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UN: One Quarter of World’s Wheat Harvest Presently Threatened by Rust Fungus; Scientists: Puccinia graminis Could Spread to USA, Canada, and Europe
So far this unrest has been directed at rising prices. Actual shortages are still to come.
— David Kotok, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer, Cumberland Advisors
The communist project known as the United Nations, an embryonic world government designed by Moscow Leninists and Western Fabian socialists associated with the Council on Foreign Relations, is begging the West for US$775 million to establish a relief fund designed to aid countries stricken by the current global food shortage. “We consider that the dramatic escalation in food prices worldwide has evolved into an unprecedented challenge of global proportions,” the UN pleaded in a press release, following the organization’s emergency summit in Berne, Switzerland. The World Bank, an organ of the UN, urged countries to refrain from imposing food export bans. “We are urging countries not to use export bans,” World Bank President Robert Zoellick said in another statement. “These controls encourage hoarding, drive up prices and hurt the poorest people around the world who are struggling to feed themselves.” In other words, the representatives of de facto world government are demanding more power to implement Antichrist’s agenda for global dictatorship.
Pictured above: UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon visits Russia’s outgoing President/incoming Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, on April 9, 2008.
U.N. and World Bank say to tackle food crisis
Tue Apr 29, 2008 10:26am EDT
By Laura MacInnis
BERNE (Reuters) – U.N. agencies and the World Bank pledged on Tuesday to set up a task force to tackle an unprecedented rise in global food prices that is threatening to spread social unrest.
The international bodies called on countries not to restrict exports of food to secure supplies at home, warning that could make the problem worse.
“We consider that the dramatic escalation in food prices worldwide has evolved into an unprecedented challenge of global proportions,” the United Nations said in a statement.
This had become a crisis for the world’s most vulnerable people, including the urban poor, it said after a meeting of 27 international agency heads in the Swiss capital, Berne, to chart a solution to food price rises that have caused hunger, riots and hoarding in poor countries.
“Though we have seen wheat prices fall over the last few days, rice and corn prices are likely to remain high, and wheat relatively so,” World Bank President Robert Zoellick told a joint news conference.
Higher costs of wheat, rice, and other staples have put extreme pressure on aid providers such as the World Food Program (WFP), a U.N. agency aiming to feed 73 million people this year.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on the international community to provide the WFP all of the $755 million in emergency funds it needs for the crisis.
“Without full funding of these emergency requirements, we risk again the specter of widespread hunger, malnutrition, and social unrest on an unprecedented scale,” Ban said.
Concern about soaring food costs and limited supplies have toppled Haiti’s government and caused riots in parts of Africa.
The task force, bringing together the heads of U.N. agencies, funds and programs, the IMF and the World Bank under the leadership of Ban, will set priorities for a plan of action and make sure it is carried out.
WORLD BANK PLEA
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Food Price Index, measuring the market prices of cereals, dairy produce, meat, sugar and oils, was 57 percent higher in March 2008 than a year earlier.
The surge is due to several factors, including increased demand in developing countries, higher fuel costs, drought in Australia, the use of crops for biofuels, and speculation on global commodity markets.
And developing world farmers, often the poorest in their countries, are not benefiting from the higher prices.
They tend to eat most of what they grow rather than selling it, and higher prices for fuel and fertilizer are putting them off growing more, World Bank analysis shows.
“Even in some areas where people know that prices are higher, they are not planting more because they are fearful that they face very high input costs,” Zoellick said.
There was at least some short-term easing in prices of key commodities on Tuesday.
U.S. rice futures fell more than 2.5 percent, deepening a retreat from last week’s record high as the world’s biggest exporter Thailand said it would release government stocks for domestic use and traders looked ahead to Asian harvests.
The Thai pledge to release 2.1 million tons of stockpiled rice came a day after a trade official said the country’s rice prices were likely to ease by about 20 percent in coming weeks on increased supply from the new domestic crop.
