The Looming Food crisis

"Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people; control money and you control the world."

Henry Kissinger - 1970

2012 seems more and more to me like a pivot point in our human evolution, so many factors are coming into play and we as whole cannot keep up with all the rapidly developing changes.  Our focus has to now be on our individual safety and survival.

Some people ask why we prep, if you read the quote above and think deeply about it you'll understand 90% of our motivation.  Penny and I are working hard at being as independent as possible in the next few years.  I say "as possible" because it is very difficult to be 100% independent, even the pioneers were somewhat dependent on others and there's nothing wrong with that.  When you give up the control of your own life and well-being, is when problems start to occur.

In the podcast for yesterday, Penny and I spoke of some specific concerns about a food crisis which is very much a possibility in the near future.  The crisis that is coming does not just involve higher prices and less availability, there are many more games being played with our food.

I have gathered some resources and links to articles from reliable and reputable sources.  I give you these to read and ponder so that you can make up your own mind.  If they strike a chord with you please delve deeper into the subject and let us know what you've found.

1. My first concern is the huge land grab being implemented by very powerful and wealthy individuals, corporations and nations.  Remember the quote?  … Control food and you control the people…

A. Falling commodity prices aren't bringing prices for farmland down with them. Even as the price of grain goes down, the cost of the land it's grown on keeps going up, leading George Soros and other guru investors to bet big on agricultural land.

The fundamentals are easy to understand: Over the next 40 years the population of the world is projected to grow from 6 billion to 9 billion, hugely increasing the strain on arable farmland worldwide.

The spiking grain prices that caused food shortages and rioting in dozens of countries in spring of 2008 fell some 50 percent by December. Yet even after the correction, grain prices remain above their 20-year average, and food stocks around the world are still near 40-year lows.

"Land is scarce and will become scarcer as the world has to double food output to satisfy increased demand by 2050," Joachim von Braun, director general at the International Food Policy Research Institute, told Fortune Magazine.

"With limited land and water resources, this will automatically lead to increased valuations of productive land. And it goes hand in hand with water. Water scarcity will probably increase even more than land."

"I'm convinced that farmland is going to be one of the best investments of our time," says commodities guru Jim Rogers.

Eventually, Rogers notes, food prices will rise enough that the market probably will be flooded with supply through development of new land or technology or both, and the bull market will end.

From Moneynews.com

B. Over the past few years hedge fund gurus like George Soros, investment powerhouses like BlackRock, and retirement plan giants like TIAA-CREF have begun to plow money into farmland - everywhere from the Midwest to Ukraine to Brazil. Canadian private equity firm AgCapita, which raised $18 million in 2008 to invest in Saskatchewan cropland, estimates that as of the first quarter of 2009, more than $2 billion of private equity money had been raised for farmland investments globally, and another $500 million was planned.

The fundamentals remain in place for a long-term boom in the prices of everything ag-related. The simplest metric to consider is the amount of farmland per person worldwide: In 1960 there were 1.1 acres of arable farmland per capita globally, according to data from the United Nations. By 2000 that had fallen to 0.6 acre. And over the next 40 years the population of the world is projected to grow from 6 billion to 9 billion.

"Land is scarce and will become scarcer as the world has to double food output to satisfy increased demand by 2050," says Joachim von Braun, director general at the International Food Policy Research Institute. "With limited land and water resources, this will automatically lead to increased valuations of productive land. And it goes hand in hand with water. Water scarcity will probably increase even more than land."

C. The biggest investors in farmland over the next decade will probably be sovereign wealth funds and governments of crop-starved countries eager to secure food supplies for their rapidly growing populations. In 2008, China announced a $5 billion plan to develop agricultural assets in Africa. That's just a start. Given that it has 20% of the world's population but only 7% of its arable land and 7% of its freshwater resources, China has no choice but to look beyond its borders. And the global recession has hardly slowed its appetite for crops. In the first four months of 2009, China imported a record 13.9 million tons of soybeans.

The Gulf States of Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Saudi Arabia have already begun making deals to acquire or lease large tracts of farmland in Africa and Asia at bargain prices. That in turn has led to spate of headlines recently about a "land grab" by rich countries. When South Korea's Daewoo Logistics announced a $6 billion deal last November to lease roughly half the arable land in Madagascar - a plot about twice the size of Delaware - it caused so much anger that it helped spur a coup d'etat. In May a UN-sponsored study concluded that too many farmland deals were giveaways by leaders of poor countries, with only vague promises of jobs and investment in return.

If any investor has a long view on world markets, it's Lord Jacob Rothschild. The 73-year-old scion of the world-famous European banking dynasty need only look to his own family history, which dates back some 200 years to the rise of patriarch Mayer Amschel Rothschild in Frankfurt. Rothschild rattles off statistics on population growth before bringing up another issue of increasing importance: inflation. "If you look at the macro picture today," says Rothschild, "we have an extraordinary situation. If you take governments' printing money as fast as they are, borrowing as fast as they are, and bailing out white-elephant corporations, we're surely going to have an inflationary situation fairly soon." In that kind of environment, owning a hard asset like land is a good hedge. He says he has already acquired some 100,000 acres in the Brazilian state of Bahia and holds an option on another 60,000. This summer it will produce its first crops of soybeans, cotton, and corn. Rothschild and Watson say they chose Brazil in part because there was a large quantity of scrubland, or cerrado, that could be irrigated and converted to farmland, enhancing the value greatly. They also liked the fact that its economy has been growing robustly. And perhaps most important, Brazil has 14% of the world's freshwater resources, the most of any country. "The world is fully in a water crisis, and we haven't realized it yet," says Watson. "When you're exporting agriculture, you're de facto exporting water."

