"Retrograde decisions on reproductive health are reached in conference rooms in Washington, but I’ve seen how they play out in African villages. A young woman lies in a hut, bleeding to death or swollen by infection, as untrained midwives offer her water or herbs. Her husband and children wait anxiously outside the hut, their faces frozen and perspiring as her groans weaken.
When she dies, her body is bundled in an old blanket and buried in a shallow hole, with brush piled on top to keep wild animals away. Her children sob and shriek and in the ensuing months they often endure neglect and are far more likely to die of hunger or disease.
In some parts of Africa, a woman now has a 1-in-10 risk of dying in childbirth. The idea that U.S. policy may increase that toll is infuriating."
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
"What One Can Do" - The Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation blog: "Walter Brueggemann on Abundance and Scarcity" -- by Carl Hooker
My July Blog post to the EGR blog, linked above and reproduced below.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
"Walter Brueggemann on Abundance and Scarcity" -- by Carl Hooker
In my last post I talked about my apparently naive shock at a preaching I saw while flipping through the channels one Sunday morning. It did shock me, and I was quite a bit confused at what I saw. Maybe I need to get out more. I found the following article while researching a sermon and feel as though it nicely places some of the issues raised by what I saw in perspective. The link will take you to the entire article while I have kept just some snips below.
The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity
by Walter Brueggemann
The majority of the world's resources pour into the United States. And as we Americans grow more and more wealthy, money is becoming a kind of narcotic for us. We hardly notice our own prosperity or the poverty of so many others. The great contradiction is that we have more and more money and less and less generosity--less and less public money for the needy, less charity for the neighbor.
Robert Wuthnow, sociologist of religion at Princeton University, has studied stewardship in the church and discovered that preachers do a good job of promoting stewardship. They study it, think about it, explain it well. But folks don't get it. Though many of us are well intentioned, we have invested our lives in consumerism. We have a love affair with "more"--and we will never have enough. Consumerism is not simply a marketing strategy. It has become a demonic spiritual force among us, and the theological question facing us is whether the gospel has the power to help us withstand it. The Bible starts out with a liturgy of abundance. Genesis 1 is a song of praise for God's generosity. It tells how well the world is ordered. It keeps saying, "It is good, it is good, it is good, it is very good." It declares that God blesses--that is, endows with vitality--the plants and the animals and the fish and the birds and humankind. And it pictures the creator as saying, "Be fruitful and multiply." In an orgy of fruitfulness, everything in its kind is to multiply the overflowing goodness that pours from God's creator spirit. And as you know, the creation ends in Sabbath. God is so overrun with fruitfulness that God says, "I've got to take a break from all this. I've got to get out of the office."
(snip)
Later in Genesis God blesses Abraham, Sarah and their family. God tells them to be a blessing, to bless the people of all nations. Blessing is the force of well-being active in the world, and faith is the awareness that creation is the gift that keeps on giving. That awareness dominates Genesis until its 47th chapter. In that chapter Pharaoh dreams that there will be a famine in the land. So Pharaoh gets organized to administer, control and monopolize the food supply. Pharaoh introduces the principle of scarcity into the world economy. For the first time in the Bible, someone says, "There's not enough. Let's get everything."
(snip)
When the children of Israel are in the wilderness, beyond the reach of Egypt, they still look back and think, "Should we really go? All the world's glory is in Egypt and with Pharaoh." But when they finally turn around and look into the wilderness, where there are no monopolies, they see the glory of Yahweh.
In answer to the people's fears and complaints, something extraordinary happens. God's love comes trickling down in the form of bread. They say, "Manhue?"--Hebrew for "What is it?"--and the word "manna" is born. They had never before received bread as a free gift that they couldn't control, predict, plan for or own. The meaning of this strange narrative is that the gifts of life are indeed given by a generous God. It's a wonder, it's a miracle, it's an embarrassment, it's irrational, but God's abundance transcends the market economy.
