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Global Food Fights It takes a decent respect for the obvious truth to admit that mankind has no control over the climate. What is occurring, however, based on actual and anecdotal information, is a trend toward global cooling. Between rising food costs driven by an environmental agenda and real, not imagined, climate change, the word famine is going to be heard more often. We are seeing (1) weather related crop failures and (2) the artificial driving up of the cost of food because crops like corn have been diverted to make ethanol. In the rush to cash in on the higher price for corn, farmers who would otherwise plant wheat and other grains are creating shortages.
However, this is nothing that can be done about the changing weather patterns that are leaving havoc in their wake, i.e., lots of snow and ice followed by lots of flooding. At the same time that Al Gore has announced a $300 million propaganda campaign to secure global warming legislation Mother Nature is getting colder. California experienced a five-day freeze in January 2007 that ruined $1.42 billion worth of produce. In April 2007, a freeze destroyed 95 percent of South Carolina’s peach crop and 90 percent of North Carolina’s apple harvest as colder weather is increasing around the world. In late March, the website www.longrangeweather.com posted an article by climatologist Cliff Harris asking, “Are We Entering a Period of Sudden ‘Global Cooling’?” in which he noted that, “The total extent of snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere at the end of February was at the highest level since the same period 42 years ago in 1966.” “According to my climatological colleagues in Britain, Japan, and the U.S., the winter months of December, January, and February were likewise the coldest as a whole since at least the late 1970s, in some cases dating back to either the 1930s or even the 1880s.” “In southeastern China, the winter of 2007-2008 has been the worst since 1210, nearly 800 years ago!” Severe winter conditions killed at least 40% of the 2007-2008 rapeseed crop (canola), a staple in China. On March 24, the Associated Press reported from Asia that the rising cost of food staples was due in part because “freak weather is a factor.” But it is not freak weather. It is part of a trend toward cooling. Peter Brabeck-Letmache, the president of Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company, spoke out in March, saying, “If as predicted we look to use biofuels to satisfy 20 percent of the growing demand for oil products, there will be nothing left to eat.” What makes this shift particularly obscene is the fact that there is ample crude oil to meet the world’s need for gasoline and diesel. The mandate to use alternative fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel has the secondary effect of exacerbating food shortages because the cost of fuel to plant, harvest, and transport crops has increased. The weather, however, continues to emerge as a mitigating factor. As one farming publication noted recently, “Extreme weather shifts over the past two years have reduced wheat harvest worldwide by nearly ten percent.” Depending on varying analysis, wheat supplies are at their lowest since either 1973 or 1940. It’s not just wheat or soy. On March 20, an article in The New York Times reported that, “Rising prices and a growing fear of scarcity have prompted some of the world’s largest rice producers to announce drastic limits on the amount of rice they export.” The price of rice has nearly doubled. Aggravating the shortages and increasing the prices are the steps being taken by nations placing curbs on the export of some of their food crops. As often as not this leads to further food shortages because local farmers then change what they plant. The result is an increasing number of food-related disturbances worldwide in places like Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, Uzbekistan, and Yemen, to name just a few. In the United States, bakers recently marched on Washington, DC to call attention to wheat shortages and its rising price. A combination of many factors, government imposed environmental dictates, export curbs, and crop losses resulting from the cooling weather cycle could generate further shortages of food. My crystal ball tells me we are going to read and hear a lot more about food protests around the world. If you have a blog or website on which you would like to post these weekly commentaries, contact me to be included among the many who share them with visitors to their sites. Have you visited my daily blog? Join the growing number of visitors who enjoy a welcome change of pace from the mainstream media’s skewed version of the news Iraq: Nothing Left But Bad Choices
