Good morning readers!
I thank all of you for your comments and emails,both positive and negative…this is how we learn but educating each other on what is actually happening all over the world!So hello to all of you guys!
I would love to hear what problems are facing you in your homes and jobs now.What worries you most and where are you? How if any or you preparing if the worse happens?
I found this article and i warn ahead it is long,but very worth the read…comments welcome ………
BETTY~SIMPLY SOUTHERN
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This is from the UK, but the situation applies to US as well. Edgar
_Nine meals from anarchy – how Britain is facing a very real food
crisis_
By Rosie Boycott
<http://www.dailymai l.co.uk/news/ article-1024833/ Nine-meals- anarchy–
Britain-facing- real-food- crisis.html>
or <http://tinyurl. com/6ae5xy>
The phrase ‘nine meals from anarchy’ sounds more like the title of a
bad Hollywood movie than any genuine threat.
But that was the expression coined by Lord Cameron of Dillington, a
farmer who was the first head of the Countryside Agency – the
quango set up by Tony Blair in the days when he pretended to care
about the countryside – to describe just how perilous Britain’s
food supply actually is.
Crisis: Britain’s food supply is in peril
Long before many others, Cameron saw the potential of a real food
crisis striking not just the poor of the Third World, but us, here in
Britain, in the 21st Century.
The scenario goes like this. Imagine a sudden shutdown of oil
supplies; a sudden collapse in the petrol that streams steadily
through the pumps and so into the engines of the lorries which
deliver our food around the country, stocking up the supermarket
shelves as soon as any item runs out.
If the trucks stopped moving, we’d start to worry and we’d head out
to the shops, cking up our larders. By the end of Day One, if there
was still no petrol, the shelves would be looking pretty thin.
Imagine, then, Day Two: your fourth, fifth and sixth meal. We’d be in
a panic. Day three: still no petrol.
What then? With hunger pangs kicking in, and no notion of how long it
might take for the supermarkets to restock, how long before those who
hadn’t stocked up began stealing from their neighbours? Or looting
what they could get their hands on?
There might be 11 million gardeners in Britain, but your delicious
summer peas won’t go far when your kids are hungry and the baked
beans have run out.
It was Lord Cameron’s estimation that it would take just nine meals
- three full days without food on supermarket shelves – before law
and order started to break down, and British streets descended into
chaos.
A far-fetched warning for a First World nation like Britain? Hardly.
Because that’s exactly what happened in the U.S. in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina. People looted in order to feed themselves and
their families.
If a similar tragedy was to befall Britain, we are fooling ourselves
if we imagine we would not witness similar scenes of crime and
disorder.
Well, today Britain is facing a very real crisis. Granted, it is not
the threat of a sudden, terrifying phenomenon such as the hurricane
that struck New Orleans. But in its capacity to cause widespread
hardship and deprivation nationwide, it is every bit as daunting.
Oil prices are spiralling – $120 a barrel this week, up 23 per cent
since the start of the year – and the cost is being felt not only
by drivers but by each and every one of us who has seen our food
bills soaring.
This week, the British Retail Consortium revealed that food price
inflation had risen to 6 per cent – the highest figure since
comparable records began – and up from 4.7 per cent in April and
4.1 per cent in March.
At its most basic, the reasons for this food inflation are twofold:
increasing demand (particularly in the emerging economies of India
and China) and spiralling production costs.
The former had been predicted for years, but the latter is more
unexpected.
Conventional wisdom had it that in an age of mechanisation, the cost
of producing the food that we eat would decrease as technology found
new ways of improving yields and minimising labour costs. But there
was a problem that hadn’t been factored in. Production methods are
now such that 95 per cent of all the food we eat in the world today
is oil-dependent.
As oil prices have risen, so has the cost of food
The ‘black gold’ is embedded in our complex global food systems, in
its fertilisers, the mechanisation necessary for its production, its
transportation and its packaging.
For example, to farm a single cow and deliver it to market requires
the equivalent of six barrels of oil – enough to drive a car from
New York to LA.
Unbelievable? One analysis of the fodder pellets which are fed to the
vast majority of beef cows to supplement their grazing found that
they were made up of ingredients that had originated in six different
countries. Think of the fuel required to transport that lot around
the world.
Now factor in the the diesel used by the farm vehicles, the carbon
footprint of chemical fertilisers used by most nonorganic beef farms
and the energy required to transport a cow to the abattoir and
process it. The total oil requirement soon adds up.
And so as oil prices have risen, so too has the cost of food – and
I’m afraid it’s only set to get worse. The age of cheap food is at an
end – and it will impact not only on our supermarket bills, but on
the whole economy.
Fifty years ago, food represented around 30 per cent of the average
household budget, whereas nowadays it is nearer to 9 per cent.
In other words, cheap food has not only helped keep inflation down,
it also allowed the postwar consumer boom to flourish.
With our most basic and necessary commodity – the food on our
plates – costing proportionally less every decade, we had plenty of
free capital to spend on luxuries: flat-screen TVs; the holidays
abroad; the home improvements and extensions that so many of us have
acquired.
That’s all set to change in a major way. A new era of austerity is
approaching, and we are illpreparedfor its scale and effect. As a
farmer myself, who runs a smallholding in Somerset, I was one of the
first to detect the winds of change, as the prices for my animal feed
rose.
This time last year, it cost me around £7.50 a month to feed
one of my pigs. Today, as wheat prices nudge upwards towards
£180 a ton, that figure is closer to £15 a month.
Over the past year, wheat prices have doubled, leading not only to
increases in the price of bread, but also to demonstrations by pig
farmers like me who are going out of business just as fast as you can
fry your bacon.
