An American look at global food shortages. Just how vulnerable are First World countries?

How Far is the US From Food Shortages and Food Riots?

by Monica Davis ( davis4000_2000 [at] yahoo.com )
Saturday Apr 12th, 2008 2:37 PM

 

Even the United States is not immune from the potential for food shortages, food riots and food insecurity. We're just blind to the possibility.

As Americans complain over high gasoline and food prices, many third world countries are experiencing food riots over price and scarcity of food. In some parts of the word rice is so expensive that it is transported in heavily guarded convoys and farmers guard their fields from thieves.---

Experts say the high prices will continue for years, putting billions of people at risk for malnutrition or starvation. World leaders continue to cast fearful eyes at the burgeoning bio-fuels industry, noting that the competition generated by the industrial biofuels industry and food agriculture is pushing up food prices and making it more profitable to grow fuel crops for industrialized countries than it is for big farmers in Third World countries to grow food for their own citizens.---

 

So far, Americans are mostly bystanders in the game, content to grumble at the gas pump and complain in the grocery aisles. As a "First World" nation, the United States so far has not been subject to the food riots, which we have seen in Haiti and other parts of the world. Americans have more per capita income than much of the world; hence the crisis of the Third World, so far, is inconvenience in the "First World" and in developed nations such as the United States.

That said, however, we must understand that this situation is not sustainable. While Americans do have more disposable income than the rest of the word, that income is not unlimited and our food supply is much more vulnerable than we think. When it comes to food security, both in terms of supply and accessibility, this country is much more vulnerable than we think.

As one retired grain salesman noted, most of the nation's grain is moved around the country by just TWO railroads. Little is stored in the event of disaster and the whole system is extremely vulnerable. While we in the United States look at the food riots in other countries with a sense of disbelief, we are not immune. Under the right circumstances, we could be in the same boat. (Ibid)

In order for riots to break out the whole food supply doesn't have to be wiped out. It just has to be threatened sufficiently. When people realize their vulnerability and the fact that there is no short-term solution to a severe enough drought in the Midwest they will have no clue as to what they should do. Other nations can't make up the difference because no other nation has a surplus of grain in good times let alone in times when they are having droughts and floods also. (Robert Felix, "US Food Riots Much Closer than You Think")

Critics say the US is currently too preoccupied with foreign excursions and oil to pay attention to food security, particularly how concentration of suppliers and processors threaten the food chain. The highly concentrated meat processing industry has generated millions of pounds of recalls this year. Outbreaks in e.coli and other food borne pathogens continue to haunt the headlines, as food prices rise around the world.

 

Complete article here.

Desperate measures for desperate times in Liberal Land

With Brendan Nelson failing to secure good opinion poll figures and John Howard always inconveniently popping up on the evening news to remind voters that no matter how the Liberals try to re-brand themselves they remain arrogant little dictators at heart, rumour is starting to surface that some Canberra party heavies are becoming rather desperate.

One or two are even said to be hunting for a connection (any connection) between the Rudd family and the NSW political donations scandal.

Apparently search engines have been running hot and now these little possums are beginning to scratch above ultra-violet and dig below infra-red in an effort to find something which will go crack-boom during the next round of Question Time.

So far they appear to be having limited success, but are providing a bit of amusement for those ever present watchers on the hill.

Nelson's mob seem to have a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock these days.

Barack hits back at 'elitist' jibe, but doesn't miss a beat in money raising efforts

Using the Obama for President email campaign as a guideline, one can be forgiven for thinking that an American president is being chosen solely on the success of fundraising efforts.
Here is today's email hitting out at Clinton and McCain while shoving a begging bowl under the nose.

