Solutions for world hunger.

reply to post by calstorm


True. My whole thing is that we go into Iraq and bomb them back into the stone age in the name of liberating them, when we could go into africa and remove these dictators, then protect the NPO's as they help build these areas. Prolly just singing to the choir on this though.

Originally posted by calstorm
I seriously doubt that the problem in Africa is space. Its politics. We could go in there put in pipes for fresh water help cultivate the land and bring in livestock, so they could go on to produce their own food, but with the wars and violence that would be difficult in some areas, but we could still bring in plenty of food with just the amount of money the stars spend on their dresses for the Oscars.

I believe we could.. absolutely, so why isnt it being done? I have an idea.. that keeping people fed and alive is NOT the motivator. Its not what is really sought. There is more than one agenda with all of this.. and i get really irritated when I see it all the time. You realize its even done in the US.. but for different reasons. Keeping competel segments of the population slaves and the federal govt is the master. All of these evil things are done under the guise of mercy and altruism.

reply to post by Gnarly


I've actually never read any papers on hydroponics till about 10 minutes ago. I'm just really good at economics, and I knew that the thousands of factors that must be considered when growing crops would come into effect (even in a greenhouse scenario), that would make the cost go skyward.

I Googled hydroponics and found several papers on the subject praising the idea of hydroponics, but were skeptical that it would work on a mass level. Here's one I found...
Hydroponics

It was an interesting read, and I may consider trying an outdoor variant of these methods next season (I currently have a table top garden).

One section in particular caught my eye:

With the superhighways in America, the energy required to transport fresh vegetables from the southern region of the United States and from Mexico is less than that required to heat a greenhouse. For example, in conventional greenhouses in Ohio, nearly 40,000 kcal of energy are required to grow 1 kg of tomatoes vs. only 4000 kcal in the open field. Shipping 1 kg of tomatoes 5000 km north by semi-truck expends only 1865 kcal of energy.

Look. I see the appeal of the science behind this, and as a personal home garden (especially in an Urban environment) its ideal, but realistically it just isn't going to work in the way that its been working for centuries. At least not in an affordable way. There's too much energy involved, and too many hands that can potentially wind up rummaging around in the purse of these facilities (energy companies, unions, politicians, etc).
I wish no one would ever have to go hungry. Maybe we can ration the obese and give their extras to the starving nations of the world.

Originally posted by LifeIsEnergy
reply to post by calstorm

 

True. My whole thing is that we go into Iraq and bomb them back into the stone age in the name of liberating them, when we could go into africa and remove these dictators, then protect the NPO's as they help build these areas. Prolly just singing to the choir on this though.

Yeah, funny how its not an appropriate action, to expensive, and the overlords/dictators have rights too ya know.. when the end result is a truly good thing isnt it?

This subject invariably gets my panties in a wad.

reply to post by Mactire

...Now when the day comes when they start filling the camps, or passing laws stating that "one can't grow their own gardens" you'll see a different animal, but for now, I sit and wait. A lion in his den....

Actually the bill to regulate gardens out of existence is slated to be passed this week. No it is not obvious that that is what the bill will do, but remember what they did with the Federal Reserve Act:

These fellows were not stupid. You have to give them credit. They didn't get to be where they were by being country bumpkins. They understood politics, they understood mass psychology and they played their cards exceedingly well.... And then at the insistence of Paul Warburg who was forever the master strategist, they added several very sound provisions to the Federal Reserve Bill. By that I mean they added some provisions which seriously restricted the ability of the Federal Reserve to create money out of nothing. Warburg's associates said, "Paul, what are you doing? We don't want those in there this is our bill." And his response was this, he said, "Relax fellas, don't you get it? Our object is to get the bill passed. We can fix it up later." Those were his exact words. "We can fix it up later." He was so right. It was because of those provisions that they won over the support of William Jennings Bryan the head of the Populist Movement, the last hold-out against the bill. Bryan was concerned that this would be an instrument for ruining the nation's money supply but when he saw those provisions he said, "Oh well, those are good provisions, I guess I can support the bill now" never dreaming that this was temporary. Everything is temporary in politics. When people go to sleep things can get changed.

