Free Republic

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has a plan to “guarantee food supply, social justice, and democracy.” As with most of Maduro’s plans, it will accomplish none of those things. Vice News reports: “A new decree establishing that any employee in Venezuela can be effectively made to work in the country’s fields as a way to fight the current food crisis is unlawful and effectively amounts to forced labor,” Amnesty International said in a statement released on Thursday. President Nicolás Maduro signed a decree at the end of last week that gives powers to the labor ministry to order “all workers from...

Venezuela's economic chaos, critics say is the consequence of failed socialist policies for the last 17 years, especially price and currency controls. Venezuelan security forces fired teargas at protesters chanting "We want food!" near Caracas' presidential palace on Thursday, the latest street violence in the crisis-hit OPEC nation. Hundreds of angry Venezuelans heading towards Miraflores palace in downtown Caracas were met by National Guard troops and police who blocked a major road. President Nicolas Maduro, under intense pressure over a worsening economic crisis in the South American nation of 30 million, had been scheduled to address a rally of indigenous...

Have anyone of us contemplated this dilemma? Here we have a nation, run by liberals and socialists. And this year we have seen how it all ended. Just like in Greece and Maybe Puerto Rico. No Money, and in the case of Venezuela, no food. By now they have probably wiped out most of their pets and farm animals. But they have to eat meat once in a while. What are they going to do? cross over in their neighboring nations and kidnap any animal walking the streets and take them back home for dinner?

This is an interesting ruling, especially the justification used by the Italian high court to throw out the conviction of a homeless man who stole about $7 worth of food from a grocery store. BBC: Judges overturned a theft conviction against Roman Ostriakov after he stole cheese and sausages worth €4.07 (£3; $4.50) from a supermarket. Mr Ostriakov, a homeless man of Ukrainian background, had taken the food "in the face of the immediate and essential need for nourishment", the court of cassation decided. Therefore it was not a crime, it said. A fellow customer informed the store's security...

After Bernie Sanders visited the Marxist Sandanista regime in Nicaragua on a propaganda tour, he argued that the bread lines in major cities were a good thing. “American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing!” The bread lines had been caused by the radical regime’s socialist agricultural policies of land seizures from farmers. Those farmers who refused to be drawn into Soviet-style communal farms rebelled, along with Indian and Creole racial minorities, and became the core of the Contras, the heroic resistance fighters whose mass murders at...

Emily BadgerDeember 9, 2015Toward the end of every month, hospitals in California see a curious uptick in admissions for hypoglycemia, the kind of low blood sugar that can affect diabetics. The pattern, detected in a recent study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, is almost entirely driven by low-income patients. The non-poor don't show much change in admissions at all. The researchers suspect this trend may point to an underlying challenge for the poor: Food stamps, given out in a lump sum at the start of each month, run out for many families before they reach the...

Food hunger in America: More Hype than Reality. Why?He that speaketh truth sheweth forth righteousness: but a false witness deceit. (Proverbs 12:17)We see often such claims in the media such as that "millions in people here in American could be staring at an empty plate," "49 million people [approx. 1 out of 6 in American]...face hunger," "millions of Americans go to bed hungry," "1 in 7 people struggles with hunger in the US," (Feeding America) or "1 in 6 people in America faces hunger every day," (https://www.dosomething.org) or "50 million Americans—including 1 out of every 4 children—do not know where...

He’s a One-Percenter! Jonathan Butler, the University of Missouri graduate student who went on a weekend hunger strike, comes from a family worth $20 million. His father is a railroad vice president and made over $8 million last year. MIZZOU HUNGER STRIKER Claims He’s Oppressed, Rips ‘White Privilege’ – Comes From Family Worth $20 Million Jim Hoft Nov 10th, 2015 10:02 pm 164 Comments He’s a One-Percenter! rich kid whitey The Revolution Jonathan Butler, the University of Missouri graduate student who went on a weekend hunger strike, comes from a family worth $20 million. His father is a railroad vice...

With all these food and nutrition programs in place, why are American citizens falling through the cracks of hunger, nutrition, and need? Why is the nation as a whole deemed obese? As liberals complain that people are going hungry and the first lady transforms the school lunch fare to “healthy” offerings nobody seems to like, the federal government is spending plenty on “domestic food assistance to provide food for the hungry and other vulnerable populations in this country.” According to the Congressional Research Service, there are many agencies that offer food assistance to the needy in this country, citizens, non-citizens,...

Those that run food banks all over America say that demand for their services just continues to explode. It always amazes me that there are still people out there that insist that an “economic collapse” is not happening. From their air-conditioned homes in their cushy suburban neighborhoods they mock the idea that the U.S. economy is crumbling. But if they would just go down and visit the local food banks in their areas, they would see how much people are hurting. According to Feeding America spokesman Ross Fraser, 46 million Americans got food from a food bank at least one...

