Starvation looms in Delhi

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habshi

Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 2:08 pm

Guest

This is a golden oppurtunity for the third world.
First stop blaming the west and start taking responsibility.
Last year they were moaning that the west was subsidising its farmers
and driving third world ones were being driven out of business because
of cheap cheap rice and wheat.
Offer the poor a flat rate welfare say $25 a month for each
adult , UNTIL the birth of the third child. Nearly all will accept a
lifelong bounty and stop at two. Even that would double current
populations. Farmers in third world must be guaranteed profitable
prices.
Dwindling oil supplies means that food cannot any longer be
produced cheap enough for the poor to afford. India cannot keep adding
20 million people a year , and expect the world to keep bailing it
out.

excerpt guardian.co.uk
It is the constant sensation of hunger that makes Kamla Devi
so angry. She argues with shopkeepers in New Delhi over prices and
quarrels with her husband, a casual labourer, over his wages - about
50 rupees (60p) a day.

'When I go to the market and see how little I can get for my money, it
makes me want to hit the shopkeepers and thrash the government,' she
says. A few months ago, Kamla - who is 42 - decided she and her
husband could no longer afford to eat twice a day. The couple, who
have already sent their two teenage sons to live with more prosperous
relatives, now exist on only one daily meal. At midday Kamla cooks a
dozen roti (a round, flat Indian bread) with some vegetables fried
with onions and spices. If there are some left, they will eat them at
night. The only other sustenance that the couple have are occasional
cups of sugared tea.

'My husband and I would argue every night. In the end he told me it
wouldn't make his wages grow larger. Instead we went down to one meal
a day to cut costs.'

It is a grim, unsettling story. Yet it is certainly not an exceptional
one. Across the world, a food crisis is now unfolding with frightening
speed. Hundreds of millions of men and women who, only a few months
ago, were able to provide food for their families have found rocketing
prices of wheat, rice and cooking oil have left them facing the
imminent prospect of starvation. The spectre of catastrophe now looms
over much of the planet.

In less than a year, the price of wheat has risen 130 per cent, soya
by 87 per cent and rice by 74 per cent. According to the UN's Food and
Agriculture Organisation, there are only eight to 12 weeks of cereal
stocks in the world, while grain supplies are at their lowest since
the 1980s.

'This is not just about meals forgone today, or about increasing
social unrest, it is about lost learning potential for children and
adults in the future, stunted intellectual and physical growth,' he
said. Without urgent action to resolve the crisis, he added, the fight
against poverty could be set back by seven years.

Not surprisingly, these swiftly rising prices have unleashed serious
political
One such victim is Kamla Devi. She has already had to abandon dhal, a
central, protein-rich dish of lentils that was a key part of her
family's diet for several months. Now the cooking of fried food - in
particular, pooris: hot, puffed, oil-soaked bread - has had to follow
suit for the simple reason that cooking oil has become unaffordable

habshi

Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 5:23 pm

Guest

The problem is that the food growth rate 0.9% is falling
behind the population growth rate , in fact wheat output is less now
than it was ten years ago inspite of an additional 200m people!
In Japan now butter has run out ! Even huge amounts of money wont feed
the world , it will just drive up prices as the food output cant rise
if the oil supplies are dwindling

cifactbook .com
india
pop growth rate 1.578% (2008 est.)
fertility rate 2.76 children born/woman

Interestingly considering the higher mortality rate , the fertility
rate is now not far off the zero pop growth rate of 2.1 to 2.4

However Indian Muslims now number more than Pakistan Muslims ie nearly
180m and if we assume that Indian Muslims being the poorer ones who
stayed behind , then

Pakistan
pop growth rate 1.805% (2008 est.)
fertility 3.58 children born/woman (2008 est.)

So Moorthy is right , most of the Indian higher pop growth and hence
the pressure on food supplies is from the burgeoning 50% higher birth
rate of Muslims 3.58 vs 2.76

So unless the politicians show the guts to tell the Islamic pop this
MUST stop and they must adopt a two or three child policy , the Indian
Muslim pop alone will grow fourfold every fifty years to 640m by 2050
and 2.5b by 2100 !!!

another problem is that Islam demands uglification of women

photo on
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7346111.stm
Sughra Jamal, a 45-year-old Koran teacher in Pakistan's southern city
of Karachi, is caught between the country's twin problems of inflation
and unemployment.

Her husband, a carpenter, had a heart attack 10 years ago and cannot
work.

One of her two sons is asthmatic and cannot hold a steady job. The
other works as an assistant at a medical clinic for 1,500 rupees ($24)
a month.

That leaves Ms Jamal as the sole breadwinner of the family, with a
monthly income of roughly $89 that she receives in fees from her
students.

How does she spread this income across various demands for food,
medical care and education of her family?

"Health problems are out, I simply have no money to pay the doctors,"
she says.

She does pay roughly $3 in monthly school fees for her seven-year-old
daughter, and another $20 to $25 a month in bus fares as she travels
from door to door to give lessons.