Warburg was right and they fixed it up later. The Federal Reserve Act since it was passed has been amended over 100 times. Every one of those provisions were long ago removed and many more have been added which greatly expand the power and reach of the Federal Reserve System to create money out of nothing.... www.bigeye.com...

The Ag cartel got the World Trade Organization Agreement on Ag passed in 1995. by 2005 they came up with the regulations designed to get rid of independent farmers and a bill appeared in Congress right on schedule.


September, 1995, USDA's Food Safety & Inspection Service presented a 600-page document Farm-To-Table - control of every step in the food chain from production to home preparation. haccpalliance.org...


July 1996 Major re-structuring of USDA food policies: Pathogen Reduction/Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) Systems rule, www.fsis.usda.gov...

( HACCP shut down government oversight labs and turned testing over to the Corporations. From this time on the government inspectors only check paper work allowing Big Ag to create a "food Safety Crisis")

December 2004 Union president Stan Painter receive reports from union member that SRM regulations are not uniformly enforced. Painter writes to the Assistant FSIS Administrator for Field Operation about enforcement problem. USDA responses by placed Painter on disciplinary investigation status and contacts the USDA Office of Inspector General about filing criminal charges.

December 2004 Freedom of Information Act requests
August 2005 Over 1000 non-compliance reports – weighing some 16 pounds -- were turned over - Union president Stan Painter's testimony before Congress: domesticpolicy.oversight.house.gov...


January 2005: Guide to Good Farming Practices: This draft guide to good farming practices for animal production food safety was taken from the Report of the Meeting of the OIE Terrestrial Animal Health Standards Commission (Paris, 17-28 January 2005) www.oie.int/boutique/extrait/25berlingueri823836_0.pdf?PHPSESSID=64969a28688594daf57a7263f42fb1ce



2005 Bill: Safe and Secure Food Act (Good Farming Practices) www.govtrack.us...

Given what regulations and WTO has done to farmers in other countries it would be foolish to think it will not happen here.

The Battle to Save the Polish Countryside

Julian Rose exposes the scandal of EU’s deliberate policy to get rid of family farms for the benefit of the corporations and gives a personal account of his battle with the GMO dragon that threatens to devastate rural Poland:

After clearing her throat and leaning slowly forward, the chair-lady said: “I don't think you understand what EU policy is.... To do this it will be necessary to shift around one million farmers off the land and encourage them to take city and service industry jobs to improve their economic position....”

There in a nutshell you have the whole tragic story of the clinically instigated demise of European farming over the past three decades. We protested that with unemployment running at 20 percent how would one provide jobs for another million farmers dumped on the streets of Warsaw? This was greeted with a stony silence, eventually broken by a lady from Portugal, who rather quietly remarked that since Portugal joined the European Union, 60 percent of small farmers had already left the land. “The European Union is simply not interested in small farms,” she said.

...Farmers, once having fallen for the CAP subsidy carrot, suddenly find themselves heavily controlled by EU and national officialdom brandishing that most vicious of anti-entrepreneurial weapons: ‘sanitary and hygiene regulations’ - as enforced by national governments at the behest of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. These are the hidden weapons of mass destruction of farmers and the main tool for achieving the CAP’s aim of ridding the countryside of small- and medium-sized family farms and replacing them with monocultural money-making agribusiness.

[UPDATE]
The so-called global food economy is in reality the instrument of a relatively small number of very wealthy transnational corporations. It is a small club that nevertheless harbours very big ambitions. One of its members is Monsanto (USA), whose recent marriage with the Cargill corporation makes it the biggest seed and agrichemical merchant in the world.

