ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Think you’re feeling pain at the gas pump? Consider the residents of Lime Village, Alaska, an isolated Denaina Athabascan Indian community where gasoline prices have hit $8.55 a gallon.
The price is severely curtailing movement around the interior Alaska village, where four-wheelers are sitting idle, said Ursula Graham, administrator for the Lime Village Traditional Council.
“Nobody’s going on joy rides, that’s for sure,” Graham said.
Alaska, despite its status as a major crude oil producer, has the highest average gasoline prices of all U.S. states, according to the American Automobile Association. Alaska prices averaged $4.65 a gallon for regular gasoline on Friday, compared with a national average of $4.10, according to AAA.
Neal Fried, an economist with the Alaska department of labor, said the ironic situation reflects the hard reality that the state’s small population hinders economies of scale and market competition.
“Even if you take all of Alaska into account, it’s a pretty small marketplace,” he said.
High oil prices have helped the state government, which relies on oil taxes, royalties and fees for at least 80 percent of its general operating revenue. Alaska reaped more than $10 billion in oil revenue in the just-completed fiscal year, double the oil revenue of the previous fiscal year.
Fried noted that North Slope oil development is bustling, which would not be the case if oil were $30 a barrel.
“There are more people working on the Slope than we’ve ever counted before,” he said.
But high fuel prices pinch individual Alaskans, especially in rural areas with no outside road access, where shipments of petroleum products require extraordinary and costly efforts.
DOG SLEDS
Fuel that goes to Lime Village is sent 1,800 miles by barge from Anchorage to the southwestern Alaska hub of Bethel, transferred to another barge for a trip up then Kuskokwim River and then flown by small plane to its final destination. Of a representative sample of Alaska communities, Lime Village had the highest fuel prices, according to a recent University of Alaska Anchorage study.
Gov. Sarah Palin has proposed using some of Alaska’s fat budget surplus to send one-time $1,200 energy-relief checks to all state residents, to suspend the state’s 8 cent-per-gallon gasoline tax and other measures for immediate assistance.
The legislature is considering her request in an ongoing special session.
Meanwhile, in Lime Village, boat trips on the Stony River are fewer and more carefully planned. Villagers combine tasks such as checking fish nets and collecting firewood, Graham said.
One man even moved his fish camp, smokehouse and all, from an outer area to the midst of the village so that he could avoid the boat trip entirely.
Residents like the idea of a $1,200 payment from the state, Graham said. But long-term solutions remain elusive.
“Going back to dog teams is an option,” she said. “It’s kind of a joke, but not a joke.”
(Reporting by Yereth Rosen; Editing by David Gregorio)
Transcript:
Some Democratic Leaders say Impeachment is off the table.
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Politicians Don’t Understand: Textile Maker Copland Industries Says Multinationals Are Killing The U.S. Economy
The federal government no longer represents the interest of U.S. manufacturing companies and their workers, instead siding with the Communist Chinese government that is putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of good paying jobs, according to James Copland, chairman of Copland Industries/Copland Fabrics of Burlington, N.C. “The U.S. government’s policy is creating millions of jobs all right, but it is creating them in the People’s Republic of China and Vietnam at the expense of hardworking Americans here at home,” Copland told a congressional hearing. “Our country should be ashamed — totally ashamed - of what our government has done to working people in America.”
The U.S. government recognized problems with the communist Soviet Union, “but for some reason it fails to see it with China,” Copland told a hearing of the House Science Committee’s subcommittee on oversight and investigations on May 22. U.S. government free trade and manufacturing policies are the reason for the current economic slump and the gloomy attitude Americans have about their economic prospects. U.S. manufacturing “is in the midst of a crisis unprecedented since the Great Depression,” Copland said.
