Hi Ken
One point you're missing here is that it's not the developed
countries that feed the rest of the world. The developed countries
are the big food importers. From a previous post in this thread:
"By the way, all the developed countries, and especially the US, are
net food importers from the developing countries. Many of the
countries in which hunger is rampant export much more in agricultural
goods than they import. Northern countries are the main food
importers, their purchases representing 71.2 percent of the total
value of food items imported in the world in 1992. Imports by the 30
lowest-income countries accounted for only 5.2 percent of all
international commerce in food and farm commodities."
>I agree with Harmon. There should be distributed food production and not a
>centralized production of food for the world.
Indeed yes. Local production, local self-sufficiency, is the path to
food security, even in cities, especially in the Third World - small,
independent city farms are providing more and more of the urban food
supply, and helping to solve waste problems that would be ever more
intractable without them.
>Right now WTO is almost a
>reality. Excess food from the US(which usually is destroyed rather than
>sold to maintain the price) can be sold elsewhere at a fraction of the cost
>of what a third world farmer can efficiently produce.
Very much of it is livestock feed rather than food for the hungry.
>The farmer would
>rather stop planting, sell his land and move to the city where odd jobs
>make better pay. In the end, that country that imports cheap food loses
>its agriculture industry(we are talking of mostly the 3rd world countries)
>and depends solely on the exporting country. Climate change is a reality
>as well. Can any exporting country of food guarantee a stable supply of
>cheap farm produce for the next 50 years?
No - especially not with the erosion of the biodiversity of food
crops, greatly accelerated by such wondrous schemes as the Green
Revolution and, now, the "Gene Giant" seed companies and the
bio-piracy of native germplasm they're so fond of. We're losing the
hardy and adaptible (and productive) traditional varieties just when
changing climatic conditions look like making a wide range of
adaptible varieties essential.
>What happens when they have a
>bad year of harvest. Is the best producer suddenly obligated to provide
>for the needs of other countries at the same cheap price? You cannot sell
>what you don't have and in economics, when demand is greater that supply,
>prices go up and during that duration of lag between supply and demand you
>get chaos(bec. we are talking of millions of people starving). Take a look
>at Indonesia, people there don't have much in material things but when
>their rice bowl was affected, people took it out on anyone they can put a
>blame on.
I'm sure that'll happen again, and not only there. The IMF didn't
exactly help, did it? That and the forthcoming water wars...
But all this isn't inevitable. It probably is inevitable though if we
- ordinary folks everywhere - sit around twiddling our thumbs waiting
for changes from the top ("them") to make everything right. But
increasing numbers aren't just sitting around.
Please let me say again that IMHO this subject is not off-topic -
it's the same context that many biofuels initiatives are beset with
and are trying to address. Environment and development are not
separate issues.
Regards
Keith Addison
Journey to Forever
Handmade Projects
Tokyo
http://journeytoforever.org/
>Ken Chua
>
>At 01:02 PM 5/29/01 -0500, you wrote:
> >"Crabb, David" wrote:
> >
> >> pardon my logic... but if there "currently is enough food around.. and the
> >> hungry only go hungry because
> >> of distribution issues"...
> >>
> >
> > Actually what is happening is even more insidious -- just one quick
> >example:
> >U.S. farmers overproduce, say, corn. So corn is shipped to Guatamala and
>dumped
> >on the market. There is no way the small local farmer can compete with his
>mule
> >and single row plow, so he goes broke, can't sell his crop. At the
>same time,
> >the military is roaming around, looking for dissidents (guerrillas) and
> >hasseling rural people, causing many people to move to the city to
>be safe --
> >especially since they can't make a living farming anymore. So then, in
>order to
> >survive, they have to work in the sweat shop factories run by
>Walmart or Nike
> >or whoever for 35 cents an hour.
> > Nice system, eh? The multinational megacorp win all the way around, the
> >people lose all the way around -- in the US, in the Third World too. All
>the US
> >jobs go to Guatamala/werever -- soon the US will be just another 3rd World
> >economy.
> >
> >
> >--
> >Harmon Seaver, MLIS
> >CyberShamanix
> >Work 920-203-9633 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >Home 920-233-5820 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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