by Ron N. Sullivan

Created on: May 29, 2008   Last Updated: February 11, 2009

Indonesian food riots spread. Government declares emergency. Food riots turn deadly in Haiti: four people killed, twenty people wounded. Bangladesh workers riot over soaring food prices.

News story headlines like these pop up like "poison mushrooms." The world's populace faces a food crisis that eats at the very fiber of world security, economic growth and social progress.

While British Prime Minister Gordon Brown states that food riots now threaten democratically elected governments, the European commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, Louis Michel, told MEPs that the growing cost of basic food is a worldwide humanitarian disaster in the making.

If governments continue to prolong their lack of investment in rural communities, which presently account for approximately 75 percent of world hunger, this cancer will spread, resulting in a future dominated by poverty, hunger, and social unrest.

At present, many countries in South Asia appear to be moving backwards - away from the future. Wheat production in India has dropped off in the last ten-years, leaving the country with the largest number of undernourished people in the world - namely 212 million. And as yet, China has not addressed the fact that 150 million of their citizens are starving.

This growing global food emergency is described by the World Food Program as the "silent tsunami."

Will this wave of despair engulf the world's continents, rendering devastation on an unprecedented scale and on all levels of society? With world communities facing the worst food crisis in forty-five years, it is estimated that twenty-five thousand people die daily from hunger.

The scenario is mind chilling; the result catastrophic.

THE ISSUES

Today's biotechnology of genetically modified crops has put the management of seeds and patents in the control of a few large international companies such as Monsanto, Dow, and Syngenta. Because of this technology we see an abrupt decline in food crop varieties due to favorite seeds that are mass-marketed. Industrial crops now represent only 150 varieties of seeds. Since the beginning of the twentieth century our variety of seeds has plummeted a full 97 percent. With the loss of these seeds, the inherited wisdom acquired over generations of local farming methods is quickly becoming a non-entity.

Changing farming practices, like industrial agriculture, are undermining our food security and affect more than just the hungry. In the search for more land to farm, these methods also damage

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