Don't Panic; Go Organic
By RONNIE CUMMINS

Rising food prices and shortages have joined the energy and climate crisis, economic recession, and the war in Iraq, as headline news. While consumers struggle to pay their bills and put food on the table, Monsanto, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland rake in billions from taxpayer-subsidized biofuels. Monopolizing markets, polluting the environment with genetically modified organisms, and hoarding future reserves of crop seeds, wheat, rice, soy, corn, and other grains, the food and gene giants profit from global crisis and misery. Adding fuel to the fire, Wall Street speculators have shifted their greed from sub-prime mortgages to food and non-renewable resources.

The public are becoming aware of the causes of the food crisis: millions of acres of corn and soybeans diverted into biofuels; corporate-driven free trade agreements that discourage nations from maintaining grain reserves and becoming self-sufficient in food production; massive subsidies for industrial agriculture and a misguided export model that have forced millions of family farmers off the land; sharply escalating oil prices, farm inputs, and transportation costs; commodity speculation; population growth; a growing demand for feed grains for meat consumption, and, most ominously, a destabilized climate spawning deadly droughts, pests, floods, and unpredictable weather.

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