“Deeply flawed U.S. trade policy toward domestic manufacturing is the single most important root cause of the illness. Every American deserves the right to provide for his family, to own a home and to educate his kids, but our flawed manufacturing and trade policies are taking this away,” Copland told members of Congress. “Our Constitutional preamble says ‘a government of the people, by the people and for the people.’ We have forgotten about the words ‘for the people.’ ”
Copland’s company is competing against Chinese companies that don’t have to pay workman’s comp or provide workers with unemployment insurance; that don’t have to deal with EPA or OSHA regulations; that pay no overtime, provide few benefits and abide by no child labor laws; and that receive untold government subsidies and benefit from a currency that is at least 30 percent undervalued. “This is an impossible task,” said Copland. “No manufacturer can compete when your competition is a foreign government determined to spend whatever it takes to force you out of the market, and the U.S. government does nothing about it.”
While Congress and the Bush administration rattle on about the importance of free trade agreements and refuse to adopt anything resembling a pro-American manufacturing policy, millions of Americans’ lives are in economic turmoil. “Their jobs are being moved overseas and they can’t get other jobs,” said Copland. “Don’t think there are high-tech jobs available for those folks, because there aren’t. They are being shipped to China and India too. If those who were laid off are lucky, they have landed jobs flipping hamburgers or as a greeter at some retail store. People are angry now, and when they connect the dots — and they are going to connect them — they are going to know where to focus their anger.”
Copland Industries/Copland Fabrics makes man-made fiber curtains, draperies and blinds. Since 2001, U.S. imports of these products from China have increased by 6,912 percent, from 845,000 kilograms to 59 million kilograms in 2007. This surge of Chinese imports “has been like a nightmare [that] we have had to face,” said Copland.
China accounted for almost 107 percent of the total U.S. growth in imports for curtains and draperies between 2001 and 2007, “meaning the rest of the world actually lost U.S. import market share,” Copland noted. China now holds 90 percent of the U.S. market for man-made curtains compared to 7.8 percent market share in 2001. “The total market today is 98 percent offshore goods,” Copland said. “A flood of imports from China in products like the ones for which we used to make fabric is one of the main reasons why my home town of Burlington has lost nearly 40 percent of its manufacturing jobs since 2001.” Chinese finished curtain prices sold in the United States are less than Copland Industries’ cost of materials.
Copland Industries has stayed in business by “picking up the pieces when our competition goes out of business,” said Copland. “We pick up a piece and, believe you me, just as soon as you get into it, here come the Chinese again. We look constantly for something that the Chinese are not doing, that they haven’t focused on yet. We are looking constantly for something that may have some natural barrier to them coming over here, but remember, everybody in our industry is doing the same thing, everybody. There have been 550,000 jobs lost in my industry since 2001 alone.” Copland Industries has reduced employment from 1,000 to less than 300.
Hundreds of mills have been closed in the Carolinas due to the surge of imports from China. “There are small towns where stores are closed with weeds growing up around them,” said Copland. “But you know it is really bad when you see the churches closing. Someone needs to think about the hard working people and what is happening to them. The big multinational companies, the importers and big retailers have exactly what they want. They couldn’t have written a book and had it more perfect for their world: buy at the China price, sell at the U.S. price and don’t worry about whether the average American has a job or he or she can make ends meet. Their world is not what is good for America.
“I will tell you that if this thing doesn’t stop there will be no survivors. We will not have any manufacturing in the United States. When these plants are closed down, they are closed. If you don’t run the equipment and keep it up, it deteriorates to nothing, but the equipment is being sold. Pakistan is buying the equipment. People are selling it for five cents on the dollar. Nobody wants it. And let me tell you what is happening to the buildings themselves. I was just down in Joanna, South Carolina, a huge mill down there has been closed for five years. They are tearing down the mills. Why? Because they are going to sell the bricks, guys. They are going to sell the beams. So don’t think that you are going to be able to say, ‘Oh, boy, as soon as this thing is over, here we come back, it is going to be regeneration.’ ”
Copland told the politicians that they don’t understand how profoundly the economy is being impacted by Chinese imports. Politicians talk about the sagging U.S. economy and home foreclosures, “but what they haven’t realized yet is that people don’t have any money,” said Copland. “The reason they don’t have any money is because they have lost their jobs or they now have jobs making a fraction of what their pay was before their jobs were exported. If people had their manufacturing jobs, they wouldn’t have the economic problems and financial problems we now have.”