Three things happened to this bread in Exodus 16. First, everybody had enough. But because Israel had learned to believe in scarcity in Egypt, people started to hoard the bread. When they tried to bank it, to invest it, it turned sour and rotted, because you cannot store up God's generosity. Finally, Moses said, "You know what we ought to do? We ought to do what God did in Genesis 1. We ought to have a Sabbath." Sabbath means that there's enough bread, that we don't have to hustle every day of our lives. There's no record that Pharaoh ever took a day off. People who think their lives consist of struggling to get more and more can never slow down because they won't ever have enough.
When the people of Israel cross the Jordan River into the promised land the manna stops coming. Now they can and will have to grow their food. Very soon Israel suffers a terrible defeat in battle and Joshua conducts an investigation to find out who or what undermined the war effort. He finally traces their defeat to a man called A'chan, who stole some of the spoils of battle and withheld them from the community. Possessing land, property and wealth makes people covetous, the Bible warns. We who are now the richest nation are today's main coveters. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us.
Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God's abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity--a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity.
(snip)
But if you are like me, while you read the Bible you keep looking over at the screen to see how the market is doing. If you are like me, you read the Bible on a good day, but you watch Nike ads every day. And the Nike story says that our beginnings are in our achievements, and that we must create ourselves. My wife and I have some young friends who have a four-year-old son. Recently the mother told us that she was about to make a crucial decision. She had to get her son into the right kindergarten because if she didn't, then he wouldn't get into the right prep school. And that would mean not being able to get into Davidson College. And if he didn't go to school there he wouldn't be connected to the bankers in Charlotte and be able to get the kind of job where he would make a lot of money. Our friends' story is a kind of a parable of our notion that we must position ourselves because we must achieve and build our own lives.
(snip)
Wouldn't it be wonderful if liberal and conservative church people, who love to quarrel with each other, came to a common realization that the real issue confronting us is whether the news of God's abundance can be trusted in the face of the story of scarcity? What we know in the secret recesses of our hearts is that the story of scarcity is a tale of death. And the people of God counter this tale by witnessing to the manna. There is a more excellent bread than crass materialism. It is the bread of life and you don't have to bake it. As we walk into the new millennium, we must decide where our trust is placed.
The great question now facing the church is whether our faith allows us to live in a new way. If we choose the story of death, we will lose the land--to excessive chemical fertilizer, or by pumping out the water table for irrigation, perhaps. Or maybe we'll only lose it at night, as going out after dark becomes more and more dangerous.
(snip)
The feeding of the multitudes, recorded in Mark's Gospel, is an example of the new world coming into being through God. When the disciples, charged with feeding the hungry crowd, found a child with five loaves and two fishes, Jesus took, blessed ,broke and gave the bread. These are the four decisive verbs of our sacramental existence. Jesus conducted a Eucharist, a gratitude. He demonstrated that the world is filled with abundance and freighted with generosity. If bread is broken and shared, there is enough for all. Jesus is engaged in the sacramental, subversive reordering of public reality.
The profane is the opposite of the sacramental. "Profane" means flat, empty, one-dimensional, exhausted. The market ideology wants us to believe that the world is profane--life consists of buying and selling, weighing, measuring and trading, and then finally sinking down into death and nothingness. But Jesus presents an entirely different kind of economy, one infused with the mystery of abundance and a cruciform kind of generosity. Five thousand are fed and 12 baskets of food are left over--one for every tribe of Israel. Jesus transforms the economy by blessing it and breaking it beyond self-interest. From broken Friday bread comes Sunday abundance. In this and in the following account of a miraculous feeding in Mark, people do not grasp, hoard, resent, or act selfishly; they watch as the juices of heaven multiply the bread of earth. Jesus reaffirms Genesis 1.
