There’s been a lot of talk about food prices and rice shortages lately. It’s easy for us expats to sit back and say, "well, of course, the Philippine government ought to provide more leadership" … "or work smarter … or "clean up their act" … take your pick.
But it is certainly not a Philippine-only problem. And CNN and especially US news agencies have been taking little notice … Katie Couric feels that unlike her, the story has no legs. 
In the US, still in many ways the world’s breadbasket … or rice bowl, you can buy California rice in SM … less than 2% of the population earns their living producing food, and they all live in "fly over" country. McCain is too old to care, Hillary couldn’t care less and Obama is still looking at a map to find out how many states there are.
A lot of the world’s food now comes from Australia … you can find many Australian and New Zealand products in SM or even your local sari-sari store. This article is well worth a read … it certainly opened my eyes to some of the factors that have been going on behind the scenes.
DENILIQUIN, Australia — Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. “It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety,” he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, “and now it has stopped.”… Full, eye-opening article here
Aside from oxygen and water food is one of most critical needs … no need to worry about "global warming’ if we are going to starve to death anyway …and news media, world-wide have not been doing much of a job to highlight what is going on.
It’s big news and certainly a personal/family tragedy if a family is having their house foreclosed, but going without a roof over your head is less traumatic than starving.
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Philly,
This article may be of interest to you. Plenty of water in Northern Australia….just not enough farmers.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-great-desert-dream/2007/08/24/1187462523682.html
Thanks, Laurence, I’ll take a look at that. From the headline it sounds as if Australia would have the same problem as the US would if food stocks got really tight. There are lots of good farm lands in the US that people no longer farm for one reason or another. If you run low on food you obviously need land, water and climate to grow more … but you need farmers, too.
Farming is a skilled occupation and people don’t learn it overnight, or even in a four year university course. It takes longer to grow a farmer than it it does to grow most any crop.
In the US today we have a terrible ‘snobbishness’ that tends to look at anyone who earns his living with labor as a failure. Schools indoctrinate kids with the idea that only coat and tie people are successful. As I am typing this I notice a big Forex add running in my side bar. I’d bet money on a farmer out of the field being able to ‘farm’ in the currency exchange world rather more successfuly than taking the average Forex trader (or bank mortgage officer … ah, now there’s a brainy job
and expecting him to make a go of a farm.