Further detailed coverage from Libcom (http://libcom.org) of the  class struggle that continues to rage in Bangladesh, focusing here on how the global 'food crisis' works concretely in this case. The effect of farming techniques imposed during Asia's 'Green Revolution' is addressed, although this needs to be put related to the world trade 'diplomacy' which since WW2 has made 'developing' countries dependent on food imports (see M. Hudson, Super Imperialism), and to the present commodity price bubble inflated by investment attempting to hedge its way out of exposure to perilous financial 'products'.

A world food crisis; empty rice bowls and fat rats
tags:

April 16th, 2008 by Ret Marut
Food riots have broken out in several countries

A short look at the problems in world food production and supply, and its links with rising oil prices, global warming and changes in farming techniques.

OK this is hardly a scoop – even Fidel Castro has got his two contraband cents' worth in – but the basic Green agenda of making the poor pay (more) for their own reproduction could hardly be better illustrated than by exponential basic food price inflation caused by transfer of essential agriculture to biofuel production.  Environmentalism and 'neoliberal' capital are not strange bedfellows: they were joined at the pinhead from birth, as their shared hallucination of Scarcity goes to show.    

From Asia Times Online: http://www.atimes.com/

The great biofuel fraud
By F William Engdahl

That bowl of Kellogg's cornflakes on the breakfast table or the portion of pasta or corn tortillas, cheese or meat on the dinner table is going to rise in price over the coming months as sure as the sun rises in the East. Welcome to the new world food-price shock, conveniently timed to accompany the current world oil-price shock.

Curiously, it's ominously similar in many respects to the early 1970s when prices for oil and food both exploded by several

The anti-G8 summit demonstrations in Rostock this June had something of the atmosphere of a music festival and a detention camp — and not all the constituents of the decentralised protests were happy campers. Chris Carlsson reports back

We fought the police with words, dances, clown-armies, yoga, laughs, music... they tried to stop us with gas, batons, water cannons, bulldozers, helicopters, stop and search actions, blockades, riot gear and intimidation… We are happy. Any action is better than none. We’re having fun.

— From Germany and Portugal and the rest of the world, Voluntari@s IMC-PT,

June 8, 2007, Rostock, Germany

If his controversial Gaia theory claimed to offer a holistic vision of planetary self-regulation, James Lovelock’s answer to global warming is anything but. Advocating a return to nuclear power, energy isolationism for Britain, and meat cultures grown in vats, his theories sound more cold war than new age. Interviewing him this January, novelist James Flint sampled the fall-out from an avenging Gaia

It’s rare that a book gets a three-page splash in a national newspaper, especially when that book hasn’t even been published, and especially when it’s a pop-science book. But that’s exactly how The Independent treated the news that James Lovelock, originator of the famous Gaia Hypothesis of planetary self-regulation, had written a new work, (The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity), arguing that it’s already too late to stop global warming.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a central figure in the Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle) and Wages For Housework campaigns in the 1970s, considers here, with Dario De Bortoli, the recent movement for alternative agriculture and food policy in Italy

> Critical Wine conference, Leoncavallo, December 2003

Poland's recent membership to the EU spells catastrophe for its farming traditions, farm labourers and environment. Zoë Young reports

‘I’m not sure we can survive the European Union’, says Andrzej Konkol, an organic farmer in Kashubia, Northern Poland. His daughter translates while her young twin brothers amble about the yard in the afternoon sun, grinning broadly as they half lead, half follow a gangling calf. ‘When I went there, to Denmark, I saw only big farms. And I learnt that small farms like ours had all gone bankrupt.’

Sebastian Hacher discusses the latest phase of the War on Drugs in Bolivia, and explains its connections to the broader political strategies being deployed against the country’s people. Strategies for resistance such as road blocks and striking have produced potent results, portrayed by the liberal regime as a conspiratorial coup

In sad or melancholy moments, the coca leaf lulls away pain and gives to the eater joy and well-being.

If someone wishes to divine their destiny, a handful of leaves thrown to the wind will disclose the secrets of their future.

But when the white man tries to do the same, and dares to use these leaves as you do, the opposite will happen [...]

Its juice, that for you is strength and life, for these masters becomes a repugnant and perverse vice...

– Local legend, La Paz, Bolivia

>> A meeting of all the coca unions in Chapere, Bolivia, at the end of January (27-30). By Sebastian Hacher

Taking heed of recommendations from the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission’s report ‘Crops On Trial’, September 2001, the Government launches its national discussion on GM this Spring. Mike Holderness takes a look at the performance so far

>> Illustration: Catherine Story [http://www.catherinestory.com ]

GM NATION: not a Cronenberg movie – though it surely should be – but the title of the new national public debate on genetically modified crops, which is launching, finally, on 3 June 2003. The project has been seriously delayed, not least by sustained and high profile complaints about its pitiful funding, which has now doubled to £500,000. (For this there will now be a CD-ROM – not available at Mute deadline time – and movie, albeit a Roger Graef one.)

After a springtime of generating apocalyptic headlines and nationwide soul-searching on matters agricultural in the media, the UK’s Foot and Mouth crisis now threatens to become an eerie background hum. The crisis continues, but has ceased to provide fuel to the fire of radically different agricultural futures. In this summer interval of positive attention, we follow up on Mute19’s futurecasting article (Hari Kunzru’s ‘The Tomorrow People’) with four satirical farming scenarios by Hari Kunzru and James Flint.

BLASTED HEATH: A WILD AND LAWLESS LAND