July 25, 2011

Introduction: A few days ago, this was published: “Twelve Signs the World is Running out of Food”.

Mama Liberty (Lady Susan, KNA) had this immediate reaction: “Such c***. Not a single indication of the real problems, just another indictment of the "greedy" capitalist pigs" of America. Meanwhile the picture they choose to make their point shows boxes of food supplied by Americans! Insane.

The picture painted is a bad one, but they are using a warped view of the world: warped by a mindset sometimes called “left-libertarian” which exhibits itself in a rabid and instinctive hatred of capitalism (of any kind, not just “crony capitalism” or “global capitalism”), Americans, and usually religions (predominantly Western religions) and with a strong streak of Luddism. This can be seen in the article, which is more an attack on concentration of wealth and the “unfair” life style of Americans and Europeans than a sound argument for world starvation.

For centuries, millennia, most people of the world lived FAR closer to starvation on a daily and annual basis than almost anyone in Africa or Asia does today. It is the United States, closely followed by the British Commonwealth, Europe, and some of South America, that in the last 200 years has ended that situation virtually worldwide. Thence, thirteen reasons, a Baker’s Dozen ™ that we are NOT running out of food in 2011 and 2012. I am not supplying references or citations for these; if someone wants to challenge me, I’ll be glad to look up the specific support for my thirteen rebuttals.

1. Supposedly, Americans are getting more obese by the second.

2. In Western countries, including the US, the most obese portion of the population consists of those who are the poorest and on welfare, such as food stamps (excuse me, SNAP). The same is true of the elite populations and their clients in Third World states.

3. Each year, Western governments pay billions of dollars to farmers and corporations NOT to grow certain crops which produce food.

4. Environmentalists in Western countries work each year to reduce the amount of land (both government and private) that can be used for crops or livestock, and millions of acres of land lie vacant as a result with the amount growing each year.

5. Other environmentalists spend millions each year fighting against genetic engineering and traditional breeding and hybrid programs that have, in the past 50 years, quadrupled the efficiency of crops and livestock in producing food, and could continue to do so.

6. Multiple governments have prohibited the use of horses for human consumption, consigning millions of pounds of meat to be buried or placed in landfills.

7. Liberals and other environmentalists advocate for the government purchase of land in rain forests and other climates to prevent its conversion into cropland by farmers.

8. Multiple governments promote the use of millions of TONS of food crops such as corn, soybeans, and sugar crops (cane, beets, etc.) for fuel production rather than food production.

9. For a century or more, governments have encouraged people to stop farming and instead move into cities to work or go on welfare, either directly or indirectly (through war, especially).

10. Many governments are encouraging or requiring that wetlands previously converted to use as cropland or grazing land be returned to wetlands and therefore to produce only a very tiny fraction of food compared to the past. At the same time, dams and levee projects and urbanization continue to destroy massive amounts of cropland.

11. More and more cities use codes that criminalize vegetable gardens, small animal production, bee keeping and so forth in their jurisdictions.

12. Criminalization of crops such as hemp that would provide a great deal of good food for both man and animal.

13. Bureaucratic rules criminalize selling substandard fruit and vegetables, and require them to be destroyed, while other bureaucratic rules make food packing and distribution either far more expensive than necessary, or impossible.

If we were so close to famine and starvation as the writers at “economic collapse blog” and other doom-and-gloom sites claim, surely the peoples of the world would rise up and do more than protest, vote, and write letters – all worthless occupations.

Isn’t it time we stopped predicting disaster and started taking responsibility for our own lives and fortunes?

Are we going to get used to no food?

About the same time as the article “Twelve Signs the World is Running out of Food” was published on Lew Rockwell (and the Economic Collapse Log), another article was published: “Getting Used to Life Without Food, Part 1, Wall Street, BP, Bio-Ethanol and the Death of Millions.”

In this article, greedy capitalists, free markets, and do-nothing governments are blamed for an upcoming food disaster which will hit the entire world. Whether this happens before or after we all drown from the rising oceans of global warming or freeze from the sudden global cooling of reduced sun activity, or before incandescent light bulbs or the destruction of water supplies or the deforestation of the world’s jungles occur, I’m not sure. But I think the article is a load of dingo’s kidneys.

First, isn’t it lovely how they accuse the free market, when the free market does not exist for all intents and purposes? What we have is just a sick government-run pretense, even here in the US.

I've done the calculations in the past, and still think that they are valid: converting corn or other food products to ethanol may be enough to affect the price, but does NOT reduce food production significantly. We have millions of acres of uncultivated land, mostly land which has been taken OUT of production over the past decades, that can be put back into production. If…

Food shortages are almost always related to governmental policies and failures. Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Haiti all come to mind. Of course, government policies and failures cause war, which in turn leads to all sorts of shortages, and thus hunger and starvation. That really is what the article is talking about: all the government policies changing the way things were done and triggering cataclysmic changes in food supply and distribution, not just on a national, but on a global scale. Exactly the OPPOSITE of their rhetoric; their mental sickness helps them think that MORE government intervention can reverse the results of decades of government intervention.

