| Middle Class May Be Subject
To Food Rations, Warns UN |
|
Published on Monday, February 25, 2008.
The UN is
warning of a food shortage crisis and drawing up plans for food
rations which will hit even middle-class suburban populations as
inflation and economic uncertainty causes the prices of staple
food commodities to skyrocket.
The
United Nation's World Food Programme cautions today that if it
doesn't receive more funding, it will have to halt food aid to
developing countries like Mexico and China.
"The
WFP crisis talks come as the body sees the emergence of a “new
area of hunger” in developing countries where even middle-class,
urban people are being “priced out of the food market” because
of rising food prices," reports
the Financial Times.
The warning coincides
with a speech by William Lapp,
of US-based consultancy Advanced Economic Solutions, who cautioned
that rising agricultural raw material prices would translate this
year into sharply higher food inflation.
It
also parallels
a prediction by Don Coxe,
a Chicago-based global portfolio strategist for BMO Financial Group
who correctly forecast the fall of the dollar and the rise in price
of gold and oil years in advance, who last week spoke of a
"global food crisis" which will cause the world to enter
into, "A period of food shortages and swiftly rising
prices," leading to government embargoes.
With
the U.S. on the verge of a recession and, as many analysts have
warned, a potential second great depression, those long scoffed at
for hoarding vast quantities of storable food may unfortunately be
able to say "I told you so" if the dollar continues to
deteriorate and people begin to be priced out of the food market.
Global
food prices have skyrocketed
by as much as 60 per cent in
the past year, while UN officials warn of the likelihood of food
riots.
"If
prices continue to rise, I would not be surprised if we began to see
food riots,” said
Jacques Diouf,
director-general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation,
last October.
Many
see the food shortages, whether real or manufactured, as simply
another pretext for the implementation of martial law and the
introduction of foreign troops to patrol major U.S. cities.
A
recent
announcement by Northcom confirmed that
U.S. and Canadian troops will be allowed to patrol each other's
countries in the event of a national emergency.
"U.S.
Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of North American Aerospace
Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, and Canadian Air Force
Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais, commander of Canada Command, have signed a
Civil Assistance Plan that allows the military from one nation to
support the armed forces of the other nation during a civil
emergency," reads a Northcom
press release.