Friday, February 12, 2010

Let's Bring Down World Food Prices

As if the poverty scourge is not enough, humanity now faces a planet-size feed grains under-supply problem as well. Since the past decades, world production of grains have been lagging behind population growth. By 2030, populations in the Middle East and Africa will nearly double to 1.7 billion. Indians and Pakistanis will number 1.6 billion. Southeast Asians may rise to 700 million. Middle classes in all these regions are rising, and all will compete for increasingly pricier food. All countries in these regions already import 30-60% of their rice, corn and wheat needs. The Philippines has been importing up to half its rice needs for decades, and will keep importing more. Unless grain production rates rise worldwide, China alone may be buying the entire world’s grain output by 2030, which means rising food prices and even worse poverty worldwide. As global warming creates more drought, floods and typhoons and at worse levels, widespread global hunger may precipitate revolutions and wars over scarce resources.

What can we bloggers do to prevent these nightmares from becoming our future? Appealing to politicians is like talking to brick walls, so we better begin to wake up two billion employees worldwide. Reason: employees know how to set up and run companies. They can certainly create and manage agribusinesses that address worsening food problems worldwide. And they can certainly do it at good profit for themselves. The profit motive becomes our weapon.

How may the world’s employee masses start? First they have to pressure their politicians to pass a Grains and Livestock Production (GLP) law. A GLP law channels 2-5% of yearly state budgets towards lending to thousand-employee groups that set up giant grain-related agribusinesses. Examples: (1) Thousand-hectare upland forest ranches with lowland rice, corn, millet, oats and sorghum farms. Livestock are kept in pens under forest trees. (2) Sub-contracting of livestock feeds cropping (grains, forage grasses, forage trees) to small farmers, all cash and equipment needs advanced on loan. The employee group’s livestock feedlots raise cattle, goats, sheep, rabbits, turkey, ostrich, fowls, etc. using sub-contract harvests. (3) Commercialization of low-cost desalination technologies for planting coastal desert edges to sorghum, wheat, corn, millet, oats and rice. (4) Reviving tropical upland stream nets thru reforestation, and supplying lands below with irrigation water to attract corporate-level grain farming and livestock raising. (5) Building huge rainwater catchment basins in the tropical uplands to store normal and abnormal rainfalls caused by global warming. The basins become sources of irrigation water for forests and farms in uplands and lowlands. The system ensures an end to the terrible tropical lowland floods that get even worse as warm temperatures keep raising the evaporation rates of seawater and glaciers, which create continent-size clouds that lead to typhoons.

Now for the crucial question: how do we bloggers persuade two billion employees worldwide into pressuring their politicians to pass a GLP law? It’s not that difficult really. We simply share the profit-making scheme among all the world’s employees, thru blogging nets of course.

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