Hunger // Current TV

A source of sea-level rise to rival glaciers

A new study finds runoff from groundwater pumping is raising sea levels as much as... more

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Clint Borgen Meets with Staff

Clint Borgen meeting with staff at The Borgen Project (July 2010).

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Clint Borgen Photographed in Seattle

Clint Borgen photographed in Seattle (2007). Clint Borgen works with Congress to... more

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Borgen Project History

Clint Borgen is the President of The Borgen Project and leads a national campaign... more

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Clint Borgen on Capitol Hill

Clint Borgen is famous because of his work in bringing political attention to global... more

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The coming famine: risks and solutions for global food security

Most of us have by now heard the forecast there will be 9.2 billion people in the world of 2050. But current projections suggest human numbers will not stop there – but will keep on climbing, to at least 11.4 billion, by the mid 2060s.

Equally, the world economy will continue to grow – and China, India and other advancing economies will require more protein food.

Thus, global demand for food will more than double over the coming half-century, as we add another 4.7 billion people. By then we will eat around 600 quadrillion calories a day, which is the equivalent of feeding 14 billion people at today’s nutritional levels.

The central issue in the human destiny in the coming half century is not climate change or the global financial crisis.

'It is whether humanity can achieve and sustain such an enormous harvest'.

By 2050, 7-8 billion people will inhabit the world’s cities. They will use about 2800 cubic kilometres of fresh water – more than the whole of irrigation agriculture uses worldwide today. Desalination may supply some but for most cities, it will be cheaper and simpler to grab the farmer’s water. This is already happening, around the world.

Our resources of mineral nutrients are starting to fail. When Canadian Patrick Dery applied Hubbert’s peak theorem to phosphorus he found, to his dismay, we had passed it in 1989. According to the International Energy Agency peak oil and gas are due in the coming decade. These spell scarcity and soaring prices in the primary nutrients – N, P and K – that sustain all advanced farming systems worldwide.

Peak oil has already happened in the United States, in Australia, Britain and in 49 out of 65 of the world’s oil producing regions. Yet 51 million new cars continue to hit the world’s roads every year.

FAO’s projected increase in world meat demand by 2050 is 185 million tonnes. Add this to the fish deficit and we would need to discover three more North Americas to grow sufficient grain to feed all these animals. This gives some impression of the scale of the challenge of meeting global protein demand by the mid-century.Most of us have by now heard the forecast there will be 9.2 billion people in the... more

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Fears grow over global food supply

Wheat prices rose further on Friday in the wake of Russia’s decision to extend... more

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MARCOART THE SERIES

POP ARTIST PETER MARCO OF MARCOART NYC COLLABS WITH PRODUCTION COMPANY LNF PRO TO... more

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Hunger at Home

This video is one interpretation of the current hunger crisis in Massachusetts. By... more

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100 Healthy After-School Snacks for Your Hungry Kids

Check out this list for some great recipes and ideas that will have your kids snacking... more

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The poor starve amidst plenty: food waste in America

*America discards 40% of the food it makes, while a billion in the world go hungry. How can we stop such dire misallocation?

The world's food systems are in crisis. Droughts and flooding have compromised crop production across the globe and more than 1 billion people are hungry. But here in America, our overstocked supermarket shelves continue to propagate the illusion of plenty and, in the past decade, our rate of food waste has more than doubled.

According to a recent study, over 40% of the food produced in America is wasted each year, and only 2% of this waste is composted. Food waste is now the second largest waste stream sent to landfills, where it produces methane, a deadly greenhouse gas that further impacts climate change. Climate change, in turn, is having a deadly impact on our food supply.

One time-honoured way to reduce waste is to increase the perceived value of the goods in question. Despite the fact that food prices have increased substantially in the past few years, Americans on average still spend proportionally less than any other nation on food.

According to research compiled by the USDA, 6.9% of household spending in America was on food, compared to 13.7% in France and 45.7% in Indonesia. If we were required to lay out a greater percentage of our household budget for food, we would probably be less likely to throw it in the garbage.

Increasing food prices is a hard sell when 14.6% of American families are food-insecure. But government intervention, which leads to artificially cheap food, is wreaking havoc with the global food chain and needs to be addressed. Farm subsidies, for instance, which favour certain crops, encourage over-production and flood the market with underpriced goods. This has a devastating effect on developing countries, which cannot compete with the subsidised produce; it also has a negative impact on the domestic market, as farmers end up leaving food in their fields to rot since it would cost more to harvest than would be gained by selling it.

Figuring out how to salvage this food and deliver it to the needy is the next problem. During the Clinton administration, Joel Berg was USDA co-ordinator for food recovery and gleaning, but when the Bush administration took over, the position was discontinued. These days, if you call the USDA to ask for information about gleaning, you will be connected with the Society of St Andrew (Sosa), a privately funded, faith-based organisation that does an excellent job salvaging approximately 25m lb of food.

Sosa only has offices in eight states, however, and volunteer operations in an additional 11 states. What happens to discarded food in the other 31 states is anybody's guess.

