PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti's presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country's prime minister packing.
Kirshnendu Halder/Reuters
HUNGER IN INDIA Villagers near the city of Hyderabad recently jostled for rice that was being sold by government officials. More Photos »
Haiti's hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.
Saint Louis Meriska's children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, "They look at me and say, 'Papa, I'm hungry,' and I have to look away. It's humiliating and it makes you angry."
That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.
In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.
"It's the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years," said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. "It's a big deal and it's obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there's more political fallout to come."
Indeed, as it roils developing nations, the spike in commodity prices — the biggest since the Nixon administration — has pitted the globe's poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations' farm and environmental policies. But experts say there are few quick fixes to a crisis tied to so many factors, from strong demand for food from emerging economies like China's to rising oil prices to the diversion of food resources to make biofuels.
There are no scripts on how to handle the crisis, either. In Asia, governments are putting in place measures to limit hoarding of rice after some shoppers panicked at price increases and bought up everything they could.
Even in Thailand, which produces 10 million more tons of rice than it consumes and is the world's largest rice exporter, supermarkets have placed signs limiting the amount of rice shoppers are allowed to purchase.
But there is also plenty of nervousness and confusion about how best to proceed and just how bad the impact may ultimately be, particularly as already strapped governments struggle to keep up their food subsidies.
'Scandalous Storm'
"This is a perfect storm," President Elías Antonio Saca of El Salvador said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Cancún, Mexico. "How long can we withstand the situation? We have to feed our people, and commodities are becoming scarce. This scandalous storm might become a hurricane that could upset not only our economies but also the stability of our countries."
In Asia, if Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi of Malaysia steps down, which is looking increasingly likely amid postelection turmoil within his party, he may be that region's first high- profile political casualty of fuel and food price inflation.
In Indonesia, fearing protests, the government recently revised its 2008 budget, increasing the amount it will spend on food subsidies by about $280 million.
"The biggest concern is food riots," said H.S. Dillon, a former adviser to Indonesia's Ministry of Agriculture. Referring to small but widespread protests touched off by a rise in soybean prices in January, he said, "It has happened in the past and can happen again."
Last month in Senegal, one of Africa's oldest and most stable democracies, police in riot gear beat and used tear gas against people protesting high food prices and later raided a television station that broadcast images of the event. Many Senegalese have expressed anger at President Abdoulaye Wade for spending lavishly on roads and five-star hotels for an Islamic summit meeting last month while many people are unable to afford rice or fish.
"Why are these riots happening?" asked Arif Husain, senior food security analyst at the World Food Program, which has issued urgent appeals for donations. "The human instinct is to survive, and people are going to do no matter what to survive. And if you're hungry you get angry quicker."
Leaders who ignore the rage do so at their own risk. President René Préval of Haiti appeared to taunt the populace as the chorus of complaints about la vie chère — the expensive life — grew. He said if Haitians could afford cellphones, which many do carry, they should be able to feed their families. "If there is a protest against the rising prices," he said, "come get me at the palace and I will demonstrate with you."
Bazuki Muhammad/Reuters
INFLATION IN MALAYSIA Cooking oil in a shop in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysians are angry at the rising cost of food and fuel. More Photos >
When they came, filled with rage and by the thousands, he huddled inside and his presidential guards, with United Nations peacekeeping troops, rebuffed them. Within days, opposition lawmakers had voted out Mr. Préval's prime minister, Jacques-Édouard Alexis, forcing him to reconstitute his government. Fragile in even the best of times, Haiti's population and politics are now both simmering.
"Why were we surprised?" asked Patrick Élie, a Haitian political activist who followed the food riots in Africa earlier in the year and feared they might come to Haiti. "When something is coming your way all the way from Burkina Faso you should see it coming. What we had was like a can of gasoline that the government left for someone to light a match to it."
Dwindling Menus
The rising prices are altering menus, and not for the better. In India, people are scrimping on milk for their children. Daily bowls of dal are getting thinner, as a bag of lentils is stretched across a few more meals.
Maninder Chand, an auto-rickshaw driver in New Delhi, said his family had given up eating meat altogether for the last several weeks.
Another rickshaw driver, Ravinder Kumar Gupta, said his wife had stopped seasoning their daily lentils, their chief source of protein, with the usual onion and spices because the price of cooking oil was now out of reach. These days, they eat bowls of watery, tasteless dal, seasoned only with salt.
