Garden As If Your Life Depended On It, Because It Does

There are at least five reasons why more of us should take up the spade, make some compost, and start gardening with a vengeance.

Garden hen/Wikimedia Commons image

Ellen LaConte
AlterNet

Spring has sprung -- at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it -- and the grass has 'riz. And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food -- all of which are also becoming more expensive -- or less food.

In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can't afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live it's 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops 20 percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!
In some cases this round of price hikes on everything from cereal and steak to fresh veggies and bread -- and even the flour that can usually be bought cheaply to make it -- will be temporary. But over the long term the systems that have provided most Americans with a diversity, quantity and quality of foods envied by the rest of the world are not going to be as reliable as they were.

What's for Supper Down the Road?

As they move through the next few decades Americans can expect:

• The price of conventionally produced food to rise and not come down again;
• Prices to rollercoaster so that budgeting is unpredictable;
• Some foods to become very expensive compared to what we're used to;
• And other foods, beginning with some of the multiple versions of the same thing made by the same company to garner a bigger market share and more shelf space, to gradually become unavailable.

Tremors in food supply chains and pricing will make gardening look like a lot more than a hobby, a seasonal workout, a practical way to fill your pantry with your summer favorites, or a physically, spiritually and mentally healing activity, or all four. Gardening and small-scale and collective farming, especially of staple crops and the ones that could stave off malnutrition, could become as important as bringing home the bacon, both the piggy and the dollar kind. Why?

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Japan crisis: 'There’s no food, tell people there is no food'

Japan’s survivors scavenge for food in aftermath of tsunami

AFP image

Peter Foster
Telegraph

The unshaven man in a tracksuit stops his bicycle on the roadside and glances over his shoulder to check that he is unobserved. Satisfied, he reaches quickly into the sludge-filled gutter, picks up a discarded ready-meal and stuffs it into a plastic carrier bag.

In another time, another place, Kazuhiro Takahashi could be taken for a tramp, out scavenging for food after a long night on the bottle. In fact, he is just another hungry victim of Japan’s tsunami trying to find food for his family.

“I am so ashamed,” says the 43-year-old construction worker after he realises he has been spotted. “But for three days we haven’t had enough food. I have no money because my house was washed away by the tsunami and the cash machine is not working.”

If his haul wasn’t so pitiful — his bag had two packets of defrosted prawn dumplings and a handful of vacuum-packed seafood sticks inside — Mr Takahashi might be taken for a looter. But in the port town of Ichinomaki, 200 miles north of Tokyo, his story is disturbingly common.

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Wholesale prices rise 1.6 pct. due to biggest jump in food costs in more than 36 years

Wikimedia Commons image

Yahoo/AP

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Wholesale prices jumped last month by the most in nearly two years due to higher energy costs and the steepest rise in food prices in 36 years. Excluding those volatile categories, inflation was tame.

The Labor Department said Wednesday that the Producer Price Index rose a seasonally adjusted 1.6 percent in February -- double the 0.8 percent rise in the previous month. Outside of food and energy costs, the core index ticked up 0.2 percent, less than January's 0.5 percent rise.

Food prices soared 3.9 percent last month, the biggest gain since November 1974. Most of that increase was due to a sharp rise in vegetable costs, which increased nearly 50 percent. That was the most in almost a year. Meat and dairy products also rose.

Energy prices rose 3.3 percent last month, led by a 3.7 percent increase in gasoline costs.

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RELATED ARTICLES:
5 Easy Ways to Prepare for Massive Food Inflation
7 Reasons Food Shortages will Become a Global Crisis

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The System is Going Down Hard

Dr. Mark Sircus
IMVA



I asked Gerald how bad things are going to get because he has a feeling for that more than most. In this interview it’s a man from Brooklyn talking to the street wise guy from the Bronx. The interview leads off an essay that addresses the converging simultaneous events of food crisis, calamities of nature, the fiscal and moral failure of government running head on to a gathering financial collapse that will bring civilization to its knees in anarchy, fascist control and severe economic depression.