You've probably heard about the latest dust-up in the Democratic race.
A few days ago, Barack spoke about the frustrations that working people in this country are feeling and said what we all know is true: that many people are bitter and angry because they believe their government isn't listening to them.
You and I both know that the hope of changing that reality is what drives the unprecedented support for this campaign from ordinary people in every part of the country.
But our opponents have been spinning the media and peddling fake outrage around the clock. John McCain's campaign, which will continue the George Bush economic policies that have devastated the middle class, called Barack out of touch and elitist. And Hillary Clinton, who is the candidate who said lobbyists represent real people, didn't just echo the Republican candidate's talking points: she actually used the very same words to pile on with more attacks.
These comments show just how out of touch Senator McCain and Senator Clinton are with the reality of what's happening in this election.
We've built the broadest campaign of ordinary people in the history of presidential politics -- and more people across this country have voted for Barack Obama than either one of them.
And we've done it the right way: our campaign is funded by everyday people giving $5 or more. That's distinctly different from Senator McCain and Senator Clinton, who both rely on money from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs.
There's nothing elitist about a movement of more than a million people standing up for a different kind of politics.
If you're fed up with these kinds of tired attacks, you can do something about it right now. We're setting a goal of 1.5 million people giving to this campaign by May 6th.
Right now, one of those million people who have already given to our campaign is waiting to match your first donation. No matter what amount you choose to give, our system will match you with a supporter who has promised to match someone's first donation today.
You can see for yourself exactly what kind of movement this is. When you make your donation, you'll see the name and town of the person just like you who matched your gift. You'll also see a note from them with their story and why they gave, if they chose to write one.
You'll double the impact of your donation if you make a matching gift right now. Will you help fight back now?
http://my.barackobama.com/match
Barack Obama's own life and story are reflected in the character of this grassroots campaign. He was raised by a single mother with help from his grandparents. He has a family he loves, not long ago finished paying off his student loans, and he's doing what he can to help change this country.
That's what he's done for his entire career. After graduating, he became a community organizer, working with people in Chicago who -- like many people across the country right now -- felt left behind by their leaders.
When you make a matching donation, you'll be paired with someone with that same sense that it's time for a government that is responsible to the people for a change.
Someone is waiting to hear your story, and to share theirs with you. If you can support the campaign at this crucial moment, you'll be able to share your story about why you're committed to this campaign.
And because this is a matching donation, your gift of $25 will be doubled by another supporter. You'll have twice the impact and help reach our unprecedented 1.5 million-person goal. Make a matching donation now and be a part of history:
http://my.barackobama.com/match
The attacks from the Clinton campaign -- on Barack Obama himself, and on supporters like you -- can be expected to increase as her chances of winning dwindle further.
A few weeks ago, one of her top aides tried to diminish our success by referring to the places we've won as "boutique" states and to our supporters as the "latte-sipping crowd."
That means 30 states and territories -- twice as many as Senator Clinton has won -- qualify as "boutique." And the nearly 15 million people who have voted for us (again, more than Senator Clinton) must drink a lot of latte.
It's clear that Senator Clinton will continue to say or do anything as her campaign gets more and more negative.
But 1.5 million donors will be an astonishing and undeniable signal that it isn't the elites fueling this movement -- it's the American people.
That starts with you.
Thank you,
David
David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

How clean are our Northern Rivers valleys?

The Australian National Pollution Inventory allows you to take a tour of your area by post code and see exactly what significant pollutants are considered to occur in local industry.
Something perhaps NSW North Coast residents in all our many valleys should be doing.

Here is a snapshot of northern NSW Clarence Valley basically listing the substances which are required to be reported.

Yamba post code area only has 2 substances from 7 sources, which are nitrogen and phosphorus coming from agricultural activity.
Across the Clarence River and into the Iluka post code area showed that a very similar profile existed to that in Yamba.
While in the Maclean post code the plot thickens with 10 substances out of 15 sources, mostly coming from mineral, metal and chemical wholesaling with some from agricultural activity.
In the Harwood post code there were 33 substances from 8 sources, mainly coming from the sugar manufacturing in the area.
Grafton post code had 28 substances from 20 sources, adding log sawmilling, timber dressing and other wood product manufacturing to the first two broad categories.

Unfortunately this only tells a fraction of a very complex story - a little herbicide or pesticide anyone?

How dumb is Liberal Frontbencher Christopher Pyne?

Answer: As dumb as proverbial dog sh*t!

Today's Age reports that Pyne, the Liberal Party Federal Member for Sturt (SA), holds the view that the electoral system should be changed so that if a member of the House of Representatives retired, his [sic] party could choose a replacement to see out the term.

What a coincidence! Pyne is running with this line at a time when a number of coalition rats are gearing themselves up to jump ship despite having stood before their electorates not so long ago and declared their intentions of representing those electorates for the term of the current parliament.

Yes, Christopher, the election was only as far back as 24th November 2007.

Already, Peter McGauran, a Nationals' MP, has pulled the plug and created a vacancy in the Victorian seat of Gippsland.

Who'll be the next rat? Will it be Pyne's fellow crow eater, the out-to-lunch Member for Mayo, Alexander (of fishnet tights fame) Downer? Or, will it be the Nats' Mark Vaile, who has already done a spot of moonlighting?

Sorry, Christopher, but if your colleagues are not prepared to go the distance of a full term in Opposition and you would have electorates saved the expense of a by-election then a more palatable solution could be to have the candidate who finished second in the election fill the vacancy.

Of course, we could always require retiring MPs to fork out and contribute towards the expenses of the by-election.

Are these the nongs who want to set off rabbit hunts at the office?

Yesterday I woke to find that the Rudd Government had lost its tiny mind and finally lurched so far right that it was convincingly lost in a strange black ops forest.

Yep, it had called up the terrorist bogey man to insist that it was fit and proper to let an employer snoop unannounced into every email passing through an office computer or a company laptop being used by a worker while out in the big bad world.

