MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
World Bank says Latam has capacity and potential to help solve global food crisis
Latin America can help solve the global food crisis by expanding farm production, the World Bank said this weekend, and Colombia said it was on board with plans for an 'agricultural revolution'. Read full article
Comments
Disclaimer & comment rulesLike I said, the worlds bread basket,
Mar 29th, 2011 - 07:51 pm - Link - Report abuse 0all ready to be carved up and sold to the highest bidder .
Briton... I think you are viewing this from a former Empire's perspective. Much has changed in South America (can't speak for the oligarchies of Central America) since colonial days. The countries are becoming more interconnected; sharing facilities and resources, standing up for one another against outside influences, developing technologies internally versus importing them, etc. I am very optimistic about the future of South America, if it can only keep from damaging itself by electing autocrats or by allowing Honduran style coups. There is a vibrancy in S.A. that can grow or be snuffed out by that outside influence. Let's hope that Obama is kept very busy in Af/Pak and Libya.
Mar 30th, 2011 - 12:54 am - Link - Report abuse 0Sold to the highest bidder? South America? haha
Mar 30th, 2011 - 12:57 am - Link - Report abuse 0The world will deal with Mercosur, agree on our terms or starve, your choice.
“Unlike some other developing regions such as Africa, one in seven Latin Americans lives in a city”
Mar 30th, 2011 - 01:19 am - Link - Report abuse 0One in seven? I doubt this statistic is right. In the two biggest LatAm countries, BR and MEX, urbanization is over 80%, and in other larger states, such as Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile, it is over 70%.
Caught Mercopress LYING again.
Mar 30th, 2011 - 01:29 am - Link - Report abuse 0The Mercopress article is an almost exact copy of the link below. I say almost exactly it has changed the second paragraph. The original text reads:
“Unlike some other developing regions such as Africa, seven in 10 Latin Americans live in a city and therefore are subject to food retailers' price increases.”
http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=42535
That is, 70% of LatAms live in cities, not 15% as Mercopress ridiculously suggests. It seems that in efforts to portray LatAm countries in a negative and condescending light, Mercopress has been resorting to forging data.
5 Forgetit86,
Mar 30th, 2011 - 03:04 am - Link - Report abuse 0Why am I not surprised?
Urban population as a percentage of total population in Latin America:
Mar 30th, 2011 - 04:16 am - Link - Report abuse 0http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country
Venezuela 93%
Argentina 92%
Uruguay 92%
Chile 88%
Brazil 86%
Mexico 77%
Cuba 76%
Colombia 74%
Peru 71%
Bolivia 66%
Over 90% of Latin America's population live in the countries above, so Mercopress's one in seven statistic isn't even close to being true. What is Mercopress's agenda, to portray LatAm as some Pakistan? :)
In other words, look for the original article if you want to know the truth.
Mar 30th, 2011 - 04:47 am - Link - Report abuse 0Uruguay 92%, as opposed to the average “15%” Mercopress posted. As if a Uruguayan news agency is going to portray its own country as under-developed.
But lets give Mercopress a break, after all they're 8,000 miles away. How could they possibly know how absurd their articles are?
TWIMC
Mar 30th, 2011 - 06:02 am - Link - Report abuse 0Reuters Fact:
Unlike some other developing regions such as Africa, seven in 10 Latin Americans live in a city…
MercoPress creative writing:
Unlike some other developing regions such as Africa, one in seven Latin Americans lives in a city…
Just a “poetic license” from an Independent Anglo journalist with a South-American “expert degree” obtained after a looong and haaard semester at the “Cuba Libre” University, Miami - Florida :-)
@Martin_Fierro
Mar 30th, 2011 - 07:37 am - Link - Report abuse 0Spot on.
@Think
LOL! And the worst part is the ”Unlike some other developing regions such as Africa (...)”, which seems to suggest that Africa is some heavily urbanized region.
@ 9 Think & other posters, Maybe they meant 7 out of 10 & not 1 out of 7. Mistakes can be made.
Mar 30th, 2011 - 10:46 am - Link - Report abuse 0You lot are showing your insecurity & complexes.
As far as the rest of the article's contents, it was praising South America.
l'd have thought that you would be pleased.
11) Isolde
Mar 30th, 2011 - 11:08 am - Link - Report abuse 0You say:
”Think & other posters, Maybe they meant 7 out of 10 & not 1 out of 7. Mistakes can be made.”
I say:
Like when MercoPress translated a whole article from Fidel Castro replacing his every mention of “Malvinas” with the word Falklands.
The Turnips rejoiced having a man like Castro using the “F” word!