If you’re looking for friends in the Middle East, you should assume they would be your friends only as long as it suited their present purposes. The shifting alliances, the sectarian rivalries, the ambitions of various dictators and monarchs, all mix together with a religion that demands a holy war to conquer the entire world. Whether you were the British Empire, French colonialists, the defunct SovietUnion, or the present American government, the Middle East has proved to be the graveyard of over-reaching imperial and military ambitions. If 70% of the worlds’ known oil reserves were located anywhere else, it is unlikely the region would command our attention. Lawrence Freedman’s new book, “A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East” examines America’s problems in the Middle East from the end of WWII. For presidents from Eisenhower to George W. Bush, the Middle East has been an irritant, a conundrum, and sometimes an ignominious end to one’s term in office. Freedman is a professor of war studies at King’s College, London. He has a fascination with U.S. policies and their outcome. One thing we know for sure. On January 20, 2009, a new hand will be at the helm of the U.S. government and will be required to address the grievance that is the Middle East. This is why it is essential to know what past presidents have done and make a judgment as to what either Sen. Barack Hussein Obama or Sen. John McCain would do. To this observer, Sen. Obama is the reincarnation of former President Jimmy Carter, a virtual unknown who gained office in the wake of the public’s disgust over the Watergate scandals. Carter was the born-again Christian, the former peanut farmer, and Governor of Georgia, who would bring “change.” What Carter actually brought to the job was an appalling lack of judgment based on his naïve belief that, if he could just talk with those causing us grief, he could change their minds on the basis of his personal good will. What Carter got was an abortive Camp David agreement between the duplicitous Yassir Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel’s reluctant Prime Minister Menachem Begin. What he also got was the 1979 Iranian Revolution that held American diplomats hostage for 444 days while declaring “Death to the United States.” They still do.
One of those beneficiaries, though not a declared combatant, is Iran. Sen. Obama says that were he elected president, he would meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, to resolve that nation’s hostility to the U.S. and Israel. Iran has its hand via proxy militias in Iraq, Lebanon, and the so-called Palestinian territories. Iran’s partner in crime, Syria, has been funneling Iranian arms and funds to Lebanon’s Hezbollah and to Hamas in the Gaza strip adjacent to Israel. It is unlikely that talking to Ahmadinejad will prove any more useful than the years of negotiations with Yassir Arafat or Syria dictators. Sen. McCain believes we will be in Iraq a very long time. This worries me because few former generals and other experts on warfare and occupation are suggesting anything other than a withdrawal of forces given the failure of administration objectives over the last five years. The Army and other forces are exhausted despite a valiant effort to meet the demands put on them. So staying with other than a minimal force is unrealistic. At home, voters must ask themselves whom do they want making foreign policy, war and peace decisions. As the title of Freedman’s book suggests, American presidents have constantly had to choose whom they would support and whom they would attack in the Middle East and how long to remain. Carter shrank from combat, preferring to fiddle about with a human rights agenda that was surely the laughing stock of dictators and authoritarian regimes. Reagan got burned in Lebanon, losing an embassy and brigade of Marines to terror bombers, but lent support to Saddam’s war against Iran. His successor, George H.W. Bush, organized a successful military response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but choose (wisely in retrospect) to limit the engagement. President Clinton paid little serious attention to provocations that included embassy bombings and the first bombing of the Twin Towers. George W. Bush drove the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan after 9/11, but then determined to invade Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein, a continuing threat to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Few have doubts about the Iranian threat. Is it not time for the nations in the region to stand up to it by supporting the Iraqis? In sum, whomever “answers the phone at 3 A.M.” will be forced to deal with a region that has long been an intractable threat to Western interests. Both Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton promises troop withdrawal. Sen. McCain says we must stay the course. Realistically, just leaving will not resolve the region’s problems, but it will reduce our involvement at a time when it is clearly needed for the sake of our fighting forces and because Iraqis must begin to determine their own future. While Americans ponder who will be their next President, whoever is elected will have only bad choices under the best of circumstances. Help the Center with your donation and help make a difference through the dissemination of facts, not liberal fantasies!
©
2008 Alan Caruba. |
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Take away “biofuels” and you take away the imbalances being seen and felt worldwide.
Events, fueled by an appalling ignorance of even recent history in the Middle East and, as often as not, useful intelligence about what was actually occurring there have served to bring us to our present involvement with more than 160,000 troops on the ground in Iraq, a raging civil war among the chief beneficiaries of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, and a conflict in Afghanistan that is not going well.