In Japan today the news is dire on every front. It is important to note that only 15% of Japan’s land is suitable for cultivation, meaning they have to import about 50% of their requirements for grain and fodder crops and rely on imports for most of their supply of meat. Japan is the world’s 2nd largest fishing nation having over 2,000 fishing ports and one of the most advanced aquaculture (sea farming) industries on the planet.

"For Japan, a nation that lives by the sea, food comes in by the sea, energy comes in by the sea and exports go out by the sea. Everything stops if a quarter of the coastline has been wiped out," said Weinberg who teaches at New York University. The main destruction that has been wrought upon Japan was centered on that 15% of their cultivatable land and has destroyed a great part of their ability to feed themselves along with annihilating their fishing fleet and ports.

Until now, in the first world at least we’ve pretty much taken food for granted but that’s about to change as the seriousness of the food crisis bites down harder each month. “Fears grow over global food supply,” “Riots spread as global food shortage worsens,” “We are sleepwalking into a crisis,” are just some of the headlines and statements we are hearing these days. This is a crisis that is going to slice through humanity though interestingly enough it is coming ashore with other simultaneous crises that are bringing an abrupt change to modern day life. In Japan it is unimaginable how life has changed adding one more pressure on the world’s food supply as well as its financial system.

The UN in March expressed alarm at a huge decline in bee colonies under a multiple onslaught of pests and pollution, urging an international effort to save the pollinators that are vital for food crops. Much of the decline, ranging up to 85 percent in some areas, is taking place in the industrialized northern hemisphere due to more than a dozen factors, according to a report by the UN’s environmental agency. They include pesticides, air pollution, a lethal pinhead-sized parasite that only affects bee species in the northern hemisphere, mismanagement of the countryside, the loss of flowering plants and a decline in beekeepers in Europe. The bees are going, bats too. Fish are dying off in staggering numbers and the birds are dropping from the sky. Are we next?

The New York Times reports, “These forecasts of apocalypse have touched a nerve. Americans, still reeling from the devastating impact of the mortgage debacle, are fearful that the next economic disaster is only a matter of time. To anyone reading the headlines of budget deficits and staggering pension liabilities, it takes little imagination to conclude that the next big one will be government itself.” In this report the Times is writing specifically about a collapse in local government and the services they provide.

The consequences of western financial indulgences will have a devastating impact. The adjustment that we are just beginning to undergo will be of such colossal magnitude that life will be very different for coming generations compared to our current financial and moral decadence. But this dire prophecy is not going to play out through a long period of time but will crash down heavily on everyone during the next two years.

The trend is down with us coming closer and closer to the edge of a frightening fall that could come as early as next week or next year, it’s hard to tell as Gerald Celente shares in the above video. In agriculture the world is consuming grains faster than farmers are growing them, draining reserves and pushing prices up to record levels. Russia’s ban on grain exports means the country’s farmers will plant the fewest wheat fields in four years, another sign that global prices will keep rising. Wheat plantings in Russia, once the second-biggest exporter, will drop 2.3 percent to 64.2 million acres for this year’s crop.

London Store Shelves – November 2010

Supermarkets typically only have an average of 72
hours of inventory so even a temporary shortage of
food supplies could be catastrophic for the unprepared.

In a true emergency most of us will have to fend for ourselves. In a true emergency forget about finding what you need at the store. You know what it’s like when there’s even a moderate snowstorm in the forecast—no bottled water, no toilet paper, no bread to be found anywhere. The shelves are stripped bare in hours. The Japanese have reported several supermarkets running out of food in Tokyo as locals rushed to get essential items. Most people simply don’t realize how fragile the food distribution system is in this or any country and how vulnerable we are to the climate as well as insane monetary policy.

China is gobbling up nearly a quarter of the
U.S. soybean crop in order to fatten hogs
and chickens craved by its middle class.