When people forget that Jesus is the bread of the world, they start eating junk food--the food of the Pharisees and of Herod, the bread of moralism and of power. Too often the church forgets the true bread and is tempted by junk food. Our faith is not just about spiritual matters; it is about the transformation of the world. The closer we stay to Jesus, the more we will bring a new economy of abundance to the world. The disciples often don't get what Jesus is about because they keep trying to fit him into old patterns--and to do so it to make him innocuous, irrelevant and boring. But Paul gets it.
(snip)
In 2 Corinthians 8, Paul directs a stewardship campaign for the early church and presents Jesus as the new economist. Though Jesus was rich, Paul says, "yet for your sakes he became poor, that by his poverty you might become rich." We say it takes money to make money. Paul says it takes poverty to produce abundance. Jesus gave himself to enrich others, and we should do the same. Our abundance and the poverty of others need to be brought into a new balance. Paul ends his stewardship letter by quoting Exodus 16: "And the one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little." The citation is from the story of the manna that transformed the wilderness into abundance.
It is, of course, easier to talk about these things than to live them. Many people both inside and outside of the church haven't a clue that Jesus is talking about the economy. We haven't taught them that he is. But we must begin to do so now, no matter how economically compromised we may feel. Our world absolutely requires this news. It has nothing to do with being Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, socialists or capitalists. It is much more elemental: the creation is infused with the Creator's generosity, and we can find practices, procedures and institutions that allow that generosity to work. Like the rich young man in Mark 10, we all have many possessions. Sharing our abundance may, as Jesus says, be impossible for mortals, but nothing is impossible for God. None of us knows what risks God's spirit may empower us to take. Our faith, ministry and hope at the turn of the millennium are that the Creator will empower us to trust his generosity, so that bread may abound.
Walter Brueggermann is professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. This article appeared in The Christian Century, March 24-31, 1999. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. This text was prepared for Religion Online by John C. Purdy.
Editor's Note: For more information about consumerism and What One Can Do to embrace the liturgy of abundance and jump fearlessly away from the myth of scarcity go to
www.giveit4good.org
www.storyof stuff.com
Please leave your comments below about how we can do this work together!
Carl Hooker is an economist employed in an academic healthcare system. He is an EGR diocese coordinator in the Diocese of Missouri, and currently studying in the diocesan school for ministry.
Posted by Mike at 9:31 AM
Labels: Brueggemann, Hooker, scarcity/abundance
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
"Walter Brueggemann on Abundance and Scarcity" -- by Carl Hooker
In my last post I talked about my apparently naive shock at a preaching I saw while flipping through the channels one Sunday morning. It did shock me, and I was quite a bit confused at what I saw. Maybe I need to get out more. I found the following article while researching a sermon and feel as though it nicely places some of the issues raised by what I saw in perspective. The link will take you to the entire article while I have kept just some snips below.
The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity
by Walter Brueggemann
The majority of the world's resources pour into the United States. And as we Americans grow more and more wealthy, money is becoming a kind of narcotic for us. We hardly notice our own prosperity or the poverty of so many others. The great contradiction is that we have more and more money and less and less generosity--less and less public money for the needy, less charity for the neighbor.
Robert Wuthnow, sociologist of religion at Princeton University, has studied stewardship in the church and discovered that preachers do a good job of promoting stewardship. They study it, think about it, explain it well. But folks don't get it. Though many of us are well intentioned, we have invested our lives in consumerism. We have a love affair with "more"--and we will never have enough. Consumerism is not simply a marketing strategy. It has become a demonic spiritual force among us, and the theological question facing us is whether the gospel has the power to help us withstand it. The Bible starts out with a liturgy of abundance. Genesis 1 is a song of praise for God's generosity. It tells how well the world is ordered. It keeps saying, "It is good, it is good, it is good, it is very good." It declares that God blesses--that is, endows with vitality--the plants and the animals and the fish and the birds and humankind. And it pictures the creator as saying, "Be fruitful and multiply." In an orgy of fruitfulness, everything in its kind is to multiply the overflowing goodness that pours from God's creator spirit. And as you know, the creation ends in Sabbath. God is so overrun with fruitfulness that God says, "I've got to take a break from all this. I've got to get out of the office."