....As we discovered, much of the Polish media is in foreign hands or largely held by outside interests. The GMO lobby had already won over the main Polish farmers union, and the new government, under Donald Tusk, kept an increasingly silent position on the future of the anti GMO legislation enacted by his predecessor Kaczynski.
www.i-sis.org.uk...

Prepare to starve

This is a thread I like. Thanks OP. It's always nice to think constructively.

The most rational and logical solution in my mind is that every continent, every nation, every city, and every town must grow their own food. The solution is very simple actually, but it will tip the entire world economy in favor of the average person instead of the rich and powerful. So it will be extremely hard to move the poker chips out of the chip leader's hands.

Countries are focusing on specific cash crops instead of crops for domestic food. These cash crops are in demand by the mega-conglomerate corporations. The rich are getting richer, the poor have less food to eat. Countries are growing acres upon acres of crops to export to other countries, while neglecting domestic food cultivation. Cash crops are more financially benefitting to the individual farmer, so the domestic population suffers lack of edible food. Besides cash money, no country can benefit from growing one or few specific crops such as tobacco, coffee, or rubber, etc. It's all for the ultimate benefit of the corporate suits. Nations should grow edible food for their own populations instead of for corporate demand.

It is also my belief that Weather Modification techniques have and are being used in Africa and other regions to cause unnatural drought and create deserts. The U.N. prohibited weather modification that causes drought and deserts, so in all probability it must exist.

Understanding Relating to Article II
It is the understanding of the Committee that the following examples are illustrative of phenomena that could be caused by the use of environmental modification techniques as defined in Article II of the Convention: earthquakes, tsunamis; an upset in the ecological balance of a region; changes in weather patterns (clouds, precipitation, cyclones of various types and tornadic storms); changes in climate patterns; changes in ocean currents; changes in the state of the ozone layer; and changes in the state of the ionosphere.

If Africa was always a bare and arid desert region completely devoid of cultivation capabilities, Africans would have all left Africa and migrated to other continents long ago. If they always had the drought problem we see today, they would have all died off long ago. The African animals would not have been in the abundance written about during "modern" European exploration of Africa. The continuous and wide-scale drought we see today was not heard of centuries ago. I believe it is an effort to exterminate black people. This, along with the man-made AIDS virus.

So how do we fight world hunger? Encourage each nation to be more isolationist in their domestic cultivation of edible crops. End cash crop cultivation. Greed stops this from happening.

“Give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach him to farm, feed him for life.”

Cash Crops
Top 5 Rubber Producing Countries
Top 5 Tobacco Producing Countries
Top 10 Coffee Producing Countries
Weather Modification
Environmental Modification Convention
Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques

reply to post by Sahabi


Good stuff! I have been thinking deeply about how seriously unlikely big corporations, banks and Gov. will "do the right thing", and being that they hold the most power and influence on these issues, the only solution I can see is to follow in MLK and Gandhi's footsteps. That being, people on a wide scale must organize and protest to create an atmosphere of guilt for these corps. and govs. It will take a lot of sacrifice from the average 'joe's' but I see no other way. Until people are willing to give their life for these issues, no one will step forward and support such ideas. I know I would drop everything in my life to help a movement that seeks to disempower these corps and banks, and work towards empowering the people, on a global scale.

reply to post by Sahabi

...So how do we fight world hunger? Encourage each nation to be more isolationist in their domestic cultivation of edible crops. End cash crop cultivation. Greed stops this from happening....

First I agree, Food Sovereignty is the key. How ever the Cash Crop Cultivation is the direct result of the greed of the World Bankers NOT the farmers who are bankrupted by the new policies. This is of course intentional. It allows the international corporations to buy the land cheap and to have a lot of cheap farm labor available.

Structural Adjustment Policies are economic policies which countries must follow in order to qualify for new World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans and help them make debt repayments on the older debts owed to commercial banks, governments and the World Bank....

