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Thousands in India protest increasing food prices
NEW DELHI — Tens of thousands of trade unionists, including those from a group linked to India’s ruling party, marched through the streets of the capital on Wednesday to protest food prices, piling pressure on a government already under fire over graft. The demonstration in New Delhi was the latest in a wave of protests sweeping across the world, including the Middle East and Africa, ignited by a worldwide spike in food prices.
India, Asia’s third-largest economy and home to more than a billion people, has been grappling with double-digit food inflation. Hundreds of millions of poor have been hit the hardest.
In one of the largest anti-government protests in New Delhi in recent years, at least 50,000 people representing trade unions from the country’s political parties marched through the center of the capital towards the parliament building. In a sea of red flags and hats bearing their union name, protesters chanted Read more…
Population, Food, Oil … Collision?
World population and growth
Factoring the net birth minus death rate in the world each year, the annual increase to world population is about 75 million people. The current world population is about 6,900,000,000, or 6.9 billion.
Annually, we add to the planet the equivalent population of any of the following scenarios,
- New York City (9 of them!)
- Los Angeles (20 of them!)
- Chicago (27 of them!)
- San Francisco (94 of them!)
- Boston (117 of them!)
- Unites States of America (25 percent of the country!)
When you think about it, this is a startling number. And that’s in just one Read more…
Rising world food prices may soon hit Africa hard, but could be a future boon
Damaged rice is seen in a paddy field destroyed by flood- waters near a village in Manmunai West in Batticaloa district, about 199 miles east of Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Jan. 26. The floods inundated rice paddies, and according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, at least 15.5 percent of the main annual rice harvest could be lost.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Reuters
Johannesburg, South Africa
Global food prices reached a historic high last month, a fact that may cause even the most comfortable of Americans to cinch in their belts and cut back on spending.
But what about the world’s poor?
“Global food prices are rising to dangerous levels and threaten tens of millions of poor people around the world,” World Bank Group President Robert Zoellick said Tuesday as he announced the bank’s findings that about 44 million people in developing countries have been pushed into poverty since Read more…
Earth Likely “Unrecognizable” by 2050 Say Experts
In 2011 the Earth’s population will reach 7 billion. The United Nations (UN) reports that the total number of people will climb to 9 billion in 2050, peak at 9.5 billion, stabilize temporarily, and then decline. Despite the confidence with which these projections are presented, in an American Association for the Advancement of Science press briefing and presentation today the Population Council’s John Bongaarts presents evidence that the actual Read more…
The Real Crisis That Will Soon Hit the US
Forget stocks, the real crisis is coming… and it’s coming fast.NATO Warns of Food Crisis and More Unrest, Prices Increase 15% in Four Months
The World Food Program’s representative in one of the countries which has seen protests, Yemen, recently stated: ‘There is an obvious link between high food prices and unrest.’
Credit: NATO
The 2008 food crisis was a warning of things to come. More recently, food prices rose by 15% in just the period October 2010 to January 2011, according to the World Bank’s Food Price Watch.
This time, the impacts have been felt more keenly in political and security circles. The President of Read more…
China cracks down on call for ‘Jasmine Revolution’
The Associated Press
Saturday, February 19, 2011; 10:05 AM
BEIJING — Chinese authorities cracked down on activists as a call circulated for people to gather in more than a dozen cities Sunday for a “Jasmine Revolution.”
The source of the call was not known, but authorities moved to halt its spread online. Searches for the word “jasmine” were blocked Saturday on China’s largest Twitter-like microblog, and the website where the request first appeared said it was hit by an attack.
Activists seemed not to know what to make of the call to protest, even as they passed it on. They said they were unaware of any known group being involved in the request for citizens to gather in 13 cities and shout “We want food, we want work, we want Read more…
Global systemic crisis / World geopolitical breakup – End of 2011: Fall of the “Petro-dollar wall”
– Public announcement GEAB N°52 (February 16, 2011) –
Farmers Deposit Seeds in Arctic Doomsday Vault, Patrolled by Polar Bears
Farmers from Australia are the latest donors to a polar bear-patrolled Arctic doomsday vault that stores seeds as insurance against an international food emergency.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a converted mine, is located about 800 miles from the North Pole in Arctic Norway.
An Australian delegation of farmers and scientists next week will deposit 301 samples of peas and 42 rare chickpeas in the vault, intending to protect the plant species from extinction by climatic or man-made events.
“It’s a very robust structure, concrete, made into the Read more…
The USDA Says Americans Need More Sugar…and More GMOs
By Josh Corn
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is worried about an impending nationwide sugar shortage. This is the reason, officials said last week, that they gave farmers the green light to plant Monsanto’s previously outlawed genetically engineered Roundup Ready sugar beets. Currently, 30% of the world’s sugar is produced from beets.
Ironically enough, the USDA just weeks ago released its latest set of dietary guidelines for Americans, which place stronger emphasis on the importance of reducing calorie consumption and avoiding things like trans fats, refined flours — and added sugars.
“The 2010 Dietary Guidelines are being released at a time when the majority of adults and 1 in 3 children is overweight or obese and this is a crisis that we can no longer ignore,” said USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack in an official press release.
So in light of this crisis and these new recommendations, why is the Read more…
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