Fifty million Americans are without health insurance because so many good jobs that provide health care have been exported due to “our flawed trade agreements,” Copland told the subcommittee. As long as the federal government refuses to adopt a manufacturing policy, “the United States will have much more difficulty ameliorating the pain an economic recession will inflict on its citizenry in a timely manner.”
U.S. government officials talk glowingly about the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), but CAFTA is causing the loss of thousands of U.S. jobs, Copland told the Congress. “It sounded like a good idea, everybody is going to be okay, but they left a loophole — and it’s the loopholes that get us so many times. The negotiators don’t even know that the loopholes are there because they are some political appointee that hasn’t done it but for about three or six months or they have been out of college for about a year, and they don’t even know the loopholes are there. If they do know, woe be to them. Let me tell you something” Copland said: “They had a deal in [CAFTA] to where they could take the pocketing for trousers — that doesn’t sound like much. But pocketing is a 180-million-yard business in the United States. They had it in the agreement and then said, ‘Well, you know, we are going to make an exception on pocketing and we are going to let these Central American countries make this stuff out of Chinese cloth.’ The Dominican Republic wanted that. They gave it to them. We pointed it out and said, ‘Look, you are going to destroy the industry.’ ‘Oh, no, don’t worry, we are going to fix it, we are going to fix it.’ That was three-plus years ago, folks. It hasn’t been fixed. There has been nothing done. Let me tell you the end result of that thing. Eighty percent of the market is gone, and it is gone folks. Haines Finishing Company in Winston-Salem closed down 75 percent of its business. Allis Manufacturing Company closed down four plants in South Carolina. Mount Vernon lost 70 million yards worth of business and closed plants in Rome, Georgia, and in Texas.
“We have got to start paying attention to what we are doing with these trade agreements. We have to get some people who know what they are doing with these trade agreements. We are being out negotiated. We better start paying attention to what we are doing because let me tell you something, we are exporting the wealth of this country as fast as we can export it. It is going offshore. We are going to pay one tremendous price in this country.”
A dozen people around the country filed suit in U.S. District Court in Idaho this week demanding the return of all the copper, silver, gold, and platinum coins — more than seven tons of metal in all — that the FBI and Secret Service seized in November during raids of a mint in Idaho and a strip mall storefront in Indiana.
The Justice Department had decided that the coins, many of which bear the familiar symbol of Lady Liberty and the phrase “TRUST IN GOD,” were being illegally marketed as government-sanctioned currency, according to the sworn affidavit of an FBI agent.
The creator of the coins, Bernard von NotHaus, who lives in Miami, claims that the federal government is trying to shut down production of his liberty dollars, as the coins are called, because of the competition they pose to the greenback. In recent years, his precious metal coins have outperformed the dollar, whose value has plunged in relation to gold.
The raids in November were the result of a two-year undercover investigation of Mr. Von NotHaus and how he sold liberty dollars. The Justice Department has not followed up with any criminal charges against Mr. Von NotHaus or the regional distributors of his coins.
In the suit filed in Idaho, the various plaintiffs say the federal government has no right to continue holding onto their coins any longer.
While it is common for agents to warehouse property seized during criminal investigations, such as firearms or surveillance equipment, the plaintiffs say coins of precious metal should be off-limits.
The coins “do not constitute contraband or other property subject to seizure,” the legal papers state, adding that the seizures violated the Fourth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs.
For the most part, the plaintiffs had possessed bearer certificates for the silver liberty dollars that were being warehoused in Couer d’Alene, Idaho, at a mint. The mint, Sunshine Minting, is one of the sites that federal agents raided.