SAPs generally require countries to devalue their currencies against the dollar; lift import and export restrictions; balance their budgets and not overspend; and remove price controls and state subsidies...
Balancing national budgets can be done by raising taxes, which the IMF frowns upon, or by cutting government spending, which it definitely recommends. As a result, SAPs often result in deep cuts in programmes like education, health and social care, and the removal of subsidies designed to control the price of basics such as food and milk. So SAPs hurt the poor most, because they depend heavily on these services and subsidies.

SAPs encourage countries to focus on the production and export of primary commodities such as cocoa and coffee to earn foreign exchange. But these commodities have notoriously erratic prices subject to the whims of global markets which can depress prices just when countries have invested in these so-called 'cash crops'.

By devaluing the currency and simultaneously removing price controls, the immediate effect of a SAP is generally to hike prices up three or four times, increasing poverty to such an extent that riots are a frequent result....
www.whirledbank.org...

Now you know why the mortgage crisis had to occurred in the USA JUST before the "Food Modernization Act" is about to be passed. Lower the price of land and then bankrupt the farmers. It is also why the flood of immigrants is allowed. SEE: www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by crimvelvet


I do blame the corporate suits and bankers, not the farmers. The farmers all got screwed with the cash crop situation. Initially the farmers earned some big bucks for converting to cash crops instead of domestic food. Then as more and more farmers switched over to cash crops, the corporations started to tighten their grip, lower payout for the crops, and even resorted to threats against the farmers.

Nice how you tied in the housing market collapse and illegal immigration.

I think the banks, corporations, and super rich will not be happy until they have absolute control of every aspect of humanity and earth. Appears to be the trend, and it's really sad.

Originally posted by TSAisaSCAM
Now let me start off by saying I'm not a genius, but if we all come together... You know that old saying "Two heads are better than one" Multiply that by 10,000 .

Every 3.6 seconds someone in the world dies of hunger



What can we do, What can you do? Let's talk about it.

What do we need? Genetically altered Food? Clones? What's the way of the future, let's see if we can figure it out.

LAST:
I've been hearing a lot that the people at the top don't want to end world hunger? I for one believe that world hunger could end tomorrow if we threw ourselves to the task. If the great old USA can destroy cities, armies, land people on the moon, etc.... Why can't it end world hunger? Because they don't want to. Simple as that. And that's just pathetic... Make a difference today, Donate a can... That won't solve world hunger today ,but it will feed one hungry soul... Be POSITIVE in this world filled with HATE.

edit on 29-11-2010 by TSAisaSCAM because: (no reason given)

edit on 29-11-2010 by TSAisaSCAM because: (no reason given)

reply to post by drkid


I don't get that video. The guys states a greenhouse garden that grows food throughout the year without heat, and then literally 5 seconds later he walks over and points to his heater that creates the heat for the greenhouse..

All of these methods are great for home gardens or even small community gardens, but when talking about the mass gardens needed to feed millions, and the use of the space and technology that goes with these methods the costs will be just be too high. Massive indoor gardens will require insurance that fields would not, as well as health precautions, the worker's pay, the electricity to grow these plants, the pumps, etc etc so on and so forth. I don't think I could afford $8.00 per tomato. And if you're going to give these jobs to Americans instead of letting those who are willing to work for fractions on the dollar to do the work, you can expect to pay even more than that.
Its great on paper, but unless you're going to give the work to robots (which would be counterintuitive), I don't think this is a feasible method to feed the masses.

Alot of third world countries are left out of the trades by the developed countries, so they are not part of the loop and therefore do not have access to the foods that we have access too.
Also, many companies like coca cola actually own water wells and stuff in africa to use for their own 'needs', not that they really need them ofcourse.
Greed is the cause of poverty unfourtunetly, even though im sure theres enough food for everyone the fat cats are reaching for there second helpings.
The solution in my eyes? Stop unnessisary consumerism and give third world countries a chance to participate ON A LARGER scale in world trade.