The article that follows is profoundly disturbing because it is well reasoned and very hard to refute. I cannot say with certainty that a famine will hit the US in 2009 but, after reading this article, I am hard put to come up with reason why it will not.
The solution is simple: a revisit to the World War II Victory Garden idea. Whether you live in an urban apartment without a terrace or a suburban community with a back yard, or anything in between, you have the ability to use tubs of earth with a grow light, plant a 4 foot square piece of land, create a community garden or otherwise Gerry rig a small vegetable farm which, properly managed, will allow you to to grow enough vegetables for your family, indoors or out, for a family of four.
Larger family, more buckets of soil or square feet of land. Smaller family? Give some food to the disabled, the elderly or the disadvantaged in your town.
This is a potent heads-up and the time is now.
The Natural Solutions Foundation will be publishing a subscription-based Intensive Gardening and Food Production newsletter. If you would like to write a column for this newsletter please contact the Natural Solutions Foundation by sending an email to dr.laibow@gmail.com with “Food” in the subject line.
In the next couple of issues of the Health Freedom eAlerts we will be announcing the new Newsletter and letting you know how you can subscribe to it.
Can this impending food shortage in the breadbasket nation of the United States be an accident, an act of God, a combination of unfortunate events or is this an intentional manipulation of the food system to make sure that the remaining farmers are driven off the land to make room for the total domination of the industrialized food supply and the mega-corporations who profit from it? I do not know the answer. I have my deep suspicions, but no conclusive data right now.
However, the answer does not matter right now. If there is a famine headed our way, we must prepare for it now. Not next week, not when the famine hits, but now. Every one of us needs to think about how s/he can lay in stores of needed supplies which cannot be home produced and how to start the process of home food production while there is lead time left.
Now would be a good time to begin thinking seriously about how to get started growing your own clean, unadulterated, non-GMO food in your own apartment, yard or community. There really is not a lot of time left to get ready if this article is correct.
Reclaiming food production is a central theme of the Natural Solutions Foundation International Decade of Nutrition (IDN), www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org. The IDN project to teach farmers how to grow healthful food for their communities and themselves (that’s you) is taking shape in the Chir
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMarketPlace.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMedia.tv
The Famine of 2009
HOLLY NOTE
Weather, as we have warned for the past year has taken a terrible
toll on crops. Floods, hail and tornadoes hammered America’s breadbasket.
Drought is killing California’s huge agriculture belt and hitting crops in the
Southeast this year. Decimated bee populations added to crop decline. Grain
reserves are non-existent. Compounding matters, fuel, seed and equipment have
all risen sharply in recent years.Daily news address rampant concerns over
rice, wheat, corn and soybean shortages. And now food rationing and hoarding
is creeping into reality…Riots and food protests have already hit many
nations: South Africa, Pakistan, Lebanon, Gaza, Kenya, Nicaragua, Mexico,
Bahrain, the Emirates, Italy, Russia, Indonesia, Egypt in addition to Haiti,
Cameroon, Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Bolivia, Peru, Thailand,
Somali, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Uzbekistan, Yemen, India, and the Philippines.
After the Mexican tortillas riots last year, corn tortillas prices rose
another 18%.Despite lower fuel prices at the pump, food prices are expected to
rise in 2009.With food shortages threatening to become the biggest crisis of
the 21st century, you can bet food riots are coming to America. In fact, top
trend forecaster, Gerald Celente, warns on coming US food riots.Stock up now –
buy in bulk – and pack for long-term storage grain products, flour, rice,
beans, powdered milk and any other foods you regularly consume. The longer you
delay, prices are only going to escalate, your options will dwindle, along
with selection. Please do this before your options close.When reading news
articles, it is our hope you’ll read beyond the headlines and hear the
unspoken message – a quiet urging to prepare.
November 27, 2008By Neal RauhauserDaily KosLast week I received a very
concerned call from South Dakota farmer and agronomist Bryan Lutter. “Neal,
we’re out of propane!” I figured this was personal distress – he and his
family farm over three square miles of land and I know this has been a tough
year for many people. He promptly corrected my misconception when I tried to
console him. “No, everybody is out, all three grain elevators, we can’t get
fuel for the bins, and we’re coming in real wet this year.”There are equally
dramatic issues due to the bankruptcy of Verasun and the apparent insolvency
of the nation’s largest private crop insurance program. Payments that would
have come in June or July of a normal year are still not dispersed at the end
of November and this has grim implications for next year’s crop.I started
digging into the details and unless I’m badly mistaken people are going to be
starving in 2009 over causes and conditions being set down right now. It’s a
complex, interlocking issue, and I hope I’ve done a good job explaining it
below the fold …(I just submitted my personal story and a vision for the
nation at change.gov – I sure hope someone is listening over there.)The
Dakotas have faced fuel restrictions for at least the last two years. They’re
at the far end of the pipeline network and after complete outages in 2007
everyone orders their diesel well in advance. Vehicle tanks are kept fuller
and the on farm tanks are not allowed to run low. Gasoline supply dynamics
have changed as well; British Petroleum shuttered three hundred stations in
the area, citing the high cost of trucking fuel to the locations from the
pipeline terminals. This year propane is in short supply. Rural homes in that
part of the world are heated with propane and the grain elevator and on farm
drying require it to bring corn moisture down for storage. There is no sense
that homes will go cold this year, at least not due to supply issues; the
grain drying season is a short period of intense usage that will draw to an
end within the next week. Pray to whatever higher power you recognize that the
unheard of figure of 18% of the crop still in the field is brought in before
the snow flies.The Dakotas were very wet this year and the corn is coming in