D. Two years ago Shonda Warner launched an investment firm, called Chess Ag Full Harvest Partners, with a fairly simple underlying strategy: Buy undervalued farmland in the U.S. and profit from the coming global agriculture boom (full article on cnnmoney.com) .  There's another thing she finds comforting about what she's doing. "I've always personally liked the idea," she says, "that even if the bottom dropped out of this whole credit bubble and the world blew up, that the farmland, while it might not make a return for two or three or four years, was going to be there down the road. Because in the end, people have to eat."

… control food and you control people…

2. Another topic kept under reported by the press is the dangerous and rapidly accelerating use of FOOD as a WEAPON.

A. NSSM 200 was a document issued in 1974 by another population anxious high official, Henry Kissinger, who coined the phrase "useless eaters".   Population control (code words for depopulation?) was seen as needing a boost since the current mode of birth control efforts were lagging.

This NSSM 200 proposal stated the need to enforce population control in third world countries by curtailing food supplies as a punishment for non compliance. Since then more stealth measures have been implemented which are even more effective.

A recent Natural News article "Watch Out for Flying Syringes, GMO Edible Vaccines, and Forced Vaccinations", disclosed how research had been funded and started in the USA from 1996 onward in universities to determine a method of genetically engineering foods to be used as a carrier for vaccines.

http://www.naturalnews.com/026434_vaccines_vaccination_vaccinations.html

B. If you don't Know about or have never heard of the Monsanto Corporation please take some time to study them and there GMO (genetically modified organizim ) food.  An example of what they intend to accomplish is their MON810 corn.

Monsanto's MON 810 corn causes sterility according to studies published by the Austrian Government. Monsanto's MON 810 corn contains the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus which, when ingested, lowers the bodies CD 4 cells to a point which, on immune tests, indicate that a person has HIV/AIDS. The lowered CD 4 cells results from eating GMO corn, the staple of the diet in many parts of Black Africa. MON 810 is grown in Europe and the USA for animal feed, and around the world for human food.

In a recent Natural News article "Note: The End of Food As We Know It" explores the recent appointment of Michael Taylor, former Monsanto leading attorney, chief lobbyist, and vice president, to Food Czar. This Food Czar position is a key Obama cabinet post, and thus part of the executive branch. Things are getting a little ridiculous with Monsanto in the White House! Go to that article for more here:

http://naturalnews.com/026809_food_Monsanto_the_FDA.html

Reducing the birth rate is not as vicious as other depopulation plans conjured by some of the oligarchs and elites so far, and those plans are not necessarily only for third worlders or "useless eaters". You or your children could become victims of "culling the herd". Again, refer to the list linked above for nasty quotes from big people if you think this is tin foil hat stuff.

Monsanto is on the leading edge with their GMO's, which alone will spread sickness, disease and death. Their terminator seed program is their seed for total control of the world's food chain. Small farmers rely on keeping seeds from previous crops for future planting. This is a centuries old tradition.

By forcing small farmers who cannot afford to repurchase these seeds that self destruct after one planting, small farmers are going out of business and eventually will become extinct, making us slaves to huge agribusiness industrial farming.  (remember, all the farmland is being bought up!)

Now there is evidence that the patent scam is being used on non-GMO and non-terminator seeds as well. Monsanto has purchased several non-GMO seed companies and has been rushing to patent even those seeds! This strange patent policy mutation is disclosed in the video documentary The Future of Food.

3. We have left ourselves in a very bad position as a nation.  The US as of February 2008 became a net importer of food

A. The USA, the worlds breadbasket now has to import food just to feed us.

http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/food-crisis/2008/02/25/

B. According to a recent FAO report, the total number of undernourished people in the world reached 963 million in 2008, nearly 15 per cent of the world's population

United Nations report

C. National Geographic - The Global Food Crisis - The End of Plenty by Joel K. Bourne Jr.

It is the simplest, most natural of acts, akin to breathing and walking upright. We sit down at the dinner table, pick up a fork, and take a juicy bite, obliv­ious to the double helping of global ramifications on our plate. Our beef comes from Iowa, fed by Nebraska corn. Our grapes come from Chile, our bananas from Honduras, our olive oil from Sicily, our apple juice-not from Washington State but all the way from China. Modern society has relieved us of the burden of growing, harvesting, even preparing our daily bread, in exchange for the burden of simply paying for it. Only when prices rise do we take notice. And the consequences of our inattention are profound.

D. High prices are the ultimate signal that demand is outstripping supply, that there is simply not enough food to go around. Such agflation hits the poorest billion people on the planet the hardest, since they typically spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food.

E. Mon April 14, 2008 Riots, instability spread as food prices skyrocket

Riots from Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt over the soaring costs of basic foods have brought the issue to a boiling point and catapulted it to the forefront of the world's attention, the head of an agency focused on global development said Monday.

Bangladeshi demonstrators chant slogans against high food prices during weekend protests.

"This is the world's big story," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute. "The finance ministers were in shock, almost in panic this weekend," he said on CNN's "American Morning," in a reference to top economic officials who gathered in Washington. "There are riots all over the world in the poor countries … and, of course, our own poor are feeling it in the United States."

CNN Story

Will this be the USA in a few years?

… control food and you control the people…