Down Cairo's Hafziyah Street, peddlers selling food from behind wood carts bark out their prices. But few customers can afford their fish or chicken, which bake in the hot sun. Food prices have doubled in two months.
Ahmed Abul Gheit, 25, sat on a cheap, stained wooden chair by his own pile of rotting tomatoes. "We can't even find food," he said, looking over at his friend Sobhy Abdullah, 50. Then raising his hands toward the sky, as if in prayer, he said, "May God take the guy I have in mind."
Mr. Abdullah nodded, knowing full well that the "guy" was President Hosni Mubarak.
The government's ability to address the crisis is limited, however. It already spends more on subsidies, including gasoline and bread, than on education and health combined.
"If all the people rise, then the government will resolve this," said Raisa Fikry, 50, whose husband receives a pension equal to about $83 a month, as she shopped for vegetables. "But everyone has to rise together. People get scared. But we will all have to rise together."
It is the kind of talk that has prompted the government to treat its economic woes as a security threat, dispatching riot forces with a strict warning that anyone who takes to the streets will be dealt with harshly.
Niger does not need to be reminded that hungry citizens overthrow governments. The country's first postcolonial president, Hamani Diori, was toppled amid allegations of rampant corruption in 1974 as millions starved during a drought.
More recently, in 2005, it was mass protests in Niamey, the Nigerien capital, that made the government sit up and take notice of that year's food crisis, which was caused by a complex mix of poor rains, locust infestation and market manipulation by traders.
"As a result of that experience the government created a cabinet-level ministry to deal with the high cost of living," said Moustapha Kadi, an activist who helped organize marches in 2005. "So when prices went up this year the government acted quickly to remove tariffs on rice, which everyone eats. That quick action has kept people from taking to the streets."
The Poor Eat Mud
In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.
"It's salty and it has butter and you don't know you're eating dirt," said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. "It makes your stomach quiet down."
But the grumbling in Haiti these days is no longer confined to the stomach. It is now spray-painted on walls of the capital and shouted by demonstrators.
In recent days, Mr. Préval has patched together a response, using international aid money and price reductions by importers to cut the price of a sack of rice by about 15 percent. He has also trimmed the salaries of some top officials. But those are considered temporary measures.
Real solutions will take years. Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself. Outside investment is the key, although that requires stability, not the sort of widespread looting and violence that the Haitian food riots have fostered.
Meanwhile, most of the poorest of the poor suffer silently, too weak for activism or too busy raising the next generation of hungry. In the sprawling slum of Haiti's Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. "Take one," she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. "You pick. Just feed them."
This post really made me think....here we are in the US and other wealthy countries whining about the price of gas and groceries and here are people who are starving to death while we groan about milk being 5 bucks a gallon. It made me realize just how lucky I and plenty of other people really are. Sometimes, it is difficult to see how good you really have it until reality slaps you in the face.
It can happen here, too. Many people in poorer communities can't pay higher prices. With the job market being shrunken due to consolidation many folks are struggling just to take care of basic needs. Yes, I'm thankful for this country but there are some who don't know why they should be thankful when they are losing much of what they worked so hard for.
Gennee
It can happen here and it IS happening here. Jobs going overseas, millions of people living at or below the poverty level who can't afford health care and basic necessities, homeless people in the millions... all the while, the middle class is disappearing as the housing market collapses triggering collapses in other markets as well and more jobs are lost. Pay increases don't keep up with the skyrocketing inflation and are offset by a currency that is losing its value more every day. The cost of feeding a family is getting to be more than a lot of people can easily afford.
Add to that all our other woes as a nation (and there are more every day) and I wonder why I get out of bed in the morning...
It's still reasonable to whine about food and energy prices, as long as we are in tune with how much more pressing it is for people in developing nations.
The reality is that we are not producing enough food and energy for human consumption. We can mitigate the energy shortage by producing more energy (wind, tidal, solar, geothermal -- and even nuclear is better than carbon combustables), as opposed to just settling for sucking the finite supply of oil/coal out of the ground. We can improve on the food front by (1) removing the destructive ethanol subisidies (with ethanol requiring about as much energy to produce as you get from actually producing it), (2) subsidize food production as necessary (which we already do considerably), and (3) encourage food production in other countries (lower trade barriers, provide them the technology we use).