In an unusual request, the plaintiffs ask for an order, at the very least, forbidding federal agents from touching or moving the coins so that they are not dirtied in any way.
“Mishandling numismatic material can negatively impact value,” the legal papers say.
A spokesman for the Justice Department, Charles Miller, said that the agency had not yet seen the legal papers and could not comment.
E-mail messages circulating among Liberty Dollar enthusiasts have expressed fears that the federal government intends to publicly auction off the coins. There has been no public announcement indicating that to be the case. The U.S. attorney’s office in Asheville, N.C., which led the investigation that prompted the raids last November, did not return several calls for comment over the last few weeks.
Mr. Von NotHaus markets his coins via the Internet as an inflation-proof currency and claims that between 100,000 and 250,000 Americans own them. They have attracted the interest of coin enthusiasts, as well as critics of the Federal Reserve.
A 1999 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center said that many of the stores that accepted liberty dollars “are run by men and women connected to the radical right.” The coins have caught on particularly well in Asheville, N.C., and Austin, Texas, and are accepted by some merchants there.
More than 50,000 of the coins seized last year bear the likeness of Rep. Ron Paul, whose monetary policies Mr. Von NotHaus supports.
“About a quarter of a million people holding liberty dollars are almost up-in arms — not up in arms yet, but almost — about having their property seized, and rightly so,” Mr. Von NotHaus told The New York Sun yesterday.
The clash between the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve over monetary strategy is causing serious strains in the global financial system and could lead to a replay of Europe’s exchange rate crisis in the 1990s, a team of bankers has warned.
“We see striking similarities between the transatlantic tensions that built up in the early 1990s and those that are accumulating again today. The outcome of the 1992 deadlock was a major currency crisis and a recession in Europe,” said a report by Morgan Stanley’s European experts
Just as then, Washington has slashed rates to bail out the banks and prevent an economic hard-landing, while Frankfurt has stuck to its hawkish line - ignoring angry protests from politicians and squeals of pain from Europe’s export industry.
Indeed, the ECB has let the de facto interest rate - Euribor - rise by over 100 basis points since the credit crisis began.
Just as then, the dollar has plummeted far enough to cause worldwide alarm. In August 1992 it fell to 1.35 against the Deutsche Mark: this time it has fallen even further to the equivalent of 1.25. It is potentially worse for Europe this time because the yen and yuan have also fallen to near record lows. So has sterling
Morgan Stanley doubts that Europe’s monetary union will break up under pressure, but it warns that corked pressures will have to find release one way or another.
This will most likely occur through property slumps and banking purges in the vulnerable countries of the Club Med region and the euro-satellite states of Eastern Europe.
“The tensions will not disappear into thin air. They will find fault lines on the periphery of Europe. Painful macro adjustments are likely to take place. Pegs to the euro could be questioned,” said the report, written by Eric Chaney, Carlos Caceres, and Pasquale Diana.
The point of maximum stress could occur in coming months if the ECB carries out the threat this month by Jean-Claude Trichet to raise rates. It will be worse yet - for Europe - if the Fed backs away from expected tightening. “This could trigger another ‘catastrophic’ event,” warned Morgan Stanley.
The markets have priced in two US rates rises later this year following a series of “hawkish” comments by Fed chief Ben Bernanke and other US officials, but this may have been a misjudgment.
An article in the Washington Post by veteran columnist Robert Novak suggested that Mr Bernanke is concerned that runaway oil costs will cause a slump in growth, viewing inflation as the lesser threat. He is irked by the ECB’s talk of further monetary tightening at such a dangerous juncture.
The contrasting approaches in Washington and Frankfurt make some sense. America’s flexible structure allows it to adjust quickly to shocks. Europe’s more rigid system leaves it with “sticky” prices that take longer to fall back as growth slows.
