Let them eat sand

28May08

Red Cross warns of food riots over soaring prices

By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER, Associated Press Writer
Tue May 27, 4:44 PM ET

The Red Cross warned Tuesday of a possible surge in “food-related violence” because of soaring prices that are increasing hunger around the world.

Most of the debate surrounding the global food crisis has focused on boosting aid to poorer countries, but there is also concern about the potential for violence as people become desperate for food, said Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Kellenberger, whose agency serves as the guardian of the Geneva Conventions on the rules of war, said fallout from rising prices has already sparked violence, alluding to food riots that erupted in Haiti, Egypt and Somalia.

It’s not just a matter of higher prices, [Kellenberger] said. “It becomes a question of survival, of just having access to food.”

from AlterNet:

Food riots are erupting all over the world. To prevent them and to help people afford the most basic of goods, we need to understand the causes of skyrocketing food prices and correct the policies that have fueled them.

World food prices rose by 39 percent in the last year. Rice alone rose to a 19-year high in March — an increase of 50 per cent in two weeks alone — while the real price of wheat has hit a 28-year high.

As a result, food riots erupted in Egypt, Guinea, Haiti, Indonesia, Mauritania, Mexico, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. For the 3 billion people in the world who subsist on $2 a day or less, the leap in food prices is a killer. They spend a majority of their income on food, and when the price goes up, they can’t afford to feed themselves or their families.

But this state of affairs did not come about by accident. Many factors have converged, many based on decisions of corporations and national governments. Said Raj Patel, in democracynow.org:

…there are [a few] factors. One of them, one of the issues, is that governments, particularly the US government, is very keen on biofuels. Biofuels are fuels that are derived from corn, from sugar cane, and they’re being presented as a way of achieving energy independence. The trouble is, of course, that the biofuels drive up the price of these commodities, which means that poor people can’t afford them anymore.

…And finally, I think one of the major issues is, of course, the price of oil. I mean, one of the problems with the way our food reaches us today is that it is industrial, it is very fossil fuel-intensive, not just to the distance the food travels, but also in the fertilizer. You know, fossil fuel is required to produce fertilizer, pesticide, these sorts of things. And so, when the price of oil is over $100 a barrel, that combines with all the other factors to make a perfect storm where food prices are absolutely beyond the means of the poorest people.

AMY GOODMAN (democracynow.org): Ethanol has been posed as an alternative to oil. What is your response to that?

RAJ PATEL: It’s an alternative to oil if you’re in the grain business. It’s an alternative to oil if you are one of the large industrial grain processors who are looking and lobbying very hard to make money out of the transformation of grain into ethanol.

The world has lost Iraq’s oil

By Youssef M. Ibrahim, USA Today, 10/5/2004

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The costs and benefits of America’s occupation of Iraq vary, according to proponents and opponents, except when it comes to oil exports. The U.S.-led invasion has resulted in the loss of an average of 2 million barrels a day of Iraqi oil from world markets. That is a significant number with huge consequences for economies around the globe.

Instead of rosy promises by the neoconservatives of the Bush administration who pushed for the invasion — partly on the premise that they would turn it into America’s private gasoline-pumping station — the contrary has occurred.

The world has lost Iraq’s oil.

The impact is slowly taking its toll as the price of everything related to petroleum rises (from the food on the supermarket shelves to the gasoline in your car to the plastic chairs on your lawn).

The consequences have been evident in the past few months. Oil prices stand at 20-year-high records with no relief in sight. Indeed, should the ongoing disruption of Iraqi oil exports be compounded with an interruption of production elsewhere — Russia, Africa, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or any member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries — we could be looking at prices far above $50 a barrel, perhaps $60 or more. Indeed, the sky is the limit.

This was written in 2004! Consider for a moment the fact that the price of oil was just under 29 dollars a barrel when the US invaded Iraq in March of 2003. Then consider that the price of oil peaked recently at about 135 dollars a barrel.

That’s nearly a 450% price increase in just over five years!!!

Now consider this, from market analyst site bloomberg.com:

Oil $200 Options Rise 10-Fold in Bet on Higher Crude

by Grant Smith

Jan. 7 (2008) — The fastest-growing bet in the oil market these days is that the price of crude will double to $200 a barrel by the end of the year.

Options to buy oil for $200 on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose 10-fold in the past two months to 5,533 contracts, a record increase for any similar period. The contracts, the cheapest way to speculate in energy markets, appreciated 36 percent since early December as crude futures reached a record $100.09 on Jan. 3.

I can just see our glorious leader, at his daughter Jenna’s wedding in the heavily guarded compound in Crawford, Texas, toasting his guests via satellite at Haliburton’s shiny new corporate headquarters in Dubai (paid for with all those enormous overruns on those fabulous no-bid contracts for staging the Iraq War)– with the words, “Let them eat sand…”

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Tags: biofuels, corn, food prices, food riots, grain, Iraq, oil, starvation, war