United Nations Warns Of A New Food Crisis

Environmental disasters and speculative investors are to blame for volatile food commodities markets, says UN's special adviser.

The world may be on the brink of a major new food crisis caused by environmental disasters and rampant market speculators, the UN was warned today at an emergency meeting on food price inflation.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) meeting in Rome today was called last month after a heatwave and wildfires in Russia led to a draconian wheat export ban and food riots broke out in Mozambique, killing 13 people. But UN experts heard that pension and hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds and large banks who speculate on commodity markets may also be responsible for inflation in food prices being seen across all continents.

In a new paper released this week, Olivier De Schutter, the UN's special rapporteur on food, says that the increases in price and the volatility of food commodities can only be explained by the emergence of a "speculative bubble" which he traces ... read more on food crisis meeting

The Daily Stirrer has been warning of the consequences of food price inflation since we began publishing. Our economics expert John De Roe repeatedly outlined the effects a speculative bubble in food commodity futures was likely to have on the living standards of people in the developed world and the humanitarian disasters that were likely to unfold because of it in poor nations.

In addition to rising prices the effect on food supplies of climate chaos is adding to the plight of the hungry. Once again we have to say that at the root of the problem is over population. Until governments and supra national organisations like the UN understand that current agriculture and technology cannot support a global population nearing seven billion. Instead of G20 leaders blethering about a global economic policy and a global culture and all the rest of their one-world, utopian, oligarchic collectivist nonesense they have to talk about a global birth control policy. In the western nations we, at grassroots level, have a self imposed population control ethic thanks to materialism and self interest. Birth rates are falling in almost all the developed nations.

Somehow our leaders must find a way to overturn the conventional wisdom of ancient cultures that big families are wealth and show people with modern healthcare two or thee children per couple is enough to sustain any society and it is large families that keep people in poverty. It will not be an easy task but if the world leaders fail or try to duck the issue by talking about crackpot 'scientific' solutions we will have to embark on a controlled cull of surplus human beings. Starting with the world leaders.

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The Age Time Bomb

The Daily Stirrer has warned many times of the various time bombs that are ticking in the basement of our bloated society. Forget climate change, it was a diversion, a phishing expedition by scientists and bureaucrats to see how much money they could persuade gullible and fear driven politicians to pump into expensive vanity projects the aim of which was not to save the planet but to win Nobel Prizes and other prestigious awards and "secure a place in history."

Climate change is a problem but it is not our biggest nor our most urgent.

The biggest problem is overpopulation, solve that and the climate will take care of itself.

Next on the list is ageing. Medical science expects to be thanked for curing or controlling many potentially fatal conditions enabling us to live longer. Unfortunately they have not cracked the problem of age induced infirmity. The burden of caring for the elderly infirm is straining the social infrastructure of developed societies.

from The Daily Telegraph
The £388 billion cost includes that of social care, unpaid care by relatives and the medical bills for treating dementia.

The figure is expected to rise rapidly in the coming years but governments are woefully unprepared to meet the challenge, said the World Alzheimer Report 2010.

Experts at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and King's College London examined the cost of dementia care and found that, if it was a country, it would be the world's 18th biggest economy.

And if it was a company, it would be the world's biggest by annual revenue, way above Wal-Mart (£265.6 billion) and Exxon Mobil (£200 billion).

Campaigners already warned that the costs of caring for people with dementia are on the rise, mostly due to people living longer.

The number of people with dementia will ... read more
Dementia Costs Equal 1% Of World Economyem>In the UK at the moment according to figures quoted in a BBC documentary, The Young Ones, last week one in five of people over seventy needs either full time or part time care. In the 1980s and 90s the elderly infirm, those not able to live independently, were moved to municipal care homes. These were impersonal and bureaucratic so eventually the emphasis was shifted to one on once care in the home. While better for individuals this was enormously expensive for the taxpayers and also distorted the state of the employment situation by vastly expanding the proportion of people employed by the state as against those working in true revenue generating industries.

The nineteenth century social reformer William Cobbett referred in his writing to tax eaters. It is an appelation we would do well to reclaim. Reducing unemployment by appointing vast numbers of tax eaters. To do that is to merely massage the statistics. We are left then with a conundrum for the science lovers to choke on. How do we now stop people living so long they become a burden on society? Or more to the point what is being done to ensure that as people live longer they do not become a burden on society? If half the population are over a million years old and the other half are busy caring for them who is going to grow food, build houses, make machines etc.

Euthanasia is not going to play well with the voters so the only alternative is rather that governments continuing to promote a dependency culture to return to a social system in which people are not given unrealistic expectations.

As humanist philosopher David Hume said: It is better to die at sixty - five while in command of one's faculties that have a few more years of increasing infirmity.

more on David Hume's life and philosophy

Listen carefully to the climate change alarmists, pay the same kind of forensic attention to the virus alarmists, the terror alarmists and all the rest. Their scaremongering is always full of might and possibly and could and maybe. Their predictions are based on mathematical models not reality.

The age time bomb is with is now and it is ticking away under the chair on which you are sitting.

The Daily Stirrer