Not alone

"The rest is taken up by food, although we hardly have two square
meals every day of the week," she says.

Ms Jamal is not alone in her ordeal.

Tens of thousands of people around the country try to fight off food
inflation through endless queues outside government-run low-price
outlets called Utility Stores.

People are queuing up for food around the country

Most people standing in the queue outside one such store in Karachi
intend to buy wheat flour at discounted prices.

Others are lining up to buy cooking oil, which is being given at
discounted rates to only those customers who make purchases of a
certain amount from the store.

They wait in the queue for hours, holding invoices of their purchases
in their hands.

A World Food Programme (WFP) report last week said nearly half of the
country's 160 million people are at risk of going short of food due to
a surge in prices.

Food prices rose at least 35% in 2007, compared with an 18% rise in
minimum wages, cutting the purchasing power of the poor by almost 50%,
WFP said.

The question is, where are the benefits of an economy that has been
growing at between 7% and 8% during the past five years?

After 9/11, Pakistan has received between $65bn to $70bn in terms of
remittances, international debt rescheduling, aid inflows and foreign
direct investment, says Asad Sayeed, an independent economist.

Slow down

This windfall fattened the bank deposits and coupled with low interest
rates during 2002-06, sparked an unprecedented monetary expansion in
the shape of consumer financing.

Easy credit lines created nearly 25 million buyers of houses,
motorbikes, cars and larger vehicles, mostly in the urban centres.

But the policy hardly created any jobs. Instead, it created
inflationary pressures in the economy, pushing more people below the
poverty line.

Since the middle of 2007, the economy has started to slow down and
defaults on consumer loans have gone up from less than 1% in 2002 to
over 8% today.

Pakistan has received much foreign aid, says economist Asad Sayeed

The economic slowdown has also hit the automobile industry, which was
the chief beneficiary of economic growth during 2002-07.

"Car sales went up from 35,000 units a year in 2000 to 180,000 in
2007, but they are now down to 120,000 and we expect further cuts,"
says Sibtain Allibhai, one of Karachi's major Honda car dealers.

Also, domestic food production is unlikely to satisfy demand over the
next year.

This bodes ill for the poor.

It is also making the new government nervous, given the belief in some
quarters that the previous government, headed by then Prime Minister
Shaukat Aziz, was routed in the February elections due to the food
crisis.

The new government faces the impossible task of bridging a yawning
trade gap of $8.4bn in the short term.

Part of the task involves withdrawing subsidies on oil - a bitter pill
the government will have to swallow in the face of rising
international oil prices.

In the medium term, it needs to promote manufacturing with the focus
on export diversification on the one hand and job creation on the
other.

Economic sense

It also needs to expand agricultural services in order to increase
domestic food production.

Both these steps will require quick decisions in the energy and water
sectors.

A major reason for the current slowdown in manufacturing is said to be
frequent power outages due to low electricity production.

Some grocery stores are giving incentives to entice shoppers

Coal-based power generation may be one option given the country's huge
coal deposits in southern Sindh province.

Water conservation projects, focusing on the paving of watercourses to
prevent 40% of irrigation water that is lost due to seepage, have also
become imperative.

But none of these projects have a gestation period of less than three
years.

"We will have to make more economic sense than the previous
government, and do it quickly," says Kaisar Bengali, an independent
economist who is currently working with a team of experts to help the
new government overcome the immediate challenges.

He worries that emphasis on relief to the people may lead to economic
imbalances in the medium term, but says the government has no choice.

"It has to get results in three years, whatever the cost. If it
doesn't, it may not survive."

habshi

Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 5:27 pm

Guest

Our present agriculture is just turing oil into food ,
five calories of oil are used for each calore of food produced!
So as oil runs out , food production is going to crash unless we beam
down solar energy from low altitude mirrors or satellites or balloons

Bob Eld

Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2008 3:54 pm

Guest

"habshi" <habshi@anony.com> wrote in message
news:48052b79.1499765@news.clara.net...

Quote:

Energy has to a part of our agricultural base as much as food does. Beaming
down energy from orbiting mirrors is not on the horizon. Nobody is planning
such a thing nor is it likely to be practical or cost effective.

Included in the practical solutions are bio-fuels that use solar energy to
produce and store calories. Those will be used to supplant petroleum and are
renewable. If it takes five calories to produce one food calorie the balance
can also be produced with agriculture in some form. It's part of the
equation and is a sustainable solution.

At present most food crops create much more caloric material than appears in
the food products. This includes stalks, roots, husks, twigs, branches,
hulls, leaves, straw, manure and so on. Surely there is enough caloric value
in this material to provide the five calories necessary to net the one
calorie of food and then some. It's a mater of utilizing a portion of this
material as biofuel to power agriculture and therefore to free it from
petroleum or other fossil sources. In this way it becomes self sustaining
and utilizes solar energy in the most practical and cost effective way.

So instead of damning biofuels as the source of food shortages, high prices
and worse, biofuels should be embraced and expanded to increase food
production and reduce its dependence on petroleum. We really have no choice.

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