Ummm .... Haiti is in the Caribbean.
Posted on 04/13/2008 3:43:57 PM PDT by bjs1779
Dubai: The food price and supply situation is turning worse, and in some places is uglier than expected and could lead to domestic turmoil, including the "risk of war", a top official said.
The food price situation has already claimed its first victim - the Haitian Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis - who was forced to quit, and food ration lines in Bangladesh are becoming longer everyday with sporadic incidents, reflecting a near explosive situation due to hunger.
"Food prices, if they go on like they are doing today... the consequences will be terrible," International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director Dominque Strauss-Kahn at a press conference ahead of the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington.
Possible impact
Gulf News has been highlighting the global food price crisis and its possible impact on the Gulf countries. "Hundreds of thousands of people will be starving... [eading] to disruption of the economic environment," Strauss-Kahn told a news conference.
Development gains made in the past five or 10 years could be "totally destroyed," he said, warning that social unrest could even lead to war.
"As we know, learning from the past, those kind of questions sometimes end in war," he said. If the world wanted to avoid "these terrible consequences," then rising prices had to be tackled.
Skyrocketing prices on rice, wheat, corn and other staple foods like milk particularly hurt developing nations, where the bulk of income is spent on the bare necessities for survival.
Rising food prices have also encouraged the UAE government to intervene, when the Ministry of Economy allowed the retail chains to directly import food items by cutting the middlemen to keep prices of essentials at a decent level.
As a result, Union Cooperative Society and Emke Group have already signed a deal with the UAE Ministry of Economy to supply essential food items at 2007 base prices to help the consumers.
My fellow Americans - dig deep into your wallets and give until it hurts. We need to get food to those poor folks in Dubai, ASAP!
Right, its the U.S.'s fault that the Gulf countries such as Haiti are starving............Give me a break, if the Saudi's gave a rip about their brother countries, with their money they could put lobster and steaks on the tables of all their oil allies..........
This is nothing more than a propaganda piece.........
If the goverment corruption were cleaned out of these third world hell holes there’d be plenty of opportunity for all to prosper.
Maybe the “Nature Nazi” will have the same sense of decency that the biggest Nazi of all time had and self-terminate with extreme prejudice!!!
And having exported our wealth in the name of "free trade", we're now paying more for food products at home as the Chicoms and Indians use our dollars to bid against us...To hell with this one world bullsh!t, I want the next president to remember that he's elected to take care of this country first.
yeah we’re at the bottom of the solar cycle... happens every 11 years or so...
Let ‘em eat SAND!!!
That’s the stupidest thing I’ve read in a long time.
You mean like Rachel Carson, or Margret Sanger? Sorry, but we'll have the left defending them for generations, the poor won't get as much as an "oops."
Haiti is not a gulf country. I forgive the public school students here.
“..will Al Gore be brought up on some kind of charges for fomenting the deaths of millions?”
No way, by that time he’ll have a global cooling scam going with another Nobel prize waiting for him. It’s not Algore who should be blamed for this lie, but those that promote it further. He is merely a small cog in the big wheel of deception.
Understand that there are so-called “cooler heads” in government who have joined promoting the global lie for political expediency. Isn’t one living in the WH right now and aren’t all three candidates for POTUS of the same opinion?
Why, you unabashed chauvenist!!!
Ummm .... Haiti is in the Caribbean.
For the record, did you want to starve Terri Schiavo? I seem to recall you were one of them.
Nothing to do with oil correct. Just American grain.
“As we know, learning from the past, those kind of questions sometimes end in war,” he said.
When? Where?
********************************************************
The French Revolution for one.
“These (other) problems were all compounded by a great scarcity of food in the 1780s. A series of crop failures caused a shortage of grain, consequently raising the price of bread. Because bread was the main source of nutrition for poor peasants, this led to starvation. The two years previous to the revolution (1788-89) saw bad harvests and harsh winters, possibly because of a strong El Niño cycle[11] caused by the 1783 Laki eruption at Iceland[12]. The little ice age was also affecting agriculture: many other areas of Europe had adopted the potato as the staple crop by this time, whereas the French generally refused it as a dirty food or the devil’s food. The potato was more resilient to the colder temperatures during the little ice age and also could not be easily destroyed by scorched earth warfare[13]. A normal worker earned anywhere from 15 to 30 sous a day while skilled workers received 30 to 40 sous. A family of four would need about 2 loaves of bread a day to survive. The price of bread rose by 88 percent in 1789, going from 9 sous to 14.5/15 sous[citation needed]. Many peasants were relying on charity to survive. The peasantry became a class with the ambition to counteract social inequity and put an end to food shortages. The ‘bread riot’ evolved into a central cause of the French Revolution.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_French_Revolution
I’m curious to see what, if any, are the US food exports to these countries that are having ‘issues’. If we aren’t regular trading partners with them, then our own biofuel uses for corn, etc, have nothing to do with their struggles
(altho, an excess of our own product would be welcomed in the starving nations).
So, I’m not jumping to conclusions. If/when it’s found out that we are burning what we used to ship, I’ll scream louder than anyone. But I don’t know enough about our trading partners to immediately blame Bush, Gore, etc.
If anyone has this kind of info...
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