Food, energy, medicine, shelter, there are necessities for productive human life. Shortages of these will stifle our own development.
I came across these articles on Alternet, and thought readers of this thread might find them interesting:
The Hidden Battle to Control the World's Food Supply
http://www.alternet.org/environment/82632/ (http://www.alternet.org/environment/82632/)
Face It, We All Aren't Going to Become Vegetarians
http://www.alternet.org/environment/82628/
Corporate Vultures Lurk Behind the World Food Crisis
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/83859/ (http://www.alternet.org/workplace/83859/)
~Simone.
I clearly recall my dad telling me once "If you don't think you're in trouble now, you just don't know trouble." And that's exactly what we are now looking at. Consider this quote, as true as anything I've ever read.
"The human instinct is to survive, and people are going to do no matter what to survive. And if you're hungry you get angry quicker."
We don't dare use the word "ration" but even in the US there have been efforts at CostCo and SamsClub to 'limit' the amount of rice people can buy. And rice is critical, as its the number one staple crop in the world. If you have a rice shortage, you're going to get mass starvation.
And its not just that 'we are not making enough food' its far closer to the fact that we are fast reaching the carrying capacity of the planet. We can't plant fence row to fence row. We don't have the water to make it possible to farm many areas now in production. We are putting more and more food stocks into biofuels, and hence, less food on the table.
If these riots had been localized to one nation or region, I might be able to shine it on, but its a global deal. In Haiti, in Africa, in the former Soviet Union, in Asia. That is not good at all.
People have been too occupied with minor threats like terrorists and Iraq and not paying attention to some of the very real stuff that Bush&Co have pulled off, including off-shoring lots of jobs and production ability. I go to Mexico and see the factories lined up just across the border.
Its like the gas deal. Gas prices are NOT rising, as much as the dollar is falling. Inflation is on the rise, making it harder for people to make ends meet who were already having big problems doing just that.
And its not just a fuel crisis (and none of those other options can supply the amount of power we currently use) its a fresh water crisis and an arable land shortfall also. Combined, its a deadly mix. And its not just there. I see people eating out of trash cans everyday here, and I live in a pretty high rent area. So far, people have enough to be tossing the extra away (or putting it on top, so that people can eat it without digging) but comes a time when that ain't happening anymore it could get rough.
The world produces plenty of food to go around.
The trouble is we squander a whole bunch of it to feed cattle (only getting 10% of the calories back in beef; trophic levels and all); we squander another bunch of it to make high-fructose corn syrup and other industrial poisons; and we flat out throw away a bunch more. And it's always been like this. We've pretty much always had more than enough food to eat on a global scale, and as a result we've always grown our population to the very limit of that amount of food. But because of the inequity and iniquity of society, there have always people left behind, and thus a drive to produce even more.
There are several solutions: war, famine, environmental catastrophe, and disease, for example. These will all alleviate the problem of hunger. Oh, yeah, there's one other thing: education for girls and women so that they have some say in their lives and reproductive choices.
"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world."
Reverend Malthus will always have the last laugh.
Beverly
maybe if we didn't waste land on harvesting stupid crops like sugar, and if we didn't waste whatever the hell the ingredients of twinkies and ding-dongs are on making twinkies and ding-dongs and if we just shared the damned food, there'd be less of an issue.
I must be in a mood today. I'm going to leave for a while.
Quote from: Rebis on April 29, 2008, 03:12:32 PM
maybe if we didn't waste land on harvesting stupid crops like sugar, and if we didn't waste whatever the hell the ingredients of twinkies and ding-dongs are on making twinkies and ding-dongs and if we just shared the damned food, there'd be less of an issue.
I must be in a mood today. I'm going to leave for a while.
I feel exactly the same way Reebs. What you say is absolutely true as well. There's more than enough to go around for everybody. Profit, politics and power ensure that it doesn't.
~Simone.
Profit sounds bad, but no one is going to go out and do the hard work of farming for free.
Quote from: tekla on April 29, 2008, 03:23:37 PM
Profit sounds bad, but no one is going to go out and do the hard work of farming for free.
Hey, what can I say. I'm an anarcho-socialist. ;D
~Simone.
But are you a farm hand, able to do manual labor for say, 12 hours a day? There is a reason that slavery was tied so close to agriculture.
Quote from: tekla on April 29, 2008, 03:23:37 PM
Profit sounds bad, but no one is going to go out and do the hard work of farming for free.
