Food prices are rising as biofuel uses up farm land and farmer’s time. Worse, Codex compliant foods, shipped long distances, add much more to global warming than locally produced and consumed foods (whose nutrients are more available and taste better, too). But all over the world, food is becoming so expensive, and the food shortages of food in storage are becoming so extreme that the ability of the poorest members of society to obtain food is becoming more and more difficult.
The following Australian article notes that a the price of a cow has increased in the past year from $700 Australian dollars to $1400 this fall. What this means to the poorest is cataclysmic. What it means to the middle class is difficult. What it means to the international corporations that control the production of food (Big Agribiz and Big Biotechna) is what disease means to Big Pharma and the rest of the illness care industry: profits, and big ones at that.
The David Suzuki Foundation notes that a basic North American meal could travel about 1,500 miles to get to your dinner table?
Transporting food causes greenhouse gases that lead to global climate change while locally grown foods help conserve farmlands and wildlife habitats. Local food also reduces the environmental costs of food transportation and is more likely to be fresh than food shipped long distances.
In fact, local eating has a new name: locovores. People whose diet consists primarily of food grown in their local areas have taken on the characteristics of a new type of human. Locovores celebrate the seasons and eat what their region produces all year long. Locovores can be meat eaters, non meat eaters, vegans, raw foodists or whatever they please. But whatever they fill their plates with, it did not travel long to get there. They are saving fuel, saving time, saving costs and saving the planet. And their food tastes better, too. Not a bad deal.
Grow and eat local organic produce to stem this tide of manipulated sticker shock and failing food supplies. Better yet, grow some or all of your own food in your own gardens or in community gardens. Find out more about community gardens from Canadian Health, the American Community Gardening Association (http://www.communitygarden.org/).
Do yourself and the planet a favor. Help counter the global food shortage by buying and eating locally.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
Food fear beats climate change
Article from: The Advertiser, Australia
CLARE PEDDIE, SCIENCE REPORTER
January 17, 2008 09:30pm
A WORSENING global food shortage is a problem far more urgent than climate change, top Australian scientists have warned.
The Australian Science Media Centre briefing heard why prices for some staple foods had risen by as much as 60 per cent in the past year, and how dramatic price rises are expected to sweep across all staples in the near future.
Executive director of the Australian Farm Institute Mick Keogh said dairy products, grain and poultry had seen the strongest price rises in recent months.
Beef and lamb were forecast to follow, with nationwide livestock shortages taking the average price for a cow from $700 a head 12 months ago to $1400 a head going into autumn.
Key speaker at the national science briefing Professor Julian Cribb said the security of our food supply is “the global scientific challenge of our time”.
The problem was more urgent even than climate change, said Professor Cribb, from the University of Technology in Sydney, because it will get us first . . . through famine and war. “By 2050 we will have to feed the equivalent of 13 billion people at today’s levels of nutrition,” he said.
“This situation brings with it the very real possibility of regional and global instability. Investment in global food stability is now defence spending and requires proportionate priority.”
A “knowledge drought” – the lack of innovation to address farm productivity challenges – had added to the crisis, Professor Cribb said.
He called for a massive increase in public investment in agricultural research and development.
Farmers face challenges posed by drought, climate change, rising oil prices, erosion and nutrient loss combined with more demand for food stocks and biofuels.
Global grain stocks have fallen to their lowest level since record-keeping began in 1960, while Australia’s sheep flock is at its lowest since the mid-1920s, with about 86 million.
In September last year 2007 the Australian Bureau of Statistics found consumers were paying 11.9 per cent more for basic food items than they were two years before. That is almost double the Consumer Price Index rise of 5.9 per cent during the period.
