Posted on 07/16/2007 5:48:50 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
The UN has come forward and admitted something that the rest of us knew well, at least since the days of Live-Aid. The UN has announced that it can’t feed the world. Anyone following the saga of the world’s efforts to feed Somalia could have told us that. If you can’t protect the food, you can’t feed the world.
What makes this iteration of UN blame-outsourcing particularly interesting is that they are blaming the environmentalists. Not personally, but indirectly, the UN cites the competition of biofuels for raw agricultural materials, as a source of World Food Program’s current budgetary angst.
Josette Sheeran, WFP executive director, said in an interview with the Financial Times: “In a world where our contributions are holding fairly steady, this [cost increase] means we are able to reach far less people.”
She said policymakers were becoming more concerned about the impact of biofuel demand on food prices and how the world would continue to feed its expanding population.
The warning could re-ignite the debate on food versus fuel amid concerns biofuel production will sustain food inflation and hit the world’s poorest people.
Not all of the environmental movement would see this as a pressing problem. Paul Watson, Director of The Sea Sheppard Conservatory, tends to think that getting rid of people is a solution, not a problem.
We need an economic system that provides all people with educational, medical, security, and support systems without mass production and vast utilization of resources. This will only work within the context of a much smaller global population.
Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans. Being a parent should be a career. Whereas some people are engineers, musicians, or lawyers, others with the desire and the skills can be fathers and mothers. Schools can be eliminated if the professional parent is also the educator of the child.
Clearly, The Sea Sheppard Conservatory represents the nut-job fringe of the Monbiot Wing. However, their thinking has infested a significant proportion of the modern intellectual class. When the former hard-blowing Senator from South Carolina, Earnest Hollings, opined that “There’s too much consumin’ going on,” this was a sign that Luddite idiocy had truly been slipped into the mainstream thoughts of our legislative mediocrities.
However pathetic the UN, or the Moonbat Climate Hawks prove at understanding how an economy works, the UN has stumbled upon a critical point here. If we decide to take all our corn and wheat and turn it into junk gasoline, we have a possible problem. Namely, that we originally intended to use that corn and wheat to feed ourselves or our livestock. Diverting that agricultural material elsewhere makes the grocery store a more expensive place to shop.
Usually, I’m the last person on Earth to care about social justice. I despise the term, and most of the $400 haircut charlatans that make political careers out of using it as a justification to steal from my wallet. However, I do feel genuine concern for the poor and downtrodden when government agencies undertake actions that artificially raise the prices of food far beyond where a mutually agreed upon market equilibrium would have posited them.
We all can do without the cigarettes, booze and entertainment. To a certain extent, we can do away with a lot of our transportation. Food and medicine, however, are not optional. We can’t survive without them, and I don’t just say that as an overweight American.
The biofuel use mandates, in the current Energy Bill, working its way through Congress, represent an act of elitist malice against the poorest and least able in America. We are literally taking the bread out of their mouths. Why? We do this so that the more upwardly mobile in our society can pay a cheaper airfare or go for a longer road trip.
The UN has no monopoly on morality in energy politics. Claudette Rosette has famously told us otherwise. However ironic it may be, the UN is absolutely correct in its evaluation of government mandated biofuel consumption. The UN should blow the whistle loudly on the continuing Food-For-Oil swindle, being perpetrated by the ethanol pirates worldwide.
Oh, this is so going to explode some heads.
But but but...the UN!...but but but...biofuel!! but but but... global warming!....but but but...poor people starving!...but but POP!
Because they’re typical liberal morons, one and all. The left is notoriously unable to see past their “good intentions” to the “unintended consequences” — even after the fact.
They are too busy stuffing their fat faces with graft.
Make no mistake none of them are morons. What you think they are doing out of ignorance is actually just political expediency to get them more of the only thing they desire. (That would be POWER)
That’s pretty much it. I feel more and more conspiracy in the wind the more I hear about the business deals behind the scenes of the proposed laws to regulate GHG emissions.
“Make no mistake none of them are morons.”
That’s probably true — with the exception of a few like Cynthia McKinney. It’s the voters that support them that are morons.
If the occupation of the world’s poorest people is farming, and the price of food goes up, are not these farmers getting a pay raise? Will they not be encouraged to produce more food and grain? Or do these poor farmers just sit around and eat what others give to them?
No, these farmers do not raise enough grain, and cannot afford to raise enough grain to cash in on this gravy train. That has been seen to. The people who rake off of this are corporate executives at Archer Danials Midland. People who spend as much time living off the lad as Bernie Ebbers or Michael Milken.
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