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In conversation with intellectuals in the International Book Fair The Havana Fidel warned of severe food crisis in progress and asked to present suggestions on their solution.
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Commander not exaggerating. Due to climatic disasters possibly triggered by the emission of greenhouse gases, the 2003 heat wave in Europe fell by a third its grain production. Russia third largest exporter of wheat in the world, for reasons similar closed in 2010 its exports and Canada adopted similar policies. All forecasts indicate that global warming and climatic disturbances tend to increase their evil influence, but are not the only factor in the global food shortage.
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Capitalism can not solve this situation: it is he who creates it. Their industries and vehicles contribute to climate disasters trigger. The capitalist does not grow to satisfy hunger, but for profit. Devotes an important part of the crops to the textile, animal feed livestock and biofuels. Transnational corporations have made massive purchases of land in the Third World, devoted to monoculture crops for export and not for domestic food. The Organization of the United Nations Food and Agriculture (FAO) admitted in 2004 that neo-liberal policies, free market and the adjustments dictated by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization it impossible for countries to ensure the human right to food ("The famine is born of the economic model; www.patrialibre.org 24/06/2008).
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The capital is concentrated in ever fewer hands: the food too. A dozen interconnected corporations and 36 subsidiaries dominate global production and marketing. Sign up the Anglo-Dutch-Swiss, twelve of them are associated to the lineup of Windsor, the English ruling house, the others are mostly linked to five other royal houses. Just two, Continental and Cargill, control more than half of global grain production. This colossal oligopoly dominates 95% of food production in the United States, Europe, the Commonwealth countries and Latin America, especially Argentina and Brazil, and their crops depend on five billion people. In the rest of the world have depressed food production by initiating the removal of protectionist policies and subsidies, the suspension of funding and large agricultural projects, dumping and control over seeds and fertilizers (Jerome War: "The scarcity and shortages as weapons of mass destruction "Rebellion, 24/02/2008).
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Before the collapse of 2008, the speculative economy was over eighty times the actual production of goods. The same is beginning to happen with food. According to FAO figures, and in 2007 the international price of maize increased 31%, rice by 74%, 60% vegetable oils, dairy products 83%, 87% soy and wheat 130% ( http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews = 42294). Katia Monteagudo informs us that as the world organization GRAIN the current speculation on food rose from $ 5,000 million in 2000 to $ 175,000 million in 2007, that between August and September 2010 on the Chicago Board of wheat jumped its price from 60 to 80 % with respect to July, which according to Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg, president of Strategic Investment Group, investment advisers from the World Bank estimates that since 2008 the speculative demand for agricultural commodities futures has grown between 40 and 80 percent ("get money to famine" Environment Bulletin, 10/03/2011). Speculation and the scarcity leads to dramatic price increases. September 2011 a bushel of corn was $ 466.3, for March 2011 has reached $ 788. Wheat in the same period jumps from $ 2,794 to $ 3,675 a bushel, with sugar, a bushel of $ 5,616 to $ 7,437 (Cynthia Carreño: http://www.publico.es/dinero/364865/el-hambre-de- profit-inflated-the-price-of-the-food ). Behind the turmoil in Europe and the Arab world are critical shortages and price hikes of food.
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Are we free from this crisis in Latin America? On the contrary, our condition makes it feel dependent economies multiplied the effects of global disturbances. Illustrative purposes only examine some Latin American countries traditionally regarded as strong producers and exporters of food. Mexico began to lose that status after the signing of NAFTA, which allowed its agriculture was destroyed by competition from subsidized U.S. crops. Some four million farmers lost their land and had to migrate to cities for 1995 the government said five "areas of hunger." The Bank of Mexico reports that in 2007 the country paid $ 5 billion dollars in 2005 for the importation of 127 basic food items and agricultural inputs, an increase of 62% and that two thirds of the increases were reflected in five commodities: corn, wheat, soy, milk powder and seeds (Laura Carlsen: "Behind Latin America's Food Crisis, America's Program, 5/19/2008). By 1989 another country agricultural tradition, Colombia, produced 90% percent of food consumed, two decades later by political and social matters over 90% percent of maize, rice 57% and 44% of the beans, and coffee production is in ruins. Although the country has not enacted a Free Trade Agreement with the U.S., they will sell agricultural products by $ 1,500 million, 38% of the $ 4,000 that sold annually in Latin America ("The famine is born of the economic model 08/06/1924 www.patrialibre.org ). One of the countries with higher agricultural production is Brazil, where agriculture pays 8% of its huge GDP, covering domestic needs and employs a quarter of its workforce, making it the world's largest producer of sugar cane coffee and major exporter of soybeans, snuff, chocolate, orange and wood. This enormous expansion of food production has been done however at the expense of deforestation and destruction of huge tracts of forest, tropical forest and "closed" that could eventually jeopardize the water supply, and by the uncontrolled expansion of estates, sometimes transnational property, which has left the status of "landless" or poverty for millions of Brazilians, of whom 46 million have been declared "unsafe food." Brazil has increased its greenhouse gas emissions by 41% between 1990 and 2005. To be located in equator, is and will in future be one of the countries most affected by global warming, which affect food production. Argentina, another major agricultural producers, was hit between 2008 and 2009 by the worst drought in a century. Also, between 2010 and 2011 unpredictable droughts and floods devastate agriculture in Colombia and Venezuela. According to World Bank reports, the total agricultural production could decline by between 3 percent and 15 percent due to global climate change by the end of the century, and some studies say these figures could be much worse in the agricultural regions of the equatorial Latin America ( Http://solveclimate.com/news/20090306/climate-change-could-devastate-latin-americas-agriculture ).
