Hungry yet?

You may be soon. The food crisis worldwide is growing daily, creating desperate conditions for millions of people who rely on commodities of wheat and corn and rice. Almost everything I read mentions ethanol as a prime reason, but few sources note that the US has vast acreages of tillable land which could be turned to corn production if farmers weren’t being paid to let it lie fallow.

Mr. Bush suggests that India is eating better, thus throwing the world into panic. India’s justifiable response is “fuck you fat American pigs” and rightfully so. Nouveau riche China is increasing its consumption of meat and this, too, is blamed for the worldwide, spreading crisis in food.

But there’s little discussion of how countries like Haiti lost their small farmers, because that is a tragedy that relates to mindnumbingly complex intervention by the never-benevolent IMF and World Bank, subsidized exports from this and other first world countries. It is mind numbing and important, because the destruction wrought upon Haiti and other 3d world nations by globalization and free market economics has been devastating. Another post, another day.

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