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Food That Costs The Earth - by - Ian R Thorpe
A bid by Australian mining giant BHP Billiton to buy Potash Corp of Canada draws attention to food price inflation, rising commodity prices in world markets and an impending global food supply crisis. It is not just potash, essential in food production, but other finite resources like oil that corporate giants are bidding to gain control of that should concern us.

Food That Will Cost The Earth
by Ian R Thorpe
2010-08-29
CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribute, non commercial, no derivs.
KEYWORDS: food, farming, crops, agriculture, fertilizer, potash, nitrates, business, beef, cattle, grain, water, health, corporate, corporations, GM,

We in the west are not nearly as aware as we should be of how fortunate we are. We have plenty of food, good food or junk food according to our individual taste and lifestyle choices. We can take for granted clean, fresh water will always be available. An overwhelming majority live in reasonably comfortable, dry, well heated, well ventilated houses. We enjoy an array of consumer luxuries that the generation of only half a century ago could not even imagine. And we have lifestyle choices.

True, the control freaks of the 'progressive left' would love to turn us all into unthinking automatons, following the diktat of the elite oligarchs but they are much further than they think from achieving that goal.

In other words we are privileged to live in a world of plenty, particularly plenty of food. Only this week were were introduced to a burger that impersonates a a pizza for the pleasure of people who put quantity before quality. Meanwhile the healthy eating fanatics told us eating asparagus helps you stay slim. Maybe they are right but if it is not dripping with in melted butter it tastes like shite. The bizarro food story of the week was that pickled squid guts blended with single cream tastes like strawberry shortcake. Whoever made that discovery, I'll take their word for it.

Such plenitude can breed complacency however and while all those silly season stories have been making headlines, on the world commodity markets escalating wheat and coffee prices due to bad weather and poor harvests are causing concern about security of food supplies. Some crackpot ideas have come out of the scientific community, cloned beef, vertical farming (growing food in skyscraper towers) and all of us feeding ourselves by growing vegetables in plant pots on the patio as well as ideas like genetically modified crops. GM food is feasible but apart from political concerns raised by the prospect of concentrating control of food production in the hands of a few global corporations that have a track record of lacking scruples, GM crops need water and fertilizer. Especially fertilizer.

On August 19 financial pages of newspapers led with the story “Australian mining giant launches hostile $40 billion takeover bid for world’s largest potash supplier”. For anyone who is not aware of the significance of potash aka potassium carbonate the headline could be rephrased “world runs out of food”. This story indicated that those of us branded 'climate deniers' because we were intelligent and far sighted enough to understand the world faces far greater problems that those posed by statistics, hockey sticks and a few incidences of freak weather.

The hostile takeover bid by BHP Billiton of Melbourne, Australia for Potash Corp of Saskatchewan, Canada represents a significant gambit in the chess game being played for control of the developed world's food supplies. Potash is a mineral salt that is mined and used as crop fertilizer. Demand has been rising because the world needs to produce more food to feed an increasing population with a constantly increasing appetite. The need to provide housing, office space, roads and recreation areas for that rapidly increasing population means that as demand for food rises there is less land available for cultivation.

It is not only that there are more of us to feed, rising expectations exacerbate the problems as well. The west's appetite for meat is a case in point. To produce meat anything like quickly enough to enable farmers and livestock merchants and slaughtermen and meat packers and retailers to make a reasonable profit in return for their efforts, we need a lot of grain – 7kg for every 1kg of beef according to figures accepted by the EU food administration. To feed the beef cattle as well as continuing to feed people large quantities of a compound known as NPK, a fertilizer that combines nitrogen with potassium, must be spread on the soil in which seed is to be planted and fed to the growing crops.

Like all commodities we extract from the earth, oil in particular, potash is a finite resource. It can be obtained by burning down forests of broad leaf trees but as deforestation (to provide land for growing grain to feed beef cattle) is one of the principal contributors to climate chaos according to the most reliable sources we would be creating a Catch 22 situation in going down that road. In any case broadleaf forests take hundreds of years to grow so while trees are more easily replenished than mineral deposits dug out of the ground, they should be considered a virtual finite resource. We would exhaust the current supply long before the new crop was ready. Mining potash is the method preferred by big food big chem and Inter - governmental agencies. But what about the nitrates we need to mix with potash to make industrial quantities of useful chemical fertilizer. Oil was mentioned above as a finite resource because we have to burn an awful lot of crude to make the nitrates we need for fertilizer to grow our crops. Did I say we could create a Catch 22 situation? Sorry, we have already created one or probably more than one.

Every government in the world needs to pay attention to how this attempted takeover of Potash by BHP Billiton, there is a lot more riding on it that the financial future of a few million peoples' pension funds. So far when governments and their international agencies have looked at global problems they have done so from the point of view of corporate interests. In this instance the interests of the bankers and stockholders must be pushed aside in the name of democracy and human dignity or we could end up being enslaved by organisations that control essential resources. The debate is about what kind of world we wish to bequeath to future generations. Be sure once we have chosen a course of action and set out on it there will be no turning back.

Assigned reading: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

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As Obama Positions Himself For A War In Syria We Learn That Like Gadaffi, Assad Is Popular With His People
Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from western mediaAssad's popularity, Arab League observers, US military involvement: all distorted in the west's propaganda war. Suppose a respectable opinion poll found that most Syrians are in favour of Bashar al-Assad remaining as president, would that not be major news? Well one did and we never heard a word of it in the Obama felching western media ...

Bullshit Sherlock
While other blogs are full of how great the cliff - faller ending of Sherlock Holmes was I felt a bit let down. The fake suicide was telegraphed all through the show. And the coda assured us Sherlock had survived. We should not forget of course it was the habit of ...

Will bringing back grammar schools boost social mobility? by Toby Young Daily Telegraph
The possibility that England may shortly see its first new grammar school in over 50 years has, predictably enough, re-opened the debate about selective education. Yesterday, for instance, Allison Pearson came down firmly in favour, while Fiona Millar shot back with an instant rebuttal. I’ll get into that argument in a moment, but first let’s be…

So Why Read Books Anymore
There is great “truth and beauty” in Homer’s Iliad, but I would not try to make his sale on such platitudes. Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains a classic. But I confess it can be hard to get through. Conrad’s Victory or Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, if authored by writer X this year, would be trashed on Amazon.So what are the reasons, in this age of ...

Eric Holder and the Chicago Way In America Obama's Brownshirts are getting hysterical as they try to make race the major issue in the election campaign.

Dystopian Prophecies Are Coming True - The Government Will Soon Choose Our Wives
Thinking of this entertaining new literary award – “the Hatchet Job of the Year” – it was natural to turn to Macaulay’s Essays, for few reviewers have ever been less reluctant to wound. I had in mind two long review-essays, one on Robert Montgomery’s Poems, the other on The State in its relations with ...
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