In the USA your grandchildren and their children won’t be excepted.
As the butterfly causes the hurricane, each part of the energy-to-food chain affects the others. For instance, if the USA [Universally Spoiled Americans] changes to a vegetarian diet it will immediately decrease the need for energy needed to inefficiently grow grain for meat production and to process, transport, refrigerate, and cook all the meat we consume.
The craziness that is the Ethanol Boom is an example of decades of poor leadership in Washington, from Farm Bills that favor corporate mega-farms to failure to force Detroit and its consumers to drastically reduce energy consumption.
In engineering school 45 years ago we saw nearly endless natural gas supplies and 200-years more of oil: there were half as many in the US population and somewhat less than half worldwide that today. Who'd have thought that the "developing" world would so rapidly copy our profligate energy use and pollution? Soon more will hit the fan and we're not being fair to ourselves in this election cycle by ignoring the problems. Let's aim for "sustainable retreat" to preserve our civilization in a simpler form.
Isn't this crisis just being caused by meat eating corporate hedge fund muslim terrorists from Mars using mind control to control security contractors and labor unions? At least they havent infiltrated the tobacco companies yet.
I'm a chef & I have noticed that there has been a massive increase over the years in food prices. To me the biggest factor of this is that we ship food globally & each region of the word doesn't sustain itself. The land is there for each region to be sustainable, however people want avocados in December & bananas in February. This is the problem, us or we don't want to give up the comfortability we've accrued in the supermarket. America (world's largest consumer) needs to give up on the supermarket, eat locally & seasonly, but I just don't think that we're ready to do that. There are several factors to this problem, this is but one.
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