Rich World Leaders Greet Global Food Crisis With Caviar, Champaign, And 25 More Courses Of Poached Irony

This goes a long ways to sum up everything wrong with the G8, or the group of the eight more wealthy and powerful nations in the world. At their recent meeting in Japan, they met to discuss the world food crisis, which has left over a billion people hungry, and has accelerated in recent years as climate change and the development of biofuels has made food more scarce and made food prices skyrocket. At the meeting, they gorged themselves on a 6-course lunch and a staggering 18-course dinner, full of delicacies and imported wines and champagnes.


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Meanwhile British PM Gordon Brown "called for prudence and thrift in our kitchens, after a Government report concluded that 4.1 million tonnes of food was being wasted by householders". He also suggested that "we could save up to £8 (around $16) a week by making our shopping go further" and that it was "vital to reduce 'unnecessary demand' for food."

Really? Really?? And you wonder why the rest of the world protests your little tea parties? Is it any wonder that Save The Children reacts with this?:

'It is deeply hypocritical that they should be lavishing course after course on world leaders when there is a food crisis and millions cannot afford a decent meal,' he said.

'If the G8 wants to betray the hopes of a generation of children, it is going the right way about it. The food crisis is an emergency and the G8 must treat it as that.'

You wonder why everyone things you don't get it, don't really care, and aren't going to really do anything to change things? Can you not see that you are part of the problem?

How hypocritical. How shameless.

Oxfam: Biofuels Increasing Global Poverty

Oxfam has released a report which backs up my longstanding criticism of biofuels as the false deus ex machina of the alternative energy debate. Its research has found that the growth of biofuels has had profound impacts on the price of food (I'm still not sure how people didn't see that coming from miles away), which has plunged more than 30 million people around the world into poverty. Oxfam also states that biofuels will do nothing to combat climate change, no doubt due to its small scale, changing land use patterns and the large amounts of petroleum required as inputs for crop cultivation.

Currently the European Union has a target of making 10% of all transportation run on renewable resources by 2020. Oxfam is now urging the EU to scrap that target.

Oxfam is of course absolutely right, biofuels are clearly the wrong direction in alternative energy. We need to drastically change how we consume energy. We need cars that use very little, if any, petrol or ethanol. We need to greatly increase our reliance on public transportation and bikes/scooters. We need to start getting a large portion of our energy from solar and wind power. We need to think local. We need to stop shipping food from one side of the world to the other when we could grow most of the same food nearby. We need to conserve energy at the household level. We need to equip our houses with solar panels and other systems to make them more, or completely, self sufficient. We need big changes, but driving up the price of food by using it as gas to fuel our cars is not the solution, and it will just lead to bigger problems. We are already seeing these big problems manifest, and we have barely begun to reach for our target development of biofuels. If we don't wake up and realize that we are making a huge mistake we are going to create a global crisis. We need our leaders to start thinking ahead. We need our leaders to think big. We need our leaders to lead us into a fundamentally different economy, a green economy.

And for chrissake people, buy some goddamn canvas bags to use for groceries instead of wasting plastic bags that will never decompose! (You can also get great canvas bags from Whole Foods) We have to start taking responsibility for the problem. This is a national problem, a global problem, and a grassroots problem, and it will take solutions on all levels to save us from ourselves.


Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags--the equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.

A Look At Food, Globally

An excellent photo diary (about a book) that shows the truly disparate relationship to food of different peoples of the world:

It is these cultural differences, emphasized and reinforced by the author, which exemplifies the lifestyles and dietary habits of people around the world. In the United States, processed foods are par for course. In the Philippines, fresh fruit and vegetables play a far more significant role. In the harsh Chad sun, a family of six exists on a measly $1.23 per week.

Check it out, very interesting, very worth your time:

Global Food Disparity: A Photo Diary
by Asinus Asinum Fricat, Daily Kos

As Starvation Skyrockets Around The Globe, So Do Profits For Agri-Multinationals

If I had to point to one problem in our country as the most menacing, I'd say it is big corporations, which ruin basically everything, through their insatiable greed. Maybe greed is the more menacing problem in our country, in our society. Yes, I change my answer to greed, but greed's main vehicle of destruction is corporate America, and the Republicans (and corporate Democrats) it owns. Read:

Giant Food & Biotech Corporations Make Billions in Profit from Growing Global Food Crisis
by Geoffrey Lean, The Independent

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.

The Shallowness of the Biofuels [non]-Debate

Ever since biofuels became all the rage I've been fairly annoyed by how willing so many have been, including environmentalists who ought to know better, to jump on the bandwagon without so much as pausing to consider the big picture. I believe it is always a good rule of thumb to not blindly accept convention. Destroying forests to grow fuel, while at the same time taking existing food crops and using them to fuel our cars, when over a billion people worldwide are starving, and using huge amounts of water and petrochemical fertilizers to accomplish all of this, despite the scarcity of drinking water in many regions of the world, and the absolute counter-productivity of using so much oil to make "clean" energy--none of that ever struck me as a good idea. Yet everyone jumped on biofuels like they were the deux ex machina for all of our ecological ills. I guess common sense doesn't factor into the equation when corporations find a way to greenwash their destructive practices by co-opting the most naive elements of the environmental movement. After a few years of wondering when people were going to start thinking again, I was excited by an article from the BBC which pointed out the obvious:

With soaring oil prices, and debates raging on how to reduce carbon emissions to slow climate change, many are looking to biofuels as a renewable and clean source of energy.

The European Union recently has issued a directive calling for biofuels to meet 5.75% of transportation fuel needs by 2010. Germany and France have announced they intend to meet the target well before the deadline; California intends going still further.