(snip)
Later in Genesis God blesses Abraham, Sarah and their family. God tells them to be a blessing, to bless the people of all nations. Blessing is the force of well-being active in the world, and faith is the awareness that creation is the gift that keeps on giving. That awareness dominates Genesis until its 47th chapter. In that chapter Pharaoh dreams that there will be a famine in the land. So Pharaoh gets organized to administer, control and monopolize the food supply. Pharaoh introduces the principle of scarcity into the world economy. For the first time in the Bible, someone says, "There's not enough. Let's get everything."
(snip)
When the children of Israel are in the wilderness, beyond the reach of Egypt, they still look back and think, "Should we really go? All the world's glory is in Egypt and with Pharaoh." But when they finally turn around and look into the wilderness, where there are no monopolies, they see the glory of Yahweh.
In answer to the people's fears and complaints, something extraordinary happens. God's love comes trickling down in the form of bread. They say, "Manhue?"--Hebrew for "What is it?"--and the word "manna" is born. They had never before received bread as a free gift that they couldn't control, predict, plan for or own. The meaning of this strange narrative is that the gifts of life are indeed given by a generous God. It's a wonder, it's a miracle, it's an embarrassment, it's irrational, but God's abundance transcends the market economy.
Three things happened to this bread in Exodus 16. First, everybody had enough. But because Israel had learned to believe in scarcity in Egypt, people started to hoard the bread. When they tried to bank it, to invest it, it turned sour and rotted, because you cannot store up God's generosity. Finally, Moses said, "You know what we ought to do? We ought to do what God did in Genesis 1. We ought to have a Sabbath." Sabbath means that there's enough bread, that we don't have to hustle every day of our lives. There's no record that Pharaoh ever took a day off. People who think their lives consist of struggling to get more and more can never slow down because they won't ever have enough.
When the people of Israel cross the Jordan River into the promised land the manna stops coming. Now they can and will have to grow their food. Very soon Israel suffers a terrible defeat in battle and Joshua conducts an investigation to find out who or what undermined the war effort. He finally traces their defeat to a man called A'chan, who stole some of the spoils of battle and withheld them from the community. Possessing land, property and wealth makes people covetous, the Bible warns. We who are now the richest nation are today's main coveters. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us.
Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God's abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity--a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity.
(snip)
But if you are like me, while you read the Bible you keep looking over at the screen to see how the market is doing. If you are like me, you read the Bible on a good day, but you watch Nike ads every day. And the Nike story says that our beginnings are in our achievements, and that we must create ourselves. My wife and I have some young friends who have a four-year-old son. Recently the mother told us that she was about to make a crucial decision. She had to get her son into the right kindergarten because if she didn't, then he wouldn't get into the right prep school. And that would mean not being able to get into Davidson College. And if he didn't go to school there he wouldn't be connected to the bankers in Charlotte and be able to get the kind of job where he would make a lot of money. Our friends' story is a kind of a parable of our notion that we must position ourselves because we must achieve and build our own lives.
(snip)
Wouldn't it be wonderful if liberal and conservative church people, who love to quarrel with each other, came to a common realization that the real issue confronting us is whether the news of God's abundance can be trusted in the face of the story of scarcity? What we know in the secret recesses of our hearts is that the story of scarcity is a tale of death. And the people of God counter this tale by witnessing to the manna. There is a more excellent bread than crass materialism. It is the bread of life and you don't have to bake it. As we walk into the new millennium, we must decide where our trust is placed.
The great question now facing the church is whether our faith allows us to live in a new way. If we choose the story of death, we will lose the land--to excessive chemical fertilizer, or by pumping out the water table for irrigation, perhaps. Or maybe we'll only lose it at night, as going out after dark becomes more and more dangerous.
