A Little Hunger Among Friends

While parts of the world are seeing riots over food scarcity, and huge increases in price for the food available, Western nations with U.S. leadership plumped for biofuels over people at the Food Summit in Rome. Investments in ethanol appear to have been Agriculture Secretary Schafer's guiding principal, as our position eschews principle.

Having found that effects of diverting land usage to growing biofuel ingredients pays well, our U.S. representatives are supporting the rich devastation of the poor.

Global Food Crisis Summit: The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) Rome food security summit concluded on Thursday and not surprisingly differences on rich country subsidies/protections for agriculture, biofuels and the opposition of well-fed Europeans to GM foods, remained unresolved.

The FAO estimates that global food consumption will double over the next 30 years as the global population increases by 42 percent to over 9 billion.

At the opening ceremony on Tuesday, FAO Director-General Dr. Jacques Diouf appealed to world leaders for $30 billion a year to re-launch agriculture and avert future threats of conflicts over food. He said that OECD countries* spent $372 billion in 2006 alone, to support their agriculture - Global Food Crisis Summit: FAO says world only needs $30 billion a year to eradicate the scourge of hunger; OECD countries spent $372 billion in 2006 alone to support their agriculture

Also on Tuesday, the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon said that that there were nearly one billion people short of food and called upon countries gathered here to act with"a sense of purpose and mission."

"Only by acting together, in partnership, can we overcome this crisis,"he said.

But it was noted that the powerful politicians in attendance spoke mostly about economics and politics.

It has been obvious for some time that the worst administration ever has business as its object, and we here in the U.S. have learned over 7+ years that the right wing is opposed to the public interest it has sworn to protect. We have agency heads who work to defeat the legislation that created their agencies, and Agriculture joins with FDA in diminishing protections of our food. Abroad, now, we see Agriculture working against food for the whole world. Promoting hunger was never the purpose of this department, but it has chosen to take that as its role.

We have to overturn the inhumane aspect of this government by thieves, and that should happen sooner, not later. The world is not going to ignore the axis of evil that our government has become.