And therein lies the rub. Why the push for ethanol in spite of the energy used in production of a gallon is nearly equal to the energy produced by the gallon produced?
Have you ever noticed fields in most of the USA? Corn followed by soybeans. There is very little else besides animal farming done in the USA. We produce tremendous amounts of corn, especially. For years we have relied on corn to grow beef and pigs and chickens and the Japanese to use our soy crops.
Farmers, what few remain that are not working directly for Con-agra and other industrial farm corporations, are consistently loosing money. They do lots of soy and corn. How to make them profitable? Ethanol.
Problem is that when the farmers pull the grain from food producers to sell to ethanol producers the prices for food goes up. Less grain to feed the animals, fewer farmers producing food crops. The third world problem is along the same lines -- many counties only have a GDP because of their commodities. Ethanol helps their bottom line, although the people starve.
As for water and arable land, yes, those problems have already become acute. And you don't have to look to sub-Saharan or Saharan Africa to find them. Check out the water-rights issue for the past forty years in the Colorado River Basin. The World Bank doesn't lend money for infrastructure improvements, like irrigation and aqueducts. The countries pressed have nothing to pay for the improvements with. Thus, the land dries out and in the meantime Indonesia and Brazil burn rain-forest, heightening much of the rainfall problem.
One thing that seems certainly true about industro-technological capitalism is that problem-solving is not their forte. Often their problem-solving makes for more acute problems twenty-five years on. Simply because, I think, capitalism is a very 'in-the-moment-focussed' system. What's good for this quarter is often very bad for a twenty-five year view.
N~
Corn is not a good feed for beef. It makes the cows sick then they pump in antibiotics. Corn is used as sugar in most processed food because the chemically produced corn sweetener is cheaper than sugar. Grass feed beef and livestock are much healthier and leaner meat. They just take longer to add weight. Sugar cane is used in Brazil to make fuel because it produces 8 times the amount ethanol per pound than corn. The US has few places sugar cane grows well.
The fact that corn, another 'grass' is not burned as efficiently by cows as is grass makes little difference in what feed the cows are fed.
And yes, corn syrup of various grades is used as a sweetner & a lot of corn is used to that end.
N~
Quote from: tekla on April 29, 2008, 01:45:22 PM
"The human instinct is to survive, and people are going to do no matter what to survive. And if you're hungry you get angry quicker."
Absolutely true. And perhaps what we need is a little more inconvenience... maybe we need more people going hungry, losing their jobs, losing their homes. We need some "real" anger. We have so much misplaced anger in the USA... maybe it's time to focus that anger into something that can bring positive change, instead of continuing down the road of complete apathy and indifference.
I've long said that if you take away the American peoples' "opiates" (television, toys, conveniences) and make them have to think for themselves and fend for themselves a little bit instead of being so constantly distracted, we would have a revolution.
Maybe it's overdue...
It sounds brutal, but it's the kick in the ass we all need.
Quote from: tekla on April 29, 2008, 03:23:37 PM
Profit sounds bad, but no one is going to go out and do the hard work of farming for free.
Unfortunately, the farmers aren't making money for their efforts, the middlemen are.
Z
QuoteThe fact that corn, another 'grass' is not burned as efficiently by cows as is grass makes little difference in what feed the cows are fed.
Read the "Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan, the NY Times food editor
"In my grandfather's time, cows were four or five years old at slaughter," Rish explained. "In the fifties, when my father was ranching, it was two or three years old.Now we get there at fourteen to sixteen months. Fast food, indeed. What gets a steer from 80 to 1100 pounds in fourteen months are tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.
Corn is a genetically domesticated grass that does not and can not grow without human assistance. The drugs keep the cow from getting sick on the corn.
My point, I hoped, Lisa, was the the cattle-growers know grass is better. But the pressures of the industrila farm approach is that htye need to get that calf from 80#s to 1100#s in 14 months to meet production goals.
They are not thjinking cost-effectiveness because the grain additives do indeed make for mosre costly eating for the cows, not to mention the huge barns and feed lots full of cows and basically miserable conditions for the animals.
The farmers are only thinking production which means they don't care about the feed and how good it is, they just want the weight.
N~
Farming is industrial, because the output must be huge as margins are small. Where I lived in Iowa a 'small, family farm' was still over 500 acres in production. And yeah, its all corn and soy, and that's up 100% in crop diversity from 20 years ago when it was almost all corn. Its still monoculture corn and beans however. And that's another problem.
