Feed the world, make it a greener place

April 13th 2008 – The Haitian president has been ousted and riots are breaking out worldwide over a food “shortage”. This follows an explosion in food prices in every country, a special downer if you live in a country where supper is a luxury; you may even notice that the bread at your local bakery has gone through a price mark-up of over 200% in the past year. The culprit, in two words, can be summed up as Al Gore.

Granted, I have to nuance my accusation and clarify that former vice-president, Nobel peace prize winner and all-around swell guy Al Gore is not personally going around the world to raise prices like an evil version of that damned Wal-mart smiley face...but I digress. The main reason that the food prices are increasing astronomically is simple supply and demand. We are producing less and less food and for some reason, demand is not going down. Why are we producing less food? It’s simple, the basic grains produced worldwide are no longer exclusively going towards the production of food and delicious Whiskey, it is also going towards the processing of ethanol. This wonder-juice is used in hybrid and eco-friendly cars in the western world and in the misguided third-world countries that want to please Europe and America by reducing pollution rather than feeding their “electors” (*see the current situation in Zimbabwe). Famine was soooo eighties, sorry Somalia, 2008 is a bad year to be hungry, Bob Geldof would have cared a lot more if it were thirty years ago.

I am now speaking to my several fans on the African continent (all 7 of them). Here is something, perhaps obvious, that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United-States, the European Union, etc. will not overtly tell you. Trees, whales, baby seals, Algae, Kiwi birds, leg hair, Halliburton, Britney Spears, Survivor and Pandas are all more important than you. With the hundreds of million, even billions of American dollars pumped into non-governmental organisations by the aforementioned economic world powers, we could easily feed you but if we do, the panda (an animal that, for all intents and purposes should be extinct, check out their mating practises...seriously) will die out forever. Perhaps I am being overly dramatic yet I don’t think I am guiltier than hippies chained to a tree while collecting welfare cheques.

I could trivially pick a historical example where food was a secondary priority to environmentalism except that THIS IS THE FIRST TIME EVER. Just as AIDS, hair metal, new wave music and communism, the western world seems to treat famine like a fad of the eighties. I agree we have to replace our oil consumption with a new source of energy, if only to prepare for the inevitable shortage of the material. Except that, on a quick list I drew up, converting food to fuel is nowhere near the top of the list (human waste is – think about it, you park on the side of the highway and go at it in your gas tank’s intake...). I could say we have to prioritise yet most of us don't have the time to go out and care, mush less do something about it.

Rick Astley is making a comeback, maybe famine is next.

(Pictured - the last time the world cared about famine and Bob Geldof - Al Gore, coming for you.)

End.

(Post scriptum: This is only to say that my final exams are soon here and thus the interval between each post is growing but it warms my heart to accuse Al Gore of encouraging thousands of deaths every day. Give the man another award!)