An article shared yesterday showed how to make homemade organic infant formula so please do not be repressed by what is a global banking movement controlling health care. We now have a predatory, profit-driven health care system in US where EVIDENCE-BASED DATA is geared towards what maximizes health industry profits and disregards DO NO HARM HIPPOCRATIC OATH.
Today we want to speak to the coming economic collapse and decade-long Great Depression MANUFACTURED BY ROBBER BARON CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA and their 5%. The US has not seen starvation in quite a long time----early American settlers unable to make the transition to American colonies died of starvation----the Great Depression brought people dying of starvation. Today we have great malnutrition----tomorrow WE THE PEOPLE THE 99% will see starvation in US. That is to where MOVING FORWARD US CITIES AS FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES takes America. What is the #1 public health issue in all of world history -----KEEP CITIZENS FED.
We reminded folks the reason we went to baby formula was women entering the workforce not having time to breast feed and low-income women tied to addictions and malnutrition having breast milk unhealthy for a newborn. What is coming next decade----LOTS OF MALNUTRITION.
AS EVERYONE KNOWS.....'Nutrient starved Mother = nutrient poor breastmilk'
All far-right extreme wealth regimes start by robbing everyone's property and wealth and creating mass human health crises----like food scarcity and starvation. We saw that with the GREAT LEAP FORWARD far-right wing MAO in China---we saw that with INDUSTRIAL STALIN----we saw that with far-right wing HITLER---we saw that with brutal MUGABE----of course MEXICO during NAFTA killed small farmers with lots of starvation. That is to where MOVING FORWARD is going. No FEED THE CITY hedge fund refugee-making of US citizens will be able to handle this planned food scarcity.
BELOW WE SEE THAT ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE FAR-RIGHT AUTHORITARIAN NGO PRETENDING TO BE LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE ON ENVIRONMENT, FOOD, AND HEALTH.
Intentional child-rearing is population control indeed tied to implanted microchip contraception. The left social progressive policies for controlling population all last century were to raise the 99% into middle-class where families most often have less children because financial security brings the feeling of smaller families.
Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa with rolling acres of farms----the desire to take back land from white colonizers was not a bad move----but deliberately allowing all that farmland to sit idle to capture power----and there were no white colonizers dying---it was sovereign black citizens.
Transforming Cultures project director at the Worldwatch Institute
Mission
Through research and outreach that inspire action, the Worldwatch Institute works to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world that meets human needs. The Institute’s top mission objectives are universal access to renewable energy and nutritious food, expansion of environmentally sound jobs and development, transformation of cultures from consumerism to sustainability, and an early end to population growth through healthy and intentional childbearing.
Famine becomes Mugabe weapon
In a shockingly sinister act of vengeance, Zimbabwe's dictator is orchestrating a slow death by starvation for millions of his opponents
Saturday 9 November 2002 20.49 EST
The rains have come to the undulating pastures of northern Matabeleland. In the bread basket of Zimbabwe, the seed should be in the ground by now. But instead the rural poor are bracing themselves for a catastrophe on a scale not seen since the Matabeleland massacres a generation ago.Death is stalking the people of Matabeleland again. Only this time it is a slow death by starvation - orchestrated in large part by Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party as a weapon against his opponents in the Movement for Democratic Change.
Amid warnings that more than 6.7 million Zimbabweans are facing starvation, the Matabele have found themselves attacked by Mugabe's thugs, who are refusing food to anyone suspected of supporting the MDC. They have been abandoned by donor countries in the international aid community, who have judged Zimbabwe a bad bet; and threatened by forecasts of a strong El Niño effect on the country's weather set to bring a season of heavy rains followed by drought.
The combination is bad enough for Zimbabwe's hungry rural communities - where one in three adults is infected with HIV - but there is more bad news. Thanks to drought and the Government's 'fast-track' land reform policy, cereal production is down 57 per cent from last year and maize output by 67 per cent. The international community has raised barely half the money needed to bridge that gap.
With inflation rampant and foreign exchange rates in dramatic decline, shortages of bread, maize, milk and sugar are worsening. To complicate the picture further, Western officials accuse senior Zanu officials of profiteering from a black market in food that most cannot afford.
'Zimbabwe is facing an utter catastrophe,' said one British official last week involved in organising the aid effort for Zimbabwe. 'Countries that usually give in crises like this don't want to know because of Mugabe's reputation. At present funding for food aid is running at only 40 per cent of what is needed. If we can't persuade people to give more, then we are looking at a disaster.
'Mugabe is playing politics with aid, but the international community must not be drawn into doing the same, no matter how repellent Mugabe's behaviour. It is the people of Zimbabwe themselves that matter, and we have got to help them.'
Britain's International Development Secretary, Clare Short, has called on fellow members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develpoment to pledge more. Despite deteriorating relations between Britain and the Mugabe regime that saw Zimbabwe last week ban scores of British and European politicians and impose visa requirements on Britons travelling to the country, Britain remains the second largest donor behind the United States - providing £36 million since September 2001.
'It is not that nothing is happening on the ground,' said one British source. 'The World Food Programme and other agencies are doing good work; it is just that no one is grasping the scale and urgency of the crisis. Unless the international community steps up a gear - and now - there is going to be a disaster.'
The most recent assessments suggest that the 'coping strategies' of those most badly affected will run out early in the new year. And then people will start to die.
But it is a message likely to be unpopular with governments from Scandinavia to Japan - usually big donors - which sources say have been reticent about giving aid to Mugabe's Zimbabwe.
It is a position that was outlined last week by Denmark's European Affairs Minister, Bertel Haarder, speaking at a meeting of European and southern African Ministers meeting in Maputo. His comments are unlikely to encourage already cautious governments to rush to Zimbabwe's aid while Mugabe is still in power.
'We would like to strongly react against the fact that the Zimbabwe government is using our aid and our food to put political and economic pressure on its own people,' said Haarder last week. 'They use our aid as a tool in the domestic fight against the opposition to survive, and that is not acceptable.'
Haarder's remarks followed comments by a senior US official earlier in the week who also accused Mugabe of politicising famine relief and said Washington was considering 'interventionist' measures that could challenge Zimbabwe's sovereignty.
The elections may be over but, according to one human rights observer returned from Zimbabwe, the use of starvation as a political weapon is continuing in some of the most hard-hit areas. The human rights worker - who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals against witnesses - described widespread use of starvation against opposition communities.
'In Nkayi in Matabeleland North, I interviewed one witness who had been planning to stand for the MDC in the district elections in September but was intimidated into pulling out,' said the worker. 'He was threatened into leaving his home. He told me that 20 families in his community had been denied the right to buy food from the government's Grain Marketing Board warehouses because of their support of the opposition. They have also been denied the right to work. So they cannot eat and they cannot earn money.'
It is a story being repeated across the country. 'In one area I actually witnessed Zanu youth militia running rural food sales with the instructions to sell only to Zanu supporters. With the government having a monopoly on the warehouses, it can control completely who is fed and who is not.'
At Murambinda District Hospital, according to the World Food Programme, doctors report increasing cases of malnutrition and pellagra, associated with starvation. Informal interviews with those queuing for food aid in Mutasa district suggest many families are going for more than two days at a time without a proper meal. As always, it is the children who are suffering the worst.
A Unicef survey last May showed acute malnutrition prevalence in under-fives at 6.4 per cent. But when broken down further, the data show prevalence of acute malnutrition up to 18.2 per cent in some areas and alarming levels of wasting in those aged three to five at 41.6 per cent nationally.
In Silobela, in Midlands province, the local chief, Malisa, warned last month that thousands of schoolchildren in his area were on the verge of starvation. 'There is no family in the area that harvested even a bucket of grain,' he said.
Clare Short told The Observer: 'This is a very serious crisis. We can't let the people of Zimbabwe be punished twice by Mugabe and then by food shortages. They mustn't be abandoned. The donor community must step up their efforts.'
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Both Stalin and MAO did the same as Mugabe----journalism tells us these great famines were created by scientific misstep but world history shows this tool for SOCIETAL CAPTURE AND CHANGE for thousands of years.
As we said---Maoist and Stalin communals were simply a move by that 1% to end peasant land ownership creating an easy capture of food production -----there are always brutal dictators arising during these attempts at MARXISM. The Chinese 1% were simply clearing land and preparing for GLOBAL BANKING FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE INDUSTRIALIZATION which came in 1980s.
THIS WAS NEVER A WORKER'S REVOLUTION IT WAS ALWAYS FAR-RIGHT WING AUTHORITARIAN EXTREME WEALTH EXTREME POVERTY LIBERTARIAN MARXISM.
What WE THE PEOPLE THE 99% in US need to remember---this is always the way GREAT LEAP FORWARD MOVING FORWARD societal changes begin ---after ROBBER BARON periods of fleecing that nation.
Its founder and chairman is Terry Gou---FoxConn was the end result of MAO'S industrial revolution pretending to be worker's movement.
Mao's Great Leap to Famine
FRANK DIKÖTTERDEC. 15, 2010
HONG KONG -- The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst anywhere, was the Great Famine of 1958 to 1962, and to this day the ruling Communist Party has not fully acknowledged the degree to which it was a direct result of the forcible herding of villagers into communes under the “Great Leap Forward” that Mao Zedong launched in 1958.
To this day, the party attempts to cover up the disaster, usually by blaming the weather. Yet detailed records of the horror exist in the party’s own national and local archives.
Access to these files would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago, but a quiet revolution has been taking place over the past few years as vast troves of documents have gradually been declassified. While the most sensitive information still remains locked up, researchers are being allowed for the first time to rummage through the dark night of the Maoist era.
From 2005 to 2009, I examined hundreds of documents all over China, traveling from subtropical Guangdong to arid Gansu Province near the deserts of Inner Mongolia.
The party records were usually housed on the local party committee premises, closely guarded by soldiers. Inside were acres of dusty, yellowing paper held together in folders that could contain anything from a single scrap of paper scribbled by a party secretary decades ago to neatly typewritten minutes of secret leadership meetings.
Historians have known for some time that the Great Leap Forward resulted in one of the world’s worst famines. Demographers have used official census figures to estimate that 20 million to 30 million people died.
But inside the archives is an abundance of evidence, from the minutes of emergency committees to secret police reports and public security investigations, that show these estimates to be woefully inadequate.
In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961. In many other cases, local party committees investigated the scale of death in the immediate aftermath of the famine, leaving detailed computations of the scale of the horror.
In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.
Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.
One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilogram stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.
When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot. The report of the investigative team sent by the provincial leadership in 1969 to interview survivors of the famine records that the man died of grief three weeks later.
Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party. One inspector in Sichuan wrote that “commune members too sick to work are deprived of food. It hastens their death.”
As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another. Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.
One police investigation from Feb. 25, 1960, details some 50 cases in Yaohejia village in Gansu: “Name of culprit: Yang Zhongsheng. Name of victim: Yang Ecshun. Relationship with culprit: younger brother. Manner of crime: killed and eaten. Reason: livelihood issues.”
The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.
Mao was sent many reports about what was happening in the countryside, some of them scribbled in longhand. He knew about the horror, but pushed for even greater extractions of food.
At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever before. The minutes of the meeting reveal a chairman insensitive to human loss: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”
Mao’s Great Famine was not merely an isolated episode in the making of modern China. It was its turning point. The subsequent Cultural Revolution was the leader’s attempt to take revenge on the colleagues who had dared to oppose him during the Great Leap Forward.
To this day, there is little public information inside China about this dark past. Historians who are allowed to work in the party archives tend to publish their findings across the border in Hong Kong.
There is no museum, no monument, no remembrance day to honor the tens of millions of victims. Survivors, most of them in the countryside, are rarely given a voice, all too often taking their memories with them to their graves.
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All of these brutal dictators were installed by global banking---that dastardly global 1% OLD WORLD MERCHANTS OF VENICE the same global 1% that now has hold of US thanks to CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA NOW TRUMP-----these are the same far-right, authoritarian, militaristic, extreme wealth extreme poverty dictators as was a MUGABE, STALIN, MAO, HITLER----it is global corporate campus FASCISM.
Because history repeats itself WE KNOW global Wall Street has planned a great big food scarcity and public health crises. Breast-feeding in these conditions often kills the mother and bad outcomes for children---take Somalia for example.
Our Food Stamp program started to be corrupted when our low-income citizens were allowed to use them at CONVENIENCE STORES known for great fresh food----because of FOOD DESERTS. Now, global Wall Street 5% shouting these few decades about addressing food deserts are of course simply going to pave over those communities with global corporate campuses and global factories. In Baltimore all the FRESH FOOD MOVEMENT will fail because no shouting to stop MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUSES has is happening.....we are building what will be a COLLAPSE OF FOOD AVAILABILITY ERGO A COMING FOOD SCARCITY. No doubt those same global 1% calling Mao's and Stalin's famines a scientific miscalculation will call this coming one in US a MISCALCULATION as well.
Keep in mind all this would be top priority to a US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE public health department IF those appointed by global Wall Street Baltimore Development and global Johns Hopkins by its puppet Baltimore City Council and mayor ----but all they are doing is PRETENDING to build sustainability for a 99% of citizens.
Mugabe, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler all had that 5% to the 1% helping to MOVE FORWARD far-right wing global corporate fascism.
What's happening in Zimbabwe today? They are installing FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE GLOBAL CORPORATE FACTORIES.
Holocaust by hunger: The truth behind Stalin's Great Famine
By Simon Sebag Montefiore for MailOnline
Updated: 20:50 EDT, 25 July 2008
The trouble was there were simply too many Romans to kill them all.
Many centuries later, the brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin reflected that he would have liked to deport the entire Ukrainian nation, but 20 million were too many to move even for him.
So he found another solution: starvation.
Now, 75 years after one of the great forgotten crimes of modern times, Stalin's man-made famine of 1932/3, the former Soviet republic of Ukraine is asking the world to classify it as a genocide.
The Ukrainians call it the Holodomor - the Hunger.
Millions starved as Soviet troops and secret policemen raided their villages, stole the harvest and all the food in villagers' homes.
They dropped dead in the streets, lay dying and rotting in their houses, and some women became so desperate for food that they ate their own children.
If they managed to fend off starvation, they were deported and shot in their hundreds of thousands.
So terrible was the famine that Igor Yukhnovsky, director of the Institute of National Memory, the Ukrainian institution researching the Holodomor, believes as many as nine million may have died.
For decades the disaster remained a state secret, denied by Stalin and his Soviet government and concealed from the outside world with the help of the 'useful idiots' - as Lenin called Soviet sympathisers in the West.
Russia is furious that Ukraine has raised the issue of the famine: the swaggering 21st-century state of Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev see this as nationalist chicanery designed to promote Ukraine, which may soon join Nato and the EU.
They see it as an anti-Russian manoeuvre more to do with modern politics than history. And they refuse to recognise this old crime as a genocide.
They argue that because the famine not only killed Ukrainians but huge numbers of Russians, Cossacks, Kazakhs and many others as well, it can't be termed genocide - defined as the deliberate killing of large numbers of a particular ethnic group.
It may be a strange defence, but it is historically correct.
So what is the truth about the Holodomor? And why is Ukraine provoking Russia's wrath by demanding public recognition now?
The Ukraine was the bread basket of Russia, but the Great Famine of 1932/3 was not just aimed at the Ukrainians as a nation - it was a deliberate policy aimed at the entire Soviet peasant population - Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakh - especially better-off, small-time farmers.
It was a class war designed to 'break the back of the peasantry', a war of the cities against the countryside and, unlike the Holocaust, it was not designed to eradicate an ethnic people, but to shatter their independent spirit.
So while it may not be a formal case of genocide, it does, indeed, rank as one of the most terrible crimes of the 20th century.
To understand the origins of the famine, we have to go back to the October 1917 Revolution when the Bolsheviks, led by a ruthless clique of Marxist revolutionaries including Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, seized power in the name of the workers and peasants of the Russian Empire to create a Marxist paradise, using terror, murder and repression.
The Russian Empire was made of many peoples, including the Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Georgians, but the great majority of them, especially in the vast arable lands of Ukraine, southern Russia, the northern Caucasus, and Siberia, were peasants, who dreamed only of owning their own land and farming it.
Initially, they were thrilled with the Revolution, which meant the breakup of the large landed estates into small parcels which they could farm.
