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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