For 15 years after Zimbabwe's agriculture sector collapsed in the face of President Robert Mugabe's seizure of white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks, the tobacco industry has been booming, with farmers funded by private firms to grow tobacco. But this switch, coupled with the worst regional drought in nearly a decade, has left Zimbabwe in a precarious food situation. Many farmers have complained of low prices as the season ends while buyers argue the quality of the crop was poor. "A number of farmers are crying foul over unsatisfactory (tobacco) prices," said Trevor Saruwaka, member of parliament for Mutasa Central...

We’re a month away from going over budget in using this year’s planetary resources. One way to balance our ecological books is to eat more insects. By mid-summer of each year, we use up the Earth. Known as Earth Overshoot Day, it’s the day, sometime in August, when our yearly demand for ecological resources exceeds how much the planet can replenish those resources for the year. Soon after August 15, this year, Earth will be operating on a deficit. All the while, the population of Earth is growing. It’s estimated there will be 9 billion people by 2050, an additional...

(CNSNews.com)-- The School Nutrition Association (SNA), which represents 55,000 school nutritionists nationwide, is pointing to data published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to draw awareness to the fact that “after 30 years of steady growth in the National School Lunch Program, student participation is abruptly down in 49 states."The nutritionists attribute the drop to new nutrition standards that were instituted by USDA in 2012.Total national participation in the School Lunch Program peaked in 2010 and 2011 at 31.8 million, according to USDA. In 2012, it was 31.7 million. But in 2013, it dropped by 1 million participants, to 30.7...

Caracas – One of the many byproducts of Venezuela’s acute political and financial crisis is food truck looting, a pattern that is plaguing the country’s highways with chaos and fear. Just last week, some 200 looters swarmed into an overturned tractor-trailer carrying canned juice — men, women and children were seen taking as many boxes of juice as they could, either by foot or on motorcycles.Drivers and even emergency personnel just stood by, unaffected. "The two Venezuelas" (Las dos Venezuelas), a catchphrase so commonly used here these days to describe the rift between the poor and the middle or upper...

Pope Francis has warned “the powerful of the Earth” they will answer to God if they fail to protect the environment to ensure the world can feed its population. “The planet has enough food for all, but it seems that there is a lack of willingness to share it with everyone,” Francis said at a mass to mark the opening of the general assembly of the Catholic charitable organisation Caritas. “We must do what we can so that everyone has something to eat, but we must also remind the powerful of the Earth that God will call them to judgment...

Merchant vessels are taking weeks to deliver vital food supplies to Yemen as Saudi-led coalition warships search for arms bound for Iran-allied Houthi fighters and heavy fighting disrupts shipments in a worsening humanitarian crisis. The conflict has hurt imports to Yemen, where about 20 million people or 80 percent of the population, are estimated to be going hungry. The Arabian peninsula's poorest country, Yemen imports more than 90 percent of its food, including most of its wheat and all its rice - most of it by sea. It faces increasing problems as many shipping companies have pulled out and those...

On February 13, L’Osservatore Romano (English edition) printed a full-page text of Pope Francis’ message to the Milan “Expo of Ideas.” Its theme was: “Nourish the Planet, Energy for Life.” Pope Bergoglio brought up again his now familiar suggestions about how to handle poverty and hunger. Pope Francis recalled his address to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, November 20, 2014). There, he linked together “the production, accessibility, and availability of foodstuffs, climate change, and agricultural trade.” Our “first concern,” however, “must be the individual person, who lacks daily nourishment, who has given up thinking about life . . .and...

There is no “right to food”. Food never was any sort of fundamental “right”. Saint Paul already warned us that to those who do not want to work, we shall give no food. You can’t find any clearer evidence that food is not a fundamental right of the person. Of course, charity demands that we feed the hungry. But this is not a subjective right of the hungry, merely the result of the charitable help of those who feed them because – let us say this once again – consider them, in their charity, worthy of being fed. Charity is...

(CNSNews.com) - In a joint radio appearance with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday, President Barack Obama said there is a “worldwide epidemic of obesity” and that he looks forward to working with the government of India and non-governmental organizations on the “issue of obesity” in India.In 2013-2014, according to a survey conducted by UNICEF and India's Ministry of Women and Child Development, 30.7 percent of Indian children under five were underweight.That was a significant improvement for India, where 43.5 percent of the children under five had been underweight at the time of the last survey in 2005-2006. "India no...

I remember our daily food always coming from a long, long line at the end of which was a loaf of bread, a liter of milk, a stick of butter, a bottle of murky cooking oil, or a kilo of bones with traces of meat and fat on them. [...] If we wanted to eat, we learned at a very young age that we had to stand in long lines every day, often in bitter cold at 4 a.m. in hopes that the store would not run out of bread or milk by the time we made it to the...