The Coming Famine, and YOU

Posted by ERUDIO in Agriculture Genetics on Sep 28th, 2009

The US has no remaining grain reserves. That’s right. Nothing is left in our emergency food pantry. It’s bare.

Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future, instead of merely trying (with pious regret) to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past.--- Dr. Norman Borlaug

This is not some catchy fiction to catch your attention. I wish it were. It’s even worse than that.

There is no cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or anything else left in the once-vast U.S. “strategic” food reserve.

Our strategic food reserve— like Joseph’s 7 years of grain storage for the Pharaoh— was our guarantee against any possible famine. The food reserve worked the same way as the Federal reserve is supposed to work with money, keeping our collective needs satisfied and in balance.

That hedge against mass death by hunger in America is now gone. The U.S. government, in it’s infinite wisdom (why ask why?) sold it to raise cash. While the food reserve was being sold off, we arrogantly continued to squander trillions of dollars, on the flashy toys of conquest. The boy-toys the politicians so love to play with. Planes, ships, bombs.

Think it can’t happen, this famine thing? Right now, while you read this, 100 million kids are starving to death.

Most live in so-called “Third World” countries. And there are others much closer, who live within a mile or two of where you sit, right now.

Conveniently, our supermarkets are still crammed with mountains of cheap food, but it’s getting more expensive every day. Living in fear of losing our jobs and homes, we watch “reality” TV shows and sports events, keeping our minds as numb as possible.

After all, we coined the concept even of “comfort food.” How wrong is that? Food eaten not for hunger but for gluttony, pure and simple. Food used as a drug, a tranquilizer for the fears that torment us.

For the first time in the history of Mankind, there are more sickly obese humans than there are sickly starving humans. And we are right to fret about our exploding population of gluttons, the volunteers of obesity.

So how could there be any danger of famine, with so much food in our stores? And what about the coming harvest, and the stocks of commercial foodstuffs?

A record harvest, at least, that’s the hope. But here’s the thing— this one harvest, this lucky score by our farmers— what will we do with it?

Black and white image of starving children.

Food security is emerging as a global focal point. As the global climate wildly shifts, regions that were always wet and fertile become dry and barren. Other areas that were dry become flooded and washed out.

The U.S. “breadbasket” of the midwest is slowly and inexorably moving northward. Canada will become the zone best tempered for growing wheat and corn, many scientists believe, while Kansas and Iowa and Nebraska may alternately dry out or flood out.

Crops that are engineered to thrive in such flexing conditions, may be humanity’s only hope for survival.

Genetically-altered food is scary, of course. We can’t know the potential for life-altering consequences.

The dilemma is horrifying. Famine, though, that we do understand.

A year ago, Larry Matlack, President of the American Agriculture Movement (AAM), spoke up against the sale of U.S. grain reserves— 18.37 million bushels of wheat from USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust.

Matlack said, “According to the May 1, 2008 CCC inventory report there are only 24.1 million bushels of wheat in inventory, so after this sale there will be only 2.7 million bushels of wheat left the entire CCC inventory.”

That would leave enough wheat to make 1/2 of a loaf of bread for each of the 300 million people in America!

Matlack was even more right that he dreaded. As we’ve said, there is now ZERO grain left in CCC inventory.

Matlack went on to say, “Our concern is not that we are using the remainder of our strategic grain reserves for humanitarian relief. AAM fully supports the action and all humanitarian food relief.”

Who among us can do anything about this? Who has tried?

Activists like Matlack stuck their neck out, they tried.

And great scientists have spent their lives trying. One of the greatest food geneticists just passed away, at age 95, a highly-educated man who used his knowledge to fight famine— Nobel laureate Norman E. Borlaug.

Borlaug was an agricultural scientist who helped develop disease-resistant wheat, so important in many poor countries. A 1970 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug was a distinguished professor of international agriculture at Texas A&M. Borlaug started at Texas A&M in 1984, after working as a scientist in a program that introduced scientific techniques for preventing famine in Mexico. He traveled worldwide, working for improvements in agricultural science and food policy.

Grain silo

Borlaug was known as a champion of high-yield crop varieties, and other science and agricultural innovations to help fight hunger in developing nations. All too soon, his work may be crucial in fending off a famine in all the nations, world-wide.

“We all eat at least three times a day in privileged nations, and yet we take food for granted,” Borlaug said, near the end of his long, amazing life. “There has been great progress, and food is more equitably distributed. But hunger is a commonplace, and famine appears all too often.”

We are what we eat. Our bodies are made of the foodstuffs, good or bad, we consume.

If we eat junk our bodies become junk. If we eat nothing, we shrivel and die. We certainly cannot eat warplanes or bombs. But if science got us into this mess, maybe science is the only thing left that can possibly save us, too.

The so-called Third World” is coming closer every day. In famine, there will be no other World but the Third, for everyone.

Wheat grain in front of mother earth.

What can anyone do? That’s not the question. The right question is— what can YOU do?

Educate yourself!

Learn, study, become a food supply activist, a Larry Matlack— create ways to conserve what we already have.

Or create new solutions— learn, educate yourself, and become a genetic scientist, like Dr Norman Borlaug— create ways to produce what we need, without disastrous consequences.

Borlaug created the World Food Prize, which recognizes the work of scientists and humanitarians, who’ve helped fight world hunger through advanced agriculture.

Wouldn’t this be worth your years of study— to get the degree that would empower you with knowledge, giving you the tools to explore solutions and to create hope for Mankind?

Wouldn’t this be a worthy goal for your own higher education? To gain knowledge, to fight the oncoming nightmare of hunger and famine!