But the peasants had no interest in the Marxist utopian ideologies that obsessed Lenin and Stalin.
Once they had seized their plots of land, they were no longer interested in esoteric absurdities such as Marx's stages in the creation of a classless society.
The fact is they were essentially conservative and wanted to pass what little wealth they had to their children.
This infuriated Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who believed that the peasantry, especially the ones who owned some land and a few cows, were a huge threat to a collectivist Soviet Russia.
Lenin's hatred of the peasantry became clear when a famine occurred in Ukraine and southern Russia in 1921, the inevitable result of the chaos and upheaval of the Revolution.
With his bloodthirsty loathing for all enemies of the Revolution, he said 'Let the peasants starve', and wrote ranting notes ordering the better-off peasants to be hanged in their thousands and their bodies displayed by the roadsides.
Yet this was an emotional outburst and, ever the ruthless pragmatist, he realised the country was so poor and weak in the immediate aftermath of its revolutionary civil war that the peasants were vital to its survival.
So instead, he embraced what he called a New Economic Policy, in effect a temporary retreat from Marxism, that allowed the peasants to grow crops and sell them for profit.
It was always planned by Lenin and his fellow radicals that this New Economic Policy should be a stopgap measure which would soon be abandoned in the Marxist cause.
But before this could happen, Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin defeated all his rivals for the Soviet leadership.
Then, three years later, grain supplies dropped radically. It had been a poor crop, made worse by the fact that many peasant farmers had shifted from grain into more lucrative cotton production.
Stalin travelled across Russia to inspect supplies and ordered forcible seizures of grain from the peasantry.
Thousands of young urban Communists were drafted into the countryside to help seize grain as Stalin determined that the old policies had failed.
Backed by the young, tough Communists of his party, he devised what he called the Great Turn: he would seize the land, force the peasants into collective farms and sell the excess grain abroad to force through a Five Year Plan of furious industrialisation to make Soviet Russia a military super power.
He expected the peasants to resist and decreed anyone who did so was a kulak - a better-off peasant who could afford to withhold grain - and who was now to be treated as a class enemy.
By 1930, it was clear the collectivisation campaign was in difficulties.
There was less grain than before it had been introduced, the peasants were still resisting and the Soviet Union seemed to be tottering.
Stalin, along with his henchman Vyacheslav Molotov and others, wrote a ruthless memorandum ordering the 'destruction of the kulaks as a class'.
They divided huge numbers of peasants into three categories.
The first was to be eliminated immediately; the second to be imprisoned in camps; the third, consisting of 150,000 households - almost a million innocent people - was to be deported to wildernesses in Siberia or Asia.
Stalin himself did not really understand how to identify a kulak or how to improve grain production, but this was beside the point.
What mattered was that sufficient numbers of peasants would be killed or deported for all resistance to his collectivisation programme to be smashed.
In letters written by many Soviet leaders, including Stalin and Molotov, which I have read in the archives, they repeatedly used the expression: 'We must break the back of the peasantry.' And they meant it.
In 1930/1, millions of peasants were deported, mainly to Siberia. But 800,000 people rebelled in small uprisings, often murdering local commissars who tried to take their grain.
So Stalin's top henchmen led armed expeditions of secret policemen to crush 'the wreckers', shooting thousands.
The peasants replied by destroying their crops and slaughtering 26 million cattle and 15 million horses to stop the Bolsheviks (and the cities they came from) getting their food.
Their mistake was to think they were dealing with ordinary politicians.
But the Bolsheviks were far more sinister than that: if many millions of peasants wished to fight to the death, then the Bolsheviks were not afraid of killing them.
It was war - and the struggle was most vicious not only in the Ukraine but in the north Caucasus, the Volga, southern Russia and central Asia.
The strain of the slaughter affected even the bull-nerved Stalin, who sensed opposition to these brutal policies by the more moderate Bolsheviks, including his wife Nadya.
He knew Soviet power was suddenly precarious, yet Stalin kept selling the grain abroad while a shortage turned into a famine.
More than a million peasants were deported to Siberia: hundreds of thousands were arrested or shot.
Like a village shopkeeper doing his accounts, Stalin totted up the numbers of executed peasants and the tonnes of grains he had collected.
By December 1931, famine was sweeping the Ukraine and north Caucasus.
'The peasants ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, anything they could find,' wrote one witness Fedor Bleov.
By summer 1932, Fred Beal, an American radical and rare outside witness, visited a village near Kharkov in Ukraine, where he found all the inhabitants dead in their houses or on the streets, except one insane woman. Rats feasted on the bodies.
Beal found messages next to the bodies such as: 'My son, I couldn't wait. God be with you.'
One young communist, Lev Kopolev, wrote at the time of 'women and children with distended bellies turning blue, with vacant lifeless eyes.
'And corpses. Corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts in the melting snow of Vologda [in Russia] and Kharkov [in Ukraine].'
Cannibalism was rife and some women offered sexual favours in return for food.
There are horrific eye-witness accounts of mothers eating their own children.
In the Ukrainian city of Poltava, Andriy Melezhyk recalled that neighbours found a pot containing a boiled liver, heart and lungs in the home of one mother who had died.
Under a barrel in the cellar they discovered a small hole in which a child's head, feet and hands were buried. It was the remains of the woman's little daughter, Vaska.
A boy named Miron Dolot described the countryside as 'like a battlefield after a war.
'Littering the fields were bodies of starving farmers who'd been combing the potato fields in the hope of finding a fragment of a potato.
'Some frozen corpses had been lying out there for months.'
On June 6, 1932, Stalin and Molotov ordered 'no deviation regarding amounts or deadlines of grain deliveries are to be permitted'.
A week later, even the Ukrainian Bolshevik leaders were begging for food, but Stalin turned on his own comrades, accusing them of being wreckers.
'The Ukraine has been given more than it should,' he stated.
When a comrade at a Politburo meeting told the truth about the horrors, Stalin, who knew what was happening perfectly well, retorted: 'Wouldn't it be better for you to leave your post and become a writer so you can concoct more fables!'
In the same week, a train pulled into Kiev from the Ukrainian villages 'loaded with corpses of people who had starved to death', according to one report.
Such tragic sights had no effect on the Soviet leadership.
When the American Beal complained to the Bolshevik Ukrainian boss, Petrovsky, he replied: 'We know millions are dying. That is unfortunate, but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify it.'
Stalin was not alone in his crazed determination to push through his plan.
The archives reveal one young communist admitting: 'I saw people dying from hunger, but I firmly believed the ends justified the means.'
Though Stalin was admittedly in a frenzy of nervous tension, it was at this point in 1932 when under another leader the Soviet Union might have simply fallen apart and history would have been different.
Embattled on all sides, criticised by his own comrades, faced with chaos and civil war and mass starvation in the countryside, he pushed on ruthlessly - even when, in 1932, his wife Nadya committed suicide, in part as a protest against the famine.
'It seems in some regions of Ukraine, Soviet power has ceased to exist,' he wrote.
'Check the problem and take measures.' That meant the destruction of any resistance.
Stalin created a draconian law that any hungry peasant who stole even a husk of grain was to be shot - the notorious Misappropriation of Socialist Property law.
'If we don't make an effort, we might lose Ukraine,' Stalin said, almost in panic.
He dispatched ferocious punitive expeditions led by his henchmen, who engaged in mass murders and executions.
Not just Ukraine was targeted - Molotov, for example, headed to the Urals, the Lower Volga and Siberia.
Lazar Kaganovich, a close associate of Stalin, crushed the Kuban and Siberia regions where famine was also rife.
Train tickets were restricted and internal passports were introduced so that it became impossible for peasants to flee the famine areas.
Stalin called the peasants 'saboteurs' and declared it 'a fight to the death! These people deliberately tried to sabotage the Soviet stage'.
Between four and five million died in Ukraine, a million died in Kazakhstan and another million in the north Caucasus and the Volga.
By 1933, 5.7 million households - somewhere between ten million and 15 million people - had vanished. They had been deported, shot or died of starvation.
As for Stalin, he emerged more ruthless, more paranoid, more isolated than before.
Stalin later told Winston Churchill that this was the most difficult time of his entire life, harder even than Hitler's invasion.
'It was a terrible struggle' in which he had 'to destroy ten million. It was fearful. Four years it lasted - but it was absolutely necessary'.
Only in the mind of a brutal dictator could the mass murder of his own people be considered 'necessary'.
Whether it was genocide or not, perhaps now the true nature of one of the worst crimes in history will finally be acknowledged.
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Anyone who is a real organic food citizen KNOWS Wholefoods has been under fire these few decades over corrupting the organics and fair trade global markets and creating monopoly killing our small organic farmers. We have been shouting Wholefoods was always that KILLER of fresh food organics ---it did so while soaking US citizens buying high-price food that was often NOT organic or animal humane.
The concerning issue over WHOLEFOODS was the systematic attack on small farms already killed by GMO and GLOBAL BIG AG. Why do our small organic farmers sell to a GLOBAL FOOD GROCER? The same reason our small farms not organic sell to GLOBAL WALMART. WE THE PEOPLE THE 99% are not making local grown DOMINATE.
With the manufactured HYPER-INFLATION from the US FED, US Treasury, Obama, and Clinton neo-liberals leading to a collapse in US DOLLAR we KNOW all our global grocery stores---almost all in US are now global foreign owned-----will pull away from US food market. What selling WHOLEFOODS to a global AMAZON.COM does is create this same dynamic. AMAZON'S BEZOS is quite the brutal dictator with his operations---he is NO LEFTY.
What was WHOLEFOODS doing just as it prepared to sell that organic food chain? It was creating an online food delivery touted as being directed at FOOD DESERTS. Know where FOOD DESERTS are? They are the US city communities slated to become GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUSES AND GLOBAL FACTORIES.
Organic farming finds itself at a crossroads
Some organic purists still want to battle the “Empire,” but the market seems to be adjusting to the presence and influence of ‘Big Ag.’
Eric MortensonCapital Press
Published on February 17, 2017 9:16AM
At this point, maybe organic producers and processors should just declare victory.
They’ve won, haven’t they? Sales of organic products show double-digit growth year after year. Consumers increasingly associate organics with safer food and better nutrition, health, soil and plants, not to mention more humane treatment of livestock and better conditions for farmworkers.
That little green USDA Organic symbol on a package says this costs more because it’s special. And it’s all delivered by a chemical-free small farm worked by a smiling couple and their beautiful brood of happy children.
Right?
Well, sure, to a certain extent.
But within the organic community, some worry the movement — and that’s how many see it, as a movement — will lose its soul as “Big Ag” takes over organic production and snaps up small organic processors.
“If we continue to mainstream, is there anything left of what was organic, or do we just become product manufacturers?” asked Oregon organic pioneer David Lively.
As the Costcos, Wal-Marts and Krogers of the world continue to enter the organic market, “Are they really concerned with what we’re doing, or is it a marketing opportunity?” Lively said.
Main disagreements
There are other issues out there, of course. Producers disagree over the proposed organic checkoff, for example, and whether a “transitioning to organic” label is proper for growers who are headed that way but aren’t yet certified.
And although organic product sales grew 11 percent to reach $43.3 billion in 2015, and have undoubtedly topped that in the interim, the number of organic farmers has actually dropped. Organic products now make up nearly 5 percent of U.S. food sales, but organic acreage is less than 1 percent of U.S. cropland, according to the Organic Trade Association.
It appears millennials, the 18 to 34 age group, account for more than half of organic purchases. That means a lot of people still aren’t convinced they should pay more for something that often looks and tastes the same as conventional vegetables, fruit, grains and meat.
“It would be shortsighted if we strive only to fill the shopping baskets of millennials and be happy at that,” warned Drew Katz, who coordinates farm transitions for Oregon Tilth, an organic certification group.
But it’s creeping bigness that seemed to bother many of the 1,100 growers, processors and activists who attended the three-day Organicology conference and trade show in Portland earlier this month. One of the panel discussions was even titled, “Challenging the Empire: Forming a Rebel Alliance.”
The rebels might have reason to worry. Phil Howard, a Michigan State University professor, has tracked the acquisitions of organic operations by the biggest “Deathstars” in America’s food system.
Organic activists can recite some of them from memory: General Mills now owns Annie’s Homegrown and seven other organic brands. Coca-Cola owns Odwalla and Pepsi owns Naked Juice. Kellogg owns Morning Star and Kashi, plus two other brands. J.M. Smucker bought R.W. Knudsen, Millstone, Santa Cruz Organic and Enray. Food giants Foster Farms, Tyson, Hormel and Nestle also own several organic brands.
Costco helped another company buy 1,200 acres in Mexico, and will use it to supply its membership warehouse stores with organic products.
Wal-Mart barged into organics 10 years ago, vowing it would bring cheaper organic food to the masses. Critics soon alleged Wal-Mart’s organics were coming from factory farms and from China, with its checkered food safety and regulatory history.
Food writer Michael Pollan said the company’s low-price promise “virtually guarantees that Wal-Mart’s version of cheap, industrialized organic food will not be sustainable in any meaningful sense of the word.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported Feb. 9 that mass-market retailers now account for 53 percent of organic sales and that Whole Foods, one of the pioneering organic chains, is closing nine smaller, older stores and only opening six.
Soul vs. integrity
Brian Baker, a Eugene, Ore., organic consultant who moderated the “Empire” panel discussion at Organicology, said it’s not the soul of the industry he’s worried about, but rather its integrity.
“My point was that corporations that enter the organic sector through the acquisition of organic enterprises behave differently from operations that have gone through the hard work of transition or have practiced organic production and handling from the beginning,” he said in an email.
Conventional food corporations generally don’t understand what it takes to become organic, Baker said. They know the organic sector is growing and sells at a premium price, but lack organic production experience and don’t have a first-hand understanding of organic standards.
“The concern is particularly acute if the corporations behave as if the rules that applied to the companies they acquired do not apply to them,” Baker said.
While some attending Organicology hold tight to the “purity” of the movement’s hippie, back-to-the-land origin, as one observer described it, others are seeking a better balance.
Values-based
The Cornucopia Institute, based in Wisconsin, has served as a watchdog on organic issues, battling the USDA, the Organic Trade Association and corporations such as Wal-Mart when it believes the spirit or letter of organic guidelines are violated.
But Mark Kastel, co-director and senior farm policy analyst, said Cornucopia’s message is more nuanced than “big is bad.”
“The issues are not corporate scale, they are about corporate ethics,” he said. “This is a values-based industry. It’s grown to $43 billion (in sales) because consumers wanted an alternative to standard practices in growing agricultural commodities and in processing, too.
“If you respect the wishes and values of consumers, there is money to be made here and profit to made here at the farm gate and in the boardroom.”
‘In this together’
Gina Colfer, a key account manager with Wilbur-Ellis in Salinas, Calif., is on the frontlines as a big, conventional ag company transitions itself to join the organic marketplace.
Colfer, with experience in agronomy, pest control and food safety, was working for Earthbound Farm, which itself had grown from a small startup farm to a national organic producer, when Wilbur-Ellis came calling.
Wilbur-Ellis has been around nearly 100 years, and provides fertilizers, pesticides, seed and crop monitoring services to farmers in the West and into the central states. Growers began asking Wilbur-Ellis reps about organics, and the company decided it didn’t want to get left behind, Colfer said.
“We didn’t want to tell our growers we didn’t know,” she said.
She was brought on board to help growers answer those questions and become organic producers. She offers options and advice on methods, employing what she calls a whole systems approach.
“We want to help these growers learn that you’re not going to spray your way out of a problem,” she said. “You have to address the soil, and build soil health first and foremost.”
Other things follow, like improving pollinator habitat by planting native, perennial flowering plants and faster growing annuals in strategic areas.
Growers who follow a whole systems approach, no matter their size, advance organics, she said.
“For me, I look at the greater good,” Colfer said. “If we can keep more synthetic pesticides and fertilizers out of the environment, it’s a win-win for everyone. Building soil health, I think, crosses over all lines.”
And having organic products in larger marketplaces, she said, opens opportunities for consumers who might not otherwise be able to buy organics.
“We’re all in this together,” Colfer said. “People, planet and profit. All three of those have to be in place for it to be sustainable.”
