The Food Disaster

The Food Disaster. I suppose it started when Global Climate Change caused a 100 years drought in Australia. Since Australia is second only to the US in the grains it grows, its crop failure due to drought reduced the world's food stores to the lowest point in 30 years. This caused food to double in price many places on earth. This then caused people who barely had enough to sustain life in their bodies to begining to starve and experience malnutrition. Even in the United States, a very rich nation, poorer people are having an extremely difficult time buying enough nutritious food to sustain body and mind in a reasonably balanced way. So, the end result is that those who were marginal are starving and many of those who weren't marginal are now.

Now, to add to this complexity we have rising oil prices. Some of the rise is due to demand and some of the rise comes from instability of currencies especially the dollar. This causes investors to buy oil futures as a way of hedging deflating currencies like the dollar. It also caused gold to go way up recently even though the last time I looked gold was in the 900 dollar per ounce range again. So, here again rising oil prices also contribute to starvation because of the cost of hauling foods and processing foods increases exponentially with the added cost of fuel.

Then, we add to this the instability in the US and World economy. This also contibutes to rising prices for food and more starvation. For the first time in a century it is very likely that our food stores will continue to drop because of all these factors and more.

Another factor in the Food Disaster is people beginning raise plants for fuel. Especially in regard to corn for fuel this is contributing starvation by the poor worldwide because of the rising corn prices. So, from all directions it doesn't look good for the worlds poor long term.