Thursday, April 17, 2014

What should we worry about next - famine?


I have coffee with my father on early on Saturday mornings.  Getting together at 6:30 a.m. or 7:00 a.m. gives us a couple of hours to talk about things that come to mind that morning.  Sometimes we talk about politics, the environment;  I might even explain some natural events or other scientific or economic issue.  Most often I try to ask him question of life during his youth, the jobs that he had, his brothers and sister, his efforts to make a living and other historical events as he perceived them when he was younger.  He always tells me stories of things that happened in the 1930s and 1940s.  To him that period of time is very much alive in his memory, more so than any other period in his life.   His greatest fear for us and the grand children and great grand children is for the country to return to the depression of the early 1930s, when drought and economic downturn caused a lot of people to suffer.


He constantly relates stories of hunger; going without anything to eat for days when he was 6 and 8 years old, in 1932 and 1934.  He tells of how a family of 10 had to eat with twenty cents and how they relied on the charity of other to be able to get food and shelter.  He relates stories of communal eating on the river bank where people made barrels of coffee for anybody to have and where people would kill and cook any animal they could find and anybody who was hungry could go and serve themselves a meal.  He also relates how people would sometimes go and steal beans, corn and rice from warehouses or freight trains in order to prepare a communal meal at the river bank, which by the way was also the garbage dump.  People used the river as a garbage dump because every year it would be flooded and eventually taken out to sea.


I relate to him that as bad as the depression was, as was not as bad as other great famines that have occurred throughout the world, and those famines might not be as bad as the potential famines that could occur if our lack of environmental discipline, lack of control in our biotechnology or economic greediness gets out of hand.   I relate to him that this is not a remote possibility.  I indicted that a recent report by the United Nations indicates that rising temperatures have already reduced the global food supply and will continue to be worse.  In fact, that climate change has already reduced corn and wheat production and will most likely cause a reduction of rice and soybean production in the near future.   With increasing population and reduced food production, something has to give.  Although he claims it is against God’s law to have birth control, my response is:  “is it against Gods law to knowingly have millions of people die?”  We are a famine waiting to happen if we do not change our ways.


We don’t have to wait for a nuclear war to wipe out people, or a meteor hitting us, or the poisoning of the waters and the atmosphere or hoards of zombies attacking the world.  I think the real fear is the outcome of the future battle against famine.  With global warming, agricultural output will break down throughout the world with fewer crops being able to be grown in fewer productive regions.  This may start in developing countries but quickly reach us here and destroy our global food supply.  The world pictured in the movie “Soylent Green” with Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, may not be that farfetched.


We read of famines in history where millions of people die.  And to us these are simply statistics.  But my dad knows how it feels to be hungry.  What he does not know is what starvation really is; We cannot understand death from starvation because we have never experienced it.  We cannot conceive our chunky bodies going through the excruciating pain as the organs fail slowly; we cannot picture how the body gets reduced to skin and bone, how our faces collapse and our heads turn to living skeletons cover with a thin layer of skin, skin that shrinks and our lips peel back exposing our gums and teeth while still alive; or how some people may move toward suicide and some may start seeing other people as tasty morsels and move toward cannibalism.  


Maybe if our leaders were more enlighten this may never happen.  But how do you convince fundamentalist whose decisions are based on faith and their unwavering belief that “God will provide” and to hell with any controls.  Or, our conservative leaders who represent the profit makers who are in turn so consumed with the creation of greater and greater wealth among the industrial giants and the few and “upper 1%” that they don't realize or care about the fate of common people, a fate that will eventually hit them.


The hunger and misery that my father went through and describes in his life in the 1930s was the result of drought, the dust bowl, and the economic depression that together created the perfect storm for misery and hunger in the US, Mexico.  That “perfect Storm” had a domino effect on the rest of the world.  But today we only have ourselves to blame – pollution!  The unlimited use of resources, the inefficiency of our energy sector and our inefficient use of energy, the continued exploitation of carbon based fuels that are key factors in climate change.  In turn, climate change threatens the world’s food supply.  If we do not turn it around, we will reap the fruit of our efforts and our disregard for our future – world famine. 

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