There are seven billion mouths to feed on earth with more arriving every day. Growing demand, falling production, a market based upon speculation, using food to produce fuel, dramatic climate conditions and the huge reduction of the number of farmers in the first world are all leading to crisis in and the result is seen in  food prices increasing for eighth consecutive months. Global food prices reached new highs in February, a U.N. food agency said last week, warning that oil price spikes could provoke further increases.

The Ogallala Aquifer, the world’s largest underground
body of fresh water, has irrigated thousands of square
miles of American farmland. Now it is running dry. In a
brief half-century we have drawn the Ogallala level down
from an average of 240 feet to about 80 feet.

Tyler Durden writes, “There are several significant factors contributing to rising food prices, such as extreme weather conditions, biofuel production and Wall Street speculation; but the Federal Reserve’s policies deliberately threw gasoline all over those brush fires.” Kevin Hall reports, “The truth of the matter is that when the Federal Reserve moved on the quantitative easing, it did export inflation to a lot of these emerging markets… There’s no doubt that one of the side effects of the weak dollar and quantitative easing has been rising commodity prices. As food prices increase, food stamps are obviously going to buy you less food. On top of that, as food prices escalate, millions more will need food assistance, right at the point when the current safety net can least afford it.”

In a recent segment, Feeding the Fires of Revolution, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria says a spike in food prices, ignited, for example, by protests in North Africa, isn’t limited to third-world countries and “may prove to be the biggest influencer of global events in 2011.” Higher prices mean more hunger worldwide. It is predictable that higher prices and eventual hyperinflation will lead to famine, misery and social unrest. The rising prices and the conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East were predictable outcomes of US Quantitative Easing.

National Uprisings

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey, writing for Pravda.Ru writes that under the world’s present financial and economic system, “It is not a question of not producing enough food to eat—it is far worse; we have created mechanisms which exclude countless and growing millions from the right to eat, to work and to live. This system does not work.” And people are getting mad and madder and eventually it will be civil disobedience all over the world as citizens just get sick of their governments and what is being done to them by their arrogant leaders.

Tyler Durden writes in detail about this system and the revolution that is starting to rise up against it. He says, “We are witnessing a decentralized global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic imperialism. While each national uprising has its own internal characteristics, each one, at its core, is about the rising costs of living and lack of financial opportunity and security. Throughout the world the situation is the same: increasing levels of unemployment and poverty as price inflation on food and basic necessities is soaring.”

Whether national populations realize it or not, these uprisings are against systemic global economic policies that are strategically designed to exploit the working class, reduce living standards, increase personal debt and create severe inequalities of wealth. These global uprisings, which have only just begun, are the first wave of the inevitable reaction to the implementation of a centralized worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order. I am afraid we have yet to see how brutal western governments are going to get and to what lengths they will go to preserve the status quo.

There are hundreds of millions of people who will not know what hit them and the government and the press are certainly not warning anyone to prepare for anything. A huge segment of earth’s population who has been accustomed to the good life will be left with a whole lot of nothing when the next financial collapse occurs. In the end it looks like it’s going to be: no services, no benefits, no jobs, no homes and lots of hungry people with empty stomachs. The world system based on debt and thin air is about to do a disappearing act but before it does it is going to go through an agonizing death dance.

One of the hidden drivers of increasing food prices is the increasing competition for food around the world as governments and individuals horde and stockpile. It is bad enough when governments buy large tonnages with real money, but consider what the United States government is doing to feed 40 million of its citizens with food stamps. They do not have the money for that program or any other program, being a bankrupt nation, so they are borrowing the billions each month and their Federal Reserve is simply monetizing that debt. Imagine if everyone could borrow unlimited funds to buy food what kind of situation we would end up with.

Even though the government is not warning its citizens about any imminent dangers, it is preparing for disaster. One of the nation’s largest suppliers of dehydrated food has cut loose 99% of their dealers and distributors because the United States federal government is ordering huge amounts of freeze-dried foods, 420 million meals, to be exact, or one billion dollars’ worth. Now all we have to do is wait until China gets into the act and puts some of their small change down on world food exchanges.

