I like to read widely, from many different sources. Even those who basically disagree, or vehemently disagree, with what I believe often have valuable insights on particular topics.
Over at Global Guerrillas http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/ the blogger is posting on how the global food production system has broken down, and the strains it puts on societies and the world. Here’s an interesting quote about how ethanol production via corn growing has had some untoward effects as farmers shift from corn for food to corn for ethanol.
QUOTE: Entropy Production
“It’s hard to believe that in five months our country has gone from a strong commitment to pay any price for energy security to the kind of backlash we’ve seen against ethanol” Jon Doggett, a lobbyist for the National Corn Growers Assn (to the LA Times).
This is what happens when a system’s ability to dampen shocks fails.
The blogger goes on to postulate that the laws of thermodynamics cover what is happening in human society right now. I think it’s somewhat simpler than that.
Going on as we speak is a global food crisis. For many of us it simply manifests as higher food prices, which blessedly prompt many of us to take up small scale gardening as a way of promoting our own independence from the food production system. For others, most notably in certain third world countries of the African variety, it means starvation because of the lethal combination of lower IQs in the general populace and systemic corruption of the upper classes. This, of course, leads to violence there because the other options never quite seem to occur to the upper classes. And there are other options. Starving Zimbabwe was once Rhodesia, breadbasket of Africa.
But the current upper classes in Zimbabwe are more concerned with skin color than they are with feeding their own people.
Whatever. Their choice.
In most cases it seems simple to me, and probably most Westerners, that despite the failings of our elites, they either care enough about the people of their countries eating regularly, producing happy, full-bellied people (or at least care about having happy “serfs” keep them in power), that they will work hard to provide food to them at a vaguely affordable price.
The upper classes in Africa don’t seem to have caught on to this. Must be all those Mercedes salesmen keeping them distracted.
OK, folks, it’s big question time.
Should Westerners feel that they are required in the sense of Christian compassion to provide food for starving African nations, most of which envy and hate us because of our skin color and basic success at supplying food and creature comforts to our own people?
Inquiring minds want to know.
God bless,
Laurel