Rice prices are expected to ease as countries rush to boost output, but the market is unlikely to return to levels of recent years, He Changchui, the FAO’s Asia head, said in Bangkok.
India slapped export taxes on basmati rice and other products as the government unveiled a series of moves to tackle inflation fuelled by the rise in food prices.
The World Bank called on countries not to ban exports of food, saying that only worsens the problem.
“We are urging countries not to use export bans,” World Bank President Zoellick said in a statement. “These controls encourage hoarding, drive up prices and hurt the poorest people around the world who are struggling to feed themselves.”
Source: Reuters
The globalist administration of US President George W. Bush appears to agree with the power-hungry cabal at the UN and its World Bank appendage. No export bans have been placed on US wheat reserves, which are at their lowest in six decades and shrinking fast. By contrast, in February neo-Soviet Russia imposed a hefty 40% export duty on grains to stabilize domestic flour and bread prices, but the duty will be lifted tomorrow, creating more hardship for Russia’s citizen-slaves. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation will no doubt use the worldwide, skyrocketing cost of living to assail the potemkin Putinist regime.
When a capitalist country faces crises, the communists will utilize the social and political unrest created to advance the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. When an established communist state faces crises, the communists are again quick to denounce capitalists, oligarchs, separatists, racists, fascists, imperialists, and counter-revolutionaries as the source of their woes. This was the case on April 23 when Latin America’s red leaders convened in Caracas for an emergency summit of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (pictured above). Priority Item Number One: Establish a food security fund to prop up the shakey Trotskyist regime of Bolivian President Evo Morales. There Venezuela’s revolutionary dictator took the occasion to identify the “fascist right,” rather than drought, consecutive poor grain harvests, growing populations, expanding middle classes in China and India, and the short-sighted diversion of corn into biofuel production, as the cause of the current global food shortage.
Nicaragua’s stridently anti-USA President Daniel Ortega attended the group therapy session for Comrade Evo in Caracas. Harping on the same theme of the evils of private property accumulation, Comandante Ortega hosted a regional summit of agricultural ministers to address the global food shortage as it impinges on Latin America. The Sandinista leader piously intoned: “The drama of poor nations, where every five seconds a child dies of hunger and malnutrition, doesn’t make the news. When they limit sales of rice in the United States, that is news.” Neo-Sandinista Nicaragua, as we previously blogged, is scheduled to assume the rotating presidency of the UN General Assembly in June.
Nicaraguan president opens emergency meeting on food crisis in Central America
The Associated Press
Sunday, April 27, 2008
MANAGUA, Nicaragua: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega says Central American food shortages have reached crisis levels and could cause social unrest.
Free trade, market forces, and farm subsidies in developed nations are contributing to the problem, Ortega told regional agriculture ministers on Saturday.
Ortega convened the ministers for what he called “an emergency meeting to take measures in the face of a food crisis, before we have any possible social explosions.”
Poverty-ridden Central America depends on imported oil and fertilizer to fuel its farms. Malnutrition is already common across the region, and soaring oil and grain prices threaten to make things worse.
The aim of Saturday’s meeting was to develop a production and marketing alliance for regional farm goods. Also attending were members of the Venezuelan-inspired Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, a trade and aid bloc known as ALBA.
On Wednesday, Ortega joined the leftist leaders of Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia in creating a US$100 million (64 million pounds) program to fight rising food costs for Latin America’s poor.
International aid groups and the news media have not paid the food crisis enough attention, Ortega said.
“The drama of poor nations, where every five seconds a child dies of hunger and malnutrition, doesn’t make the news,” Ortega said. “When they limit sales of rice in the United States, that is news.”
Source: International Herald Tribune
Not content to jab America in the ribs, unrepentant Marxist Ortega denounced his domestic opponents as “people’s foes” for seeking transparency with respect to millions of dollars received under an oil supply agreement with Red Venezuela and used discretionarily by the neo-Sandinista regime.
