Ban Ki-moon has an amazing grasp of the obvious....UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has urged nations to seize an "historic opportunity to revitalise agriculture" as a way of tackling the food crisis.
Mr Ban told a UN-sponsored summit in Rome that food production would have to rise by 50% by 2030 to meet demand.
Mr Ban said export restrictions and import tariffs ought to be minimised to alleviate the crisis.
The summit comes as food costs have reached a 30-year high in real terms, causing riots in several countries.
What a revelation! Produce more food, to alleviate the food crisis. I'm quite sure nobody's thought of that.
The world can produce plenty of food easily and cheaply. The problems are these: 1. protectionist countries like the US pay their farmers NOT to plant crops so that the prices of what they do grow remain high 2. at the behest of idiot environmentalists, politically correct legislators force the markets to pour 20% of our corn into our gas tanks in the form of ethanol 3. many would-be bread-basket countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela are rife with corruption, lawlessness, and/or socialism, preventing them from meeting regional food demand.
You people sometimes criticize me for complaining about problems but not offering solutions. That's not true first of all but, I'll offer these simple solutions to help relieve the food crisis.....and to stifle your unbearable whining...
1. Let the American farmers do what they do best, grow more food than any country in the world, feed Americans first and export the rest to the highest bidder. Do not pay them NOT to plant their land.
2. Completely abandon this moronic insistence on biofuels. They are absurdly inefficient as fuels, costly, and undesirable in the marketplace. If biofuels were a good idea, people would demand them and the markets would provide them without government mandates. Putting our food into our gas tanks is the stupidest idea environmentalist have come up with....and that's a stupid bunch of idiots.
3. The UN should apply intense pressure on countries who could be growing plenty of food, but don't because of government corruption, violence, or whatever. For instance, Zimbabwe should be forced to return it's farms to the whites who used to manage them very successfully....so successfully in fact, that Zimbabwe used to export food because they had so much. Venezuela used to be a bread-basket country until Hugo Chavez nationalized many of the privately managed farms. Now there's no incentive, no profit motive to plant and grow crops, so nobody does and that creates shortages.
4. The UN should promise poor and/or developing countries not only aid handouts, but agri-training. Only those countries who can demonstrate their dedication to law and open markets will receive this traning and aid.
5. Wealthy nations could privide farm equipment, seeds, fertilizer, and expertise to nations that qualify for it. Rather than handing our tax dollars over to corrupt UN officials, use it to directly help development of agri-business in poor nations.
If the UN and the US did these obvious things, there would be no world hunger problem.
1 comment:
Let's add something to the biofuel discussion before people start talking about how it works. Ed you have told me this on several occasions, so i will credit you, and your sources for this info. Roughly 1.5 gallons of unleaded gasoline is required to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. It is less efficient for you engine. Countries such as Brazil have a successful ethanol gas plan working because they use sugar cane to produce it. We use corn. We are not able to produce that much sugar cane either. So don't go saying that ethanol works elsewhere. Its like saying nationalized healthcare works in Canada and UK. It doesn't, if it did, people would not be illegally sneaking into the US and paying large sums of money for relatively easy treatments.
Post a Comment