(snip)
The feeding of the multitudes, recorded in Mark's Gospel, is an example of the new world coming into being through God. When the disciples, charged with feeding the hungry crowd, found a child with five loaves and two fishes, Jesus took, blessed ,broke and gave the bread. These are the four decisive verbs of our sacramental existence. Jesus conducted a Eucharist, a gratitude. He demonstrated that the world is filled with abundance and freighted with generosity. If bread is broken and shared, there is enough for all. Jesus is engaged in the sacramental, subversive reordering of public reality.
The profane is the opposite of the sacramental. "Profane" means flat, empty, one-dimensional, exhausted. The market ideology wants us to believe that the world is profane--life consists of buying and selling, weighing, measuring and trading, and then finally sinking down into death and nothingness. But Jesus presents an entirely different kind of economy, one infused with the mystery of abundance and a cruciform kind of generosity. Five thousand are fed and 12 baskets of food are left over--one for every tribe of Israel. Jesus transforms the economy by blessing it and breaking it beyond self-interest. From broken Friday bread comes Sunday abundance. In this and in the following account of a miraculous feeding in Mark, people do not grasp, hoard, resent, or act selfishly; they watch as the juices of heaven multiply the bread of earth. Jesus reaffirms Genesis 1.
When people forget that Jesus is the bread of the world, they start eating junk food--the food of the Pharisees and of Herod, the bread of moralism and of power. Too often the church forgets the true bread and is tempted by junk food. Our faith is not just about spiritual matters; it is about the transformation of the world. The closer we stay to Jesus, the more we will bring a new economy of abundance to the world. The disciples often don't get what Jesus is about because they keep trying to fit him into old patterns--and to do so it to make him innocuous, irrelevant and boring. But Paul gets it.
(snip)
In 2 Corinthians 8, Paul directs a stewardship campaign for the early church and presents Jesus as the new economist. Though Jesus was rich, Paul says, "yet for your sakes he became poor, that by his poverty you might become rich." We say it takes money to make money. Paul says it takes poverty to produce abundance. Jesus gave himself to enrich others, and we should do the same. Our abundance and the poverty of others need to be brought into a new balance. Paul ends his stewardship letter by quoting Exodus 16: "And the one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little." The citation is from the story of the manna that transformed the wilderness into abundance.
It is, of course, easier to talk about these things than to live them. Many people both inside and outside of the church haven't a clue that Jesus is talking about the economy. We haven't taught them that he is. But we must begin to do so now, no matter how economically compromised we may feel. Our world absolutely requires this news. It has nothing to do with being Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, socialists or capitalists. It is much more elemental: the creation is infused with the Creator's generosity, and we can find practices, procedures and institutions that allow that generosity to work. Like the rich young man in Mark 10, we all have many possessions. Sharing our abundance may, as Jesus says, be impossible for mortals, but nothing is impossible for God. None of us knows what risks God's spirit may empower us to take. Our faith, ministry and hope at the turn of the millennium are that the Creator will empower us to trust his generosity, so that bread may abound.
Walter Brueggermann is professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. This article appeared in The Christian Century, March 24-31, 1999. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. This text was prepared for Religion Online by John C. Purdy.
Editor's Note: For more information about consumerism and What One Can Do to embrace the liturgy of abundance and jump fearlessly away from the myth of scarcity go to
www.giveit4good.org
www.storyof stuff.com
Please leave your comments below about how we can do this work together!
Carl Hooker is an economist employed in an academic healthcare system. He is an EGR diocese coordinator in the Diocese of Missouri, and currently studying in the diocesan school for ministry.
Posted by Mike at 9:31 AM
Labels: Brueggemann, Hooker, scarcity/abundance
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Two More Views on the Food Crisis
Cross Posting my Own Blog Post source, how cool is that. What is not cool is the food shortage which is apparently only going to get worse.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Two More Views on the Food Crisis
EGR diocesan contact (& blogger) Carl Hooker pointed us to these entries on the continuing food crisis and its effect on the poorest countries.
