The Threat of Food Shortage

Discussion in 'Activism' started by MrFahrenheit, Oct 9, 2008.

  1. MrFahrenheit

    MrFahrenheit Guest

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    With the threat of hyperinflation, the immense devaluation of the USD, and possibly even the unlikely(?) scenario of an entire banking system shutdown, I worry about possible food shortages.

    I am thinking of putting up some flyers around town and on campus, advertising a community gathering. On the flyer there would be paper vouchers attached for people to take with the info of when and where, and also the voucher will be good for 1 loaf of homemade bread (1 per person).

    When the time actually comes, my group will setup a table, and have some pamphlets. Hopefully, people will be open to discussion. As people show up, they will form a line and eventually we start trading bread for the vouchers. After the 2 or 3 loaves are given out, we announce we are out of bread, and explain that the paper vouchers are worthless if there isn't actually any food to "buy" with it.

    My overall point will be that through hyperinflation the USD will be devalued, making paper cash as valuable as the vouchers, and because we are so dependent on purchasing food rather than producing it, we leave ourselves to the will of those who actually have the food.

    Do you guys think this could be a good tactic to spread the word?

    If you do, I would grateful if you can help me better develop a message to spread with this action, and any pamphlets you think would be good to distribute. Any artists who want to help design flyers would be appreciated.

    Also, I expect if anybody actually shows up to this, they'll want to know what the solution is. So we'll need to develop that.

    Don't ever say it can't happen:
    http://uk.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=79041
     
  2. stalk

    stalk Banned

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    I like the idea, if it were to come down to this.
     
  3. dojodee

    dojodee Member

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    great idea but don't waste your money at this point of time because you can never make these people realize the value of their money as it is driving them crazy.
     
  4. Spaced06

    Spaced06 Member

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    I think some people might get mad at the fact that you offered them bread, and didn't give it to them. I mean very mad, if they where living through a food shortage.
     
  5. 420UFO

    420UFO Member

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    you're probably going to get your ass kicked if you offer people bread and don't give it to them. great idea.
     
  6. Spaced06

    Spaced06 Member

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    That's another way to phrase it.
     
  7. snake_grass

    snake_grass Senior Member

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    maybe aim towards a place where people whould listen to this and actually want to try and help

    you know random people how they act there all like "yay he said some words "

    then they take off and go do what ever

    but if you go talk to a large group that whould or might be interested in this they might actually take this into consideration

    then spread out telling one person at a time that whould want to listen to what they are trying to say that you told them
     
  8. FritzDaKat

    FritzDaKat Member

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    While I think it's a great idea to put the message across, it's pointless to inform them unless you have a good solution to it coupled with warnings against Monsanto and their terminator seeds.

    Push Heirloom gardening for a sustainable food supply, urban gardening methods like Hydro & Aeroponics, rain gathering on rooftops and using the wasted space from our industrial era as greenhouses to feed the masses which will essentially be trapped within major cities once the oil stops flowing and currency is worth less than the materials and energy required to produce it.

    Also, mabey just make alot of little Twinkie sized loaves of bread so there will be enough to cover the coupons but impress on them the importance of how it's all fine and well to feed a man fish for a day but to truly do him a service, one must teach him how to fish for himself? Not only would it keep you in good light with the croud for making good on that bread promise, but the tiny loaves will further serve to emphasize our dwindling supplies??
     
  9. mai

    mai Member

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    There will be no food shortage in the West or East Asia

    the only place that will have food shortage is the 3rd world
    but this is not because of the global credit crisis
    in fact famine is quite common in the 3rd world (there's in ethiopia at the moment) and has been a part of human history since forever
    the reason for famine are almost always political (like the current famine in ethiopia) or related to technology

    a good example of a technology that can help is GM , but of course many people on this forum will be against it , though the apples and bananas we eat today have also been genetically modified by farmers through various breeding techniques (ever eaten a "real" banana- it's full of seeds, carrots are white "in nature" , and so on...)
     
  10. FritzDaKat

    FritzDaKat Member

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    Correct, as will many people outside the forum, but when has that ever mattered in the face of national direction?

    The one thing which will set my mind at ease would be 30 years of intensive testing in Biospheres to determine their long range impact on both neighboring plants, the insects which feed on their pollen and flesh and the Scientists and families so intent to push this technology down our throats.

    But I think you're a tad off on the point of Carrots, true that Wild Carrot is white, but the orange, red, purple etc varieties have not been GMO'ed in that nasty sort of "Lets rip a strand of DNA apart and plug & play with chromazones till we get it to grow with teeth" sort of way, they have been cross bred and hybridized to acheive their appearance, more akin to natural eugenics than Frankenstinean creations of Monsanto the Mad Scientist.

    If it works that is all fine and good, but considering we are toying with the genetic makeup of the very big biosphere we all share I think it's of utmost importance to fully ensure that some of these trait's they are GMOing into plants aren't responsible for things like Colony Colapse disorder in our honey bees or that the enhanced "natural resistance" to Insects and disease wont result in some form of chromazonal damage to everything that eats the stuff.

    But definatly has potential once it's proven safe for Us, our future generations and our environment. Still, thats a far way off before we can declare with certainty we have a strong enough understanding of genetics to safely use it to roll dice with the world's food chain.