Morgan Stanley says the current account deficits of Spain (10.5pc of GDP), Portugal (10.5pc), and Greece (14pc) would never have been able to reach such extreme levels before the launch of the euro.
EMU has shielded them from punishment by the markets, but this has allowed them to store up serious trouble. By contrast, Germany now has a huge surplus of 7.7pc of GDP.
The imbalances appear to be getting worse. The latest food and oil spike has pushed eurozone inflation to a record 3.7pc, with big variations by country. Spanish inflation is rising at 4.7pc even though the country is now in the grip of a full-blown property crash. It is still falling further behind Germany. The squeeze required to claw back lost competitiveness will be “politically unpalatable”.
Morgan Stanley said the biggest risk lies in the arc of countries from the Baltics to the Black Sea where credit growth has been roaring at 40pc to 50pc a year. Current account deficits have reached 23pc of GDP in Latvia, and 22pc in Bulgaria. In Hungary and Romania, over 55pc of household debt is in euros or Swiss francs.
Swedish, Austrian, Greek and Italian banks have provided much of the funding for the credit booms. A crunch is looming in 2009 when a wave of maturities fall due. “Could the funding dry up? We think it could,” said the bank
MEXICO CITY — A sizzling stock market. A strengthening peso. Good economic growth. Someone forgot to tell Mexico that the United States has been flirting with recession.
“Mexico . . . is not immune” to what’s happening north of the border, said Gray Newman, chief Latin American economist for Morgan Stanley in New York. But, “it’s not suffering the kind of downturn that everyone was expecting with weakness in the U. S.”
Mexico’s gross domestic product expanded at an annualized rate of 2.6 percent in the first three months of the year compared to the same period a year earlier, according to government figures.
But there was statistical noise in the first-quarter numbers: Adoption of the new international standard for calculating gross domestic product, and an early Easter week holiday, which resulted in fewer working days compared to the first three months of last year. Adjusting for those factors, first-quarter GDP growth was a solid 3.7 percent, according to the government.
Meanwhile, U. S. gross domestic product rose just 0.9 percent in the first quarter.
Mexico is the world’s 14th largest economy, according to the latest statistics available from the World Bank, with a GDP of $839.2 billion in 2006.
Bound to the United States by history, geography, immigration, trade and investment, Mexico’s fortunes have long been linked to those of its northern neighbor. The U. S. housing industry, for example, which employs one in five Hispanic immigrants, is in a slump, resulting in a marked slowdown of remittances sent to Mexico. A prolonged U. S. downturn would undoubtedly hit Mexico hard.
Still, the nation’s economy is holding up well. The Mexican bolsa (stock) index is up 14.5 percent so far this year. The peso is strong: At the first of the year, $1 could buy nearly 10.9 pesos; now $1 buys a little over 10.3 pesos.
One factor is that much of the world economy is growing despite the U. S. slowdown. While Mexico still ships about 80 percent of its exports to the United States, its farmers and manufacturers are looking for new customers in Asia, Europe and the rest of Latin America.
That diversification is paying off. During the first quarter, Mexican exports to the U. S. grew slightly more than 16 percent, while shipments to the rest of the world grew at twice that pace, 32 percent. Exports to Europe grew by 56 percent.
The trend can be seen in Volkswagen de Mexico, the Mexican division of the German automaker, which manufactures Beetles and Jettas at a sprawling facility in Puebla, Mexico. Through the first four months of the year, VW’s Mexican exports totaled 123,000 vehicles, up 29 percent from the same period a year ago, said spokesman Thomas Karig.
The Puebla plant recently began manufacturing a new fuel-efficient station wagon, the Jetta SportWagen, which is proving a hot seller in Europe, Karig said. Exports to Brazil and Argentina are strong as well.
The Mexican government’s decision to enter into free-trade agreements with a number of nations has made Mexico an attractive place for Volkswagen to build cars, Karig said.
