Health Freedom Requires Healthy Food
The Natural Solutions Foundation is concerned with the quality and health-promoting impact of food, thus our strong opposition to the continuing degradation of the global food supply through Codex and the use of unlabeled and dangerous food components and treatments such as genetically modified foods, pesticides, growth hormones and irradiation. We are also aware that if we are to support a sustainable world and its health needs through healthy and abundant food, we must reclaim food production. For that reason, we have initiated the International Decade of Nutrition (IDN). The premise upon which IDN is based is that we already have enough information, technology and capacity to eliminate world hunger and most world disease. Of course, we do not know everything we will know, but what we know now is sufficient to make these goals an attainable reality using simple, effective and high-impact/low-tech procedures to grow and reclaim food production and help local farmers sustain themselves, their families and their communities with clean, inexpensive and healthy food.
We are currently in discussion with a leading-edge company to provide one of those technologies to a number of pilot projects in the desert, the jungle, temperate climates, etc., to field test a safe, sustainable, and effective method to increase crop yield by as much as 6 times, nutrient density by the same amount, reduce water usage substantially and virtually eliminate crop loss post harvest.
These means will allow subsistence and community-based farmers to stay on their land, feed their communities with the clean, chemical free food they grow, support their families and resist the forces of the industrialization of the world’s food supply: Codex, genetically modified crops and animals, chemical farming and their combined pressure to take away the land and livelihood.
In February of 2008 General Stubblebine and Dr. Laibow will visit African countries to initiate agricultural projects using these high tech options and are in discussion with a Thai NGO for similar pruposes.
Here is what the Financial Post has to say about the new shortage of food caused by the use of farmland for bio fuels:
Forget oil, the new global crisis is food
BMO strategist Donald Coxe warns credit crunch and soaring oil prices will pale in comparison to looming catastrophe
Alia McMullen, Financial Post Published: Friday, January 04, 2008
Corn grows in a farm field near Seneca, Illinois. Rising demand for grain to make fuel, food and livestock feed has helped push the prices of corn and soybeans.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesCorn grows in a farm field near Seneca, Illinois. Rising demand for grain to make fuel, food and livestock feed has helped push the prices of corn and soybeans.
A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club’s 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto on Thursday.
“It’s not a matter of if, but when,” he warned investors. “It’s going to hit this year hard.”
Mr. Coxe said the sharp rise in raw food prices in the past year will intensify in the next few years amid increased demand for meat and dairy products from the growing middle classes of countries such as China and India as well as heavy demand from the biofuels industry.
“The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil; it’s getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we’ve got to expand food output dramatically,” he said.
The impact of tighter food supply is already evident in raw food prices, which have risen 22% in the past year.
Mr. Coxe said in an interview that this surge would begin to show in the prices of consumer foods in the next six months. Consumers already paid 6.5% more for food in the past year.
Wheat prices alone have risen 92% in the past year, and yesterday closed at US$9.45 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade.
At the centre of the imminent food catastrophe is corn – the main staple of the ethanol industry. The price of corn has risen about 44% over the past 15 months, closing at US$4.66 a bushel on the CBOT yesterday – its best finish since June 1996.
This not only impacts the price of food products made using grains, but also the price of meat, with feed prices for livestock also increasing.
“You’re going to have real problems in countries that are food short, because we’re already getting embargoes on food exports from countries, who were trying desperately to sell their stuff before, but now they’re embargoing exports,” he said, citing Russia and India as examples.
“Those who have food are going to have a big edge.”
With 54% of the world’s corn supply grown in America’s mid-west, the U.S. is one of those countries with an edge.
But Mr. Coxe warned U.S. corn exports were in danger of seizing up in about three years if the country continues to subsidize ethanol production. Biofuels are expected to eat up about a third of America’s grain harvest in 2007.
The amount of U.S. grain currently stored for following seasons was the lowest on record, relative to consumption, he said.
“You should be there for it fully-hedged by having access to those stocks that benefit from rising food prices.”
He said there are about two dozen stocks in the world that are going to redefine the world’s food supplies, and “those stocks will have a precious value as we move forward.”
Mr. Coxe said crop yields around the world need to increase to something close to what is achieved in the state of Illinois, which produces over 200 corn bushes an acre compared with an average 30 bushes an acre in the rest of the world.
“That will be done with more fertilizer, with genetically modified seeds, and with advanced machinery and technology,” he said.