at 22% moisture. A more usual number would be 18% and for long term storage it
must be dried to 14% to avoid spoilage. That doubling in the moisture
reduction needed, an 8% drop instead of 4%, pretty much doubles the amount of
propane used. Right now the harvest is at a dead stop. What can be dried has
been and what is left can’t even be combined without the fuel to make it ready
for storage; it would all just spoil in the bin if put up wet.I wondered if
this was a spot problem in that particular part of South Dakota, but Bryan
said it was widespread – he’d talked to farmers as far away as St. Louis and
they were reporting similar issues.I made a few calls to try to figure out how
broad the problem was. I ended up talking to Rollin Tiefenthaler at fuel
dealer Al’s Corner in Carroll, Iowa about the issue.The Iowa crop comes
matures earlier and is brought in earlier, so that is done, but he confirms
that propane is being trucked long distances because local terminals have
outages. They did have one farmer’s cooperative run out of propane and they
scrambled to get them enough, but in general it wasn’t a problem. These are
plains cooperatives, operations with thirty employees, dozens of vehicles, and
tens of millions of dollars in inventory and commodities under management, so
one running out of fuel is a problem that would affect a whole county.Diesel
has been a bigger concern for them – instead of the thirty mile drive to the
Magellan pipeline terminal in Milford they’re running as far as Des Moines or
Omaha, each about two hours away, and the added time and cost for running more
trucks is eating them alive.The die has already been cast in the Dakotas,
they’ll either get the crop in or they won’t. If they don’t and it winters in
the field they not only lose 40% of the yield on that ground they lose 20% of
next year’s yield in soy beans. The corn makes an excellent snow fence,
trapping drifts six feet high, and they’re slow to clear in the spring. The
farmers have to wait until it’s dry enough to plant before they can finish
bringing in the corn crop, then they plant their soy, and that delay cuts into
the growing degree days available for the soy beans and thusly we see the
yield drop.A few of you might not be from farm state and thusly won’t know the
normal work flow. The corn crop is still partially in the field, but the soy
beans are already done. Soy matures and dries earlier, so it gets tended
first. There would never been an instance of soy being left to overwinter just
based on crop timing and I don’t think the small, thin stocks with relatively
fragile pods would prove to be terribly durable under snow banks.I wrote
earlier about the famine potential we face due to the underfertilization of
the wheat crop. Wheat that gets enough ammonia is 14% protein, if it is
unfertilized closer to 8%, and that 43% reduction in total plant protein is
going to cause unimaginable suffering in places like Egypt, where half of the
population gets subsidized bread. Global end of season per capita wheat stocks
have been about seventy pounds my entire life, except the last three years
where they’ve dropped to only forty pounds. One mistake in this area and one
of the four horsemen gets loose, certainly dragging his brothers along behind.
That mistake may already have been made in the lack of wheat fertilization
this fall.The fall nitrogen fertilizer application has been 10% of the norm. A
typical year would see 50% put on in the fall and 50% in the spring. During
fertilizer application season the 3,100 mile national ammonia pipeline network
runs flat out and the far points on the network experience low flow both fall
and spring. If they try to jam 90% of the fertilization into a period of time
when the system can only flow a little more than half of the need much of our
cropland will go without in the spring of 2009.Finances as much as weather are
the issue with regards to fertilization this fall. Crop prices have fallen to
half of what they were, ammonia prices have dropped but ammonia suppliers
here, receiving 75% of their supply from overseas, still have product in their
storage tanks purchase at the historical highs last spring and summer.When
farmers plant they record the acreage and they purchase crop insurance – $20
to $40 an acre depending on the crop. If they have a failure they file a
claim, an adjustor contacts them, and they get a check to cover the deficit.
Some of this runs through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and some of it is
through private insurers.My conversations with farmers earlier this week lead
me to believe that the largest private insurer, Des Moines Iowa’s Rain and
Hail Agricultural Insurance may be insolvent. Flooding claims from this spring
were filed and payments would have typically been received by the end of June
or beginning of July. It’s now the end of November and payments are not being
dispersed. Individual farmers are told there was something wrong with their
paperwork, but this is nonsense – some of these guys have been farming
thirty years and they all didn’t forget how to fill out a simple form all at
the same time. Iowa did have its second five hundred year flood in a decade
and a half this spring which certainly has something to do with the situation,
but I suspect Wall Street’s sticky fingers got hold of Rain & Hail’s assets,
just as they’ve done to every pension fund and state run municipal investment
pool.So, we’re already facing what Bryan Lutter calls “the mother of all
fertilizer shortages” next spring and on top of that local banks won’t lend to
farmers.The local bank was quite willing to lend to a farmer on a crop despite
the weather related risks just like they’d lend on a car despite the driving
risks. So long as the asset was insured the risk was deemed manageable. There
were sure to be losses here and there, but they’d be administrative hassles
associated with well known risks. If the auto insurance companies were viewed
as untrustworthy no one would be getting a car without 100% down at the
dealership and the same rule is now in effect for farmers.Farmers without
financing can’t afford nitrogen fertilizer at $1,000 a ton, which translates
to $100 an acre at current application rates. They won’t be paying $300 for a
bag of 80,000 hybrid corn kernels, again a $100 per acre expense. The average
farm size in Iowa is four hundred acres and planting to harvesting would run
about $120,000.This looks incredibly bad. Bryan and I are both puzzled as to
why the mainstream media isn’t covering this. Perhaps the need to sell
Christmas season advertising trumps the need for the public to know about the
troubles that are brewing.This is already 1,600 words and I haven’t even
touched Verasun. Executive summary? The nation’s second largest ethanol maker
took corn from farmers, went bankrupt without paying many of them, and a whole
lot of family farms are going to be foreclosed upon in short order if
something isn’t done.
http://standeyo.com/NEWS/08_Food_Water/081128.famine.2009.html