 

So who or what has been whispering in the shell-like ears of our fearless Cabinet members?

After US Homeland Security and FBI, the first Aussie culprit appears to be The Research Network for a Secure Australia, a "multi-disciplinary collaboration established to strengthen Australia's research capacity for protecting critical infrastructure from natural or human caused disasters including terrorist acts" and provide security "commercialisation opportunities", funded by the Australian Government (at least until next year) and administered by Melbourne University.

 

Looking at the Network's management and advisory line up, I am flabbergasted that all these academics and professionals could apparently come up with to 'protect' Australia from cyber threats was a plan to spy on ordinary people.

 

The management committee contacts are:

A/Prof. Priyan Mendis
Reader, Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering
The University of Melbourne,
Prof. Ed Dawson

Director- Information Security Institute
Queensland University of Technology
Prof. Joseph Lai
Associate Dean (Research)
UNSW @ ADFA
Australian Defence Force Academy

 

Its advisory committee is made up of the following:

Chair:
Mr. Mike Rothery (Director, Critical Infrastructure Branch, Attorney-General's Dept.).

Members:
Dr. Richard Davis (Head, NSST Unit);
Dr. Lynn Booth (DSTO);
Mr. Bruce Howard (Engineers Australia, Security Commissioner);
Prof. Ed Dawson (QUT);
Prof. Peter Anderson (PICT, Macquarie University);
Mr. Jason Brown (General Manager, Thales);
Craig Sharkie (CSL Ltd);
Tony Sleigh (NSW Lands);
Mr. Warwick Watkins (Director-General NSW Lands);
A/Prof Priyan Mendis (Convenor of RNSA);
Prof. Joseph Lai (ADFA);
Ms. Jennie Clothier (DSTO);
Mr. Terry Vincent (Australian Bomb Data Centre).

Advisory Board Secretary:
Mr. Athol Yates (Australian Homeland Security Research Centre)

 

The Australian Homeland Security Research Centre  which gives the advisory board its secretary also has an expertise roll call that makes for interesting reading. An employment background  combination of business, military, embassy and spooks all seemingly looking to sell us something to fight that bogeyman.

 

Of course the bogeyman is just as likely to be an infrastructure company like Telstra who very recently repaired an internet exchange box storm-damage fault with an equally faulty computer card and launched its own 2-day denial of service cyber attack on Yamba customers by bringing down its broadband service.

And in the process actually realising the observation that being struck by lightening is more probable than a terrorist attack!

Rudd Government disappoints over personal privacy and the workplace

Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard and the Federal Attorney-General may have announced the Rudd Government's intention to allow business to secretly snoop on employees e-mails, but it is easy to see Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Senator Stephen Conroy's puritanical hand in all this as well.

Even if this holier-than-thou senator has nothing up on his website or that of his department at the moment.

 

According to The Age almost any business in Australia which considers itself vital to the national economy will be given these new intercept powers.

Apparently on the basis that every worker is now a potential terrorist threat and every emailed picture of their youngest's first tooth or of last Saturday's party is likely to be a cyber attack.

 

Though I honestly doubt that US Homeland Security-driven Cyber Storm ll simulations conducted globally and here in March actually came to such a conclusion.

The weeklong exercise 18 months in the planning and involved 18 U.S. federal agencies, 5 countries, 9 states, 40 companies, and 10 information sharing and analysis centres. This 'war game' involved disruptions of telecommunications, the Internet and control systems.

Indeed its interim conclusions appeared to be more about further global linking of government and corporate bodies and increased information sharing. 

The 2006 Cyber Storm l report also did not identify e-mail traffic as a potential problem.

 

One has to wonder exactly how monitoring what an employee writes will suddenly stop cyber attacks involving e-mails.

Especially when this seems to be the usual scenario.

 

Top-level business executives, including CEOs, presidents, CIOs, and CFOs, are being directly targeted by e-mails containing malicious Trojans. Cyberattackers know how to follow the money, which is why they often set their sights on companies that are rich with customer data that can be sold online to other attackers and to fraudsters. Now it's getting personal, with top-level business executives, including CEOs, presidents, CIOs, and CFOs, finding themselves being directly targeted by e-mails containing malicious Trojans.

 

All of which points to flaws in company security software as the major security problem. However, rather than invest in some form of reliable secure mail relay, corporate Australia wants to spy in the workplace instead.

A move that appears to have more to do with a corporate desire to find whistle-blowers or build a case to move unpopular employees out the door.

 

Today's The Age article.

 

The proposal has been slammed by civil liberty groups, who say the new laws would be abused by employers.

"These new powers will facilitate fishing expeditions into employees' e-mails and computer use rather than being used to protect critical infrastructure," said Dale Clapperton from Electronic Frontiers Australia.

