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Gulf News
Focus on biofuels aggravates food crisis worldwide
Published: April 14, 2008
It always sounded like a great idea. Forget pumping limited amounts of petroleum products out of the ground to power our cars, trucks, boats and planes. Instead we could eventually grow our fuel, turning corn and sugarcane into ethanol and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the process. Well, it seems like we can’t do it without starving a good portion of the world. So now the question has become: eat or fuel?

In Haiti, five are dead after people, furious that the price of rice, flour and cooking oil has doubled in two weeks, rioted…In Bangladesh, roughly 20,000 workers rioted over high food prices and low wages on Saturday, and Egypt saw two days of rioting last week after food prices doubled over the last year. Earlier this year, 40 people died during inflation-related riots in Cameroon, and in Manila, President Gloria Arroyo said the country is planning to boost rice production even as the government threatened food hoarders with a lifetime in jail. Other protests over the soaring price of food and fuel have bubbled up from Bolivia to Madagascar and Indonesia, and reports have surfaced that troops in Pakistan and Thailand are watching over fields and warehouses to prevent food thefts. More

(Reuters) – Egyptian archaeologists have discovered a pyramid buried in the desert and thought to belong to the mother of a pharaoh who ruled more than 4,000 years ago, Egypt’s antiquities chief said on Tuesday. The pyramid, found about two months ago in the sand south of Cairo, probably housed the remains of Queen Sesheshet, the mother of King Teti, who ruled from 2323 to 2291 BC and founded Egypt’s Sixth Dynasty, Zahi Hawass told reporters. “The only queen whose pyramid is missing is Shesheshet, which is why I am sure it belonged to her,” Hawass said. “This will enrich our knowledge about the Old Kingdom.” The Sixth Dynasty, a time of conflict in Egypt’s royal family and erosion of centralized power, is considered to be the last dynasty of the Old Kingdom, after which Egypt descended into famine and social upheaval. More

NaturalNews — Some of the 19 people who have died from the avian flu in Egypt in the last two years were killed by a strain that shows moderate drug resistance, the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced. Four people died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu in Egypt during the last week of December (2007?), bringing the country’s death toll from the disease to 19. This represents more than 40 percent of the 43 people who are known to have been infected by the disease. All four recent victims were women between the ages of 25 and 50, and all are believed to have had close contact with infected poultry. One of the women was a chicken seller, and the others were believed to keep domestic fowl in their homes. More

Photo courtesy of StormyDog

As farmers confront mounting costs and riots erupt from Haiti to Egypt over food, farmers pay the price for Wall Street’s speculation in grain markets. “It’s the best of times for somebody speculating on grain prices, but it’s not the best of times for farmers. The demand for futures exceeds the demand for cash grains.” Commodity investors control more U.S. crops than ever before, competing with governments and consumers for dwindling food supplies. Demand is rising with population and income gains in Asia, while record energy costs boost biofuels consumption, sending grain inventories to the lowest levels in two decades.
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