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Emergencies require immediate and extreme measures. To begin to remedy the situation, movements and progressive governments must stop the destruction of green areas and wetlands on the planet, veto any efforts to privatize water systems or for distribution, limiting the emission of greenhouse gases; place social control water and arable land, prohibiting bulk purchases of land by transnational or foreign powers, implement radical reforms land, declaring the public interest and protect food production, limit the cultivation of biofuels, textiles and vegetable consumption and promote livestock species for direct human consumption, hold the import or export of such goods to the public interest to tightly control GM and severely penalize land speculation or with food.
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Low will however such measures while the attempt within the capitalist mode of production, who founded the accumulation for the few over the misery of all. Still others elements highlight the urgency of building a new mode of production. Studies show worthy of any claim that was exceeded the peak of exploitation of hydrocarbons, which now yields its holding must be reduced. Some estimates indicate that by the year 2050 will run out of oil. Other calculations extend this expectation, but overconsumption can shorten. Anything else will the coal, further polluting fuel, but also be consumed. With them will go out the model of civilization in which we live. There are technical means to survive this catastrophe, but not social and economic organization to enable their implementation. Rather than create, the more developed countries are oil pillage. Those who have, we should organize ourselves to survive.
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No great power handling coherent plans to survive in a world without oil. While the progressive exhaustion impoverish the world, Venezuela and other countries for a few decades will have greater income from its sale, if not imperial wars the snatch. To defend that income, they depend on our present and future, we must halt and reverse the concessions to corporations and associations with them, and apply the principle that different national companies, including PDVSA, will always be shareholders of its subsidiaries. Our duty is to use these inputs to create what the rest of the planet and try to not be able to do: an alternative model that does not depend on the waste of hydrocarbons, which essentially retains the decisive advantages of the present form of civilization, to replace burning hydrocarbon hydro, wind and solar energy use of oil by multiplying its derivatives such as plastics, fertilizers, medicines, and maintain its own reserve intended for internal use in the most extreme contingencies.
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No country Hegemonic develops long-term strategies for preserving the environment. We, the countries with progressive governments, countries with energy and natural resources, we must stop attempts to privatize water and other natural resources, stop the devastation of our Amazon together with the other countries sharing the region in absolute terms leave mining techniques with mercury and other contaminants, extend our reserves and parks and adamantly defend his integrity, halt and reverse the salinization of large water reservoirs, including Lake Maracaibo, and curb pollution of rivers, replant with native species devastated forests, to recover our limited arable land is currently unproductive estates confiscated by cobalt or buried under houses, enabling treatment for agriculture and cultivated land infertile the plains and sow in them the foundation of our food self-sufficiency.
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No great power displays coherent plans to remedy the extreme inequality that tears the world into two hundred and seven countries wasteful and need, and maps to capitalist wealth hundred half world's population. Before these two hundred hogs to monopolize the world, we must ensure social control over our major means of production, and oriented towards the creation of basic goods to meet the needs of the majority. This involves passing the waste of fossil fuels toward alternative sources, from consumerism to recycling, climate control ozone-destroying architectural management of drafts, individual to collective transport, urban concentration to the repopulation agrarian mobilization of information goods.
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No country Hegemonic
found to shorten the growing gap between state, political parties and people. We must avoid the confiscation of State for political and economic classes and become the ruler of the arm movements, all leaders must be nominated and elected by the grassroots, to serve and be accountable to them. State management of the progressive countries, the states of countries with natural resources, all States should be oriented toward program goals and objectives and evaluated in terms of compliance. The State should be fully computerized to avoid delay and multiplication of unnecessary steps. His senseless proliferation of federal and decentralized entities to be reduced according to the logic. We must eradicate tax systems that exempt the transnational companies and financial capital and take it out people carrying recessive taxes such as VAT and bank debits to replace peche progressive taxation in proportion to the amount of income. It is imperative that we eliminate at once, for cancellation or payment, Debt bondage, in which there is no sovereignty. To the extent that the wealth of the countries blessed with natural resources will be increasingly desirable, we must reshape its military doctrine clearly defining our enemy, role in the defense by giving every citizen, increasingly democratizing the army, making weapons and diversifying our purchase, contracting and multi-regional partnerships to avoid the confiscation of fossil energy by a single power.
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the imminence of the end of a model of civilization based on resource destruction, pillage and accumulation, no hegemon tries to create a culture of renewal, cooperation and equality. In Venezuela and other countries must try by expanding the free educational opportunities to all population, the inclusion of audiovisual and computer as teaching tools, adapting academic curriculum to the real needs of the country, its emphasis on learning to learn techniques and research, automation and infinite availability of knowledge and heritage group, the conversion of each citizen in a scientist and artist for any scientist. We must build a knowledge society, based on the information, the most precious and more democratic by virtue of their infinite replicability and dissemination by computer.
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will only have one chance to get this model if the triple conjure energy crisis, environmental and food that threatens humanity. To this end, we must start a double action, with international bodies to enforce treaties and regulations to curb global destruction, waste of resources and speculation in food and biofuel production, and within each country to adopt regulations conservationists, punish and prevent food speculation, curb wastage and destruction of resources and apply those rules drastically while establishing a conservation consciousness among citizens. Intellectuals can work with this campaign by spreading the survival of the world as far as possible the severity of the situation that threatens humanity, and recommending the necessary measures to avert it. The rider rides on the world hunger and stop only if we can prevent it from breaking after the Plague, War and Death.
PD: The next International Book Fair of Venezuela will be submitted my books The Empire counter: from rock to post-modernity, The Mask of power: The language of demagoguery, and Abrapalabra.
Luis Britto Books online:
media dictatorship in Venezuela: www.minci.gob.ve
peace with Colombia: www.minci.gob.ve
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