Ortega lambasts those who demand accountability for Venezuelan oil
Caracas, Monday April 28 , 2008
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega blasted his critics, who requested him to account for the destiny of million dollars received under an oil supply agreement with Venezuela and used discretionarily.
Last Sunday, Ortega called “people’s foes” those who queried about the revenues from the Venezuelan oil granted by means of a permissive loan, reported on Monday newspaper El Nuevo Diario.
The Nicaraguan Comptroller’s General Office ordered last week to audit Nicaraguan state-owned oil company Petróleos de Nicaragua (Petronic) in order to learn about the management of the funds resulting from the oil received by Nicaragua as a member of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA).
Ortega explained that due to the ALBA membership, Nicaragua had oil and energy available, allowing for low-cost urban transportation.
Source: El Universal
While the Left’s iron-fist-in-velvet-glove prescription for universal prosperity has a poor track record, the entire world is in fact facing a new threat that could lead to a food shortage of truly Biblical proportions. The so-called rust fungus that is preparing to wipe out most of Africa’s upcoming wheat harvest could spread to other continents. Ominously, the story below reports, “Scientists fear that the spores could spread on the wind and reach the U.S. and Canada or Europe.” Presently, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Office, nearly one quarter of the world’s global wheat harvest is threatened by the fungus known as Ug99. Pictured above: Afghan food sellers in the city of Kabul, on April 14, 2008. The price of wheat flour shot up an average of 60 percent across Afghanistan last year.
Wheat Crop Failures Could be Total, Experts Warn
Thursday, April 24, 2008 10:03 a.m. EDT
On top of record-breaking rice prices and corn through the roof on ethanol demand, wheat is now rusting in the fields across Africa.
Officials fear near total crop losses, and the fungus, known as Ug99, is spreading.
Wheat prices have been soaring this week on top of already high prices, and futures contracts spiked, too, on panic buying.
Experts fear the cost of bread could soon follow the path of rice, the price of which has triggered riots in some countries and prompted countries to cut off exports.
David Kotok, chairman and chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors, said the deadly fungus, Puccinia graminis, is now spreading through some areas of the globe where “crop losses are expected to reach 100 percent.”
Losses in Africa are already at 70 percent of the crop, Kotok said.
“The economic losses expected from this fungus are now in the many billions and growing. Worse, there is an intensifying fear of exacerbated food shortages in poor and emerging countries of the world,” Kotok told investors in a research note.
“The ramifications are serious. Food rioting continues to expand around the world. We saw the most recent in Johannesburg.
“So far this unrest has been directed at rising prices. Actual shortages are still to come.”
Last month, scientists met in the Middle East to determine measures to track the progress of “Ug99,” which was first discovered in 1999 in Uganda.
The fungus has spread from its initial outbreak site in Africa to Asia, including Iran and Pakistan. Spores of the fungus spread with the winds, according science journal reports.
According to the Food and Agriculture Office (FAO) of the United Nations, approximately a quarter of the world’s global wheat harvest is currently threatened by the fungus.
Meanwhile, global wheat stocks are at lows not seen in half a century, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Scientists fear that the spores could spread on the wind and reach the U.S. and Canada or Europe.
“It will take five to eight years to genetically engineer a resistance,” said Kotok. “In the interim, U.S. agriculture faces higher risk.”
Kotok is worried that governments around the globe are reacting to the crisis — which he believes is as big of a threat as bird flu — inappropriately by artificially lowering the prices of domestic wheat, and raising export taxes on wheat.
William Gamble, president of Emerging Market Strategies, tells MoneyNews that artificial mechanisms put in place by governments could be as much to blame for the crisis as anything.
“Twenty countries have put food in price controls or export restrictions,” Gamble says.
“Others have restricted futures markets. It is the politicians who are interfering in the markets to protect themselves, and that causes the problem.”
Source: MoneyNews.com
Blogger’s Note: We have created a new news category called “End Times File” in which we correlate current events with various Bible prophecies concerning the end of the church, or present, age. We have recategorized some posts of recent weeks within this new category.