global food crisis
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"Strained by rising demand and battered by bad weather, the global food supply chain is stretched to the limit, sending prices soaring and sparking concerns about a repeat of food riots last seen three years ago. Signs of the strain can be found from Australia to Argentina, Canada to Russia. On Friday, Tunisia's president fled the country after trying to quell deadly riots in the North African country by slashing prices on food staples. "We are entering a danger territory," Abdolreza Abbassian, chief economist at the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said last week. The U.N.'s fear is that the latest run-up in food prices could spark a repeat of the deadly food riots that broke out in 2008 in Haiti, Kenya and Somalia. That price spike was relatively short-lived. But Abbassian said the latest surge in food stuffs may be more sustained. "Situations have changed. The supply/demand structures have changed," Abbassian told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "Certainly the kind of weather developments we have seen makes us worry a little bit more that it may last much, much longer. Are we prepared for it? Really this is the question." Global food stock piles have fallen drastically because of disaster relief across the globe. "I haven't seen numbers this low that I can remember in the last 20 or 30 years," said Dennis Conley, an agricultural economist at the University of Nebraska. "We are at record low stocks. So if there any kind of glitch at all in the U.S. weather, supplies are going to remain tighter and we might see even higher prices." -MSNBC

food price index
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The coming famine:
Disasters are exacting their toll on the natural ecology of the planet. Flooding, drought, storms, and excessive heat are gnawing away at growing seasons across the globe. In my book, I warned of the great famine looming over the planet as food production plunges and global population numbers continue to swell in the face of these ensuing Earthchanges. The length of growing seasons around the world are slowly diminishing. Food shortages and food price shock will reverberate across the planet by the end of 2011. We should all be moving towards some degree of self-sufficiency in domestic food production as these Earthchanges intensify.


Christianservant & (c) CNBC - For the record, less than 4% of the planet's land surface supports permanent crops