Huffpo on Hunger

The left has begun to notice the hunger, but it took riots and multiple articles to get them there. At Huffpo Richard Walden wants to obfuscate the real issues with Global Warming — right on cue. You see, Global Warming has somehow screwed up “farmer’s intuition”…. Oh, and there’s not enough money in UN aid programs, he wants us to give more.

So there you have it – the eco-boogey man that’s driving the policy creating the current shortages and inflation is at fault, not the policy itself.

As I pointed out we already are giving more, and the shortage in aid money is due to two things: the inflation in prices, and the devalued dollar now buys less.

In articles over the past weeks I’ve spelled out what created the problem, and backed it up with proof in the form of news articles, UN reports, World Bank reports, and some pretty solid logic and history. You can choose who you wish to believe, but again I believe the main factors to be:

  1. Sustained high energy prices (transport, fertilizer, irrigation, processing.)
  2. Croplands (all, not just corn) converted to fuel
  3. Low dollar 
  4. Cold Weather and or Drought in some regions
  5. Rising Demand from India and China

Put those together and you have the perfect storm for famine in some regions.

If you lower the price of energy, some of these factors go away for they are symptiomatic of the first. Cheap abundant energy (in terms of real dollars) was a factor in the green revolution that ended famine in our lifetimes, however with energy prices at sustained highs even Norman Borlaug’s great work is not going to be enough.

So it is the last-century eco-luddites who have put us here, remove any two of the factors above and I would have nothing to write about here. The most easily fixed is the energy problem. There are untapped natural gas reserves in Alaska, there are unbuilt nuclear reactors, there are untapped reservoirs of oil off the north slope, and off shore.

Low energy in a world with 6 billion people leads to massive pollution, starvation, and unending turmoil. An abundant energy future takes care of most problems of pollution as well as hunger.

There is enough food out there right now to feed everyone – just barely, as the surplus has shrunk the past seven years as croplands converted. The problem is buying at the inflated cost that has spiked from shorter supply, higher cost to produce, and higher costs to transport.

More on the burgeoning problem at NYT. Please note that right now you are only going to see issues and problems with food in countries with bad Governance, and low energy societies. That would be spots like Haiti and Egypt as examples of the first, and most of sub-saharan Africa as well as the Eastern Islamic nations in the Sub-continent of Asia as examples of the second.

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