I don't doubt that changing government policies and the endless rounds of GATT and WTO and the rest of the bogus "free-trade" stuff have impacted on food supplies, reserves, and the like. But these are NOT part of a free-market, just a perversion of the word to describe the current government -micromanaged economy that we are watching die. But this socialist website (and many more) seems to delight in confusing the two. However, they can't get their data straight. Either global agribusiness is pricing the food out of the reach of billions or they are dropping the price of food so much that local farmers in various countries can't compete; they are either poisoning us all with genies or increasing food production or not.

The writer refused to make any reasonable correlations. Example: he claims that the various governments in North American and Europe have stopped their "wise" practice of having years (he claims seven years - funny, doesn't that number show up in Genesis with Joseph as Prime Minister?) of grain reserves, which he sees as a bad thing. He then laments that private business has not picked up the slack as expected. But he fails to note that it would be insane from a business point of view to create and maintain such supplies, since as soon as demand rose due to crop failures or other problems and the companies tried to sell their stocks at a free market price, government would step in and either force price freezes, or just steal it. At the same time, government has trashed the value of "money" and so created an inflationary spiral, while politicians - to prove that they care - have destroyed the ag sector of nations around the world.

It appears that the bottom line is much simpler than they claim. In the last 50 years, as the world population more than doubled, the total number of people who have died of starvation (for whatever reason) has pretty steadily dropped, so as a percentage of total population, the death toll is going down even if inflation and other shenanigans are continuing. It makes me suspect that if we could get government OUT of the food business, that we WOULD come pretty close to eliminating starvation, hunger, malnutrition and "food security" problems (except for those people who do it to themselves or whose parents do it to them), with the exception of war. And the more that we could get government out of our lives, the closer we'd come to eliminating war and tyranny as causes for hunger as well.

Going back again and reading both articles, virtually ALL of their issues are socialist-type economic issues and their statistics are slanted. Some have NO basis in any study that I can find, just a bald claim made in an obviously-biased website. Among other things, a lot has to do with percentage of ownership of wealth and similar issues, or with inflation, and inflation - even in the world of Lew Rockwell - is a purely government-caused headache. These sound like Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) sort of mad ravings; although given the current administration's sudden panic about "food security" and "food deserts" this may be part of a much wider effort to push massive socialist programs.

For example, they claim one death from starvation every 3.6 seconds, and the reference is to a web site which simply makes that statement (and that 3/4 of those are children) but NO reference at all. That amounts to 8,760,000 people per year, of which 6,570,000 are children. But a Wikipedia article on causes of death, which does provide SOME citations, claims that 58% of all deaths are related to hunger and malnutrition, and that about 6 million children die each year:

Jean Ziegler"The Right to Food: Report by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Mr. Jean Ziegler, Submitted in Accordance with Commission on Human Rights Resolution 2000/10".United Nations, February 7, 2001, p. 5.

"On average, 62 million people die each year, of whom probably 36 million (58 per cent) directly or indirectly as a result of nutritional deficiencies, infections, epidemics or diseases which attack the body when its resistance and immunity have been weakened by undernourishment and hunger.".

Food and Agriculture Organization, Economic and Social Dept."The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2005: Eradicating World Hunger - Key to Achieving the Millennium Development Goals".Food and Agriculture Organizationof theUnited Nations, 2005, p. 18.

"Hunger and malnutrition are the underlying cause of more than half of all child deaths, killing nearly 6 million children each year – a figure that is roughly equivalent to the entire preschool population of Japan. Relatively few of these children die of starvation. The vast majority are killed by neonatal disorders and a handful of treatable infectious diseases, including diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria and measles. Most would not die if their bodies and immune systems had not been weakened by hunger and malnutrition moderately to severely underweight, the risk of death is five to eight times higher."

The numbers do not add up, and being weakened by malnutrition and succumbing to some disease is NOT STARVING to death, however bad it might be. Of course, other web sites are even MORE extreme: Starvation.net claims that 38.6 million people have died of starvation (not malnourishment and other diseases) SO FAR THIS YEAR: That amounts to nearly 70 million per year, or about 8 times what this LRC article claims.

Nor do the various articles identify the other circumstances that have an influence on hunger and malnutrition and starvation in these countries. No just wars and rebellions and raids by enemies, but government policies that both work to reduce food production and then steal it from those who produce it, along with other government policies which limit essentials: uncontested land ownership, water supplies, availability of equipment and materials (including fuels and fertilizers), and of course, the flooding of many countries with food aid which is proven, paradoxically, to reduce the supply of food available.

So these lists of “why we is all gonna starve” are essentially bogus.

But that is NOT the reason that horror-mongering stories like this are written. And we know it: it is to JUSTIFY more government power and theft, more control, more limits. Fear breeds acquiescence to rule by governments. And for that, and that alone, these stories are very successful. And Lew Rockwell, and Financial Sense, among other sites and organizations, should be ashamed of republishing them.

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