First, from Betsy Aviles on the ONE Blog.
In Ethiopia, only enough food for the "hungriest"
The food crisis has taken its harshest toll on the poorest countries, Ethiopia being one of the hardest hit.
From the Christian Science Monitor :
In this African nation, about 10 million people, more than 12 percent of the population, are now in need of emergency food aid after a drought wiped out harvests. But because grain is now twice as expensive as a year ago – if it is available at all – there is not enough food in Ethiopia to feed everyone in need.
The UN estimates that 4.6 million Ethiopians are suffering from “severe malnutrition,”, but the lack of food is so severe that foreign and domestic aid-workers need to “prioritize” who is the most needy. Some have take to weighing children on wooden scales and providing food rations to the most malnourished.
UNICEF has made an appeal for $49 million to go towards “immediate intervention” in Ethiopia. UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Hilde F. Johnson emphasized the severity of the situation:
“We talked to mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers and all actors in the field. This picture was confirmed by all of them and a clear message was conveyed: there is no food. The assistance needs to be taken to scale and it has to happen urgently.”
Next, from yesterday's New York Times
Hoarding Nations Drive Food Costs Ever Higher
By KEITH BRADSHER and ANDREW MARTIN
BANGKOK — At least 29 countries have sharply curbed food exports in recent months, to ensure that their own people have enough to eat, at affordable prices.
When it comes to rice, India, Vietnam, China and 11 other countries have limited or banned exports. Fifteen countries, including Pakistan and Bolivia, have capped or halted wheat exports. More than a dozen have limited corn exports. Kazakhstan has restricted exports of sunflower seeds.
The restrictions are making it harder for impoverished importing countries to afford the food they need. The export limits are forcing some of the most vulnerable people, those who rely on relief agencies, to go hungry.
“It’s obvious that these export restrictions fuel the fire of price increases,” said Pascal Lamy, the director general of the World Trade Organization.
And by increasing perceptions of shortages, the restrictions have led to hoarding around the world, by farmers, traders and consumers.
“People are in a panic, so they are buying more and more — at least, those who have money are buying,” said Conching Vasquez, a 56-year-old rice vendor who sat one recent morning among piles of rice at her large stall in Los Baños, in the Philippines, the world’s largest rice importer. Her customers buy 8,000 pounds of rice a day, up from 5,500 pounds a year ago.
The new restrictions are just an acute symptom of a chronic condition. Since 1980, even as trade in services and in manufactured goods has tripled, adjusting for inflation, trade in food has barely increased. Instead, for decades, food has been a convoluted tangle of restrictive rules, in the form of tariffs, quotas and subsidies.
Now, with Australia’s farm sector crippled by drought and Argentina suffering a series of strikes and other disruptions, the world is increasingly dependent on a handful of countries like Thailand, Brazil, Canada and the United States that are still exporting large quantities of food.
Read the entire piece here.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Two More Views on the Food Crisis
EGR diocesan contact (& blogger) Carl Hooker pointed us to these entries on the continuing food crisis and its effect on the poorest countries.
First, from Betsy Aviles on the ONE Blog.
In Ethiopia, only enough food for the "hungriest"
The food crisis has taken its harshest toll on the poorest countries, Ethiopia being one of the hardest hit.
From the Christian Science Monitor :
In this African nation, about 10 million people, more than 12 percent of the population, are now in need of emergency food aid after a drought wiped out harvests. But because grain is now twice as expensive as a year ago – if it is available at all – there is not enough food in Ethiopia to feed everyone in need.
The UN estimates that 4.6 million Ethiopians are suffering from “severe malnutrition,”, but the lack of food is so severe that foreign and domestic aid-workers need to “prioritize” who is the most needy. Some have take to weighing children on wooden scales and providing food rations to the most malnourished.
UNICEF has made an appeal for $49 million to go towards “immediate intervention” in Ethiopia. UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Hilde F. Johnson emphasized the severity of the situation:
“We talked to mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers and all actors in the field. This picture was confirmed by all of them and a clear message was conveyed: there is no food. The assistance needs to be taken to scale and it has to happen urgently.”