And its not just that. All the prime agricultural land in Napa and Sonoma is in wine grapes. Even the old prune ranches (plums) have gone over. The food cycle is pretty amazing really, and a lot of it is going away, or at least back to the old system of things being 'in season.' So give up that fresh salad in the winter, its going to be too expensive to drag all that stuff back from Cali or up from the Deep South to New England when gas passes, $5, which it will do by the end of the summer at the rate its moving now.
Even if we raise enough food, and we are at that margin now, its not just an agricultural production problem its a storage problem, a processing problem, and a transportation problem -- its also a 'can you afford it' problem. Hence Haiti. But Haiti is screwed anyway. They have far more people than the land can support, so who is support to support them? Hard to pass that burden off onto others.
And you do have to move that stuff fast, hence the hormones in the feed.
WASHINGTON - Science has provided the souped-up seeds to feed the world, through biotechnology and old-fashioned crossbreeding. Now the problem is the dirt they're planted in.
As seeds get better, much of the world's soil is getting worse and people are going hungry. Scientists say if they can get the world out of the economically triggered global food crisis, better dirt will be at the root of the solution.
Soils around the world are deteriorating with about one-fifth of the world's cropland considered degraded in some manner. The poor quality has cut production by about one-sixth, according to a World Resources Institute study. Some scientists consider it a slow-motion disaster
In sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 1 million square miles of cropland have shown a "consistent significant decline," according to a March 2008 report by a worldwide consortium of agricultural institutions.
The cause of the current global food crisis is mostly based on market forces, speculation and hoarding, experts say. But beyond the economics lie droughts and floods, plant diseases and pests, and all too often, poor soil.
A generation ago, through better types of plants, Earth's food production exploded in what was then called the "green revolution." Some people thought the problem of feeding the world was solved and moved on. However, developing these new "magic seeds" was the easy part. The crucial element, fertile soil, was missing.
"The first thing to do is to have good soil," said Hans Herren, winner of the World Food Prize. "Even the best seeds can't do anything in sand and gravel."
Herren is co-chairman of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, a collection of scientists sponsored by the United Nations and World Bank. It produced a 2,500-page report last month which, among other recommendations, emphasized a need to improve the world's soil.
Genetic improvements in corn make it possible to grow up to 9,000 pounds of corn per acre in Africa. But millions of poor African farmers only get about 500 pounds an acre "because over the years, their soils have become very infertile and they can't afford to purchase fertilizers," said Roger Leakey, a co-author of the international report and professor at James Cooke University in Australia.
Soil and water issues "have been taken for granted," said Ohio State University soil scientist Rattan Lal. "It is a problem that is not going to be solved. It's going to get worse before it gets better."
In Africa, farmers are forced to use practices that rob nutrients from the soil, not put it back, said Herren, who heads an Arlington, Va., nonprofit. Fertilizer is a quick, short-term fix, but even that isn't being done, he said.
The current crisis could have been avoided "if we, the world, had promoted fertilizer in Africa and we have known for ages it works," said Pedro Sanchez, Columbia University tropical agricultural director.
In that way, the problem with soil is a prime example of a larger failing of agriculture science, said Sanchez, who has won both the World Food Prize and a MacArthur genius grant. Scientists have the knowledge to feed the world right now, but that is not happening, Sanchez said. "It's very frustrating, especially when you see children dying."
The fruits of biotechnology and the staples of modern agricultural scientific techniques include irrigation, crop rotation, reduced tilling, use of fertilizer and improved seeds. It's a way of farming differently instead of just using better seeds that requires extra money up-front that many African farmers don't have, scientists said.
Fixing soil just isn't "sexy" enough to interest governments or charities, said Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Manila, Philippines.
Zeigler's center last week planted its 133rd crop of rice in the same land since 1963, trying to pinpoint the right combination of nitrogen and fertilizer. Better seeds worked wonders. But finding money for soil health is difficult and because of that, less work is accomplished, he said.
But there are success stories, Sanchez said, pointing to the small African country of Malawi. Three years ago, the country's new president invested 8 percent of Malawi's national budget in a subsidy program to get fertilizer and better seeds to small farmers. Each farmer got two bags of fertilizer and 4 1/2 pounds of seeds at less than half the cost.