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If one is planning a food scarcity for 99% of citizens a global 1% would need to assure food availability for that global 1% and their 2% inside US cities deemed FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES. Stalin did that in USSR when he seized all food grown by peasant collective farmers to send that food to cities for that 1% and their 2% leaving those peasants growing the food to die of hunger.
What we see is just that----we see a system of food availability for a few while all avenues to food for the 99% of citizens being dismantled. Remember, whenever global Wall Street pols and national media say a policy is geared to help US city low-income communities-----AS ENTERPRISE ZONES ----the goal is to displace the low-income to install global corporate campuses----that is to what this BEZOS plan with WHOLEFOODS delivered will be.
BEZOS is self-driven vehicles----he is drone delivery----he is partnered with the DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE AND HOMELAND SECURITY----so BEZOS is quite the far-right, authoritarian, militaristic, extreme wealth extreme poverty kind of guy=====so, global corporate campuses get food---- WE THE PEOPLE THE 99% do not. If a citizen thinks having that job on global corporate campuses is protecting them -----WAKE UP! EMPLOYMENT OF US CITIZENS IS GOING, GOING, GOING, GONE.
The Amazon-Whole Foods deal is less about stores and more about data, says data scientist
Chantel McGee
Sunday, 25 Jun 2017 | 3:24 PM ETCNBC.com
Mike Segar | Reuters
Amazon President, Chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos.
Amazon's acquisition of specialty grocer Whole Foods is not only about acquiring hundreds of stores and affluent customers — the real value of the deal is in all of that customer data, according to one data expert.
Kenneth Sanford, data scientist at Dataiku, told CNBC recently that one of Amazon's goals should be to combine the data it already collects from its online platforms, Echo and Alexa, with Whole Foods' customer transaction data.
In that regard, the company can predict what customers need and automatically send it to them, creating a personalized "auto grocery" experience, he said. "Amazon will know what's in your refrigerator already and will be able to deliver extra turmeric when you need it," said Sanford.
Essentially, Amazon will leverage its know-how in technology to customize the individual grocery shopping experience — all without the consumer ever even leaving the house.
"They'll be able to say, 'I know you have these three things in your cabinet, I'll send you these two additional things, based on the fact that you haven't had it in three weeks and you liked it last time,'" Sanford said. "They're going to be able to create meal bundles at a level that, say, [the] Blue Apron's of the world could never really do," he added.
Amazon did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
Grocery buying as a way to build relationships
Ambient e-commerce is something Instacart, one of Amazon's competitors in the grocery space, is already working toward.
"We're really deep into the consumer data, because we have a direct relationship with the consumer," Jeremy Stanley, vice president of data science for Instacart, told CNBC. "One of the wonderful things about groceries is that compared to other e-commerce purchases, groceries are habitual and frequent. People need groceries every week," Stanley said.
Instacart already uses customer behavioral data and search activity to anticipate what a customer wants or might like, he said.
The company is also using machine learning to improve logistics. "We're rapidly experimenting with computer vision for different types of applications, especially in understanding our catalog and enriching our catalog also potentially in identifying items on shelves in stores. There are lots of other directions that we can go with this," Stanley said.
Like Amazon, Instacart's online retail business is built on optimizing customer purchasing, relationships and recommendations by using the most innovative data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence technology.
"It's the digital and end to end asset … being able to understand everything from when the customer first shows up what their intent was to the long tail of their transactions in the months and years to come," Stanley said. "That kind of integrated data doesn't exist in many classic businesses."
The delivery startup is working with traditional grocers to collect data and insights that will allow them to remain competitive.
"Our customers are the customers of the retailers we serve, there is such brand loyalty to the retailers," Stanley said. "Groceries are really personal, maybe even more personal than the movies you watch, and I think data can really change the way people buy food."
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Here we have that same movement towards CLOSING BRICK AND MORTAR GROCERY STORES-----no need to build actual Whole Foods stores---let's deliver by drone to LOW-INCOME surrounding communities rather than build stores. All the global Wall Street Baltimore Development and global Johns Hopkins 'labor and justice' organizations led by that pesky 5% are now selling this as a fix for the poor in food deserts.
Urban League and black Wall Street sells this as a win for 99% of black citizens the majority living in those surrounding low-income communities.
I had a FB friend ask a good question----
WHY ARE BLACK 5% NOT PREPARING TO SUPPORT WHAT WILL BE LARGE NUMBERS OF POOR BLACK CITIZENS LOSING SOCIAL BENEFITS LIKE FOOD STAMPS?
The same question goes to WHITE 5% knowing that white citizens make up the majority of Food Stamp recipients.
So, our 5 % to the 1% all know to where MOVING FORWARD economic crash and hyper-inflation will goes as regards food, home energy, shelter but are making FAKE POLICIES pretending to address this-----
WAKE UP 99%-----THIS WILL NOT TARGET ONE POPULATION GROUP----EVERYONE IN NO ONE OUT....
Harbor East where Baltimore's Whole Foods is located is seen by Baltimore City Hall as a JEWEL ----with heavy surveillance and security.
Delivery drones to food deserts? 7 ideas, real and fantastical, we hope Amazon brings to Whole Foods
"I'd like to see Amazon using its tech prowess to address the problem of food deserts. It need not be building brick-and-mortar grocery stores in these areas'.
When the news broke this morning that Amazon is buying Whole Foods, our first thought was: What? Our next thought was: In our dream world, what would Amazon do to change/improve the grocery chain? Below, members of the Food & Dining team share their ideal merger scenarios — some humorous, others sincere, and many touching on the role Amazon could play in serving food deserts.
"I'd like to see Amazon using its tech prowess to address the problem of food deserts. It need not be building brick-and-mortar grocery stores in these areas. A drone fleet serving underserved communities, or a mobile team of trucks-turned-grocery-pop-ups that partner with local producers — that sort of thing would be great. Amazon has the money and the innovative team to do it." — Joseph Hernandez, reporter
"I’d love to create a shopping list on my phone, similar to Amazon's shopping cart, so that I could get the groceries delivered or set for pickup. That way, I’d never forget to cross something off the list. Also, in a dream world, they’d include a nice selection of cheese samples in each order, which I inevitably eat when shopping on the weekends." — Nick Kindelsperger, reporter
"My first thoughts was along the same lines as Joseph’s. Amazon could be positioned to help food deserts in unique ways. I’d like to see it taken a step further even, by offering affordable Blue Apron-style meal prep packages, maybe even with some materials to help raise nutritional and/or cooking literacy, etc., for people who don’t have much time to shop or cook. An Amazon/Whole Foods entrance into that market would be intriguing." — Adam Lukach, editorial assistant
"I'd like to see every Whole Foods tricked out with super-duper drones so my groceries can be flown to my house while I dawdle behind sipping some sort of iced coffee beverage." — Bill Daley, reporter
"When I need something I don’t normally buy that’s not stocked in a logical area, no more circling the store. I want to be able to type the food into an app that figures out what Whole Foods I’m in and then steers me directly to that item — basically Amazon’s online-shopping search brought into real life." — Marissa Conrad, deputy editor
"I would like to see Amazon bring to Whole Foods better data use on a personal and global level. On a global level, to reduce food waste through optimized distribution. On a personal level, to alert me when that giant bottle of laundry detergent gets back in stock somewhere then ask me if I want to pick it up or have it delivered. Whole Foods can bring to Amazon some of the best experiential retail anywhere. And I would like for them to get together and finally bottle the aroma of the Whole Foods body section that smells so good." — Louisa Chu, reporter
" 'If you order steaks, be sure to sign up for Amazon Prime....'
'Look, mommy! It's the tomato drone!'
'People who bought quinoa also bought.......'
'Free three-day delivery on dairy products!'
More seriously, though, Amazon could set up pickup-only stations in neighborhoods that lack grocery stores. Order online, and pick up the next day (or sooner). For customers lacking computer/cellphone access, Amazon could set up ordering kiosks in easily accessible locations. SNAP payments could be handled electronically." — Phil Vettel, restaurant critic
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As everyone in Baltimore knows and no doubt Detroit's gentrification is ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE global corporate campus as well------when those PRETENDING to be left social progressives at the same time hiding a Wholefoods building in poor Detroit is building in what will become as in Baltimore a luxury community. This is how we know the posers-----
When one corporation in an industry makes such a move as drone delivery of groceries----we can bet first other stores will be pushed out of business and then to compete all stores will move to drone delivery----as Wholefoods stops building brick and mortar so too will any grocer left open.
We already addressed the authoritarian public transit tied to driverless vehicles and 99% of citizens being captured as they pass through communities---we are watching what we have shouted for a decade----that DEEP DEEP STATE creating fresh food and fresh water sources for that global 1% and their 2% ---forget that 5% ---they are going under the bus real soon.
We would think 2027 would be when most of MOVING FORWARD US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES like Baltimore would near completion of global corporate campus and global factory development so indeed it would be that global 1% and their 2% living in US city centers with global corporate campuses taking all of US city surrounding communities. Eating 3 meals a day at cafeterias on global corporate campuses is the goal of global corporate campus SOCIALISM. But that is for those global labor pool workers working for just a bed and a meal.
Annie’s John Foraker Calls on Bezos to End Food Deserts by 2027
by Guest
18 Jun 2017
This is a guest post by John Foraker, President of Annie’s, Inc.
Right before the U.S. equity markets opened on Friday, June 16th my phone erupted with texts from numerous industry friends on the announcement of the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods. I have been in this industry for decades, and, for me, this was one of the most exciting and interesting days I can remember for the organic movement, certainly since the release of the USDA organic standards in 2002.
This deal has so many implications for the industry it is mind numbing. Total and complete #gamechanger. Who will be the biggest winners and losers? Will this make it even easier for highly disruptive challenger brands to grow and mainstream? What will the impact be on local organic systems and on the scaling of organic acreage globally? What are the implications for technology enabled food transparency? What will happen to pricing organic price premiums across the industry?
Those and so many more…But there was one monster question that popped into my head and rolled around with both fascination and optimism: Will this combination mark the beginning of the end to the tragic problem of food deserts in the US? Let’s explore that possibility.
The U.S. Food Desert Challenge
Food deserts are communities where access to affordable, quality, and nutritious foods is limited. More than 23 million Americans, including 6.5 million children, live in low-income urban and rural neighborhoods that are more than a mile away from a supermarket. In these neighborhoods it’s easy to buy 44’s, cigarettes and fast food, but fresh produce and other healthier food options? Not so much.
Is there really a food access problem?
There sure is. America’s top 75 food retailers – led by Wal-Mart, Kroger, Costco, Target and Safeway – opened more than 10,000 new locations between 2011 and the first quarter of 2015, according to a 2015 analysis published by The Associated Press. When the AP stripped away convenience stores and dollar stores that don’t usually provide fresh meal options, it found that only a little over 250 new supermarkets cropped up in the country’s expansive food deserts. The takeaway: traditional retailers have not been meeting the healthy food needs of those who need it most.
And then there is the issue of the costs of living far from a grocery store. A study published in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review finds that “lower-income shoppers must travel further and/or have fewer shopping options than do higher-income shoppers.” Fewer shopping options generally equates to less intense pricing competition for local stores, which could allow grocers to boost prices or offer products of poorer quality. Higher costs for better food leaves low-income shoppers with fewer choices.
There is clearly a monumental #foodjustice problem, so how are individuals and businesses solving it?One citizen who is fighting for food self determination is the courageous “Gangster Gardener” Ron Finley of South Central Los Angeles, who became famous for fighting the Los Angeles bureaucracy to allow citizens to grow food on public parkways in their own neighborhoods. Finley’s powerful message to “plant some shit” and grow your own food became a global sensation with this inspiring TED talk. Local self-empowerment and the education about healthy food that accompanies it is most definitely a big part of the solution, but will it alone be enough, fast enough?
Some incredible businesses have emerged to increase the availability of healthier foods in low-income communities through online delivery models. Thrive Market, for example, a membership-based online buying club that sells natural and organic products at reduced costs, is on a growth tear as it pursues its mission “to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone.” For every new membership Thrive donates a membership to a low-income family, teacher, veteran, or student. But can highly successful, relatively small online players alone really make a dent in such an enormous problem fast enough?
Brick and mortar retailers like Whole Foods have also tried to improve access in recent years, stepping outside their historical comfort zone and opening physical stores in underserved places like Detroit. Former Whole Foods Co-CEO Walter Robb said when addressing corporate leaders at the Milken Institute Global Conference that at the Detroit store “we’re going after elitism. We’re going after racism.” Real success, Robb said, would include improvements in health outcomes. Opening Whole Foods stores like this in many more food deserts requires a lot of capital and they are slow to build and drive impact. Beyond that, even though these stores have been a commercial success, prices are still high relative to the limited consumer incomes in these areas, as Slate outlines. But Whole Foods’ cultural commitment to attacking this problem is real, admirable and deeply rooted. Through its Whole Cities Foundation, a non-profit founded in 2014, it works to “improve individual and community health through collaborative partnerships, education, and broader access to nutritious food in the communities we serve.”
Amazon + Whole Foods Market = Golden Opportunity to End Food Deserts
Back to the Whole Foods-Amazon combination. What promise does the merging of these companies hold to attack food access issues? The potential is simply immense.
Amazon has been investing heavily in Amazon Fresh’s capabilities to deliver groceries at scale. This delivery infrastructure, coupled with its focus on driving down costs for consumers and its use of data analytics to target offerings to shoppers, are exactly the tools that can bring healthier food options to the front door, or landing target (in the case of drones), to any corner of any underserved neighborhood anywhere. This alone is a great start. But when you combine this delivery infrastructure with Whole Foods’ 450+ stores and organic food supply chain, you enable the delivery of natural and organic foods to most places in the US in a matter of an hour or two. Given Whole Foods’ deeply rooted cultural commitment to addressing food deserts, this acquisition has the magic potential to address this difficult problem. It will take a while, but I expect the combined company to make this a priority, and that it will indeed drive significant impact in the affordability and accessibility of good food in every neighborhood.
Access Alone is not Enough
We also know, however, that access alone will not improve food choices and health outcomes. According to a 2014 PBS article entitled Why It Takes More Than a Grocery Store To Eliminate A Food Desert, the problem may not lie solely with food accessibility; it is also due to shopping and eating habits developed over many generations. In the article, Steven Cummins, a professor of population health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, suggests that merely adding a new grocery store to a neighborhood won’t be enough to motivate individuals to shop there for healthier foods. “If you think about Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams — ‘If you build it, they will come’ — I guess that’s the kind of logic model that underpins these interventions. But that doesn’t do everything it’s supposed to do,” he says. “It can improve perceptions of food access, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into a behavior change.”
The educational and grassroots orientation of Whole Cities Foundation and countless other local organizations will be needed to educate consumers about making healthier food choices. I sincerely hope Amazon’s leadership team will understand the potential they have to educate their customers. The potential for societal change is significant, and the investments will be worth it. There are plenty of willing partners ready to get after this big mission, and all that is needed is a catalyst and a focal point for the work. There is a tremendous leadership opportunity available to Amazon if they choose to grasp it.
The also government needs to play a role in furthering education about healthy food in schools, while driving changes in school menus. In the absence of federal leadership, states and localities need to pick up the slack and continue to fight.
Large food companies like General Mills and their organic businesses like Annie’s need to continue to direct resources and passion to this problem. Pioneering organizations like Food Corps need to be scaled dramatically to overcome the educational and behavioral barriers to healthier food adoption. Together, all these groups can connect kids and families to real food. All of these things need to happen in unison for significant change to happen.
A Call to Action
The combination of Amazon and Whole Foods has the potential to make a big difference in food deserts, but they cannot do it alone. We need to leverage this new capability with help from all levels of government, the private sector, the engagement and commitment of passionate local activists like Ron Finley, combined with significant public & private sector investment to unlock it. Big problems are never easy to solve, but this is one I firmly believe can be overcome in my lifetime.
Two days ago, Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos Tweeted the following message:
Jeff, here’s my idea. Post-merger, host a big summit called something along the lines of “Eliminating Food Deserts in the U.S. by 2027”, invite all the parties that can help make that happen, and build a plan to do it using the Amazon-Whole Foods platform as the backbone.
Let this be the decade of now.