Another scandalous reason that food is discarded is because it doesn't meet superficial aesthetic criteria. So carrots that are not straight enough and potatoes that are not round enough end up being weaned out in the sorting process. But even perfectly formed vegetables and other perishables will end up in supermarket dumpsters because as Berg put it, "we are far too hung up on cosmetic issues and artificial sell-by dates."

There are many non-profit organisations such as DC Central Kitchen and City Harvest in New York that work with supermarkets and restaurants to recover food. But many businesses choose not to get involved in recovery because it seems like more trouble than it's worth. There is some cause for optimism, though, as more businesses are starting to realise the cost benefits of reducing waste. Walmart, of all places, is leading the charge to becoming a sustainable company. At a recent EPA roundtable on food recovery issues, Bobby Fanning, senior manager of solid waste and recycling for Walmart, discussed plans to make the round stickers on bananas biodegradable. Somehow, that makes me feel that all is not lost.

The other cause for optimism is that individual consumers have a lot of power to effect change by altering our own behaviour. Jonathan Bloom, author of the upcoming book American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of its Food (and What We Can Do About it), has a five-step plan to reducing post-consumer waste. Plan your meals; make a detailed shopping list and stick to it; serve reasonable portions; save your leftovers and eat those leftovers.

Since I started writing this piece a day ago, I've had to discard three broccoli crowns, two peaches and a tub of yoghurt that I failed to eat on time. Any one of the hungry billion people in the world would have been very glad of that food. As the global population continues to explode – it is expected to reach 9 billion by 2045 – and our ability to produce food continues to be compromised, more and more people will go hungry. I'm going to try to keep this in mind next time I dump my food in the trash can.*America discards 40% of the food it makes, while a billion in the world go hungry.... more

JanforGore
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A 'Right to Food'

To combat rampant hunger among the poor in India, politician Sonia Gandhi is... more

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The Artfully Pleading Hands That Speak a Language of Their Own

Those of us living in the Western world know relatively little about deeply severe... more

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Millions facing hunger in Niger

Cattle carcasses dot the desert. More beggars show up at street corners in the... more

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How Goldman Sachs Starved Millions and Got Away With It

While Goldman Sachs agreed to pay $550 million to resolve a civil fraud lawsuit filed by the SEC, Goldman has not been held accountable for many of its other questionable investment practices. A new article in Harper’s Magazine examines the role Goldman played in the food crisis of 2008 when the ranks of the world’s hungry increased by 250 million. We speak to Harper’s contributing editor Frederick Kaufman.

AMY GOODMAN: We continue with Goldman Sachs.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, while Goldman Sachs agreed Thursday to pay $550 million to resolve a civil fraud lawsuit filed by the SEC, Goldman has not been held accountable for many of its other questionable investment practices. A new article in Harper’s Magazine examines the role Goldman played in the food crisis of 2008, when the ranks of the world’s hungry increased by 250 million. The article is titled "The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It."

AMY GOODMAN: The author of the article, Frederick Kaufman, joins us now. He’s a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine.

Well, explain. We’re talking about Goldman Sachs today, this—they call it a landmark settlement, but they made more after-hours in trading last night than they will have to pay. So let’s look at Goldman Sachs and its record overall.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah, this is really—it’s really outrageous. And on a certain level, this reform bill is really a sham, because it does not cover, in any way, shape or form, what Goldman Sachs—and really, let’s be honest here, it wasn’t just Goldman; it was Goldman, and it was Bear, and it was AIG, and it was Lehman, it was Deutsche, it was all across the board, JPMorgan Chase—what these banks were able to do in commodity markets, really which reached its peak from 2005 to 2008, in what is now known as the food bubble. And as Juan points out, this is unconscionable what happened, in the sense that their speculation and their restructuring of these commodity markets pushed 250 million new people into food insecurity and starving, and brought the world total up to over a billion people. This is the most abysmal total in the history of the world.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, what were these commodities markets like before the Wall Street firms got involved? And you have a haunting picture, especially of the Minneapolis Exchange, what it was before, what it was like. Could you talk about how things operated and then what Goldman Sachs did precisely?

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: The wheat markets, in particular, in this country are the outcome of a process of development of over 150 years. And that is why, from about 1903 to 2003, the real price of wheat in this country has gone down. And this was one of the great reasons for America’s great twentieth century, the fact that we had cheap food, we had cheap bread. And Goldman, in 1991, came up with a new idea and a new product, which, as I said before, completely restructured this market and completely threw it out of whack.

But before we go there, we just have to maybe review for a second a little bit about how these markets worked and what kept that wheat price stabilized. And Juan, you mentioned the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, this kind of obscure syndicate in the Midwest, which is where the price of this particular kind of wheat, hard red spring wheat, which is the most widely traded wheat in the world, and it’s the most widely exported wheat from the American continent—we kind of set the world price on this wheat. This is where it happens. What’s the history of that price being stabilized is you have, traditionally, in the wheat futures market, two kinds of players: one of the farmers and the millers and the warehousemen—right? And this, of course, includes players like Domino’s Pizza and Sara Lee and General Mills, very large business, capitalist stakes are in this wheat market, right? And they are called bona fide hedgers, because they’re actually buying and selling real wheat. As the price fluctuates in the futures markets, you also traditionally have speculators in this market, people who don’t want wheat, who wouldn’t have any place to put it if they bought it, but they’re making money off buy orders and sell orders, as the price fluctuates each day, and hopefully they’re bringing in some money for themselves every day. That’s the idea.