Next, from yesterday's New York Times
Hoarding Nations Drive Food Costs Ever Higher
By KEITH BRADSHER and ANDREW MARTIN
BANGKOK — At least 29 countries have sharply curbed food exports in recent months, to ensure that their own people have enough to eat, at affordable prices.
When it comes to rice, India, Vietnam, China and 11 other countries have limited or banned exports. Fifteen countries, including Pakistan and Bolivia, have capped or halted wheat exports. More than a dozen have limited corn exports. Kazakhstan has restricted exports of sunflower seeds.
The restrictions are making it harder for impoverished importing countries to afford the food they need. The export limits are forcing some of the most vulnerable people, those who rely on relief agencies, to go hungry.
“It’s obvious that these export restrictions fuel the fire of price increases,” said Pascal Lamy, the director general of the World Trade Organization.
And by increasing perceptions of shortages, the restrictions have led to hoarding around the world, by farmers, traders and consumers.
“People are in a panic, so they are buying more and more — at least, those who have money are buying,” said Conching Vasquez, a 56-year-old rice vendor who sat one recent morning among piles of rice at her large stall in Los Baños, in the Philippines, the world’s largest rice importer. Her customers buy 8,000 pounds of rice a day, up from 5,500 pounds a year ago.
The new restrictions are just an acute symptom of a chronic condition. Since 1980, even as trade in services and in manufactured goods has tripled, adjusting for inflation, trade in food has barely increased. Instead, for decades, food has been a convoluted tangle of restrictive rules, in the form of tariffs, quotas and subsidies.
Now, with Australia’s farm sector crippled by drought and Argentina suffering a series of strikes and other disruptions, the world is increasingly dependent on a handful of countries like Thailand, Brazil, Canada and the United States that are still exporting large quantities of food.
Read the entire piece here.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
The Food Chain - Worries Mount as Farmers Push for Big Harvest - Series - NYTimes.com
Apparently we cannot plan for the unexpected. So who thought using food for gas for cars was a good idea?
Op-Ed Columnist - David Brooks - The Great Seduction by Debt - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
Another piece hitting the nail on the head, good to see that root cause is mostly identified here rather than just the content providers.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
BBC World News - The World Debate - Food - Who Pays The Price?
From EGR Blog
Dwindling food stocks and rising food prices raise questions about who produces our food and how.
Urbanization, climate change, changing diets in emerging economies and the impact of supermarkets are putting new pressures on the land and changing the face of farming.
One solution is to support the hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers in developing countries. Yet just when they’re needed most, many smallholder farmers are finding it difficult to make a living and are leaving the land.
Should food be treated as a global commodity? Is industrial scale farming the best way to meet global demand and protect the environment? Or could and should more be done globally to protect small independent farmers and the food they produce?
BBC World brings together six international panelists considered some of the most important issues effecting the future of global food production in the BBC World debate “Food – Who Pays the Price?”. Click and watch above.
Dwindling food stocks and rising food prices raise questions about who produces our food and how.
Urbanization, climate change, changing diets in emerging economies and the impact of supermarkets are putting new pressures on the land and changing the face of farming.
One solution is to support the hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers in developing countries. Yet just when they’re needed most, many smallholder farmers are finding it difficult to make a living and are leaving the land.
Should food be treated as a global commodity? Is industrial scale farming the best way to meet global demand and protect the environment? Or could and should more be done globally to protect small independent farmers and the food they produce?
BBC World brings together six international panelists considered some of the most important issues effecting the future of global food production in the BBC World debate “Food – Who Pays the Price?”. Click and watch above.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor - A Fountain on Every Corner - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
Can someone do an actual study and estimate the economic impact here? Bottled water has always freaked me out anyway, and without aggressive recycling laws it surely is a waste. What's up with importing water from Fiji anyway?