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We see these kinds of articles all over the globe-----threats of global collapse in food markets---they are placing this cause to CLIMATE CHANGE----but 2040 is too soon to see that much shift in warming climate. WE THE PEOPLE THE 99% were silent as US BIG AG went to GLOBAL BIG AG/MONSANTO====we watched as global IVY LEAGUE endowments were used to buy fertile land and fresh water sources around the globe. We knew there was a plan to use this to bring down civil society----
This coming food scarcity in US will be driven by MANUFACTURED HYPER-INFLATION----MOVING FORWARD will see the building of SMART CITIES TECHNOLOGY where drones do indeed deliver groceries with brick and mortar groceries closing. All of this prepares for what has been throughout CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ----manufactured CRISES----you can ask those 5% to the 1% religious leaders---they know these goals. Any talk of MEDICAID----UNIVERSAL CARE---FIXING FOOD DESERTS is all LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE POSING---they are lying.
The Foreign Economic Zones being built in US and Africa are designed to last for 50--60 years just as those overseas in Asia-----so all these predictions of disaster under NEW WORLD ORDER will be filled with PROPAGANDA. The food scarcity we are creating stems from allowing MOVING FORWARD US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES build global corporate campuses and global factories in our US cities for the sustainability of global 1% ----vs stopping MOVING FORWARD and keeping global corporate campuses at bay and rebuilding each community with a local, small business and small manufacturing economy----that is 99% sustainability.
People laugh when we shout to create CANDLESTICK local businesses---but then they again are not paying attention to goals of SMART METERS on home energy rationing------where 99% of citizens will have periods of the day when they will have no electricity, no natural gas, and no fresh water. PEOPLE WILL NEED CANDLESTICKS TO ADDRESS RATIONED HOME ENERGY..........nothing being done to create that bartering trade locally. I trade candlesticks for your fresh food garden.
Don't allow what will be lots of SENSATIONALISM around this topic fool you----these goals are real but natural disaster it will not be. The global 1% promoting breast feeding only know our global women will be under great physical strain ---not good for healthy natural milk.
Society To Collapse By 2040 Due To Catastrophic Food Shortages, Environmental Disaster
New scientific models supported by the British government’s Foreign Office show that if we don’t change course, in less than three decades industrial civilization will essentially collapse due to catastrophic food shortages, triggered by a combination of climate change, water scarcity, energy crisis, and political instability that are fueled by war.
By Nafeez Ahmed | | @nafeezahmed | June 22, 2015
Before you panic, the good news is that the scientists behind the model don’t believe it’s predictive. The model does not account for the reality that people will react to escalating crises by changing behavior and policies.
But even so, it’s a sobering wake-up call, which shows that business-as-usual guarantees the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it: our current way of life is not sustainable.
The new models are being developed at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute (GSI), through a project called the ‘Global Resource Observatory’ (GRO).
The GRO is chiefly funded by the Dawe Charitable Trust, but its partners include the British government’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO); British bank, Lloyds of London; the Aldersgate Group, the environment coalition of leaders from business, politics and civil society; the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries; Africa Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, and the University of Wisconsin.
Disruption risk
This week, Lloyds released a report for the insurance industry assessing the risk of a near-term “acute disruption to the global food supply.” Research for the project was led by Anglia Ruskin University’s GSI, and based on its GRO modelling initiative.
The report explores the scenario of a near-term global food supply disruption, considered plausible on the basis of past events, especially in relation to future climate trends. The global food system, the authors find, is “under chronic pressure to meet an ever-rising demand, and its vulnerability to acute disruptions is compounded by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation and heightening political instability.”
Three steps from crisis
Lloyd’s scenario analysis shows that food production across the planet could be significantly undermined due to a combination of just three catastrophic weather events, leading to shortfalls in the production of staple crops, and ensuing price spikes.
In the scenario, which is “set in the near future,” wheat, maize and soybean prices “increase to quadruple the levels seen around 2000,” while rice prices increase by 500%. This leads to rocketing stock prices for agricultural commodities, agricultural chemicals and agriculture engineering supply chains:
“Food riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America. The euro weakens and the main European stock markets lose 10% of their value; US stock markets follow and lose 5% of their value.”
The scenario analysis demonstrates that a key outcome of any such systemic shock to the global food supply — apart from “negative humanitarian consequences and major financial losses worldwide” — would be geopolitical mayhem as well as escalating terrorism and civil unrest.
The purpose of exploring such scenarios is to prepare insurers for possibilities that are now more likely than previously assumed. The Lloyd’s report points out:
“What is striking about the scenario is that the probability of occurrence is estimated as significantly higher than the benchmark return period of 1:200 years applied for assessing insurers’ ability to pay claims against extreme events.”
That leading insurance companies are now attempting to factor in potential losses from such crises is a major step forward in pushing the financial sector to recognise the dark-side of the current system of fossil fuel dependence.
The report concludes:
“A global production shock of the kind set out in this scenario would be expected to generate major economic and political impacts that could affect clients across a very wide spectrum of insurance classes.”
It would have “major consequences for companies’ investment income,” with the potential to “generate losses that span many years.” It would also result in political instabilities that take “decades to resolve” while imposing “greater restrictions on international business.”
Governments want answers
The scenario was developed for Lloyds by the Anglia Ruskin University team with the British Foreign Office’s UK/US Task Force on Resilience of the Global Food Supply Chain to Extreme Events.
The Foreign Office’s food resilience Task Force began to come together late last year. An FCO document from February 2015 for a Task Force workshop throws light on its rationale, direction, and participants.
“The taskforce is looking at plausible worst case scenarios of disruption to the global agri-food system, caused by extreme weather events,” the document explains. Taskforce projects aim to “improve understanding of how changing extreme weather events (severity, type, frequency, geographical impact) may impact on global food security” and to “identify how market and policy responses may exacerbate or ameliorate these effects.”
Of particular concern to the FCO’s taskforce is to determine “how large shocks in agricultural production could occur (e.g. floods, droughts, wind storms),” how these would translate into “crop reductions,” and “how society responds to high food prices or limited local availability.”
Although coordinated by the FCO, other British government-backed programmes are involved, chiefly, the Global Food Security Programme and UK Science & Innovation Network, together representing the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA); the Department of Health; the Department for International Development (DFID); the Government Office for Science; the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; and the Scottish and Welsh governments.
On the US side, government involvement was limited to the Center for Integrated Modeling of Sustainable Agriculture and Nutrition Security (CIMSANS), which is supported by the US State Department, and USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network.
Another participant was a senior researcher from the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), whose members include many leading international institutions.
Collapse
I had been in touch with the Anglia Ruskin GSI team for a while, having previously reported on some of their work — and this month joined GSI as a visiting research fellow.
Earlier this year, I attended an invite-only GRO steering committee meeting of scientists, technologists, financiers, economists, and academics, where GSI’s Director, Dr. Aled Jones, delivered a detailed presentation on the modelling work done so far, what it implied, and where it was leading.
Dr. Jones was previously Deputy Director of the Programme for Sustainability Leadership at the University Cambridge, where he was Director of the British government’s flagship Chevening Fellowships Economics of Climate Change Programme, supported by the UK Foreign Office to deliver the FCO’s Strategic Framework. Jones also chairs a working group of the UK government’s Department for Energy and Climate Change’s Capital Markets Climate Initiative (CMCI).
Jones’ GRO initiative has received direct funding from the Foreign Office to develop its modelling capacity, and he is a co-leader of the FCO Task Force’s working group on ‘Impacts’, where he and his team apply the GRO models to assess the way crop reductions would affect global food security.
GRO is developing two types of model: an Agent-Based Model to explore short-term scenarios of policy decisions by simulating social-economical-environmental systems; and a System Dynamics Model capable of providing projections for the next 5 years based on modelling the complex interconnections between finite resources, planetary carrying capacity, and the human economy.
“The financial and economic system is exposed to catastrophic short-term risks that the system cannot address in its current form,” Dr. Jones told us.
He described GRO’s use of the Agent-Based Model to capture and simulate the multiple factors that led to the 2011 Arab Spring events.
By successfully modeling the “impact of climate-induced drought on crop failures and the ensuing impact on food prices,” he said, the model can then be recalibrated to “experiment with different scenarios.”
“We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory based on ‘do-nothing’ trends — that is, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend. The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots. In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption.”
Another steering committee member raised their hand: “So is this going to happen? Is this a forecast?”
“No,” said Jones. “This scenario is based on simply running the model forward. The model is a short-term model. It’s not designed to run this long, as in the real world, trends are always likely to change, whether for better or worse.”
“Okay, but what you’re saying is that if there is no change in current trends, then this is the outcome?” continued the questioner.
Jones nodded with a half-smile. “Yes,” he said quietly.
In other words, simply running the Agent-Based Model forward cannot generate a reliable forecast of the future. For instance, no one anticipated the pace at which solar and wind energy would become cost-competitive with fossil fuels. And the fact that governments and insurers are now beginning to scope such risks, and explore ways of responding, shows how growing awareness of the risks has the potential to trigger change.
Whether that change is big enough to avoid or mitigate the worst is another question. Either way, the model does prove in no uncertain terms that present-day policies are utterly bankrupt.
Limits to growth
GRO’s System Dynamics Model takes a different approach, building on the ‘World3’ model developed by scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which famously forecast that humankind faced impending “limits to growth” due to environmental and resource constraints.
In popular consciousness, the ‘limits to growth’ forecasts were wrong. But recent studies, including one by the Australian government’s scientific research agency CSIRO, confirm that most of its predictions were startlingly prescient.
Dr. Jones and his team at Anglia Ruskin University have taken this confirmation several steps further, not only by testing the model against the real world, but by recalibrating it internally using new and updated data.
“World3 was a very good, robust system,” he told us. “Some assumptions were incorrect and misparameterised — for instance, life expectancy is smaller than assumed, and industrial and service outputs are larger than assumed. And the model was missing some shock dynamics and feedback loops.”
The same questioner put his hand up and asked, “Does this mean the original model and its predictions are flawed?”
“I would say the model was largely correct,” said Jones. “It was right enough to give a fairly accurate picture of future limits to growth. But there are some incorrect parameters and gaps.”
The System Dynamics Model, Jones explained, is designed to overcome the limitations of World3 by recalibrating the incorrect parameters, adding new parameters where necessary, and inputting fresh data. There are now roughly 2,000 parameters in the model, drawing on a database of key indicators on resources and social measures for 212 countries, from 1995 until today.
Jones’ affirmation of the general accuracy of the limits to growth model was an obvious surprise to some in the room.
The original model forecasted global ecological and economic collapse by around the middle of the 21st century, due to the convergence of climate change, food and water scarcity, and the depletion of cheap fossil fuels — which chimes with both the GRO’s models.
Last year, Dr. Graham Turner updated his CSIRO research at the University of Melbourne, concluding that:
“… the general onset of collapse first appears at about 2015 when per capita industrial output begins a sharp decline. Given this imminent timing, a further issue this paper raises is whether the current economic difficulties of the global financial crisis are potentially related to mechanisms of breakdown in the Limits to Growth BAU [business-as-usual] scenario.”
For the first time, then, we know that in private, British and US government agencies are taking seriously longstanding scientific data showing that a business-as-usual trajectory will likely lead to civilisational collapse within a few decades — generating multiple near-term global disruptions along the way.
The question that remains is: what we are going to do about it?
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'As we move agriculture north, we're going to be putting it in areas that don't have the same water-holding capacity, nutrient-holding capacity." '
Everyone has known these few decades the need to shift US breadbasket industry TO NORTHERN STATES was vital ---what did Obama and Clinton neo-liberals do with FARM BILL over several years---they created all kinds of laws subsidizing this dying MID-WEST/WEST COAST GLOBAL BIG AG----knowing it will all become a dust belt. All those hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidizing existing BIG AG could have long ago built a REAL US food source that would indeed feed ALL OF WE THE PEOPLE THE 99%.
We showed how global VEOLA ENVIRONMENTAL has privatized Great Lakes fresh water access with lots of US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES around those lakes and happening to be those NORTHERN REGIONS NEEDED FOR US BREADBASKET---the goal is to kill environment, deplete fresh water sources, and leave US inhabitable.
The REAL left social progressive issue is not simply to shout against XL PIPELINE protecting native land-----REAL left social progressives would have marched on each US CITY DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE to stop GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUS AND GLOBAL FACTORY development----the rest are global Wall Street 5% players. BE A LEADER NOT A FOLLOWER----
WE CAN DO IT-----LET'S GET RID OF GLOBAL WALL STREET POLS AND PLAYERS.
Anyone tied to public health would have long ago been shouting against this----not in Baltimore----our Baltimore Public Health Department is partnered with global Wall Street MOVING FORWARD to killing public health for 99% of citizens.
Science
Feb 24 2015, 9:10 pm ETClimate Change Will Hit America in the Breadbasket, Scientists Say
Wheat harvesters work on a field near Clearwater, Kansas in 2012. Fernando Salazar / AP
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Climate experts have seen the future of America's breadbasket — and from their perspective, it doesn't look pretty.
"I don't want to be a wheat farmer in Kansas in the future," said Harold Brooks, a senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma.
Brooks isn't a wheat farmer. He's a researcher who has analyzed how climate change could affect the weather in America's midsection, based on historical data and computer modeling. Last year, he and his colleagues found that tornado patterns are becoming more variable — with severe storms coming in bunches or not at all.
There's more variability in the long-term weather outlook as well, Brooks said this month in San Jose during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Some climate models suggest there'll be more storms, while others suggest there'll be more drought.
Either scenario is bad for the farmers. "I lose all my crop because it gets hailed on, or it burns up," Brooks said.
In a warmer world, the threat of drought is drawing more attention. "If I look at the future, and I say, 'What's the biggest threat to food security in the future,' at least from a Midwest perspective, it is more intense, major droughts," said Kenneth Kunkel, senior scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites.
More heat wavesIt's no surprise that drought is a big part of the climate forecast, but Brooks, Kunkel and other experts are now working out how a rise in global mean temperatures are likely to translate into changed weather conditions for key areas, including America's wheat belt and corn belt.
Last year, for example, researchers matched up their computer models with weather data in an attempt to determine the contribution of human-caused climate change to extreme weather events ranging from western Europe's heat wave to California's mega-drought. Their verdict: Greenhouse-gas emissions played a substantial role in Europe's misery, but not so much in California.
Looking ahead, the models predict that today's heat-wave conditions will become the norm in Europe. "By the end of the century ... this event will seem cold," said Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at Berkeley Lab who helped write the latest U.N. climate report.
Shifting grain beltThe outlook suggests that the most suited region for U.S. crop production will shift northward as global temperatures increase. Although it's dangerous to read too much into one year's statistics, North Dakota surpassed Kansas as the nation's top wheat-producing state last year, due primarily to Kansas droughts.
Theoretically, reduced production along the southern edge of the country's grain-producing regions should be offset by increased production along the northern edge. The Corn Belt (and Soybean Belt) is already pushing up past the Canadian border, and Canada's wheat-producing zone is creeping farther north. But in reality, the shift is still likely to produce a net loss in crop production, said Jerry Hatfield, director of the USDA-ARS National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment.
"We're going to consume soil resources, because the urban population that we're going to build up is going to consume more land as well," he said. "We'll lose other parts of the land because of excessive erosion and degradation that occurs. As we move agriculture north, we're going to be putting it in areas that don't have the same water-holding capacity, nutrient-holding capacity."
Hatfield said the world's increasing population, plus the rise in per capita consumption that comes with economic development, will add to the pressure. Between the year 2000 and 2050, "we basically have to produce the same amount of food as we've produced in the last 500 years," he said.
Can we adapt?The experts said heading off a food crisis will require changes in every aspect of production and consumption. "Adaptation strategies should be under way," Wehner said. "Denying this, I think, is a disservice to the public."
Among the strategies: developing new crop strains that produce bigger yields; reducing waste at every step in the food production chain; and eating less meat, to cut down on the huge amounts of grain that are consumed by livestock.
Will we be able to feed the world in 2050? "I'd say we could, but I would bet against it," said Paul Ehrlich, president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. The longtime critic of overpopulation and overconsumption noted that little has been done to counter negative trends in food security, even though they've been known about for decades.
Ehrlich said climate shifts could make things worse, and fast.
"If we had a thousand years to solve this, I'd be very relaxed," he said. "But we may have 10 or 20. That's a different story."
