Organic News 3

On the other side of the globe, such a price
change can mean the difference between life
and death. The following is from the CNN article mentioned
above.... But step outside the developed world, and the
price of food suddenly becomes the single most important fact of
human economic life. In poor countries, people typically spend
half their incomes on food -- and by ‘ food,’ they mean first and
foremost bread.
When grain prices spiked in 2007-2008, bread
riots shook 30 countries across the developing
world, from Haiti to Bangladesh, according to the Financial
Times. A drought in Russia in 2010 forced suspension
of Russian grain exports that year and set in motion the
so-called Arab spring.
Already, 18 million people in Niger, Mali, Chad,
Mauritania and Senegal are dealing with very
serious food shortages.
In Yemen, things are even worse.... Yemen has a
catastrophic food crisis. Nearly half the population,
10 million people, does not have enough to eat. While
300,000 children are facing life threatening levels of malnutrition.
The United Nations says Yemen is already in the
throes of a disaster. ‘The levels are truly terrible.
Whatever we do thousands upon thousands of children will die
this year from malnutrition,’ Unicef’s man in Yemen, Geert
Cappelaere, said. ‘In some areas child malnutrition is at 30%,
to put it in context, an emergency is 15%. It is double that
already.’
But this is just the beginning. These food shortages
are going to spread and we will eventually see
food riots that will absolutely dwarf the food riots of 2008.
Many scientists fear the worst. Some are even
now warning that food shortages will become
so severe that they will eventually force much of the globe on
to a vegetarian diet....
Leading water scientists have issued one of the
sternest warnings yet about global food supplies,
saying that the world’s population may have to switch almost
completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years
to avoid catastrophic shortages.
Humans derive about 20% of their protein from
animal-based products now, but this may
need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected
to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of
the world’s leading water scientists. ‘There will not be enough
water available on current croplands to produce food for the expected
9 billion population in 2050 if we follow current trends
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