By In the last couple of months we’ve heard quite a bit about a global food crisis. There’s been a flurry of media coverage, emergency multilateral meetings (FAO), and concern even amongst U.S. consumers who have been hit with higher food prices at the store. I want to share this article called “The Empty Plate Club” with you by John Feffer. Here’s a snippet:
“The current food crisis is an early warning, and it looks as though we’re ignoring it. We dismissed an even earlier warning, when North Korea suffered a major famine in the late 1990s because of rising energy prices, limited land, and environmental stresses. “After the attacks of September 11, 2001, ‘We are all Americans’ briefly became a popular expression of solidarity around the world,” I write in Mother Earth’s Triple Whammy in TomDispatch. “If we don’t devise policy choices that address energy, agriculture, and climate, while replacing the idolatry of unrestrained growth at the heart of both capitalist and communist economies, the tagline for the 21st century may be: ‘We are all North Koreans.'”
Feffer’s article does a great job at assessing this complex and serious problem, and challenges us to get to real systemic solutions if we want to solve the problem.