Posted on 05/28/2011 3:09:59 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Africa is facing what African Development Bank President Donald Kaberuka calls a "Molotov cocktail" of rising food and oil prices that analysts fear could trigger widespread political upheaval like that which has swept the Arab world since January.
There are concerns that the turmoil in North Africa, embracing Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco and Algeria, could mutate south into the sub-Saharan heart of the conflict-ridden continent, where democracy is in its infancy, although growing, populations are swelling and corruption and unemployment are rife.
At the same time, popular anger is rising as foreign governments and corporations are pouncing on the continent's last great resource, its farmland, to grow food for others.
Kaberuka told the Financial Times that rising costs were hitting the continent's urban poor the hardest at a time when governments have fewer resources to counter the problem than during the food crisis in 2007-08...
Africa remains riven by wars and insurgencies, many over the continent's vast natural and mineral resources and kleptocratic dictatorships, some thinly disguised as democracies, are still in power.
...democracies are growing. In 1980, there were only two. These days more than 40 countries conduct regular, multi-party elections. But population growth is outstripping economic advances. In sub-Saharan Africa, the population has risen from 100 million in 1900 to 800 million. It should hit 1.5 billion-2 billion by 2050.
Unemployment is rising rapidly, as it did in North Africa, while political and business elites are cushioned from hardship.
Such grievances played a large part in triggering the pro-democracy uprisings that toppled the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt and threaten at least three other Arab regimes.
(Excerpt) Read more at upi.com ...
Chinese women set up their vegetable stalls at the opening of a massive food wet market in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, August 30, 2010. China has ordered local leaders to cool a surge in politically sensitive food prices by raising vegetable production amid rising tensions over surging food costs. UPI/Stephen Shaver
There’s only one answer to this — world caliphate. /s
Seriously, read the rest of this op-ed, which is thinly disguised as a news story. Haves vs Have-nots, Global Warming, Globalization, waaah, waaah, waaah. I’m a little surprised the joker didn’t mention US ethanol subsidies. Oh, and compact fluorescents, TARP, fiat money...
I thought this was written about the United States. We are sitting on pour own Molotov cocktail of rising food and fuel prices and the dipstick is pushing for higher taxes and bankrupting us with his Obamacare.
Of course Most Americans don’t get as much fun out of rioting and murder as the Africans do, but if we shut down the entitlements the same people will cause the same problems.
They could always borrow money from China and then buy food, after all that's what we do.
He is descended from an entire continent of the "Eat your own seed corn" culture.
On a smaller scale, we saw it during Katrina. Now we will see it on a continental scale.
Africa Population (2009) = 1,000,000,000
U.S.A. Population (2010) = 307,000,000
“this op-ed, which is thinly disguised as a news story.”
Who knows? The original draft might have been a good piece of journalism before the UPI editors censored it. Now it’s just a silly cookie cutter piece that blames the usual suspects - global warming, foreign corporations, Big Oil.
No mention of the ethanol boondoggle, which has crowded out land for food production and encouraged the clearing of forests in the third world.
And what about the selloff of African natural resources to the Chinese government? Would the sensibilities of the Chinese or corrupt African dictators have considered that too sensitive?
The United States is broke - they need to grow their own, or turn to someone else for help.
I guess having huge riots and churning up the populace will make things all better.
WHY is food production down, to the degree that food prices EVERYWHERE in the world are rising, sometimes precipitously?
It is not because the world cannot produce the crops, there seems to be a collective will to simply not do what is necessary to encourage the agricultural production we need, and to deliver it to the recipients in a timely and mutually acceptable manner.
Using the truly massive production of maize here in the US to produce a motor fuel of only marginal value, while diverting the crop away from export markets, seems to be a misapplication of available resources. The price is artificially bid up, because of the subsidy being paid for the domestic production of ethanol, when ethanol is available on the world market from the major sugar prooducers, like Brazil. There is a large tariff AGAINST the importation of fuel-grade ethanol. And isn’t too much refined sugar one of the major nutritional problems in the world today? What better thing to do with that world glut of sugar, than to turn it into motor fuel, rather than using a high-value food ingredient like corn grain?
Adn what is the bias against using the mineral resources so widely available in our OWN country, so we are not competing with the rest of the world for the relatively finite amount of petroleum produced on a daily basis globally? Natural gas, which we have in PLENTIFUL supply, and even coal, we have in huge abundance, both of which may be much more fully utilized than they now are, to produce the most flexible of all energy delivery systems, electricity.
You want really clean coal? Easy, we already have the technology to produce just that. By a modification of something called Plasma Arc Trash Reduction, (http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-03/prophet-garbage) which may be used to turn the trash stream into electrical power generation, we could be well on the way to production of not only electrical energy, but very high-quality, sulfur-free Diesel fuel, and recapture of all the noxious elements found in coal.
