And how are Americans going to react in a country where the store shelves have always been full?
"A 'perfect storm' of hunger"
".... Meteoric food and fuel prices, a slumping dollar, the demand for biofuels and a string of poor harvests have combined to abruptly multiply WFP's operating costs, even as needs increase. In other words, if the number of needy people stayed constant, it would take much more money to feed them. But the number of people needing help is surging dramatically. It is what WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran calls "a perfect storm" hitting the world's hungry....
The most vulnerable are people like those in Sudan, whom Joannes is struggling to feed and who rely heavily, perhaps exclusively, on the aid. But at least as alarming, WFP officials say, is the emerging community of newly needy.
These are the people who once ate three meals a day and could afford nominal healthcare or to send their children to school. They are more likely to live in urban areas and buy most of their food in a market.
That sure sounds like 'murkns, doesn't it?
This isn't going to be good at all.
Can't you feel the world on the precipice of a disaster?
They are the urban poor in Afghanistan, where the government has asked for urgent help. They are families in Central America, who have been getting by on remittances from relatives abroad, but who can no longer make ends meet as the price of corn and beans nearly doubles....
Countries are taking steps to avert widespread hunger. Some, like Egypt and Indonesia, have quickly expanded subsidies; others, like China, have banned exports of precious commodities.
Afghanistan was the first country to request urgent help. President Hamid Karzai in January asked the agency to feed an additional 2.5 million people, most of them urban poor, in addition to the 5 million rural people the agency already feeds.
In Kabul, the Afghan capital, Abdul Fatah and his wife Nooriya raise their five children on her teacher's salary; he lost his government job a year ago.
"Life is getting harder day by day," said Fatah, who is 45 but looks far older. "We cannot even buy meat once a month."
This is BUSH'S LIBERATION, huh?
Liberated into hunger!
My heart is cracking and the tears are falling for these people whose lives we ruined and destroyed!
O' Fatima!!!!!
The price of wheat in Afghanistan has risen by more than two-thirds in the last year. Because staples such as rice, oil and beans are also expensive, Fatah and his wife are sometimes unable to buy pens and notebooks for the children to use in school. Unable to afford both food and lamp oil, the household goes to sleep early.
Kabul homemaker Mahmooda Sharif, a mother of three, said that instead of eating meat twice a week, her family can now afford it only twice a month. The cost of food competes with school expenses and medical bills. She has delayed dental visits because she can't afford them.
A world away in El Salvador, in hills that once yielded abundant harvests of coffee, signs of malnutrition are spreading.
Salvadorans need twice the money to buy the same amount of food they could purchase a year ago, meaning their nutritional sustenance is cut in half, the WFP says.
"My children ask for food, and how can I not feed them? They ask for some eggs, beans, and I give it to them," said Maria De Las Mercedes Ramirez, a 41-year-old mother of five. "I, as the mother, will eat less."
The Ramirezes are one of about 70 families living in shacks on a desolate coffee plantation near the town of Taltapanca, abandoned more than a decade ago when coffee prices took a dive. Most of the families are run by mothers; the fathers have left to find work in the Salvadoran capital, or out of the country.
Ramirez lives on about $80 a month that comes from wages her husband sends and the little she can eke from an occasional job pruning coffee plants. What Ramirez spends on corn has shot up more than 50% in the last few months, cooking oil is up 75%, and beans have doubled in price.
Many families rely heavily on schools that give students one meal a day.
And what are Americans going to do when this comes to their towns and cities?
I guess it won't matter with the children; we will have sent our young adults to war by then.
"You can see a lot of concern in their faces when they come to pick up their kids," principal Delsy Amilia Chavez said of the mothers. "And some of the mothers are anemic. They can't afford to eat beans and aren't getting the iron they need."
But we have TRILLIONS for OCCUPATIONS, and BILLIONS for BANKS and BILLIONS for Israel -- all while BURNING UP OUR FOOD SUPPLY!!!
Dumb idea, real dumb! I never, ever liked it to begin with!