Now, the key here is that both the bona fide hedgers and the speculators, every time they buy, they’re also selling, and every time they sell, they eventually buy. So their positions are cleared off at the end of the day, OK? Goldman, we have to understand, and a lot of these banks, are not interested in the particular structure of any of these markets. I think it’s a lot of mistake people make when they think about how these bankers are working. We think that they’re actually interested in the markets. We think that they’re—no. What they’re after are very large pools of cash for themselves. They’re after accumulating huge pools of money that they can do with whatever they like on a day-to-day basis. Right? And so, Goldman, in 1991, came up with this idea of the commodity index fund, which really was a way for them to accumulate huge piles of cash for themselves. It wasn’t really about the markets, anyway. The market was just an excuse. And so, the fact that they threw these wheat markets out of whack didn’t really matter to them.

How did this work? Instead of a buy-and-sell order, like everybody does in these markets, they just started buying. It’s called "going long." They started going long on wheat futures. OK? And every time one of these contracts came due, they would do something called "rolling it over" into the next contract. So they would take all those buy promises they had made and say, "OK, we still—we’re just going to—we’ll buy more later. And plus we’re going to buy more now." And they kept on buying and buying and buying and buying and accumulating this unprecedented, this historically unprecedented pile of long-only wheat futures. And this accumulation created a very odd phenomenon in the market. It’s called a "demand shock." Usually prices go up because supply is low, right? That’s the idea. There’s not a lot of supply, so the price goes up. In this case, Goldman and the other banks had introduced this completely unnatural and artificial demand to buy wheat, and that then set the price up. Now, a lot of people are saying, "Oh, it was biofuel production. It was drought in Australia. It was floods in Kazakhstan." Let me tell you, hard red wheat generally trades between $3 and $6 per sixty-pound bushel. It went up to $12, then $15, then $18. Then it broke $20. And on February 25th, 2008, hard red spring futures settled at $25 per bushel. This is completely beyond the pale, particularly at a—

JUAN GONZALEZ: Almost ten times its historic price.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah. It was just completely out of control. And, of course, the irony here is that in 2008, it was the greatest wheat-producing year in world history. The world produced more wheat in 2008 than ever before.While Goldman Sachs agreed to pay $550 million to resolve a civil fraud lawsuit filed... more

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Dupont, Monsanto, and Obama Versus the World's Family Farmers

The Obama administration has indicated a shift in US development policy from... more

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Limbaugh’s solution to childhood hunger: Kids should ‘dumpster dive’ : Veterans Today

By Raw Story

Rush Limbaugh believes he knows why 16 million American schoolchildren will go hungry this summer, and it has nothing to do with soaring job losses or endemic poverty — the problem is kids can’t find their refrigerator or the local neighborhood McDonald’s.

Responding to an article Wednesday at AOL.com that reports 16 million children will go hungry this summer once free or subsidized school lunches are no longer available, Limbaugh suggested he would run a daily feature on his radio show all summer entitled “Where to find food.”

And, of course, the first will be: “Try your house.” It’s a thing called the refrigerator. You probably already know about it. Try looking there. There are also things in what’s called the kitchen of your house called cupboards. And in those cupboards, most likely you’re going to find Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, Lays ridgy potato chips, all kinds of dips and maybe a can of corn that you don’t want, but it will be there. If that doesn’t work, try a Happy Meal at McDonald’s….

There’s another place if none of these options work to find food; there’s always the neighborhood dumpster. Now, you might find competition with homeless people there, but there are videos that have been produced to show you how to healthfully dine and how to dumpster dive and survive until school kicks back up in August.

Limbaugh suggested that the problem of childhood hunger is an artificial creation from people who believe that “rotten” parents “let their kids go hungry.”

“God, this is just — we can’t escape these people,” Limbaugh said, referring evidently to the author of the AOL article. “We just can’t escape them. They live in the utter deniability of basic human nature. They actually have it in their heads somehow that parents are so rotten that they will let their kids go hungry and starve, unless the schools take care of it.”

The following audio was broadcast on The Rush Limbaugh Show, June 16, 2010, and uploaded to the Web by MediaMatters.By Raw Story Rush Limbaugh believes he knows why 16 million American schoolchildren... more

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Record Number of US Kids Facing Summer of Hunger

WASHINGTON (June 16) -- With the school year ending in communities across America,... more

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UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet

Lesser consumption of animal products is necessary to save the world from the worst... more

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Bacon, Hot Dogs And Sausage Look Worse For Heart Than Unprocessed Red Meat : NPR

The link between heart disease or diabetes and a diet rich in red meat has always been... more

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