This Plasma Arc Trash Reduction process is briefly explained as follows. ALL forms of trash are reduced to their constituent atomic structure, then the heat generated by this process is used to drive electric power generation. The primary products of this process are “syngas”, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which may be then used to form various hydrocarbon fractions, through the Fischer-Trofsch process. Once up and running, the operating temperature of the plasma torch is about 33,000 degrees F., about three times the temperature of the sun’s surface. The syngas generated is about 2,200 degrees F., and is passed over a heat exchanger to generate superheated steam, in the process of cooling it. Once cooled, the stream of hydrogen and carbon monoxide may be separated, yielding up pure hydrogen which may be used to power a fuel cell, or burned directly in the presence of oxygen to yield a very hot flame, which may be used to further produce power through the medium of superheated steam. Carbon monoxide itself is an excellent fuel which when combined with oxygen, forms carbon dioxide, a safe, NON-POLLUTING fraction of our atmosphere, and one that is vital for the photosynthesis of oxygen and carbohydrates in green growing plants. The carbon dioxide may also be captured, cooled and compressed into either liquid CO2, or allowed to become “dry ice”, an intensely cold and solid form of CO2, and an important industrial product.
The hydrogen, of course, when combined with oxygen, becomes water vapor.
Empty out our land fills and turn those blighted acres back into “greenfields”, divert all the existing and continuing waste stream into electric power, reduce need for and dependence on fossil fuels, assure a continuous supply of building materials that will prove to be the equal of our current supplies, and provide a way of reclaiming metallic elements otherwise lost when merely dumped in a hole in the ground. And not only the land fills, the sewage sludge that is now dumped there could go through this plasma arc, with the decomposed fecal matter adding its bit to the “syngas”, and simultaneously extracting all the dreaded metals like cadmium and mercury from circulation in the soil and groundwater.
I don’t see a downside. Most elegant solution.
It has been estimated that perhaps fewer than a dozen of these processing units could both clean up all the existing waste dumps, and the current waste stream, for a municipality the size of New York City, and generate enough electricity to keep it lit and industry-capable, without tapping into outside sources.
There is a place to spend the funds for infrastructure that does NOT have to be only for the roads and bridges. This is infrastructure that actually IMPROVES our environment. And generates a number of useful by-products, not the least of which is relatively cheap electric power.
And as stated before, the material needed to fuel these Plasma Arc torches need not be just the trash stream, ANY organic material, and practially all hazardous waste, could be put through this process, yielding up additional energy as it operates.
AMEN & LOL
Just off the topof my head, in the last three years, all of the countries had unrest over food prices:
Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Kenya, Senegal, Yemen, Sudan, Madagascar,
Combined population is greater than that of the USA.
Every agro-business media outlet/blog I follow has been chiming in on this from either early 2008 and the West African unrest, or February 2011 when the big protests started in North Africa.
http://home.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/ena/wfp234060.pdf
My food bill is up 30%.
Starving Africans can always fall back on the Rhodesia model.
Back in the bad old days, before the racial enlightenment when white Rhodesian farmers were slaughtered and their land was confiscated, white farmeras grew and exported so much food the country was called “The Breadbasket of Africa”.
When the blacks took over they changed the name from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe and they changed the country from “The Breadbasket of Africa” to “The Basket Case of Africa”.
But the situation is not static.
They actually produce less and less every year.
So now the country is another liberal success story - sort of like Detroit and Washington, DC, only bigger and further away.
"Tunisia has long seemed a gracious outpost of moderation and stability in the developing world: solidly pro-Western, extending a perpetual welcome to foreign sun worshipers. But when word came that the government was raising the price of bread by over 100%, the facade of stability cracked. Riots erupted last week, starting in outlying regions and spreading to Tunis, the capital. As mobs composed mainly of teen-agers and young men in their 20s rampaged through the city streets, smashing shop windows, and attacking post offices and banks..."
This was published in the January 16 issue of TIME... in 1984.
We went grocery shopping today & it was painful!
Two people....Houston, Texas....$844 and we don’t eat like rich folks.
The basic problem of Africa is that the market value of the average African's productivity has become less than the cost of feeding them, and the first world has run out of spare cash to subsidize them due to our own experiments with socialism.
The world can no longer afford to feed the unskilled.
I have a new customer who has worked for various NASA contractors for many years. The guy is one of those multi-talented geniuses who seems to know something about every field of science and technology.
He told me that he had dug up some very old research showing that you can build a fuel cell that DIRECTLY oxidizes coal to make electricity at 60% efficiency!
Sounds like a new project for my lab.
In another generation, two at the most, they will have eaten their way through every herd of moving creatures on the continent.
The only place our posterity will see giraffes, elephants, rhinos, hippos, etc. is in old movies and perhaps a few zoos and tourist attractions.
Yes...it is a devilish set up for world communism.
I'm reminded of the remake pf "The Day the Earth Stood Still", the radical-eco-fascist-fantasy one where Mankind's technology gets disabled at the end, so that humans will die off to a "sustainable" level.
I wonder what would happen if a radical environmentalist group declared to the world that the only way to preserve Africa's wildlife was to kill off the Africans. How many Democrats' heads would explode over that?
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