Jomo Kwame Sundaram , United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development writes :- “Lack of food is rarely the reason that people go hungry. The world today produces enough food to feed everyone. The problem is that more and more people simply cannot afford to buy the food they need. Even before the recent...
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Food
Food Prices – speculation and hoarding
Making Bread
Wheat is the new gold. As poor countries brace for shortages, it’s boom time for Kansas farmers. “It feels like Christmas in August,” admitted Darrell Hanavan, of the Colorado Wheat Administrative Committee, noting that the harvest just completed in his state seems to have been the most bountiful for 25 years. The dollar value...
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Can’t Pay – Can’t Have
The ongoing food crisis in the Sahel, West Africa is actually a purchasing power crisis: there is food in the markets, but the poorest households cannot afford it said Bakari Seidou, food security advisor to Save the Children UK. “The market is their main source of food, but they need money. Their main source...
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Capitalism and food security – an oxymoron
Capitalism and food security – an oxymoron Food security for all the people of the world will only be possible whem the profit motive is taken out of food supply. It’s official! Now more than one billion people are hungry and in desperate need of food aid according to the World Food Programme. To...
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Food Business
Eat Your Heart Out. Felicity Lawrence. Penguin. Following on from Not on the Label, this is another book by Felicity Lawrence that exposes much that’s wrong with the food we eat and the way it’s produced and, therefore, much that’s wrong with capitalism as a way of running the world. Lawrence describes conventional farming...
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Food, Inc.
In 1921 36 companies were responsible for 85 percent of US grain exports. By the end of the 70s six companies controlled 90+ percent of Canadian, European, Australian and Argentinian grain and currently Cargill and Continental each control 25 percent of the world’s grain trade. While 37 nations have been plunged into food crisis...
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Feeding the World?
President Bush in an interactive business session had argued that while prosperity in countries like India is good, it triggers increased demand for better nutrition, which in turn leads to higher food prices.The comments came close on the heels of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s controversial statement that ‘apparent improvement’ in the diets...
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Jumbo Gets Smaller
“American supermarkets are epics of excess: it often seems like every item in the store comes in a “Jumbo” size or has “Bonus!” splashed across the label. But is it possible that the amount of food Americans are buying is, in fact… shrinking? Well, yes. Soaring commodity and fuel prices are driving up costs...
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Biofuels…What the hell’s goin’ on?
A series of media reports indicate that fuel produced from food crops to replace fossil oil is far from the panacea it was hoped to be. For example Guenter Verheugen, a vice president of the European Commission, stated recently that “It makes no sense to make car fuel from plants that ought to provide...
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