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Morning Open Thread: It's the Food, Baby |
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(with apologizes to Common)
Echoing the concerns of the World Bank and IMF, the UN issued a warning about the impending food crisis. Moreover, the UN food envoy, Jean Ziegler, called the growing food prices "silent mass murder" (h/t The Agonist, and issued a stern warning about the instability resulting from the price rise:
Ziegler said he was bound to highlight the "madness" of people who think that hunger is down to fate.
"Hunger has not been down to fate for a long time — just as (Karl) Marx thought. It is rather that a murder is behind every victim. This is silent mass murder," he said in an interview.
[snip]
Ziegler said he believed that one day starving people could rise up against their persecutors. "It's just as possible as the French Revolution was," he said.
Resulting from the sharp spike in food costs, governments and companies are now looking more seriously to biotech grains to feed their countries and produce their products. What is most striking is the consideration by regions usually adverse to biotech engineered foods:
Even in Europe, where opposition to what the Europeans call Frankenfoods has been fiercest, some prominent government officials and business executives are calling for faster approvals of imports of genetically modified crops. They are responding in part to complaints from livestock producers, who say they might suffer a critical shortage of feed if imports are not accelerated.
Is biotech an answer to the food crisis? What can done to lower food costs and prevent more instability?