"I'm talking about corporate eavesdropping and witch-hunts ... If an employer wanted to bone someone, they could use these powers."

The government hopes to have the new laws in place by the middle of next year.

 

The biggest mistake that Kevin Rudd made on taking government was to leave Howard's neo-con public service mandarins in place. Their advice frequently borders on the unsafe or absurd and the Rudd Ministry is showing itself as foolish in its reliance on such advice.

 

It is disappointing to see Julia Gillard lend her name to this intrusive cyber nonsense. She was the one Labor politician I thought would not lose her perspective simply because she was now part of government.

I suggest that Ms. Gillard look at whether Australian business executives have truly tried all other alternatives to what is now suggested.

She might start by asking them all to complete this Security School multichoice quiz to see if they even understand what e-mail security is about.

A Harvard student spills the beans on that speech - John Howard bored, fizzled and embarrassed

In last Thursday's issue of The Harvard Independent Student one Australian gave an undergraduate

view of John Howard's university speech and his meeting with the 'great leader'.

 

Here are some highlights.

 

"It was to the collective antipodean chagrin that John Howard, recently voted out of government in Australia, was repeatedly referred to as "Prime Minister" on his recent visit to the Kennedy School of Government's IOP forum. Perhaps I am mistaken, but "Prime Minister" is not to my knowledge an honorific title that once acquired is taken to the grave."

 

"When I implied that the Australian tertiary education system was held together by chewing gum and fee paying foreign students Mr. Howard stuttered:"Yes, well there's been a flood of Chinese students taking advantage of the opportunities presenting themselves." Such is the delicacy of the man. He might as well have alluded to the "Yellow Peril" without actually addressing my point."

 

"The Howards wanted to know what we all planned to do. Around we went, finance, law, and charity featuring prominently. When I said I wanted to be a journalist Mr. Howard grimaced a little, like a man discovering spoilage in an otherwise preserved bottle of red. He exlaimed, "A journo! What do you want to spend your time writing about people like me for?"
What indeed. Fortunately, before I could explain myself an anemic looking aid came in and suggested we leave. The talk was beginning."

 

"John Howard doesn't speak from text. He freestyles with the convincing invective of a stuttering schoolboy debater. It has a charm, it must be conceded, but it is not the silky polish of Bill Clinton or the merciless sophistry of Tony Blaire. He misuses words, jumbles them and draws on an outdated vocabulary.

Howard appears to be at pains to prove things that are self-evident. He has the conservative, unimaginative, "we know what we know" way of talking which must have made him very convincing in suburban litigation. Good fences make good neighbors."

 

"The speech gave little insight into Sino-Australian or American-Australian relations and, but for some irksome factual errors, succeeded in boring the majority of those in attendance. At one stage, Mr. Howard referred to Australia as a "Western European nation" in the Asian Pacific region. Cringe. It was full of classic Howard half-tautologies that meant nothing, yet were exasperatingly inefficient: "I've learned over the years from my time in politics that the substance of what you do is more important than the symbolism; but also symbolism can mean a great deal and can say a lot about relations between society's and nations."

Q. When is a media release not a good idea? A. When you are the Federal Shadow Minister for Business Development

On 2nd April Nationals MP for Cowper and very vague Shadow Minister for Business Development, Luke Hartsuyker, had a brilliant idea and sent out a media release on the evils of the Rudd Government.

The local freebie newspaper Clarence Valley Review picked up on the media release a week later under the front page headline Hartsuyker blames Rudd for unemployment rise.

So far so good. Start anticipating a run on the board.

However this little National did not plan far enough ahead. He didn't tee up a few tame local fellow travellers to supply a quote or two.

Which left me chortling, because not one of the four business chamber leaders contacted and quoted by the reporter agreed with Luke.

Indeed he was called 'hasty' and found guilty of a 'knee jerk reaction' and the general opinion appears to have been that the rise in the December 2007 Small Area Labour Market unemployment figures (between .02-.04 of a percentage point) was more likely due to interest rate rises.

All that Mr. Hartsuyker got in exchange for his trouble was a very red face. The evidence of which was delivered to around 18,000 households and businesses in the Clarence Valley.

Somebody should remind the Member for Cowper that flirting with the media is always a dangerous occupation. 

Governor-General Her Excellency Ms. Quentin Bryce AC - how sweet the sound

Although you can't see it, the grin I am wearing stretches from ear-to-ear.

Raised in an era when the lives of women and girls were constricted and confined by various religious, social and economic taboos, I may have seen quite a few things change on the way to 2008 but I never thought to see the day when Australia's Head of State would have a female Vice-Regal representative.

The words Governor-General Her Excellency Ms. Quentin Bryce AC trip like sweet music from the tongue.

 

The Courier Mail report earlier today.

 

How Queenslanders sees Her Excellency and Queensland Government official brief biography.