“We can export our cars very competitively from Mexico to these other markets,” he said.
Other automakers are posting good numbers as well. Through the first four months of the year, vehicle exports from Mexico are up 18.5 percent over the same period a year ago, according to the Mexican Automotive Industry Association.
One of the strongest performers has been General Motors. Mexico’s largest automaker exported 127,625 vehicles in the first four months of the year, up nearly 38 percent over 2007, the association says.
Part of that jump reflects production of a new model, the Saturn VUE, at GM’s Saltillo, Mexico, plant. The crossover sport utility vehicle gets better gas mileage than traditional full-size SUVs, according to GM spokesman Mauricio Kuri.
And Ford Motor Co. announced Friday that it plans to build its new Fiesta subcompact at a factory near Mexico City for sale in the U. S.
The plant now makes trucks for the Mexican market. The company plans to import trucks from the U. S. in the future to free factory capacity for the new small cars.
Ford also said Friday that it plans a new diesel engine line at its at Chihuahua Engine Plant and a new joint venture transmission plant with Getrag in Guanajuato.
Overall, Ford and its parts suppliers will invest $3 billion in Mexico as part of the Fiesta project, Ford said. About 4,500 Ford jobs should be created at the plants, the company said.
As it loses more manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico has focused its energies on the automotive industry.
“We want Mexico to be an automotive country, one that is competitive and with the most advantages so that the worldwide automotive industry will establish itself here,” President Felipe Calderon said.
Skyrocketing crude prices might be pinching U. S. drivers, but they’ve meant record oil revenue for Mexico, the world’s sixth-largest oil producer. The petroleum windfall is bankrolling a slew of government spending and investment, which is helping to keep the economy rolling.
Total public spending increased 9.5 percent in the first three months of the year compared to the same period last year.
Calderon plans to invest about $250 billion in roads, airports and other infrastructure during his six-year term, which ends in 2012.
“… it is of utmost importance that an equilibrium be established between the world’s total population and the capacity of ’spaceship earth’…” - RIO: Reshaping the International Order, 1976 (p124)
The establishment of a World Food Authority to control the food supply of the world is a major goal of The Club of Rome’s RIO report. This issue is intertwined with exaggerated fears of environmental collapse and the elite’s obsession with population control.
The Club of Rome is a premiere think tank composed of approximately 100 members including leading scientists, philosophers, political advisors, former politicians and many other influential bureaucrats and technocrats. This series of articles describes the major conclusions of the 1976 book Rio: Reshaping the International Order: A Report to the Club of Rome [1] coordinated by Nobel Laureate Jan Tinbergen. The RIO report “addresses the following question: what new international order should be recommended to the world’s statesmen and social groups so as to meet, to the extent practically and realistically possible, the urgent needs of today’s population and the probable needs of future generations?”
Part 1 of this series gives an overview of the proposed new international order described by the RIO report as “humanistic socialism”. This includes: collective neighbourhood armies, a fully planned world economy, global free trade, public international enterprises, proposed changes in consumption patterns among other topics. Changes to the financial system including international taxation and the creation of a World Treasury, World Central Bank and World Currency are examined in part 2. Part 3 addresses the redefinition of sovereignty from “territorial sovereignty” to “functional sovereignty” as well as the use of the concept of the “common heritage of mankind” to gain international control of not just the oceans, atmosphere and outer space but also all material and non-material resources. Part 4 discusses the generation of public opinion and the use of white coated propagandists.