Or when MercoPress reported about some 300 Argentinean toddlers dying of malnutrition in the little province of Misiones last year.
300 was the TOTAL infant mortality (0 to 10 years) in the province for ALL causes (sickness, accidents, natural causes etc. , including 3 deaths caused by malnutrition)
The Turnip crowd cheered until exhaustion……
Or when MercoPress reported about how Néstor liked to punch Cristina directly in the face….
The Turnip Crowd went mad about that “non libelous” relevant piece of journalistic gold.
Or when.................................................
Brainwas anybody?
@lsolde
Mar 30th, 2011 - 06:49 pm - Link - Report abuse 0The article is entirely copy and paste. When using the CTRL+C + CTRL+V, has it ever occurred to you to not get an exact copy of the text being copied? No, because that's impossible.
Btw, it's not the first time that I've seen Mercopress being caught in a lie. Just to give an example of that: last year on an article about a Prosperity Index, Mercopress reported that Argentina had gone down 3 positions in a year. After visiting the Prosperity research's website, I saw that that wasn't true: that Argentina had actually climbed three positions. I wrote on the forum about the dishonesty in the Mercopress article, only to have my post removed after Mercopress erased that chunk of misinformation.
As for us showing insecurity, perhaps you're right. But that Mercopress has a tendency to publish texts that are derogatory of the region as whole and Argentina in particular - derogatory of the peoples, their lives, their countries, their economies and, in case they're governed by a leftist party, their politicians - is a fact. Since you Brits know nothing about the region, you perhaps miss that.
Pamela Cox is talking out of her backside. The world will always reach the point, locally and regionally, where it cannot feed itself. This is the nature of Carrying Capacity, and it is one of ecology's certainties..
Mar 30th, 2011 - 08:26 pm - Link - Report abuse 0The problem can be mitigated by food processing & storage for 'acute' distributions, and for helping in eg. India where vast amounts of good food rots before it is distributed. The problem can be also mitigated if 'bread basket' countries produce surpluses for transfers to locations of food deficit.
The problem is that, as the world dries out with climate change and deforestation, more and more parts of the world will be in food deficit - and this is an accelerating process.
So Brasil - as the world's great prospective food producing nation will have to increase MASSIVELY its production, year in year out, for its own people first and then for the people of the starving world.
But should a nation, itself 'developing', with many regions of severe underdevelopment, do it as an altruistic service to the world?
In part yes, in part no.
Where nations have the wherewithal to pay, it should be a transaction;
where there is no such ability, then altruism should figure.
A little help spread thinly will keep most of the world at starvation level but not dead.
But is this better than favouring whole countries and letting others 'depopulate' ?
. . . . . . . a question the world has yet to address and will be loathe to do so.
12) Think--well, Think, it IS the Falklands, not the Malvinas. So l guess they were making a correction.
Mar 31st, 2011 - 09:38 am - Link - Report abuse 0Did Nestor punch Cristina? l don't know, do you? Men who hit women are cowards. They should get jailtime for that.
l would hope that nobody, Turnips, Swedes, Parsnips or Rutabagas would “cheer to exhaustion” over toddlers' deaths. Very bad taste.
@ 13 Forgetit87, lf you think that MercoPress is that corrupt, then why do you bother to read it?
Just for the record, l have had a couple of posts removed also. On one of them it was justified as l insulted one idiot who annoyed me.
15 lsolde,
Mar 31st, 2011 - 11:56 am - Link - Report abuse 0“On one of them it was justified as l insulted one idiot who annoyed me.”
You had one post removed for insulting, we have every post in which we correct Mercopress removed.
Thanks for proving my point. ;-)
@16, Martin, if you think that it proves your point then feel free to think that. l don't think it does. l had some other posts removed also, but l don't know why, they weren't insulting.
Apr 01st, 2011 - 09:39 am - Link - Report abuse 0Once again, if you don't like MercoPress, then why do you read & post on it? You can leave any time that you like.
No, please don't leave, Martin.
Apr 01st, 2011 - 07:35 pm - Link - Report abuse 0You add colour and counter-point and fun.
@ lsolde
Apr 02nd, 2011 - 01:19 am - Link - Report abuse 0If I ceased reading a news outlet just because of ideological distortion in analysis and reporting, I'd have to avoid all news outlets I know of. Plus, Mercopress provides a fairly wide coverage for South American issues, more so than what I get from my country's press.
Quite agree - there was a definite need to have a Mercopress, and I'm glad came out of this stable (whatever it is) rather than the Chavez press etc.
Apr 02nd, 2011 - 12:25 pm - Link - Report abuse 0At least this way we get to comment without being closed down, thrown out, or disappeared.
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