    P.S. Thanks for the warning about Apples and Banannas, oddly enough I gave them up when I was in my Teen's as they seemed to lack the flavor I remembered from my even younger day's.

    But I do agree it is an avertable disaster even in the face of an unchecked population growth thanks to things like Aeroponics gardening which has yeilds 40% greater or more from traditional methods of farming thou the startup cost would be enormous.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroponics
    http://www.biocontrols.com/

    Neat stuff
     
  11. mai

    mai Member

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    some might claim that saving the lives of the millions starving would be considered more of a priority than the future life of insects.
    I understand what you are saying , you suggest that genetically modified crops might influence the biosphere in such a way that they would virtually destroy it in some way, but it seems unlikely. What GM does is usually enhances certain properties that the gene already has, in exactly the same way bananas are grown without seeds. Originally bananas contained a lot of seeds but farmers selected and cross-bred only those with few seeds to create what we now call banana. What was done with the banana through hundred of years , can now be done with GM in a few months.
    Part of the reason we have such an extreme population growth these past 100 or so years is because of advancement in both medicine and food technology.
    It's those places that lack the technology that are prone to suffer famine, especially if he government is super corrupt and there's a war.
     
  12. FritzDaKat

    FritzDaKat Member

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    Well if you're volunteering to manually pollinate the worlds food supply in the event it kills them off then I guess I cant object. ;)

    And while wonderful in principal I still dont feel secure enough with our limited 20 years of experience in the field of Genetic manipulation that our current skills in such provide enough of a guarantee to the long term and far reaching impact of how this Science in it's current infancy will effect our ecosystem on the whole. We do only have one of these to mess with after all

    And aeroponics systems can provide just as much of a boost to overall Produce farming if not more, it's not tampering with genetic code to do so and by the sake that the roots of different plants are held apart from one another does about as much for their defense from disease as would geneticly modifying them but without the potential risks to our future survival involved.

    And as we know, the 3rd world is generally hardest hit, lets take a short look at how switching to GM crops would impact them,

    For starters, they're dirt poor, their farming techniques are primarily built around Heirloom Gardening and seed saving to ensure seed for next years crops, these crops of course are open pollinated for the most part. Also, most of the Farms in the 3rd world are small and family based, not the huge Agro-industrial complexes such as we see here in the States, this means theres alot more of them.

    So, in comes Monesanto and his GM strain of seed which has been made in such a way as to make it's seeds unviable after only one generation and thereby forcing the already poor farmers to continue purchacing his product if they wish to stick with GMO varieties, so thats loss #1 for them.
    Now GM farmer's neighbor who chose to stick with the Heirloom varieties of seed faces another problem as his crops have cross pollinated with GM farmers crops which are under copyright protection thereby forming an "Illegal hybrid" and granted while I'm sure such a law would be overlooked in 3rd world cases ( :D Not really ) The second farmer is now forced to buy into the GM way of things as even his heirloom variety has picked up on the non-viability of it's seeds trait from the GM crop.

    There have already been a few cases I've heard of regarding strains of commercial varieties which have cross polinated with heirloom varieties of neighboring farms and had forced the heirloom farmers to rip up their crops &/or pay heavy fines for copyright infringment.

    So with all the potential nightmare that GM proucts pose, why not just go with wide scale Aeroponics gardening, it would even allow for gardening in even the rockiest and most unhospitible climates where they have to import foods while at the same time provide as much or more of the same disease resistantce and abundant harvest benefits of GM crops without even having to raise the question of wether or not these crops are safe in the long run because the crops in question would be the same old Heirloom and Hybridized varieties we've been eating all along??

    (Seriously, have a look at that Wiki I posted on the topic, pretty cool stuff.)
     
  13. mai

    mai Member

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    Fritz
    I think we agree in principal that technology is the way to save famine stricken people in the 3rd world (that is if they can sort out their own political mess before) . I know nothing about Aeroponics so I can't comment. Thanks for the interesting link though
     
  14. FritzDaKat

    FritzDaKat Member

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    Absolutely, sorry if I seem overly "touchy" on the topic of GM but I just see it as being a hurried science driven by corporate greed wearing the mask of nessesity, and as theres been alot of positive press generated in the industry due to the fact that it is sucessfull in the sense of greater harvest and better disease / pest resistance, one missed step in gene splicing could possibly lead us to something akin to a 28 days later or 12 Monkies scenario in the most extreme of cases.

    Just found out about Aeroponics myself back in April while I was first digging in to the Art of gardening but it's been around a long while, just prohibitivly expensive when systems are bought off-the-shelf in most cases. Guess thats just capitalism at work thou. But the outrageous price of systems really have me puzzled as the actual components involved arent incredibly complex. Still, nothing stopping D.I.Y'ers from building their own.
     
  15. FritzDaKatx2

    FritzDaKatx2 Vinegar Taster

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    And now of course, theres the whole Terra Preta thing,,, Power generation as a waste of making "Dirt",,, so yea, we dont need that shit to save anyone,,, BUT with proper R&D I bet we can do some really cool shit for BioFuel production on non-food crops,,,
     
  16. MisterMudz

    MisterMudz Member

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    I think it sounds like a fine demonstration. Seems like the only people you will attract there will be poor, and wont really care about money value because they have none. But if anyone out of the group were to start thinking about that possibility and maybe even be motivated to pass the word on. Definitely try it.
     

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