MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Insufficient harvests and soaring prices anticipate another world food crisis
With droughts parching farms in the United States and near the Black Sea, weak monsoon rains in India and persistent hunger in Africa's Sahel region, the world could be headed towards another food crisis, experts say. Read full article
Comments
Disclaimer & comment rulesThe reason for the droughts is because all the rain seems to be falling in the UK!
Aug 20th, 2012 - 09:43 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Leprecon,
Aug 20th, 2012 - 10:21 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Don't knock it. Here in my corner of Chile, we had rain at the weekend for the first time since Sep 2011!
The reason for the inflated prices is the US government printing dollars ad lib and thus devaluing thier paper money against commodities which are in fixed supply
Aug 20th, 2012 - 10:44 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Its been raining for a month here in Arg.
Aug 21st, 2012 - 12:11 am - Link - Report abuse 0Bad Moon Rising.
http://en.mercopress.com/2012/08/20/insufficient-harvests-and-soaring-prices-anticipate-another-world-food-crisis#comment155455: Did you actually read the article? Commodities are not in fixed supply. They're falling in supply. That's the problem!
Aug 21st, 2012 - 02:52 am - Link - Report abuse 0@2 - Condorito
Aug 21st, 2012 - 11:44 am - Link - Report abuse 0Yes I see your point, but Britain must be the only country in the world who can have a drought whilst it's constantly raining!
@6 Earlier in the year I left the UK in the grips of a drought. The local reservoir was low - a place I go often to ramble - and the officials there were asserting that even if it rained until the end of the year it would not reach normal levels. Two months later I returned to the UK and the reservoir was full. : )
Aug 21st, 2012 - 12:10 pm - Link - Report abuse 0@6
Aug 21st, 2012 - 01:43 pm - Link - Report abuse 0That is a good point. It would suggest limited ability to store water.
Here we just need 5 or 6 rainy days in the year and we are set becasue when it rains here in town it snows on the Andes and that's one big fookin' reservoir!
It is the most beautiful time of year: the arid hills turn green, the sky is unfeasibly blue and the snow covered Andes are a stunning backdrop...and....and...the Pacific, in the words of Pablo Neruda:
“El oceano pacifico se salia del mapa.
No habia donde ponerlo.
Era tan grande, desordenado y azul que no cabia en ninguna parte.
Por eso lo dejaron frente a mi ventana.”
Elaine, condorito. I think you have rather skated round the point. Fresh water is a limited resource (commodity) and future wars wil be over that rather than oil. I would be the first to admit as a farmer that we are probably the worst culprits in its misuse. In some cases such as the Midwest in the USA the fossil water in the aquifers is seriusly depleted > when that runs out, what next? But an example for you both. Uk has no water grid and there are mutterings from the Welsh about exporting thier water to England. Uk has a perfectly adequate system of water distribution - the canals built in the 18th century which have been allowed to fall into disuse. As for Chile the main
Aug 21st, 2012 - 03:34 pm - Link - Report abuse 0objection to the new gold mine in the Andes is more about the destruction of two small glaciers which are the source of a river on which the population further down the valley depend. I could give other examples but that'll do for now
Redpoll
Aug 21st, 2012 - 04:23 pm - Link - Report abuse 0I’m not too concerned about water resources. Water is after all renewable. It never goes away. We just need to manage it better.
If it comes to it, we can desalinate water from the ocean. I know it is an energy intensive process, but I can envisage solar powered desalination plants here in the Chilean north.
Unlimited sunshine, unlimited water and sh1t loads of salt for the parrillada!
The future’s bright.
I guess a century's drought is much better than your rivers catching fire, right yankeeboy?
Aug 21st, 2012 - 04:34 pm - Link - Report abuse 0(I just learned yesterday that the only two confirmed cases of rivers actually ON FIRE where in the USA, one in a mine area in the early 20th century, the other in the city of Cleveland)... hahahaha, and he's complaining of the Riachuelo?
Rivers catching fire... what a beautiful environment up there!
Comment removed by the editor.
Aug 21st, 2012 - 06:09 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Comment removed by the editor.
Aug 21st, 2012 - 09:15 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Redpoll
Aug 21st, 2012 - 09:41 pm - Link - Report abuse 0I think it is some kind of a spam-bot that generates automatic replies on forums. You can see from the linguistic structure that the programmer has neither English nor Spanish as a first language. It seems to snatch random words from the thread and mix them in to an incoherent ramble. It is vaguely amusing in a childish way.
Its situations like this that make the case for socialist distribution most starkly apparent. I pray that this time we won't see artificial famines of poor people who can't pay the inflated market price of otherwise available and eventually unused food
Aug 23rd, 2012 - 12:27 am - Link - Report abuse 0Commenting for this story is now closed.
If you have a Facebook account, become a fan and comment on our Facebook Page!