Today we want to speak to the coming economic collapse and decade-long Great Depression MANUFACTURED BY ROBBER BARON CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA and their 5%. The US has not seen starvation in quite a long time----early American settlers unable to make the transition to American colonies died of starvation----the Great Depression brought people dying of starvation. Today we have great malnutrition----tomorrow WE THE PEOPLE THE 99% will see starvation in US. That is to where MOVING FORWARD US CITIES AS FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES takes America. What is the #1 public health issue in all of world history -----KEEP CITIZENS FED.
We reminded folks the reason we went to baby formula was women entering the workforce not having time to breast feed and low-income women tied to addictions and malnutrition having breast milk unhealthy for a newborn. What is coming next decade----LOTS OF MALNUTRITION.
AS EVERYONE KNOWS.....'Nutrient starved Mother = nutrient poor breastmilk'
All far-right extreme wealth regimes start by robbing everyone's property and wealth and creating mass human health crises----like food scarcity and starvation. We saw that with the GREAT LEAP FORWARD far-right wing MAO in China---we saw that with INDUSTRIAL STALIN----we saw that with far-right wing HITLER---we saw that with brutal MUGABE----of course MEXICO during NAFTA killed small farmers with lots of starvation. That is to where MOVING FORWARD is going. No FEED THE CITY hedge fund refugee-making of US citizens will be able to handle this planned food scarcity.
BELOW WE SEE THAT ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE FAR-RIGHT AUTHORITARIAN NGO PRETENDING TO BE LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE ON ENVIRONMENT, FOOD, AND HEALTH.
Intentional child-rearing is population control indeed tied to implanted microchip contraception. The left social progressive policies for controlling population all last century were to raise the 99% into middle-class where families most often have less children because financial security brings the feeling of smaller families.
Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa with rolling acres of farms----the desire to take back land from white colonizers was not a bad move----but deliberately allowing all that farmland to sit idle to capture power----and there were no white colonizers dying---it was sovereign black citizens.
Transforming Cultures project director at the Worldwatch Institute
Mission
Through research and outreach that inspire action, the Worldwatch Institute works to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world that meets human needs. The Institute’s top mission objectives are universal access to renewable energy and nutritious food, expansion of environmentally sound jobs and development, transformation of cultures from consumerism to sustainability, and an early end to population growth through healthy and intentional childbearing.
Famine becomes Mugabe weapon
In a shockingly sinister act of vengeance, Zimbabwe's dictator is orchestrating a slow death by starvation for millions of his opponents
- Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Saturday 9 November 2002 20.49 EST
The rains have come to the undulating pastures of northern Matabeleland. In the bread basket of Zimbabwe, the seed should be in the ground by now. But instead the rural poor are bracing themselves for a catastrophe on a scale not seen since the Matabeleland massacres a generation ago.Death is stalking the people of Matabeleland again. Only this time it is a slow death by starvation - orchestrated in large part by Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party as a weapon against his opponents in the Movement for Democratic Change.
Amid warnings that more than 6.7 million Zimbabweans are facing starvation, the Matabele have found themselves attacked by Mugabe's thugs, who are refusing food to anyone suspected of supporting the MDC. They have been abandoned by donor countries in the international aid community, who have judged Zimbabwe a bad bet; and threatened by forecasts of a strong El Niño effect on the country's weather set to bring a season of heavy rains followed by drought.
The combination is bad enough for Zimbabwe's hungry rural communities - where one in three adults is infected with HIV - but there is more bad news. Thanks to drought and the Government's 'fast-track' land reform policy, cereal production is down 57 per cent from last year and maize output by 67 per cent. The international community has raised barely half the money needed to bridge that gap.
With inflation rampant and foreign exchange rates in dramatic decline, shortages of bread, maize, milk and sugar are worsening. To complicate the picture further, Western officials accuse senior Zanu officials of profiteering from a black market in food that most cannot afford.
'Zimbabwe is facing an utter catastrophe,' said one British official last week involved in organising the aid effort for Zimbabwe. 'Countries that usually give in crises like this don't want to know because of Mugabe's reputation. At present funding for food aid is running at only 40 per cent of what is needed. If we can't persuade people to give more, then we are looking at a disaster.
'Mugabe is playing politics with aid, but the international community must not be drawn into doing the same, no matter how repellent Mugabe's behaviour. It is the people of Zimbabwe themselves that matter, and we have got to help them.'
Britain's International Development Secretary, Clare Short, has called on fellow members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develpoment to pledge more. Despite deteriorating relations between Britain and the Mugabe regime that saw Zimbabwe last week ban scores of British and European politicians and impose visa requirements on Britons travelling to the country, Britain remains the second largest donor behind the United States - providing £36 million since September 2001.
'It is not that nothing is happening on the ground,' said one British source. 'The World Food Programme and other agencies are doing good work; it is just that no one is grasping the scale and urgency of the crisis. Unless the international community steps up a gear - and now - there is going to be a disaster.'
The most recent assessments suggest that the 'coping strategies' of those most badly affected will run out early in the new year. And then people will start to die.
But it is a message likely to be unpopular with governments from Scandinavia to Japan - usually big donors - which sources say have been reticent about giving aid to Mugabe's Zimbabwe.
It is a position that was outlined last week by Denmark's European Affairs Minister, Bertel Haarder, speaking at a meeting of European and southern African Ministers meeting in Maputo. His comments are unlikely to encourage already cautious governments to rush to Zimbabwe's aid while Mugabe is still in power.
'We would like to strongly react against the fact that the Zimbabwe government is using our aid and our food to put political and economic pressure on its own people,' said Haarder last week. 'They use our aid as a tool in the domestic fight against the opposition to survive, and that is not acceptable.'
Haarder's remarks followed comments by a senior US official earlier in the week who also accused Mugabe of politicising famine relief and said Washington was considering 'interventionist' measures that could challenge Zimbabwe's sovereignty.
The elections may be over but, according to one human rights observer returned from Zimbabwe, the use of starvation as a political weapon is continuing in some of the most hard-hit areas. The human rights worker - who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals against witnesses - described widespread use of starvation against opposition communities.
'In Nkayi in Matabeleland North, I interviewed one witness who had been planning to stand for the MDC in the district elections in September but was intimidated into pulling out,' said the worker. 'He was threatened into leaving his home. He told me that 20 families in his community had been denied the right to buy food from the government's Grain Marketing Board warehouses because of their support of the opposition. They have also been denied the right to work. So they cannot eat and they cannot earn money.'
It is a story being repeated across the country. 'In one area I actually witnessed Zanu youth militia running rural food sales with the instructions to sell only to Zanu supporters. With the government having a monopoly on the warehouses, it can control completely who is fed and who is not.'
At Murambinda District Hospital, according to the World Food Programme, doctors report increasing cases of malnutrition and pellagra, associated with starvation. Informal interviews with those queuing for food aid in Mutasa district suggest many families are going for more than two days at a time without a proper meal. As always, it is the children who are suffering the worst.
A Unicef survey last May showed acute malnutrition prevalence in under-fives at 6.4 per cent. But when broken down further, the data show prevalence of acute malnutrition up to 18.2 per cent in some areas and alarming levels of wasting in those aged three to five at 41.6 per cent nationally.
In Silobela, in Midlands province, the local chief, Malisa, warned last month that thousands of schoolchildren in his area were on the verge of starvation. 'There is no family in the area that harvested even a bucket of grain,' he said.
Clare Short told The Observer: 'This is a very serious crisis. We can't let the people of Zimbabwe be punished twice by Mugabe and then by food shortages. They mustn't be abandoned. The donor community must step up their efforts.'
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Both Stalin and MAO did the same as Mugabe----journalism tells us these great famines were created by scientific misstep but world history shows this tool for SOCIETAL CAPTURE AND CHANGE for thousands of years.
As we said---Maoist and Stalin communals were simply a move by that 1% to end peasant land ownership creating an easy capture of food production -----there are always brutal dictators arising during these attempts at MARXISM. The Chinese 1% were simply clearing land and preparing for GLOBAL BANKING FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE INDUSTRIALIZATION which came in 1980s.
THIS WAS NEVER A WORKER'S REVOLUTION IT WAS ALWAYS FAR-RIGHT WING AUTHORITARIAN EXTREME WEALTH EXTREME POVERTY LIBERTARIAN MARXISM.
What WE THE PEOPLE THE 99% in US need to remember---this is always the way GREAT LEAP FORWARD MOVING FORWARD societal changes begin ---after ROBBER BARON periods of fleecing that nation.
Its founder and chairman is Terry Gou---FoxConn was the end result of MAO'S industrial revolution pretending to be worker's movement.
Mao's Great Leap to Famine
FRANK DIKÖTTERDEC. 15, 2010
HONG KONG -- The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst anywhere, was the Great Famine of 1958 to 1962, and to this day the ruling Communist Party has not fully acknowledged the degree to which it was a direct result of the forcible herding of villagers into communes under the “Great Leap Forward” that Mao Zedong launched in 1958.
To this day, the party attempts to cover up the disaster, usually by blaming the weather. Yet detailed records of the horror exist in the party’s own national and local archives.
Access to these files would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago, but a quiet revolution has been taking place over the past few years as vast troves of documents have gradually been declassified. While the most sensitive information still remains locked up, researchers are being allowed for the first time to rummage through the dark night of the Maoist era.
From 2005 to 2009, I examined hundreds of documents all over China, traveling from subtropical Guangdong to arid Gansu Province near the deserts of Inner Mongolia.
The party records were usually housed on the local party committee premises, closely guarded by soldiers. Inside were acres of dusty, yellowing paper held together in folders that could contain anything from a single scrap of paper scribbled by a party secretary decades ago to neatly typewritten minutes of secret leadership meetings.
Historians have known for some time that the Great Leap Forward resulted in one of the world’s worst famines. Demographers have used official census figures to estimate that 20 million to 30 million people died.
But inside the archives is an abundance of evidence, from the minutes of emergency committees to secret police reports and public security investigations, that show these estimates to be woefully inadequate.
In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961. In many other cases, local party committees investigated the scale of death in the immediate aftermath of the famine, leaving detailed computations of the scale of the horror.
In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.
Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.
One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilogram stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.
When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot. The report of the investigative team sent by the provincial leadership in 1969 to interview survivors of the famine records that the man died of grief three weeks later.
Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party. One inspector in Sichuan wrote that “commune members too sick to work are deprived of food. It hastens their death.”
As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another. Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.
One police investigation from Feb. 25, 1960, details some 50 cases in Yaohejia village in Gansu: “Name of culprit: Yang Zhongsheng. Name of victim: Yang Ecshun. Relationship with culprit: younger brother. Manner of crime: killed and eaten. Reason: livelihood issues.”
The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.
Mao was sent many reports about what was happening in the countryside, some of them scribbled in longhand. He knew about the horror, but pushed for even greater extractions of food.
At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever before. The minutes of the meeting reveal a chairman insensitive to human loss: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”
Mao’s Great Famine was not merely an isolated episode in the making of modern China. It was its turning point. The subsequent Cultural Revolution was the leader’s attempt to take revenge on the colleagues who had dared to oppose him during the Great Leap Forward.
To this day, there is little public information inside China about this dark past. Historians who are allowed to work in the party archives tend to publish their findings across the border in Hong Kong.
There is no museum, no monument, no remembrance day to honor the tens of millions of victims. Survivors, most of them in the countryside, are rarely given a voice, all too often taking their memories with them to their graves.
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All of these brutal dictators were installed by global banking---that dastardly global 1% OLD WORLD MERCHANTS OF VENICE the same global 1% that now has hold of US thanks to CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA NOW TRUMP-----these are the same far-right, authoritarian, militaristic, extreme wealth extreme poverty dictators as was a MUGABE, STALIN, MAO, HITLER----it is global corporate campus FASCISM.
Because history repeats itself WE KNOW global Wall Street has planned a great big food scarcity and public health crises. Breast-feeding in these conditions often kills the mother and bad outcomes for children---take Somalia for example.
Our Food Stamp program started to be corrupted when our low-income citizens were allowed to use them at CONVENIENCE STORES known for great fresh food----because of FOOD DESERTS. Now, global Wall Street 5% shouting these few decades about addressing food deserts are of course simply going to pave over those communities with global corporate campuses and global factories. In Baltimore all the FRESH FOOD MOVEMENT will fail because no shouting to stop MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUSES has is happening.....we are building what will be a COLLAPSE OF FOOD AVAILABILITY ERGO A COMING FOOD SCARCITY. No doubt those same global 1% calling Mao's and Stalin's famines a scientific miscalculation will call this coming one in US a MISCALCULATION as well.
Keep in mind all this would be top priority to a US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE public health department IF those appointed by global Wall Street Baltimore Development and global Johns Hopkins by its puppet Baltimore City Council and mayor ----but all they are doing is PRETENDING to build sustainability for a 99% of citizens.
Mugabe, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler all had that 5% to the 1% helping to MOVE FORWARD far-right wing global corporate fascism.
What's happening in Zimbabwe today? They are installing FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE GLOBAL CORPORATE FACTORIES.
Holocaust by hunger: The truth behind Stalin's Great Famine
By Simon Sebag Montefiore for MailOnline
Updated: 20:50 EDT, 25 July 2008
- The demented Roman Emperor Caligula once mused that if all the people of Rome had one neck he would cut it just to be rid of his troublesome people.
The trouble was there were simply too many Romans to kill them all.
Many centuries later, the brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin reflected that he would have liked to deport the entire Ukrainian nation, but 20 million were too many to move even for him.
So he found another solution: starvation.
Now, 75 years after one of the great forgotten crimes of modern times, Stalin's man-made famine of 1932/3, the former Soviet republic of Ukraine is asking the world to classify it as a genocide.
The Ukrainians call it the Holodomor - the Hunger.
Millions starved as Soviet troops and secret policemen raided their villages, stole the harvest and all the food in villagers' homes.
They dropped dead in the streets, lay dying and rotting in their houses, and some women became so desperate for food that they ate their own children.
If they managed to fend off starvation, they were deported and shot in their hundreds of thousands.
So terrible was the famine that Igor Yukhnovsky, director of the Institute of National Memory, the Ukrainian institution researching the Holodomor, believes as many as nine million may have died.
For decades the disaster remained a state secret, denied by Stalin and his Soviet government and concealed from the outside world with the help of the 'useful idiots' - as Lenin called Soviet sympathisers in the West.
Russia is furious that Ukraine has raised the issue of the famine: the swaggering 21st-century state of Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev see this as nationalist chicanery designed to promote Ukraine, which may soon join Nato and the EU.
They see it as an anti-Russian manoeuvre more to do with modern politics than history. And they refuse to recognise this old crime as a genocide.
They argue that because the famine not only killed Ukrainians but huge numbers of Russians, Cossacks, Kazakhs and many others as well, it can't be termed genocide - defined as the deliberate killing of large numbers of a particular ethnic group.
It may be a strange defence, but it is historically correct.
So what is the truth about the Holodomor? And why is Ukraine provoking Russia's wrath by demanding public recognition now?
The Ukraine was the bread basket of Russia, but the Great Famine of 1932/3 was not just aimed at the Ukrainians as a nation - it was a deliberate policy aimed at the entire Soviet peasant population - Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakh - especially better-off, small-time farmers.
It was a class war designed to 'break the back of the peasantry', a war of the cities against the countryside and, unlike the Holocaust, it was not designed to eradicate an ethnic people, but to shatter their independent spirit.
So while it may not be a formal case of genocide, it does, indeed, rank as one of the most terrible crimes of the 20th century.
To understand the origins of the famine, we have to go back to the October 1917 Revolution when the Bolsheviks, led by a ruthless clique of Marxist revolutionaries including Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, seized power in the name of the workers and peasants of the Russian Empire to create a Marxist paradise, using terror, murder and repression.
The Russian Empire was made of many peoples, including the Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Georgians, but the great majority of them, especially in the vast arable lands of Ukraine, southern Russia, the northern Caucasus, and Siberia, were peasants, who dreamed only of owning their own land and farming it.
Initially, they were thrilled with the Revolution, which meant the breakup of the large landed estates into small parcels which they could farm.
But the peasants had no interest in the Marxist utopian ideologies that obsessed Lenin and Stalin.
Once they had seized their plots of land, they were no longer interested in esoteric absurdities such as Marx's stages in the creation of a classless society.