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The Neural Buddhists - New York Times
Ideas from David Brooks about the collision of religion and science.
"In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects."
"In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects."
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Tips for taming rising grocery prices | Special Coverage | Reuters
Some nice tips here for maybe saving some cash in the food line. The coupon thing does work, been there done that.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Food and the poor | The new face of hunger | Economist.com
I picked this up from the EGR blog, stupid people suck!
No matter where I turn it seems our issues get bigger because we cannot seem to all get along and sit down and talk about stuff before we do something.
No matter where I turn it seems our issues get bigger because we cannot seem to all get along and sit down and talk about stuff before we do something.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
We can ease the burden of high food prices on the most vulnerable people
Leadership, at least at this time in discussion about the global food issue. Several points are made to link poverty in here.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Clueless in America - New York Times
"An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year"
"Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education."
"When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong."
Bob Hebert of the NYT points to what must be a root cause for many of our societal issues. One would think I suspect that a better educated population would better be able to think thru and talk about and then ultimately address and solve the "other" issues we waste so much of our breath on.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger - New York Times
Let me spoil this article for you with the ending.
"Meanwhile, most of the poorest of the poor suffer silently, too weak for activism or too busy raising the next generation of hungry. In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. “Take one,” she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. “You pick. Just feed them.”"
May God Make Speed To Help Us
May God Make Haste to Save Us
Carl
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Toil and Trouble - New York Times
I should just have a permanent link to Maureen Dowd's articles. I heard some testimony and am starting to read the rest of the coverage, but my guess is she is spot on.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
"What One Can Do" - The Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation blog: "Augustine said, 'Be what you see, and receive who you are.'" - by Stephanie Rho
"What One Can Do" - The Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation blog: "Augustine said, 'Be what you see, and receive who you are.'" - by Stephanie Rhodes
I loved this post today because it calls me to my own accountability for what I say and do as well as who I am. And just because I am something by birth or genetics does not remove me from being me, especially when 'we' manage to muck things up.
I loved this post today because it calls me to my own accountability for what I say and do as well as who I am. And just because I am something by birth or genetics does not remove me from being me, especially when 'we' manage to muck things up.
ONE » Blog Archive » New ONE Ice Cream Launching in Burbank in a Few Hours
ONE » Blog Archive » New ONE Ice Cream Launching in Burbank in a Few Hours
The boys back home in Vermont have come on board the ONE campaign with what sounds like a great new flavor. Cannot wait to see on the shelves here.
The boys back home in Vermont have come on board the ONE campaign with what sounds like a great new flavor. Cannot wait to see on the shelves here.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Feature: Trim Down Windows to the Bare Essentials
Feature: Trim Down Windows to the Bare Essentials
Excellent find by my friend Ken, just what you need to minimize the damage of an XP install to your mac.
Excellent find by my friend Ken, just what you need to minimize the damage of an XP install to your mac.
Rwanda Genocide Victims, Killers Meet
Rwanda Genocide Victims, Killers Meet
The possible success of the MDG's is detailed here by current situations in Rwanda. Horrific stories of genocide frame the article's beginning before the relationship between economy/poverty are tied to the wars and genocides of the continent.
The possible success of the MDG's is detailed here by current situations in Rwanda. Horrific stories of genocide frame the article's beginning before the relationship between economy/poverty are tied to the wars and genocides of the continent.
A Not-So-Fine Romance - New York Times
A Not-So-Fine Romance - New York Times
An excellent dialog piece on the situation with Tibet and China. Also a very nice calling it what it is part on the US and China similarities.
An excellent dialog piece on the situation with Tibet and China. Also a very nice calling it what it is part on the US and China similarities.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Entered the world of blogging
Well, I am officially a blogger I guess having decided to take on a monthly gig with my friends at E4GR. The link takes you to the post and this one takes you to the regular E4GR blog site. I still have quite a bit to figure out, so lock and load.
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