CUT TO THE CHASE

Posted by Stelios Theocharous January 27, 2011 - 8:15 pm

There is a very big storm brewing at the moment, and it probably cannot be avoided either. I am sure everyone seen the riots in Tunisia on the news and how the president had to flee his country and how thousands of british holidaymakers had to return back to the UK early, oh how they complained about cutting there holiday short. The truth is it only probably made the news because british tourists were over there and there safety was in jeopardy.

Its shocking to think that at least 14 people died in the riots in Tunisia and all for the most important commodity in the world, the thing that humans can not do without, yes I am talking about food not energy. You would be surprised to know that food and energy can be interchanged one way but not the other, we can use food for fuel but not fuel for food unfortunately this is not so obvious to some.

In this day and age we can go to a supermarket 24 hours a day, we can buy a vast amount of food for generally quite cheap. Some of the figures that have been been thrown around is that 8.3 million tonnes of food is thrown away each year in the UK alone. Can you imagine how many more people could eat that food and also how much cheaper the food would be if that was circulating.

Global authorities are concerned that these food riots might start spreading – especially if the extremely harsh weather all over the globe continues to damage crops.

In fact, there are some signs that economic unrest is already beginning to spread….

*In the nation of Jordan, peaceful demonstrations were held in several locations around the country on Friday to protest rising food prices.

*Economic protests also been reported recently in Mozambique, Morocco and Chile.

Sadly, the desperate economic conditions that are sparking these food riots did not develop overnight. Rather, they have been building for decades. The truth is that the new “global economy” is designed to funnel more and more of the wealth of the world into the hands of the wealthiest 0.001% of the global population. Everyone else is left to fight with one another to divide up a pie that is increasingly shrinking.

Just consider the following facts….

#1 Approximately 1 billion people throughout the world go to bed hungry every single night.

#2 Approximately 28% of all children in developing countries are considered to be underweight or have had their growth stunted as a result of malnutrition.

#3 Every 3.6 seconds someone starves to death and three-quarters of them are children under the age of 5.

#4 “Least developed countries” spent 9 billion dollars on food imports in 2002. By 2008, that number had risen to 23 billion dollars.

So if things are this bad already, what kind of food riots are we going to see if all of this weird weather continues and global harvests are much lower than anticipated in 2011?

Most of us have a really hard time even imagining such a thing, but the truth is that we are just one really bad harvest away from mass starvation in many areas of the world.

I am not trying to scare people, but these are facts that people in the food industry need to be aware of, especially when dealing with consumers who have less money to spend. What options do you have ?