The fact is they were essentially conservative and wanted to pass what little wealth they had to their children.
This infuriated Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who believed that the peasantry, especially the ones who owned some land and a few cows, were a huge threat to a collectivist Soviet Russia.
Lenin's hatred of the peasantry became clear when a famine occurred in Ukraine and southern Russia in 1921, the inevitable result of the chaos and upheaval of the Revolution.
With his bloodthirsty loathing for all enemies of the Revolution, he said 'Let the peasants starve', and wrote ranting notes ordering the better-off peasants to be hanged in their thousands and their bodies displayed by the roadsides.
Yet this was an emotional outburst and, ever the ruthless pragmatist, he realised the country was so poor and weak in the immediate aftermath of its revolutionary civil war that the peasants were vital to its survival.
So instead, he embraced what he called a New Economic Policy, in effect a temporary retreat from Marxism, that allowed the peasants to grow crops and sell them for profit.
It was always planned by Lenin and his fellow radicals that this New Economic Policy should be a stopgap measure which would soon be abandoned in the Marxist cause.
But before this could happen, Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin defeated all his rivals for the Soviet leadership.
Then, three years later, grain supplies dropped radically. It had been a poor crop, made worse by the fact that many peasant farmers had shifted from grain into more lucrative cotton production.
Stalin travelled across Russia to inspect supplies and ordered forcible seizures of grain from the peasantry.
Thousands of young urban Communists were drafted into the countryside to help seize grain as Stalin determined that the old policies had failed.
Backed by the young, tough Communists of his party, he devised what he called the Great Turn: he would seize the land, force the peasants into collective farms and sell the excess grain abroad to force through a Five Year Plan of furious industrialisation to make Soviet Russia a military super power.
He expected the peasants to resist and decreed anyone who did so was a kulak - a better-off peasant who could afford to withhold grain - and who was now to be treated as a class enemy.
By 1930, it was clear the collectivisation campaign was in difficulties.
There was less grain than before it had been introduced, the peasants were still resisting and the Soviet Union seemed to be tottering.
Stalin, along with his henchman Vyacheslav Molotov and others, wrote a ruthless memorandum ordering the 'destruction of the kulaks as a class'.
They divided huge numbers of peasants into three categories.
The first was to be eliminated immediately; the second to be imprisoned in camps; the third, consisting of 150,000 households - almost a million innocent people - was to be deported to wildernesses in Siberia or Asia.
Stalin himself did not really understand how to identify a kulak or how to improve grain production, but this was beside the point.
What mattered was that sufficient numbers of peasants would be killed or deported for all resistance to his collectivisation programme to be smashed.
In letters written by many Soviet leaders, including Stalin and Molotov, which I have read in the archives, they repeatedly used the expression: 'We must break the back of the peasantry.' And they meant it.
In 1930/1, millions of peasants were deported, mainly to Siberia. But 800,000 people rebelled in small uprisings, often murdering local commissars who tried to take their grain.
So Stalin's top henchmen led armed expeditions of secret policemen to crush 'the wreckers', shooting thousands.
The peasants replied by destroying their crops and slaughtering 26 million cattle and 15 million horses to stop the Bolsheviks (and the cities they came from) getting their food.
Their mistake was to think they were dealing with ordinary politicians.
But the Bolsheviks were far more sinister than that: if many millions of peasants wished to fight to the death, then the Bolsheviks were not afraid of killing them.
It was war - and the struggle was most vicious not only in the Ukraine but in the north Caucasus, the Volga, southern Russia and central Asia.
The strain of the slaughter affected even the bull-nerved Stalin, who sensed opposition to these brutal policies by the more moderate Bolsheviks, including his wife Nadya.
He knew Soviet power was suddenly precarious, yet Stalin kept selling the grain abroad while a shortage turned into a famine.
More than a million peasants were deported to Siberia: hundreds of thousands were arrested or shot.
Like a village shopkeeper doing his accounts, Stalin totted up the numbers of executed peasants and the tonnes of grains he had collected.
By December 1931, famine was sweeping the Ukraine and north Caucasus.
'The peasants ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, anything they could find,' wrote one witness Fedor Bleov.
By summer 1932, Fred Beal, an American radical and rare outside witness, visited a village near Kharkov in Ukraine, where he found all the inhabitants dead in their houses or on the streets, except one insane woman. Rats feasted on the bodies.
Beal found messages next to the bodies such as: 'My son, I couldn't wait. God be with you.'
One young communist, Lev Kopolev, wrote at the time of 'women and children with distended bellies turning blue, with vacant lifeless eyes.
'And corpses. Corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts in the melting snow of Vologda [in Russia] and Kharkov [in Ukraine].'
Cannibalism was rife and some women offered sexual favours in return for food.
There are horrific eye-witness accounts of mothers eating their own children.
In the Ukrainian city of Poltava, Andriy Melezhyk recalled that neighbours found a pot containing a boiled liver, heart and lungs in the home of one mother who had died.
Under a barrel in the cellar they discovered a small hole in which a child's head, feet and hands were buried. It was the remains of the woman's little daughter, Vaska.
A boy named Miron Dolot described the countryside as 'like a battlefield after a war.
'Littering the fields were bodies of starving farmers who'd been combing the potato fields in the hope of finding a fragment of a potato.
'Some frozen corpses had been lying out there for months.'
On June 6, 1932, Stalin and Molotov ordered 'no deviation regarding amounts or deadlines of grain deliveries are to be permitted'.
A week later, even the Ukrainian Bolshevik leaders were begging for food, but Stalin turned on his own comrades, accusing them of being wreckers.
'The Ukraine has been given more than it should,' he stated.
When a comrade at a Politburo meeting told the truth about the horrors, Stalin, who knew what was happening perfectly well, retorted: 'Wouldn't it be better for you to leave your post and become a writer so you can concoct more fables!'
In the same week, a train pulled into Kiev from the Ukrainian villages 'loaded with corpses of people who had starved to death', according to one report.
Such tragic sights had no effect on the Soviet leadership.
When the American Beal complained to the Bolshevik Ukrainian boss, Petrovsky, he replied: 'We know millions are dying. That is unfortunate, but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify it.'
Stalin was not alone in his crazed determination to push through his plan.
The archives reveal one young communist admitting: 'I saw people dying from hunger, but I firmly believed the ends justified the means.'
Though Stalin was admittedly in a frenzy of nervous tension, it was at this point in 1932 when under another leader the Soviet Union might have simply fallen apart and history would have been different.
Embattled on all sides, criticised by his own comrades, faced with chaos and civil war and mass starvation in the countryside, he pushed on ruthlessly - even when, in 1932, his wife Nadya committed suicide, in part as a protest against the famine.
'It seems in some regions of Ukraine, Soviet power has ceased to exist,' he wrote.
'Check the problem and take measures.' That meant the destruction of any resistance.
Stalin created a draconian law that any hungry peasant who stole even a husk of grain was to be shot - the notorious Misappropriation of Socialist Property law.
'If we don't make an effort, we might lose Ukraine,' Stalin said, almost in panic.
He dispatched ferocious punitive expeditions led by his henchmen, who engaged in mass murders and executions.
Not just Ukraine was targeted - Molotov, for example, headed to the Urals, the Lower Volga and Siberia.
Lazar Kaganovich, a close associate of Stalin, crushed the Kuban and Siberia regions where famine was also rife.
Train tickets were restricted and internal passports were introduced so that it became impossible for peasants to flee the famine areas.
Stalin called the peasants 'saboteurs' and declared it 'a fight to the death! These people deliberately tried to sabotage the Soviet stage'.
Between four and five million died in Ukraine, a million died in Kazakhstan and another million in the north Caucasus and the Volga.
By 1933, 5.7 million households - somewhere between ten million and 15 million people - had vanished. They had been deported, shot or died of starvation.
As for Stalin, he emerged more ruthless, more paranoid, more isolated than before.
Stalin later told Winston Churchill that this was the most difficult time of his entire life, harder even than Hitler's invasion.
'It was a terrible struggle' in which he had 'to destroy ten million. It was fearful. Four years it lasted - but it was absolutely necessary'.
Only in the mind of a brutal dictator could the mass murder of his own people be considered 'necessary'.
Whether it was genocide or not, perhaps now the true nature of one of the worst crimes in history will finally be acknowledged.
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Anyone who is a real organic food citizen KNOWS Wholefoods has been under fire these few decades over corrupting the organics and fair trade global markets and creating monopoly killing our small organic farmers. We have been shouting Wholefoods was always that KILLER of fresh food organics ---it did so while soaking US citizens buying high-price food that was often NOT organic or animal humane.
The concerning issue over WHOLEFOODS was the systematic attack on small farms already killed by GMO and GLOBAL BIG AG. Why do our small organic farmers sell to a GLOBAL FOOD GROCER? The same reason our small farms not organic sell to GLOBAL WALMART. WE THE PEOPLE THE 99% are not making local grown DOMINATE.
With the manufactured HYPER-INFLATION from the US FED, US Treasury, Obama, and Clinton neo-liberals leading to a collapse in US DOLLAR we KNOW all our global grocery stores---almost all in US are now global foreign owned-----will pull away from US food market. What selling WHOLEFOODS to a global AMAZON.COM does is create this same dynamic. AMAZON'S BEZOS is quite the brutal dictator with his operations---he is NO LEFTY.
What was WHOLEFOODS doing just as it prepared to sell that organic food chain? It was creating an online food delivery touted as being directed at FOOD DESERTS. Know where FOOD DESERTS are? They are the US city communities slated to become GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUSES AND GLOBAL FACTORIES.
Organic farming finds itself at a crossroads
Some organic purists still want to battle the “Empire,” but the market seems to be adjusting to the presence and influence of ‘Big Ag.’
Eric MortensonCapital Press
Published on February 17, 2017 9:16AM
At this point, maybe organic producers and processors should just declare victory.
They’ve won, haven’t they? Sales of organic products show double-digit growth year after year. Consumers increasingly associate organics with safer food and better nutrition, health, soil and plants, not to mention more humane treatment of livestock and better conditions for farmworkers.
That little green USDA Organic symbol on a package says this costs more because it’s special. And it’s all delivered by a chemical-free small farm worked by a smiling couple and their beautiful brood of happy children.
Right?
Well, sure, to a certain extent.
But within the organic community, some worry the movement — and that’s how many see it, as a movement — will lose its soul as “Big Ag” takes over organic production and snaps up small organic processors.
“If we continue to mainstream, is there anything left of what was organic, or do we just become product manufacturers?” asked Oregon organic pioneer David Lively.
As the Costcos, Wal-Marts and Krogers of the world continue to enter the organic market, “Are they really concerned with what we’re doing, or is it a marketing opportunity?” Lively said.
Main disagreements
There are other issues out there, of course. Producers disagree over the proposed organic checkoff, for example, and whether a “transitioning to organic” label is proper for growers who are headed that way but aren’t yet certified.
And although organic product sales grew 11 percent to reach $43.3 billion in 2015, and have undoubtedly topped that in the interim, the number of organic farmers has actually dropped. Organic products now make up nearly 5 percent of U.S. food sales, but organic acreage is less than 1 percent of U.S. cropland, according to the Organic Trade Association.
It appears millennials, the 18 to 34 age group, account for more than half of organic purchases. That means a lot of people still aren’t convinced they should pay more for something that often looks and tastes the same as conventional vegetables, fruit, grains and meat.
“It would be shortsighted if we strive only to fill the shopping baskets of millennials and be happy at that,” warned Drew Katz, who coordinates farm transitions for Oregon Tilth, an organic certification group.
But it’s creeping bigness that seemed to bother many of the 1,100 growers, processors and activists who attended the three-day Organicology conference and trade show in Portland earlier this month. One of the panel discussions was even titled, “Challenging the Empire: Forming a Rebel Alliance.”
The rebels might have reason to worry. Phil Howard, a Michigan State University professor, has tracked the acquisitions of organic operations by the biggest “Deathstars” in America’s food system.
Organic activists can recite some of them from memory: General Mills now owns Annie’s Homegrown and seven other organic brands. Coca-Cola owns Odwalla and Pepsi owns Naked Juice. Kellogg owns Morning Star and Kashi, plus two other brands. J.M. Smucker bought R.W. Knudsen, Millstone, Santa Cruz Organic and Enray. Food giants Foster Farms, Tyson, Hormel and Nestle also own several organic brands.
Costco helped another company buy 1,200 acres in Mexico, and will use it to supply its membership warehouse stores with organic products.
Wal-Mart barged into organics 10 years ago, vowing it would bring cheaper organic food to the masses. Critics soon alleged Wal-Mart’s organics were coming from factory farms and from China, with its checkered food safety and regulatory history.
Food writer Michael Pollan said the company’s low-price promise “virtually guarantees that Wal-Mart’s version of cheap, industrialized organic food will not be sustainable in any meaningful sense of the word.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported Feb. 9 that mass-market retailers now account for 53 percent of organic sales and that Whole Foods, one of the pioneering organic chains, is closing nine smaller, older stores and only opening six.
Soul vs. integrity
Brian Baker, a Eugene, Ore., organic consultant who moderated the “Empire” panel discussion at Organicology, said it’s not the soul of the industry he’s worried about, but rather its integrity.
“My point was that corporations that enter the organic sector through the acquisition of organic enterprises behave differently from operations that have gone through the hard work of transition or have practiced organic production and handling from the beginning,” he said in an email.
Conventional food corporations generally don’t understand what it takes to become organic, Baker said. They know the organic sector is growing and sells at a premium price, but lack organic production experience and don’t have a first-hand understanding of organic standards.
“The concern is particularly acute if the corporations behave as if the rules that applied to the companies they acquired do not apply to them,” Baker said.
While some attending Organicology hold tight to the “purity” of the movement’s hippie, back-to-the-land origin, as one observer described it, others are seeking a better balance.
Values-based
The Cornucopia Institute, based in Wisconsin, has served as a watchdog on organic issues, battling the USDA, the Organic Trade Association and corporations such as Wal-Mart when it believes the spirit or letter of organic guidelines are violated.
But Mark Kastel, co-director and senior farm policy analyst, said Cornucopia’s message is more nuanced than “big is bad.”
“The issues are not corporate scale, they are about corporate ethics,” he said. “This is a values-based industry. It’s grown to $43 billion (in sales) because consumers wanted an alternative to standard practices in growing agricultural commodities and in processing, too.
“If you respect the wishes and values of consumers, there is money to be made here and profit to made here at the farm gate and in the boardroom.”
‘In this together’
Gina Colfer, a key account manager with Wilbur-Ellis in Salinas, Calif., is on the frontlines as a big, conventional ag company transitions itself to join the organic marketplace.
Colfer, with experience in agronomy, pest control and food safety, was working for Earthbound Farm, which itself had grown from a small startup farm to a national organic producer, when Wilbur-Ellis came calling.
Wilbur-Ellis has been around nearly 100 years, and provides fertilizers, pesticides, seed and crop monitoring services to farmers in the West and into the central states. Growers began asking Wilbur-Ellis reps about organics, and the company decided it didn’t want to get left behind, Colfer said.
“We didn’t want to tell our growers we didn’t know,” she said.
She was brought on board to help growers answer those questions and become organic producers. She offers options and advice on methods, employing what she calls a whole systems approach.
“We want to help these growers learn that you’re not going to spray your way out of a problem,” she said. “You have to address the soil, and build soil health first and foremost.”
Other things follow, like improving pollinator habitat by planting native, perennial flowering plants and faster growing annuals in strategic areas.
Growers who follow a whole systems approach, no matter their size, advance organics, she said.
“For me, I look at the greater good,” Colfer said. “If we can keep more synthetic pesticides and fertilizers out of the environment, it’s a win-win for everyone. Building soil health, I think, crosses over all lines.”
And having organic products in larger marketplaces, she said, opens opportunities for consumers who might not otherwise be able to buy organics.
“We’re all in this together,” Colfer said. “People, planet and profit. All three of those have to be in place for it to be sustainable.”
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If one is planning a food scarcity for 99% of citizens a global 1% would need to assure food availability for that global 1% and their 2% inside US cities deemed FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES. Stalin did that in USSR when he seized all food grown by peasant collective farmers to send that food to cities for that 1% and their 2% leaving those peasants growing the food to die of hunger.