And while wheat farmers might be having a brief moment of glory in
the sunshine of rising prices as the world competes for rapidly
decreasing supplies, the crisis is hitting home in ways that I
certainly never expected to see in my lifetime.
In a report published on Thursday, 18 charities found that many
disabled people and poorer pensioners are having to go short of food
in order to pay for home care or simple things such as transport to
their local day care centre.
Sue Bott, director of the National Centre for Independent Living,
said: ‘The shocking reality is that people are being forced to choose
between eating properly and using vital care services.’ So much for
our civilised society.
It’s not just a matter of cost, either, but of real shortages. In the
U.S., supplies of rice are so low that retail giant WalMart has been
rationing the amount any one customer can buy.
Is that a prospect that now lies ahead of us – a life of rationing
similar to the one my parents lived in the years immediately
following the war, when we eked out tiny rations of orange juice, and
a banana was an almost unheard of treat?
If so, how will a nation that has grown accustomed to having what it
wants, when it wants, cope? We are no more used to real deprivation
than we are to the pandemic diseases that claimed so many British
lives a century or so ago.
Yet the truly shocking fact is that the Government has made no plans
at all to prepare for this possibility. Indeed, it has utterly failed
to address the vital issues surrounding our food supplies and
security.
For years, experts who warned that the combined impact of climate
change and oil depletion would converge and plunge food supplies into
crisis have been ignored.
John Krebs, former chair of the Food Standards Authority (FSA), told
me recently that not only was the issue not even considered, it was
laughed at when anyone dared suggest that a country so apparently
bountiful as ours could one day find itself facing a food shortage.
But Britain, as an island nation, is particularly vulnerable. We have
not been self-sufficient in food since the late 18th century, but the
situation is rapidly worsening.
In 1995, 27 per cent of UK food was imported. By 2006 it was 37 per
cent. The situation is obviously more critical in cities: London
imports more than 80 per cent and a food shortage would hit the
capital the hardest.
The situation is worsened, of course, by the fact that we are having
to compete for supplies on the global market with many more nations
than ever before.
For centuries, the typical Chinese diet consisted of rice and
vegetables, but as the Chinese pour into the newly emerging cities,
so their diets are changing. In 1962, the average Chinese ate just
4kg of meat per year: by 2005 that figure was 60kg and rising.
The result has placed huge pressure not only on prices, but on
natural resources required to cope with this increased demand.
It is not simply that we do not have enough land to grow the grain to
feed the animals which in turn feed us. In the past two decades,
pressure on our natural resources has increased to a level which many
experts fear has become unsustainable.
For example, in the U.S., the use of hydrocarbon pesticides has
increased 33 times as farmers sought to increase production and yet,
as soil structures weaken due to over-use and mono-crop cultivation,
more crops are being lost to pests every year.
The world has a finite supply of fresh water too, yet 70 per cent of
all freshwater is used for agriculture, often horribly wastefully.
For example, it takes four litres of water to grow a single Kenyan
green bean stem which we in Britain import by the ton – and this is
from an officially ‘ water-stressed’ country. And that’s before we
factor in climate change, which many believe will render great
swathes of land infertile.
Certainly, intensive farming methods are only adding to the problem:
according to the UN, animal farming now accounts for a fifth of
global greenhouse gas emissions, due to forest clearances and the
methane emitted by cattle.
The net result is a looming crisis of which soaring oil prices could
simply be the starting gun.
In this regard, the dominance of the supermarkets in British food
retailing contributes massively to our vulnerability. Rising energy
prices have an immediate impact on many of the food giants’ common
practices.
Their reliance on diesel trucks for ‘Just in time delivery’ and ‘
warehousing on wheels’; their endless plastic packaging and their
transportation of processed foods and raw materials around the world
means that our supermarkets have been hit doubly hard by the high oil
price.
(How much longer, I wonder, will the seafood business Young’s of
Scotland find it economic to fly prawns to Thailand to be cleaned and
de-shelled, before flying them back to Scotland for packaging)?
During the fuel protests of September 2000, we caught a glimpse of
how even the supply of basic foodstuffs are dependent on oil: Justin
King, the CEO of Sainsbury, warned Blair that we would be ‘out of
food’ within ‘days not weeks’ if the protests continued.
Today, we stand on the brink of a longer-term problem. In the words
of Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, London: ‘We
are sleep-walking into a crisis.’
Yet even now, the Government has not woken up to the immediacy of the
problem. Indeed, it doesn’t even have a coherent means of taking
control of the situation. Food, and its related issues, currently
straddles no fewer than 19 different ministries.
When I questioned Joan Ruddock about whether the Government would
change its policy about allowing pig farmers to feed their animals
swill made from left-over food scraps (a practice banned after the
food-and-mouth outbreak) she replied that she couldn’t answer the
question because it fell under the jurisdiction of a different
department.
This is madness. Food, along with shelter and safety, is one of our
most basic needs. Professor Lang believes that nothing short of a
radical change in our diets – away from meat and towards vegetables
and grains – will solve the problem long term.
But in the meantime, alarm bells should be going off all over
Westminster about the scale and impact of the impending food crisis.
Suddenly, that warning of being ‘nine meals from anarchy’ no longer
seems such a distant or improbable threat.
wE CELEBRATE THIS DAY IN REMEMBRANCE OF WHAT JESUS DID! He died for our sins and on the third day he rose...
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June 17, 2008 at 9:00 am
[...] ‘nine meals from anarchy’ -fACING FOOD SHORTAGES It was Lord Cameron’s estimation that it would take just nine meals – three full days without food on supermarket shelves – before law and order started to break down, and British streets descended into … [...]