G8--Listen to the Farmers!

If greed weren't the motivating factor for our economic system, think of what a wonderful planet this would be! The farmers, fishing people, anyone who works with their hands and sees the profits slipping through their fingers know that change is imperative!
Protests precede G8 summit
Protesters have gathered in the Japanese city of Sapporo to demonstrate against rising food prices, ahead of a summit of the Group of Eight (G8) rich nations.
Thousands of people, including many farmers, are taking part in Saturday's protest.
About 21,000 police officers have been deployed near Toyako, the northern Japanese lakeside resort where G8 leaders will meet on Monday.
The demonstrators are calling for the G8 to pay more attention to food producers.
"We should have a more balanced food supply in the world," Eiichi Hayashizaki, a rice farmer at the protest, said.
"Japan imports the majority of its food from overseas, so we don't starve ourselves, but the government should stop controlling rice production in the country," he said.
[...] Oxfam International has said that soaring food prices and climate change are having a negative impact on world poverty.
"This isn't the time for a holiday, this is the time for sorting out problems," Lucy Brinicombe, an Oxfam International spokesperson, said.
[...] Earlier this week, Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, called for G8 leaders to address rising food prices at their summit.
The crisis, which is limiting many poor peoples' access to staple foodstuffs, is a "man-made catastrophe" which is overwhelming the bank's resources, he said.
Global food prices have nearly doubled in three years, according to the World Bank.
[...] Activists said that Japanese immigration authorities barred the entry of more than two dozen South Koreans who planned to take part in Saturday's demonstration.
South Koreans have a reputation for being particularly impassioned on issues of global trade.
A farmer from South Korea stabbed himself to death in 2003 during a protest at global trade negotiations in Mexico. http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2008/07/2008755522967115.html

Japanese Police Terrorize Citizens Over G8

The government has spent $100 million more in security than last year’s summit in Germany, and police are going around the remote island to tell residents to be on the lookout for "suspicious packages."
Several thousand anti-G8 protesters rally in Japan
Sat Jul 5, 2008 10:02am EDT
By Yoko Kubota and Edwina Gibbs
SAPPORO, Japan (Reuters) - Several thousand people rallied on Saturday on the streets of central Sapporo, Japan, to protest against a Group of Eight summit due to start next week [my bold] at a luxury hotel a two-hour drive away.
Four Japanese men were arrested, said a police official on the northern island of Hokkaido, of which Sapporo is the capital. Two were arrested for violating the public safety ordinances and two others for interfering with police activities.
A Reuters cameraman was taken away by police but it was not immediately clear if he was among the four arrested.
The one-and-a-half hour march by Japanese and foreign activists, citizen groups and non-governmental organizations took place under heavy security ahead of the July 7-9 summit of the rich nations at the hot spring and lake resort of Toyako 70 km (45 miles) away
[...] Japan has detained and questioned dozens of people [my bold] at its airports, including journalists and academics, in the run-up to the summit, although many have been allowed to enter the country after several hours.
[...] Although the protesters generally marched peacefully, scuffles broke out with police around a truck in the middle of the march that was blasting music, and the truck's window was shattered.
Japan is concerned about violent protests as well as acts of terrorism during the summit and has tightened security around the country at a cost of some 30 billion yen ($283 million), topping the 113 million euros ($186 million) spent at the last summit in Germany.
Around 21,000 police officers are being deployed in Hokkaido and domestic media have said a similar number have been mobilized in Tokyo.
(Additional reporting by Hiroyuki Muramoto; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUST36823520080705?sp=true

Balance Your Food Intake...and Walk

Here is another example of how industrialization may not have been the great, universal boon to mankind. While we burn gas to get a soda, these people are eating dirt. But the old ways can be used with better science and application to create new solutions. There's hope.
ARIANA CUBILLOS/AP PHOTODemonstrator eats grass in front of a U.N. peacekeeper at a food riot April 8, 2008 in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince -- Ariana Cubillos/AP Photo
Let them eat dirt?
Soaring food prices are causing riots in many poor nations. The good news is that there are solutions if the West can muster the political will
April 20, 2008
David Olive, Business Columnist
It would be inhuman to understate the global food crisis.
With food prices up as much as 45 per cent since the end of 2006, El Salvador's poor eat about half as much food as they did a year ago. In Haiti, a destitute population is turning increasingly to mud patties made of dirt, oil and sugar, which at least quieten the stomach.
[...] For the estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide who live on just $1 to $2 (U.S.) per day, today's severe food inflation means forsaking health care, withdrawing children from school, cutting meat and vegetables from one's diet, and subsisting on cereals alone.
[...] "World agriculture has entered a new, unsustainable and politically risky period," Joachim von Braun, head of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute told The Economist, after G8 finance ministers ended their summit last weekend declaring that global hunger had eclipsed in importance the worldwide credit and climate-change crises they had gathered to discuss.
There is a consensus among agricultural economists that a 30-year era of cheap food is over.
In contrast to the localized food shortages of recent decades, caused by weather- or war-related crop failures and supply disruptions, this crisis is marked by shortages of affordable food in scores of nations simultaneously. And this debacle is not tied mostly to floods or civil wars. Instead, it arises from a variety of factors, ranging from food-demand growth in super-charged economies in the developing world, soaring energy, transportation, fertilizer and other farm costs, and the diversion of corn to biofuels production – a new phenomenon described by one international food-aid expert as "a crime against humanity."
[...] And there may be at least some transitory factors at play, such as the prolonged drought in Australia and crop failures in Tanzania, along with suspicions that speculators have fled the crippled financial sector to manipulate prices of agricultural and other commodities for gain.
[...] It must seem, with global warming, international terrorism, soaring energy costs and a worldwide credit crisis, that the world at the dawn of the 21st century faces more than its share of larger-than-life spectres. Yet in the current food crisis, it becomes plain how these challenges are related and ultimately curable.
[...] The biggest single boost to incomes in the developing world, as foreign-aid experts have long argued, would be less emphasis on grants and loans to poor countries, and instead the removal of Western subsidies and tariffs that block food imports from Africa, Asia and Latin America. More prosperous farming in troubled parts of the world still heavily reliant on farm incomes would curb social unrest and the export of violence.
That might seem an idealist vision. But there is no compelling alternative.
In a join-the-dots exercise, it's not difficult to see how paying Nebraska farmers not to produce while denying Mexican maize producers access to the U.S. and French markets discourages developing-world farmers from acquiring the means to boost their production capacity, creating first resentment and ultimately food shortages. That this should coincide with unprecedented soaring costs for fuel and other essentials was unforeseen. But the outlines of the current catastrophe were long evident.
Today's rampant food-price inflation is yet more evidence that the world's ills are interconnected and leave no part of the planet untouched. Seen as a communal project to lift world incomes through meaningful reform in global agricultural policy, rather than as another necessary exercise in passing the begging bowl on behalf of "failed" nations, the food-inflation crisis is an undisguised opportunity to make the world a more prosperous and thus safer place.
And no one should have to eat dirt.
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/416328

Starving Americans

Over 35.5 million found hungry in 2006
By HOPE YEN
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 35.5 million people in this country went hungry in 2006 as they struggled to find jobs that can support them, a figure that was virtually unchanged from the previous year, the Agriculture Department said Wednesday.
Single mothers and their children were among the most likely to suffer, according to the study.
http://www.al.com/newsflash/washington/index.ssf?/base/politics-13/119506765074940.xml&storylist=washington
Please also see this blog's post of November 13, 2007: Starved & Stupid In The USA