The Environmental Scare
From RIO: Reshaping the International Order:
“History has frequently shown that people, in times of crisis and once convinced of the necessity for change, are prepared to accept policies which demand changes in their behaviour so as to help secure better lives for themselves and their children.” - 110
The threat of environmental catastrophe to further the population control agenda is nothing new and continues to this day with the manmade global warming scare. Back in the 1970’s the Club of Rome was not shy at using the environmental catastrophe card to push for population control. Below are some examples from RIO: Reshaping the International Order:
“Moreover, it has been estimated that by 1985 all land surfaces, except those so cold or at such high altitudes as to be incompatible with human habitation or exploration, will have been occupied and utilized by man.” - 89
“Although not yet proven, climatologists are being forced to conclude that our planet has in recent times passed through a period which may well have been optimal as far as food production is concerned. They believe that future decades may well be characterized by extremes - hot and cold, wet and dry - without necessarily a change in average temperature. (4)” - 90
The endnote used to back up this claim is given below:
“(4) There is certainly sufficient evidence for this concern: the Asian monsoons were unsatisfactory for three successive years between 1972-1974; severe droughts in the Sahel and other parts of Africa and the Great Plains area of the United States and Canada in 1974; an unexpected late frost in Brazil in 1975 which may have destroyed as much as 60 per cent of its 1976 coffee crop. The growing season of the best grain producing areas in the Soviet Union is now believed to [be] about a week shorter than it was in the 1950’s; an even more pronounced shift appears to have taken place in the United Kingdom.” - 97
Do these types of arguments sound familiar?
“Much effort has been made in the past ten years, in some industrialized countries, to bring the disadvantage facing many Third World countries to the attention of large numbers of people. If it has met with only limited success, it is probably because it has failed to bring out the concept of interdependence of countries and issues. More attention must in future be focused on information and education on how our planet functions and on the ’survival fact’ that the claim of the whole is wider and deeper than the claim of any of its parts. There is also a fundamental need to develop a broadly educated political class which is capable of understanding science and the broad implications, possibilities and dangers of technological advance, and which can harness technological advance for constructive social purposes.” - 111
Population Control and The World Food Authority
“… these threats [of food shortage] might well be exacerbated by increasing population pressures and deteriorating climatological conditions.” - 135
“Population control policies carry the important indirect consequence of restricting the supply of unskilled labour, thereby raising its price.” - 73
“If the world is to be liberated from the continual nightmares of hunger and malnutrition, these and the various measures proposed by the FAO [Food and Agricultural Organization] Worlds Food Conference should be implemented to the full and call for the creation of the World Food Authority, with extensive and real powers; or, as a second best, the World Food Council proposed by the World Food Conference.” - 138
“internationally owned and internationally managed [food] buffer stocks…” - 226
“the question of introducing meat rationing should be seriously considered [for developed countries].” - 227
Food as a Weapon
The incredible power that would be accomplished from a massive concentration of food stocks under the control of a single agency did not escape the authors of this report to the Club of Rome. The reigning food situation in the world was dominated by the great dependence of many countries on the North American breadbasket. This gave the Americans a considerable amount of power over their dependent countries.
“the American Secretary for Agriculture who has observed: “Food is a weapon. It is one of the principal tools in our negotiating kit” ” - 29
The further centralization of food stocks under a single international power would only increase the abuse of food supplies not decrease it. This, quite naturally, is the point. The result of this control is well described by Bertrand Russell (who strongly supported this idea) in his 1952 book The Impact of Science of Society [2]:
“To deal with this problem [increasing population and decreasing food supplies] it will be necessary to find ways of preventing an increase in world population. If this is to be done otherwise than by wars, pestilence, and famines, it will demand a powerful international authority. This authority should deal out the world’s food to the various nations in proportion to their population at the time of the establishment of the authority. If any nation subsequently increased its population it should not on that account receive any more food. The motive for not increasing population would therefore be very compelling. What method of preventing an increase might be preferred should be left to each state to decide.” - 124
Conclusion
The final article in this series deals with a variety of issues including global solidarity, regional unions, legal changes and a standing United Nations Peace Force.
[1] Quotes from Jan Tinbergen, RIO: Reshaping the International Order: A Report to the Club of Rome (1976). ISBN 0-525-04340-3
[2] Quotes from Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (1952). ISBN 0-415-10906-X
CAFTA