What we see is just that----we see a system of food availability for a few while all avenues to food for the 99% of citizens being dismantled. Remember, whenever global Wall Street pols and national media say a policy is geared to help US city low-income communities-----AS ENTERPRISE ZONES ----the goal is to displace the low-income to install global corporate campuses----that is to what this BEZOS plan with WHOLEFOODS delivered will be.
BEZOS is self-driven vehicles----he is drone delivery----he is partnered with the DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE AND HOMELAND SECURITY----so BEZOS is quite the far-right, authoritarian, militaristic, extreme wealth extreme poverty kind of guy=====so, global corporate campuses get food---- WE THE PEOPLE THE 99% do not. If a citizen thinks having that job on global corporate campuses is protecting them -----WAKE UP! EMPLOYMENT OF US CITIZENS IS GOING, GOING, GOING, GONE.
The Amazon-Whole Foods deal is less about stores and more about data, says data scientist
- Amazon will likely use data from all of its platforms to create an ambient e-commerce experience for customers, said Kenneth Sanford of Dataiku.
- Instacart is working with traditional retailers to bring them customer data insights.
- The startup is also experimenting with computer vision to make it easier for its shoppers to find things on shelves.
Chantel McGee
Sunday, 25 Jun 2017 | 3:24 PM ETCNBC.com
Mike Segar | Reuters
Amazon President, Chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos.
Amazon's acquisition of specialty grocer Whole Foods is not only about acquiring hundreds of stores and affluent customers — the real value of the deal is in all of that customer data, according to one data expert.
Kenneth Sanford, data scientist at Dataiku, told CNBC recently that one of Amazon's goals should be to combine the data it already collects from its online platforms, Echo and Alexa, with Whole Foods' customer transaction data.
In that regard, the company can predict what customers need and automatically send it to them, creating a personalized "auto grocery" experience, he said. "Amazon will know what's in your refrigerator already and will be able to deliver extra turmeric when you need it," said Sanford.
Essentially, Amazon will leverage its know-how in technology to customize the individual grocery shopping experience — all without the consumer ever even leaving the house.
"They'll be able to say, 'I know you have these three things in your cabinet, I'll send you these two additional things, based on the fact that you haven't had it in three weeks and you liked it last time,'" Sanford said. "They're going to be able to create meal bundles at a level that, say, [the] Blue Apron's of the world could never really do," he added.
Amazon did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
Grocery buying as a way to build relationships
Ambient e-commerce is something Instacart, one of Amazon's competitors in the grocery space, is already working toward.
"We're really deep into the consumer data, because we have a direct relationship with the consumer," Jeremy Stanley, vice president of data science for Instacart, told CNBC. "One of the wonderful things about groceries is that compared to other e-commerce purchases, groceries are habitual and frequent. People need groceries every week," Stanley said.
Instacart already uses customer behavioral data and search activity to anticipate what a customer wants or might like, he said.
The company is also using machine learning to improve logistics. "We're rapidly experimenting with computer vision for different types of applications, especially in understanding our catalog and enriching our catalog also potentially in identifying items on shelves in stores. There are lots of other directions that we can go with this," Stanley said.
Like Amazon, Instacart's online retail business is built on optimizing customer purchasing, relationships and recommendations by using the most innovative data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence technology.
"It's the digital and end to end asset … being able to understand everything from when the customer first shows up what their intent was to the long tail of their transactions in the months and years to come," Stanley said. "That kind of integrated data doesn't exist in many classic businesses."
The delivery startup is working with traditional grocers to collect data and insights that will allow them to remain competitive.
"Our customers are the customers of the retailers we serve, there is such brand loyalty to the retailers," Stanley said. "Groceries are really personal, maybe even more personal than the movies you watch, and I think data can really change the way people buy food."
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Here we have that same movement towards CLOSING BRICK AND MORTAR GROCERY STORES-----no need to build actual Whole Foods stores---let's deliver by drone to LOW-INCOME surrounding communities rather than build stores. All the global Wall Street Baltimore Development and global Johns Hopkins 'labor and justice' organizations led by that pesky 5% are now selling this as a fix for the poor in food deserts.
Urban League and black Wall Street sells this as a win for 99% of black citizens the majority living in those surrounding low-income communities.
I had a FB friend ask a good question----
WHY ARE BLACK 5% NOT PREPARING TO SUPPORT WHAT WILL BE LARGE NUMBERS OF POOR BLACK CITIZENS LOSING SOCIAL BENEFITS LIKE FOOD STAMPS?
The same question goes to WHITE 5% knowing that white citizens make up the majority of Food Stamp recipients.
So, our 5 % to the 1% all know to where MOVING FORWARD economic crash and hyper-inflation will goes as regards food, home energy, shelter but are making FAKE POLICIES pretending to address this-----
WAKE UP 99%-----THIS WILL NOT TARGET ONE POPULATION GROUP----EVERYONE IN NO ONE OUT....
Harbor East where Baltimore's Whole Foods is located is seen by Baltimore City Hall as a JEWEL ----with heavy surveillance and security.
Delivery drones to food deserts? 7 ideas, real and fantastical, we hope Amazon brings to Whole Foods
"I'd like to see Amazon using its tech prowess to address the problem of food deserts. It need not be building brick-and-mortar grocery stores in these areas'.
When the news broke this morning that Amazon is buying Whole Foods, our first thought was: What? Our next thought was: In our dream world, what would Amazon do to change/improve the grocery chain? Below, members of the Food & Dining team share their ideal merger scenarios — some humorous, others sincere, and many touching on the role Amazon could play in serving food deserts.
"I'd like to see Amazon using its tech prowess to address the problem of food deserts. It need not be building brick-and-mortar grocery stores in these areas. A drone fleet serving underserved communities, or a mobile team of trucks-turned-grocery-pop-ups that partner with local producers — that sort of thing would be great. Amazon has the money and the innovative team to do it." — Joseph Hernandez, reporter
"I’d love to create a shopping list on my phone, similar to Amazon's shopping cart, so that I could get the groceries delivered or set for pickup. That way, I’d never forget to cross something off the list. Also, in a dream world, they’d include a nice selection of cheese samples in each order, which I inevitably eat when shopping on the weekends." — Nick Kindelsperger, reporter
"My first thoughts was along the same lines as Joseph’s. Amazon could be positioned to help food deserts in unique ways. I’d like to see it taken a step further even, by offering affordable Blue Apron-style meal prep packages, maybe even with some materials to help raise nutritional and/or cooking literacy, etc., for people who don’t have much time to shop or cook. An Amazon/Whole Foods entrance into that market would be intriguing." — Adam Lukach, editorial assistant
"I'd like to see every Whole Foods tricked out with super-duper drones so my groceries can be flown to my house while I dawdle behind sipping some sort of iced coffee beverage." — Bill Daley, reporter
"When I need something I don’t normally buy that’s not stocked in a logical area, no more circling the store. I want to be able to type the food into an app that figures out what Whole Foods I’m in and then steers me directly to that item — basically Amazon’s online-shopping search brought into real life." — Marissa Conrad, deputy editor
"I would like to see Amazon bring to Whole Foods better data use on a personal and global level. On a global level, to reduce food waste through optimized distribution. On a personal level, to alert me when that giant bottle of laundry detergent gets back in stock somewhere then ask me if I want to pick it up or have it delivered. Whole Foods can bring to Amazon some of the best experiential retail anywhere. And I would like for them to get together and finally bottle the aroma of the Whole Foods body section that smells so good." — Louisa Chu, reporter
" 'If you order steaks, be sure to sign up for Amazon Prime....'
'Look, mommy! It's the tomato drone!'
'People who bought quinoa also bought.......'
'Free three-day delivery on dairy products!'
More seriously, though, Amazon could set up pickup-only stations in neighborhoods that lack grocery stores. Order online, and pick up the next day (or sooner). For customers lacking computer/cellphone access, Amazon could set up ordering kiosks in easily accessible locations. SNAP payments could be handled electronically." — Phil Vettel, restaurant critic
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As everyone in Baltimore knows and no doubt Detroit's gentrification is ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE global corporate campus as well------when those PRETENDING to be left social progressives at the same time hiding a Wholefoods building in poor Detroit is building in what will become as in Baltimore a luxury community. This is how we know the posers-----
When one corporation in an industry makes such a move as drone delivery of groceries----we can bet first other stores will be pushed out of business and then to compete all stores will move to drone delivery----as Wholefoods stops building brick and mortar so too will any grocer left open.
We already addressed the authoritarian public transit tied to driverless vehicles and 99% of citizens being captured as they pass through communities---we are watching what we have shouted for a decade----that DEEP DEEP STATE creating fresh food and fresh water sources for that global 1% and their 2% ---forget that 5% ---they are going under the bus real soon.
We would think 2027 would be when most of MOVING FORWARD US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES like Baltimore would near completion of global corporate campus and global factory development so indeed it would be that global 1% and their 2% living in US city centers with global corporate campuses taking all of US city surrounding communities. Eating 3 meals a day at cafeterias on global corporate campuses is the goal of global corporate campus SOCIALISM. But that is for those global labor pool workers working for just a bed and a meal.
Annie’s John Foraker Calls on Bezos to End Food Deserts by 2027
by Guest
18 Jun 2017
This is a guest post by John Foraker, President of Annie’s, Inc.
Right before the U.S. equity markets opened on Friday, June 16th my phone erupted with texts from numerous industry friends on the announcement of the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods. I have been in this industry for decades, and, for me, this was one of the most exciting and interesting days I can remember for the organic movement, certainly since the release of the USDA organic standards in 2002.
This deal has so many implications for the industry it is mind numbing. Total and complete #gamechanger. Who will be the biggest winners and losers? Will this make it even easier for highly disruptive challenger brands to grow and mainstream? What will the impact be on local organic systems and on the scaling of organic acreage globally? What are the implications for technology enabled food transparency? What will happen to pricing organic price premiums across the industry?
Those and so many more…But there was one monster question that popped into my head and rolled around with both fascination and optimism: Will this combination mark the beginning of the end to the tragic problem of food deserts in the US? Let’s explore that possibility.
The U.S. Food Desert Challenge
Food deserts are communities where access to affordable, quality, and nutritious foods is limited. More than 23 million Americans, including 6.5 million children, live in low-income urban and rural neighborhoods that are more than a mile away from a supermarket. In these neighborhoods it’s easy to buy 44’s, cigarettes and fast food, but fresh produce and other healthier food options? Not so much.
Is there really a food access problem?
There sure is. America’s top 75 food retailers – led by Wal-Mart, Kroger, Costco, Target and Safeway – opened more than 10,000 new locations between 2011 and the first quarter of 2015, according to a 2015 analysis published by The Associated Press. When the AP stripped away convenience stores and dollar stores that don’t usually provide fresh meal options, it found that only a little over 250 new supermarkets cropped up in the country’s expansive food deserts. The takeaway: traditional retailers have not been meeting the healthy food needs of those who need it most.
And then there is the issue of the costs of living far from a grocery store. A study published in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review finds that “lower-income shoppers must travel further and/or have fewer shopping options than do higher-income shoppers.” Fewer shopping options generally equates to less intense pricing competition for local stores, which could allow grocers to boost prices or offer products of poorer quality. Higher costs for better food leaves low-income shoppers with fewer choices.
There is clearly a monumental #foodjustice problem, so how are individuals and businesses solving it?One citizen who is fighting for food self determination is the courageous “Gangster Gardener” Ron Finley of South Central Los Angeles, who became famous for fighting the Los Angeles bureaucracy to allow citizens to grow food on public parkways in their own neighborhoods. Finley’s powerful message to “plant some shit” and grow your own food became a global sensation with this inspiring TED talk. Local self-empowerment and the education about healthy food that accompanies it is most definitely a big part of the solution, but will it alone be enough, fast enough?
Some incredible businesses have emerged to increase the availability of healthier foods in low-income communities through online delivery models. Thrive Market, for example, a membership-based online buying club that sells natural and organic products at reduced costs, is on a growth tear as it pursues its mission “to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone.” For every new membership Thrive donates a membership to a low-income family, teacher, veteran, or student. But can highly successful, relatively small online players alone really make a dent in such an enormous problem fast enough?
Brick and mortar retailers like Whole Foods have also tried to improve access in recent years, stepping outside their historical comfort zone and opening physical stores in underserved places like Detroit. Former Whole Foods Co-CEO Walter Robb said when addressing corporate leaders at the Milken Institute Global Conference that at the Detroit store “we’re going after elitism. We’re going after racism.” Real success, Robb said, would include improvements in health outcomes. Opening Whole Foods stores like this in many more food deserts requires a lot of capital and they are slow to build and drive impact. Beyond that, even though these stores have been a commercial success, prices are still high relative to the limited consumer incomes in these areas, as Slate outlines. But Whole Foods’ cultural commitment to attacking this problem is real, admirable and deeply rooted. Through its Whole Cities Foundation, a non-profit founded in 2014, it works to “improve individual and community health through collaborative partnerships, education, and broader access to nutritious food in the communities we serve.”
Amazon + Whole Foods Market = Golden Opportunity to End Food Deserts
Back to the Whole Foods-Amazon combination. What promise does the merging of these companies hold to attack food access issues? The potential is simply immense.
Amazon has been investing heavily in Amazon Fresh’s capabilities to deliver groceries at scale. This delivery infrastructure, coupled with its focus on driving down costs for consumers and its use of data analytics to target offerings to shoppers, are exactly the tools that can bring healthier food options to the front door, or landing target (in the case of drones), to any corner of any underserved neighborhood anywhere. This alone is a great start. But when you combine this delivery infrastructure with Whole Foods’ 450+ stores and organic food supply chain, you enable the delivery of natural and organic foods to most places in the US in a matter of an hour or two. Given Whole Foods’ deeply rooted cultural commitment to addressing food deserts, this acquisition has the magic potential to address this difficult problem. It will take a while, but I expect the combined company to make this a priority, and that it will indeed drive significant impact in the affordability and accessibility of good food in every neighborhood.
Access Alone is not Enough
We also know, however, that access alone will not improve food choices and health outcomes. According to a 2014 PBS article entitled Why It Takes More Than a Grocery Store To Eliminate A Food Desert, the problem may not lie solely with food accessibility; it is also due to shopping and eating habits developed over many generations. In the article, Steven Cummins, a professor of population health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, suggests that merely adding a new grocery store to a neighborhood won’t be enough to motivate individuals to shop there for healthier foods. “If you think about Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams — ‘If you build it, they will come’ — I guess that’s the kind of logic model that underpins these interventions. But that doesn’t do everything it’s supposed to do,” he says. “It can improve perceptions of food access, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into a behavior change.”
The educational and grassroots orientation of Whole Cities Foundation and countless other local organizations will be needed to educate consumers about making healthier food choices. I sincerely hope Amazon’s leadership team will understand the potential they have to educate their customers. The potential for societal change is significant, and the investments will be worth it. There are plenty of willing partners ready to get after this big mission, and all that is needed is a catalyst and a focal point for the work. There is a tremendous leadership opportunity available to Amazon if they choose to grasp it.
The also government needs to play a role in furthering education about healthy food in schools, while driving changes in school menus. In the absence of federal leadership, states and localities need to pick up the slack and continue to fight.
Large food companies like General Mills and their organic businesses like Annie’s need to continue to direct resources and passion to this problem. Pioneering organizations like Food Corps need to be scaled dramatically to overcome the educational and behavioral barriers to healthier food adoption. Together, all these groups can connect kids and families to real food. All of these things need to happen in unison for significant change to happen.
A Call to Action
The combination of Amazon and Whole Foods has the potential to make a big difference in food deserts, but they cannot do it alone. We need to leverage this new capability with help from all levels of government, the private sector, the engagement and commitment of passionate local activists like Ron Finley, combined with significant public & private sector investment to unlock it. Big problems are never easy to solve, but this is one I firmly believe can be overcome in my lifetime.
Two days ago, Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos Tweeted the following message:
Jeff, here’s my idea. Post-merger, host a big summit called something along the lines of “Eliminating Food Deserts in the U.S. by 2027”, invite all the parties that can help make that happen, and build a plan to do it using the Amazon-Whole Foods platform as the backbone.
Let this be the decade of now.