Preparing our own Private Food Stocks

When it comes to our own food stockpiles, we can do a lot better than the freeze-dried foods the government buys. We can go with superfoods that are live and so potent that they act as both medicines and health food at the same time. We can grow and make our own wheat grass juice and we can consume spirulina and barley juice, but my favorite is Rejuvenate!™. It not only tastes great but it is also the ideal superfood that supports optimal health while boosting and sustaining energy levels—plus, it has an extremely long shelf life. It is a medicine, a fantastic health food and survival food all rolled into one. It certainly is a part of my protocol for cancer and all other serious diseases. The US government should be ordering this instead of drab and nutritionally less powerful freeze-dried foods.

And if you are one of the few who are preparing then contemplate what medicines you are going to stock your medicine cabinet up with. Start out with rushing out to secure your supply of iodine right now and see my blog post later today on iodine dosages and an interview with Dr. David Brownstein on the necessity of protecting oneself with iodine against radioactive iodine which be dropping down from the jet stream in coming days, weeks, months and probably years.

RELATED ARTICLES:
5 Simple Ways to Prepare For The Coming Food Crisis
3 Key Preparation Components For Any Emergency

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Groundbreaking New UN Report on How to Feed the World's Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture

A new report from the UN advises ditching corporate-controlled and chemically intensive farming in favor of agroecology.

Wikimedia Commons

Jill Richardson
AlterNet

There are a billion hungry people in the world and that number could rise as food insecurity increases along with population growth, economic fallout and environmental crises. But a roadmap to defeating hunger exists, if we can follow the course -- and that course involves ditching corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive farming.

"To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available. And today's scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live," says Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Agroecology is more or less what many Americans would simply call "organic agriculture," although important nuances separate the two terms.

Used successfully by peasant farmers worldwide, agroecology applies ecology to agriculture in order to optimize long-term food production, requiring few purchased inputs and increasing soil quality, carbon sequestration and biodiversity over time. Agroecology also values traditional and indigenous farming methods, studying the scientific principals underpinning them instead of merely seeking to replace them with new technologies. As such, agroecology is grounded in local (material, cultural and intellectual) resources.


A new report, presented today before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, makes several important points along with its recommendation of agroecology. For example, it says, "We won't solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations." Instead, it says the solution lies with smallholder farmers. The majority of the world's hungry are smallholder farmers, capable of growing food but currently not growing enough food to feed their families each year. A net global increase in food production alone will not guarantee the end of hunger (as the poor cannot access food even when it is available), an increase in productivity for poor farmers will make a dent in global hunger. Potentially, gains in productivity by smallholder farmers will provide an income to farmers as well, if they grow a surplus of food that they can sell.

With its potential to double crop yields, as the report notes, agroecology could help ensure smallholder farmers have enough to eat and perhaps provide a surplus to sell as well. The report calls for investment in extension services, storage facilities, and rural infrastructure like roads, electricity, and communication technologies, to help provide smallholders with access to markets, agricultural research and development, and education. Additionally, it notes the importance of providing farmers with credit and insurance against weather-related risks.

In the past, efforts to help the hungry involved developing high yielding seeds and providing them along with industrial inputs to farmers in poor countries. However, in poor countries, smallholder farmers who often live on less than $1 or $2 per day, cannot afford industrial inputs like hybrid or genetically engineered seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, or irrigation. Many work each year to make sure their crops go far enough to feed their families, with little left over to sell. And for those who live far from roads and cities, there might not be a market to sell to anyway.

Agroecology requires replacing chemical inputs with knowledge, often disseminated by farmers who work together with scientists and aid organizations to teach their fellow farmers. "Rather than treating smallholder farmers as beneficiaries of aid, they should be seen as experts with knowledge that is complementary to formalized expertise," the report notes. For example, in Kenya, researchers and farmers developed a successful "push-pull" strategy to control pests in corn, and using town meetings, national radio broadcasts, and farmer field schools, spread the system to over 10,000 households.

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RELATED ARTICLES:
5 Easy Ways to Prepare for Food Inflation
4 Best Off-the-Grid Food Production Methods

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