This is a classic "good news-bad news" story.

Of course we all want greater energy security, and helping achieve the goals (however weak) of the Kyoto Protocol is surely a good thing.

However, biofuels - made by producing ethanol, an alcohol fuel made from maize, sugar cane, or other plant matter - may be a penny wise but pound foolish way of doing so.

Consider the following:

• The grain required to fill the petrol tank of a Range Rover with ethanol is sufficient to feed one person per year. Assuming the petrol tank is refilled every two weeks, the amount of grain required would feed a hungry African village for a year
• Much of the fuel that Europeans use will be imported from Brazil, where the Amazon is being burned to plant more sugar and soybeans, and Southeast Asia, where oil palm plantations are destroying the rainforest habitat of orangutans and many other species. Species are dying for our driving
• If ethanol is imported from the US, it will likely come from maize, which uses fossil fuels at every stage in the production process, from cultivation using fertilisers and tractors to processing and transportation. Growing maize appears to use 30% more energy than the finished fuel produces, and leaves eroded soils and polluted waters behind
• Meeting the 5.75% target would require, according to one authoritative study, a quarter of the EU's arable land
• Using ethanol rather than petrol reduces total emissions of carbon dioxide by only about 13% because of the pollution caused by the production process, and because ethanol gets only about 70% of the mileage of petrol
• Food prices are already increasing. With just 10% of the world's sugar harvest being converted to ethanol, the price of sugar has doubled; the price of palm oil has increased 15% over the past year, with a further 25% gain expected next year.

Little wonder that many are calling biofuels "deforestation diesel", the opposite of the environmentally friendly fuel that all are seeking.

With so much farmland already taking the form of monoculture, with all that implies for wildlife, do we really want to create more diversity-stripped desert?

Others are worried about the impacts of biofuels on food prices, which will affect especially the poor who already spend a large proportion of their income on food.

This was indeed a refreshing interjection of the obvious into the debate (or non-debate) about biofuels. However it never went anywhere. Over a year and a half later we are only increasing our sprint toward biofuels, and the much needed debate isn't any closer to breaking out. Now we are seeing the cost of food shoot up, thanks to our ignorance. Perhaps now that we are facing a big recession, and Americans are more sensitive to their financial situation they will take note of the rise in food prices, and connect the dots for once. Perhaps then they will also connect the dots between biofuels and deforestation. Perhaps then they will question all of the negative side effects of biofuels, and start to restrict this greenwashed corporate bonanza before we leave ourselves in worse shape than when we embarked on this ill-conceived adventure.

We need to finally realize that there will be no deus ex machina to save us from ourselves--halting global warming will only be accomplished through sacrifice, with corporations taking the first, largest, and most deserved sacrifice. Now all we need is a government that will stand up to corporations before it is too late. In happier news, Bill Maher apparently caught on to the fact that biofuels are actually quite destructive:

The Biofuel Boom
by Bill Maher

A couple years ago, investing in biofuels was the shit. Incentivizing biofuel production was thought to be good for business and good for the environment, a win-win. It's that rare cause that could bring together Al Gore, President Bush, and Willie Nelson.

Oops. It turns out now that we've had a few years to study things, and worldwide investment in biofuels has risen from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005, everybody's wrong, and we're all fucked. The biofuel boom is actually accelerating global warming. Time has an excellent cover story this week, The Clean Energy Scam, with all the details, but the basic problem is simple: "using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands, and grasslands that store huge amounts of carbon." Yes, switchgrass, sugarcane ethanol, even corn ethanol are all cleaner energy sources than oil-based gasoline, but those crops replace vegetation and soils that suck up even more carbon. So it's a big net loss. In order to get these biofuels, we're devastating huge swaths of land - a Rhode Island-size chunk of the Amazon rain forest was deforested just in the second half of 2007. And the demands to kill more carbon-absorbing land are only growing: the energy bill signed last year mandates producing 36 billion gallons of biofuel by 2022 (we do 7 billion now). It's not just the farmers in Iowa getting rich off this, agribusiness has plants going up in several other states. The beast is loose: "biofuels increase demand for crops, which boosts prices, which drives agricultural expansion, which eats forests."

Scientists have been on the biofuel bandwagon - how did they get it so wrong? As Time puts it, "It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots. The deforestation in Indonesia shows that's not the case. It turns out the carbon lost when wilderness is razed overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels."

Just as bad, apparently some people in the world still use land to grow real food, and the 800 million people in the world with cars are taking food from the 800 million people in the world who are hungry and putting it in our gas tanks. I, for one, think that's rude. Going up to a poor Brazilian boy, snatching the hot dog out of his hand and shoving it in the nozzle of your Prius, that's wrong. But this is happening: four years ago, two University of Minnesota researchers predicted hunger would drop to 625 million but last year they revised that estimate to 1.2 billion, a significant gain, because of biofuels.

What do we do? I don't know. If global warming really is a planetary emergency, we need socialized medicine for our environment. As long as the profit motive is what it is, deforestation will continue to be a problem. Railing against it has to become hip again, like it was in the early 90s. But what do we do for fuel, now that even switchgrass isn't even that good? Filling our cars with Chinese people is looking better and better everyday.

Update: Read this DailyKos diary about the food riots that have broken out recently on pretty much every continent as a result of a 83% increase in food prices worldwide in the last three years. It doesn't take a genius to pinpoint the cause of these price increases, or the result of the price of food nearly doubling in three years when a billion people were already starving at the old prices. (hint: cutting their already minuscule food intake in half makes it harder to not starve to death)