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We see these kinds of articles all over the globe-----threats of global collapse in food markets---they are placing this cause to CLIMATE CHANGE----but 2040 is too soon to see that much shift in warming climate. WE THE PEOPLE THE 99% were silent as US BIG AG went to GLOBAL BIG AG/MONSANTO====we watched as global IVY LEAGUE endowments were used to buy fertile land and fresh water sources around the globe. We knew there was a plan to use this to bring down civil society----
This coming food scarcity in US will be driven by MANUFACTURED HYPER-INFLATION----MOVING FORWARD will see the building of SMART CITIES TECHNOLOGY where drones do indeed deliver groceries with brick and mortar groceries closing. All of this prepares for what has been throughout CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ----manufactured CRISES----you can ask those 5% to the 1% religious leaders---they know these goals. Any talk of MEDICAID----UNIVERSAL CARE---FIXING FOOD DESERTS is all LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE POSING---they are lying.
The Foreign Economic Zones being built in US and Africa are designed to last for 50--60 years just as those overseas in Asia-----so all these predictions of disaster under NEW WORLD ORDER will be filled with PROPAGANDA. The food scarcity we are creating stems from allowing MOVING FORWARD US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES build global corporate campuses and global factories in our US cities for the sustainability of global 1% ----vs stopping MOVING FORWARD and keeping global corporate campuses at bay and rebuilding each community with a local, small business and small manufacturing economy----that is 99% sustainability.
People laugh when we shout to create CANDLESTICK local businesses---but then they again are not paying attention to goals of SMART METERS on home energy rationing------where 99% of citizens will have periods of the day when they will have no electricity, no natural gas, and no fresh water. PEOPLE WILL NEED CANDLESTICKS TO ADDRESS RATIONED HOME ENERGY..........nothing being done to create that bartering trade locally. I trade candlesticks for your fresh food garden.
Don't allow what will be lots of SENSATIONALISM around this topic fool you----these goals are real but natural disaster it will not be. The global 1% promoting breast feeding only know our global women will be under great physical strain ---not good for healthy natural milk.
Society To Collapse By 2040 Due To Catastrophic Food Shortages, Environmental Disaster
New scientific models supported by the British government’s Foreign Office show that if we don’t change course, in less than three decades industrial civilization will essentially collapse due to catastrophic food shortages, triggered by a combination of climate change, water scarcity, energy crisis, and political instability that are fueled by war.
By Nafeez Ahmed | | @nafeezahmed | June 22, 2015
Before you panic, the good news is that the scientists behind the model don’t believe it’s predictive. The model does not account for the reality that people will react to escalating crises by changing behavior and policies.
But even so, it’s a sobering wake-up call, which shows that business-as-usual guarantees the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it: our current way of life is not sustainable.
The new models are being developed at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute (GSI), through a project called the ‘Global Resource Observatory’ (GRO).
The GRO is chiefly funded by the Dawe Charitable Trust, but its partners include the British government’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO); British bank, Lloyds of London; the Aldersgate Group, the environment coalition of leaders from business, politics and civil society; the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries; Africa Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, and the University of Wisconsin.
Disruption risk
This week, Lloyds released a report for the insurance industry assessing the risk of a near-term “acute disruption to the global food supply.” Research for the project was led by Anglia Ruskin University’s GSI, and based on its GRO modelling initiative.
The report explores the scenario of a near-term global food supply disruption, considered plausible on the basis of past events, especially in relation to future climate trends. The global food system, the authors find, is “under chronic pressure to meet an ever-rising demand, and its vulnerability to acute disruptions is compounded by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation and heightening political instability.”
Three steps from crisis
Lloyd’s scenario analysis shows that food production across the planet could be significantly undermined due to a combination of just three catastrophic weather events, leading to shortfalls in the production of staple crops, and ensuing price spikes.
In the scenario, which is “set in the near future,” wheat, maize and soybean prices “increase to quadruple the levels seen around 2000,” while rice prices increase by 500%. This leads to rocketing stock prices for agricultural commodities, agricultural chemicals and agriculture engineering supply chains:
“Food riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America. The euro weakens and the main European stock markets lose 10% of their value; US stock markets follow and lose 5% of their value.”
The scenario analysis demonstrates that a key outcome of any such systemic shock to the global food supply — apart from “negative humanitarian consequences and major financial losses worldwide” — would be geopolitical mayhem as well as escalating terrorism and civil unrest.
The purpose of exploring such scenarios is to prepare insurers for possibilities that are now more likely than previously assumed. The Lloyd’s report points out:
“What is striking about the scenario is that the probability of occurrence is estimated as significantly higher than the benchmark return period of 1:200 years applied for assessing insurers’ ability to pay claims against extreme events.”
That leading insurance companies are now attempting to factor in potential losses from such crises is a major step forward in pushing the financial sector to recognise the dark-side of the current system of fossil fuel dependence.
The report concludes:
“A global production shock of the kind set out in this scenario would be expected to generate major economic and political impacts that could affect clients across a very wide spectrum of insurance classes.”
It would have “major consequences for companies’ investment income,” with the potential to “generate losses that span many years.” It would also result in political instabilities that take “decades to resolve” while imposing “greater restrictions on international business.”
Governments want answers
The scenario was developed for Lloyds by the Anglia Ruskin University team with the British Foreign Office’s UK/US Task Force on Resilience of the Global Food Supply Chain to Extreme Events.
The Foreign Office’s food resilience Task Force began to come together late last year. An FCO document from February 2015 for a Task Force workshop throws light on its rationale, direction, and participants.
“The taskforce is looking at plausible worst case scenarios of disruption to the global agri-food system, caused by extreme weather events,” the document explains. Taskforce projects aim to “improve understanding of how changing extreme weather events (severity, type, frequency, geographical impact) may impact on global food security” and to “identify how market and policy responses may exacerbate or ameliorate these effects.”
Of particular concern to the FCO’s taskforce is to determine “how large shocks in agricultural production could occur (e.g. floods, droughts, wind storms),” how these would translate into “crop reductions,” and “how society responds to high food prices or limited local availability.”
Although coordinated by the FCO, other British government-backed programmes are involved, chiefly, the Global Food Security Programme and UK Science & Innovation Network, together representing the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA); the Department of Health; the Department for International Development (DFID); the Government Office for Science; the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; and the Scottish and Welsh governments.
On the US side, government involvement was limited to the Center for Integrated Modeling of Sustainable Agriculture and Nutrition Security (CIMSANS), which is supported by the US State Department, and USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network.
Another participant was a senior researcher from the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), whose members include many leading international institutions.
Collapse
I had been in touch with the Anglia Ruskin GSI team for a while, having previously reported on some of their work — and this month joined GSI as a visiting research fellow.
Earlier this year, I attended an invite-only GRO steering committee meeting of scientists, technologists, financiers, economists, and academics, where GSI’s Director, Dr. Aled Jones, delivered a detailed presentation on the modelling work done so far, what it implied, and where it was leading.
Dr. Jones was previously Deputy Director of the Programme for Sustainability Leadership at the University Cambridge, where he was Director of the British government’s flagship Chevening Fellowships Economics of Climate Change Programme, supported by the UK Foreign Office to deliver the FCO’s Strategic Framework. Jones also chairs a working group of the UK government’s Department for Energy and Climate Change’s Capital Markets Climate Initiative (CMCI).
Jones’ GRO initiative has received direct funding from the Foreign Office to develop its modelling capacity, and he is a co-leader of the FCO Task Force’s working group on ‘Impacts’, where he and his team apply the GRO models to assess the way crop reductions would affect global food security.
GRO is developing two types of model: an Agent-Based Model to explore short-term scenarios of policy decisions by simulating social-economical-environmental systems; and a System Dynamics Model capable of providing projections for the next 5 years based on modelling the complex interconnections between finite resources, planetary carrying capacity, and the human economy.
“The financial and economic system is exposed to catastrophic short-term risks that the system cannot address in its current form,” Dr. Jones told us.
He described GRO’s use of the Agent-Based Model to capture and simulate the multiple factors that led to the 2011 Arab Spring events.
By successfully modeling the “impact of climate-induced drought on crop failures and the ensuing impact on food prices,” he said, the model can then be recalibrated to “experiment with different scenarios.”
“We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory based on ‘do-nothing’ trends — that is, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend. The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots. In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption.”
Another steering committee member raised their hand: “So is this going to happen? Is this a forecast?”
“No,” said Jones. “This scenario is based on simply running the model forward. The model is a short-term model. It’s not designed to run this long, as in the real world, trends are always likely to change, whether for better or worse.”
“Okay, but what you’re saying is that if there is no change in current trends, then this is the outcome?” continued the questioner.
Jones nodded with a half-smile. “Yes,” he said quietly.
In other words, simply running the Agent-Based Model forward cannot generate a reliable forecast of the future. For instance, no one anticipated the pace at which solar and wind energy would become cost-competitive with fossil fuels. And the fact that governments and insurers are now beginning to scope such risks, and explore ways of responding, shows how growing awareness of the risks has the potential to trigger change.
Whether that change is big enough to avoid or mitigate the worst is another question. Either way, the model does prove in no uncertain terms that present-day policies are utterly bankrupt.
Limits to growth
GRO’s System Dynamics Model takes a different approach, building on the ‘World3’ model developed by scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which famously forecast that humankind faced impending “limits to growth” due to environmental and resource constraints.
In popular consciousness, the ‘limits to growth’ forecasts were wrong. But recent studies, including one by the Australian government’s scientific research agency CSIRO, confirm that most of its predictions were startlingly prescient.
Dr. Jones and his team at Anglia Ruskin University have taken this confirmation several steps further, not only by testing the model against the real world, but by recalibrating it internally using new and updated data.
“World3 was a very good, robust system,” he told us. “Some assumptions were incorrect and misparameterised — for instance, life expectancy is smaller than assumed, and industrial and service outputs are larger than assumed. And the model was missing some shock dynamics and feedback loops.”
The same questioner put his hand up and asked, “Does this mean the original model and its predictions are flawed?”
“I would say the model was largely correct,” said Jones. “It was right enough to give a fairly accurate picture of future limits to growth. But there are some incorrect parameters and gaps.”
The System Dynamics Model, Jones explained, is designed to overcome the limitations of World3 by recalibrating the incorrect parameters, adding new parameters where necessary, and inputting fresh data. There are now roughly 2,000 parameters in the model, drawing on a database of key indicators on resources and social measures for 212 countries, from 1995 until today.
Jones’ affirmation of the general accuracy of the limits to growth model was an obvious surprise to some in the room.
The original model forecasted global ecological and economic collapse by around the middle of the 21st century, due to the convergence of climate change, food and water scarcity, and the depletion of cheap fossil fuels — which chimes with both the GRO’s models.
Last year, Dr. Graham Turner updated his CSIRO research at the University of Melbourne, concluding that:
“… the general onset of collapse first appears at about 2015 when per capita industrial output begins a sharp decline. Given this imminent timing, a further issue this paper raises is whether the current economic difficulties of the global financial crisis are potentially related to mechanisms of breakdown in the Limits to Growth BAU [business-as-usual] scenario.”
For the first time, then, we know that in private, British and US government agencies are taking seriously longstanding scientific data showing that a business-as-usual trajectory will likely lead to civilisational collapse within a few decades — generating multiple near-term global disruptions along the way.
The question that remains is: what we are going to do about it?
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'As we move agriculture north, we're going to be putting it in areas that don't have the same water-holding capacity, nutrient-holding capacity." '
Everyone has known these few decades the need to shift US breadbasket industry TO NORTHERN STATES was vital ---what did Obama and Clinton neo-liberals do with FARM BILL over several years---they created all kinds of laws subsidizing this dying MID-WEST/WEST COAST GLOBAL BIG AG----knowing it will all become a dust belt. All those hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidizing existing BIG AG could have long ago built a REAL US food source that would indeed feed ALL OF WE THE PEOPLE THE 99%.
We showed how global VEOLA ENVIRONMENTAL has privatized Great Lakes fresh water access with lots of US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES around those lakes and happening to be those NORTHERN REGIONS NEEDED FOR US BREADBASKET---the goal is to kill environment, deplete fresh water sources, and leave US inhabitable.
The REAL left social progressive issue is not simply to shout against XL PIPELINE protecting native land-----REAL left social progressives would have marched on each US CITY DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE to stop GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUS AND GLOBAL FACTORY development----the rest are global Wall Street 5% players. BE A LEADER NOT A FOLLOWER----
WE CAN DO IT-----LET'S GET RID OF GLOBAL WALL STREET POLS AND PLAYERS.
Anyone tied to public health would have long ago been shouting against this----not in Baltimore----our Baltimore Public Health Department is partnered with global Wall Street MOVING FORWARD to killing public health for 99% of citizens.
Science
Feb 24 2015, 9:10 pm ETClimate Change Will Hit America in the Breadbasket, Scientists Say
Wheat harvesters work on a field near Clearwater, Kansas in 2012. Fernando Salazar / AP
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Climate experts have seen the future of America's breadbasket — and from their perspective, it doesn't look pretty.
"I don't want to be a wheat farmer in Kansas in the future," said Harold Brooks, a senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma.
Brooks isn't a wheat farmer. He's a researcher who has analyzed how climate change could affect the weather in America's midsection, based on historical data and computer modeling. Last year, he and his colleagues found that tornado patterns are becoming more variable — with severe storms coming in bunches or not at all.
There's more variability in the long-term weather outlook as well, Brooks said this month in San Jose during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Some climate models suggest there'll be more storms, while others suggest there'll be more drought.
Either scenario is bad for the farmers. "I lose all my crop because it gets hailed on, or it burns up," Brooks said.
In a warmer world, the threat of drought is drawing more attention. "If I look at the future, and I say, 'What's the biggest threat to food security in the future,' at least from a Midwest perspective, it is more intense, major droughts," said Kenneth Kunkel, senior scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites.
More heat wavesIt's no surprise that drought is a big part of the climate forecast, but Brooks, Kunkel and other experts are now working out how a rise in global mean temperatures are likely to translate into changed weather conditions for key areas, including America's wheat belt and corn belt.
Last year, for example, researchers matched up their computer models with weather data in an attempt to determine the contribution of human-caused climate change to extreme weather events ranging from western Europe's heat wave to California's mega-drought. Their verdict: Greenhouse-gas emissions played a substantial role in Europe's misery, but not so much in California.
Looking ahead, the models predict that today's heat-wave conditions will become the norm in Europe. "By the end of the century ... this event will seem cold," said Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at Berkeley Lab who helped write the latest U.N. climate report.
Shifting grain beltThe outlook suggests that the most suited region for U.S. crop production will shift northward as global temperatures increase. Although it's dangerous to read too much into one year's statistics, North Dakota surpassed Kansas as the nation's top wheat-producing state last year, due primarily to Kansas droughts.
Theoretically, reduced production along the southern edge of the country's grain-producing regions should be offset by increased production along the northern edge. The Corn Belt (and Soybean Belt) is already pushing up past the Canadian border, and Canada's wheat-producing zone is creeping farther north. But in reality, the shift is still likely to produce a net loss in crop production, said Jerry Hatfield, director of the USDA-ARS National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment.
"We're going to consume soil resources, because the urban population that we're going to build up is going to consume more land as well," he said. "We'll lose other parts of the land because of excessive erosion and degradation that occurs. As we move agriculture north, we're going to be putting it in areas that don't have the same water-holding capacity, nutrient-holding capacity."
Hatfield said the world's increasing population, plus the rise in per capita consumption that comes with economic development, will add to the pressure. Between the year 2000 and 2050, "we basically have to produce the same amount of food as we've produced in the last 500 years," he said.
Can we adapt?The experts said heading off a food crisis will require changes in every aspect of production and consumption. "Adaptation strategies should be under way," Wehner said. "Denying this, I think, is a disservice to the public."
Among the strategies: developing new crop strains that produce bigger yields; reducing waste at every step in the food production chain; and eating less meat, to cut down on the huge amounts of grain that are consumed by livestock.
Will we be able to feed the world in 2050? "I'd say we could, but I would bet against it," said Paul Ehrlich, president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. The longtime critic of overpopulation and overconsumption noted that little has been done to counter negative trends in food security, even though they've been known about for decades.
Ehrlich said climate shifts could make things worse, and fast.
"If we had a thousand years to solve this, I'd be very relaxed," he said. "But we may have 10 or 20. That's a different story."
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