Before the program started, one-third of Malawi was on food aid and the country wasn't growing enough food for itself, Sanchez said. It was producing 1.2 million tons of maize in 2005. In 2006, Malawi had more than doubled its production. By 2007 and 2008, the crop was up to 3.4 and 3.3 million tons. Now Malawi is exporting corn.
"In two years, the country has changed from a food aid recipient to a food aid donor and is self-sufficient," Sanchez said. "If Malawi can do it, richer countries like Nigeria, Kenya can do it."
It's not that simple, the seeds they are providing are copyright, and patent protected intellectual property of a few large agribusiness (do I really need to say they were big BIG supporters of G. W. Bush????) who own not only the rights to the product, but all future offspring. Its not a solution at all.
The only solutions are to work around governments and corporations.
However, no one will do as I say. :laugh:
There are farmers around the world that got talked into special seeds that now find out they need all sorts of chemicals and plenty of water. Some of them that can not afford the extras are committing suicide because they can not feed their family and are bankrupt as farmers.
Posted on: May 09, 2008, 03:08:59 PM
GENEVA (Reuters) - Exposure in the womb to common chemicals used to make everything from plastic bottles to pizza box liners may program a person to become obese later in life, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
Their studies of mice showed animals exposed to even tiny amounts of the chemicals during development were fatter when they grew older compared with mice not exposed to the compounds, they told the 2008 European Congress on Obesity.
"We are talking about an exposure at very low levels for a finite time during development," said Jerry Heindel of the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
"The fact that it is such a sensitive period, it may be altering the tissue and making people more susceptible to obesity."
The World Health Organization estimates some 400 million people are obese, a problem that raises the risk of conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Previous studies have linked these chemicals -- also found in water pipes -- to cancer and reproductive problems, prompting a number of countries and U.S. states to consider potential bans or limits of the compounds, the researchers said.
One of the chemicals is called Bisphenol A, found in polycarbonate plastics. Past research has suggested it leaches from plastic food and drink containers.
A team at Tufts University in the United States showed that female mice whose mothers were exposed to this chemical early in pregnancy gained more weight in adulthood even though they ate the same amount of food and were as active as other mice
So mice are getting fatter. Wonder how the mice in Botswana fare, or those in Khazakistan?
There's no doubt that the average weight of Americans is up. Many are obese. All due to Bisphenol ya reckon?
But, the photos I see from Darfur, Somalia and Zimbabwe don't show a lot of fat people walking about. They don't use plastics? Or they just don't use food?
And with corps doing exactly what tekla says, patenting seeds and constantly pushing factory-produced chemical fertilizers, how does a farmer whose land is drought-plagued and whose avg yearly income, not profit is $60 use all that 'green revolution' technology when his wife can't afford mealies enough to make pita?
N~
Quote from: Nichole on May 17, 2008, 07:54:57 AM
So mice are getting fatter. Wonder how the mice in Botswana fare, or those in Khazakistan?
There's no doubt that the average weight of Americans is up. Many are obese. All due to Bisphenol ya reckon?
But, the photos I see from Darfur, Somalia and Zimbabwe don't show a lot of fat people walking about. They don't use plastics? Or they just don't use food?
And with corps doing exactly what tekla says, patenting seeds and constantly pushing factory-produced chemical fertilizers, how does a farmer whose land is drought-plagued and whose avg yearly income, not profit is $60 use all that 'green revolution' technology when his wife can't afford mealies enough to make pita?
N~
There are some places that just do not have affordable food therefor people are starving to death regardless of plastic.
Some farmers who get hybrid seeds can not afford the water pumps, insecticides, and fertilizers after they plant and are never told by the seed marketer all that is involved so they lose the crop as some end it all, in places like India.
Posted on: May 17, 2008, 08:22:16 AM
QuoteOne contributor to higher prices has been the brown plant hopper. The insect has been spreading rapidly through China, evolving so fast that it can now withstand 100 times the concentration of insecticide it took to kill the bugs just a decade ago. The insects cling to stalks of young rice plants, sucking the juices out of them
Posted on: May 17, 2008, 04:27:11 PM
New Trend in Biofuels Has New Risks
But now, biologists and botanists are warning that they, too, may bring serious unintended consequences. Most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species — that is, weeds — that have an extraordinarily high potential to escape biofuel plantations, overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc in the process, they now say.