Published Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 14:35
by
corinnebord 
in Save our planet (818 views and 3 comments)
Every five seconds,
a child under 10 years old dies of hunger or of its consequences.
Who would have thought we were to undergo such an acute food
crisis? The increase in prices is worrying but the decrease of
the world's food stocks is all too often ignored. The stocks of
basic foodstuffs (like wheat, corn or rice) have never been so
low for the last 20 years. In 2007, food production decreased in
real terms while consumption increased by and large, among others
because of a higher industrial demand. At the heart of the debate
is the ever increasing use of cereals for biofuel production.
This means in practice that farmlands are increasingly used
not for food-producing crops but for the much more profitable
production of biofuels.
Rather than questioning our patterns of oil dependency and overconsumption, the Western World has thrown itself into exploiting technological progress without much caring for its human consequences. The bet was clearly profitable but what is the human and environmental price of such a policy? Within a year, the price of wheat has gone up by 130%, rice by 74%, soy beans by 87%, and corn by 53%. It is therefore necessary and urgent to recall that the eradication of hunger is the first of the Millenium Development Goals. Only Socialists in Europe can tackle this issue from the right angle: on...
read morePublished Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 09:42
by
Duncan Anderson
in EU in the world (683 views and 0 comments)
I don't want to suggest that PES/EU can solve this problem within one term of office. But I do think that the EU should start talking to other countries and organisations about dealing with the consequences of over population.
Over population or having more people on the planet that it can sustain was a topic of discussion during the 1970s and China responded. I'm not saying that we or other countries should follow China's route.
But over population is at the core of many global problems. We need to use artificial fertilisers and G.M. products to feed the world and even then a lot of people starve. There is insufficient water to both grow food for people and for them to drink. We can't provide enough energy for everybody without damaging the planet.
Question, how do we address the twin problems of having a sustainable level of population on this planet? Answer, I don't know, but I'm interested in listening to there people's views.
If it is decided to reduce the population we have to consider the demographics of having more older people who are above a working age - but still need food, water and energy - than younger people who would be generating income and therefore taxes to pay for the water, food and energy of the older people.
But until we start discussing these concepts, both amongst ourselves and with other countries we're not going to fully understand the problems and therefore we won't find the correct answers.
read morePublished Monday, April 28, 2008 at 14:33
by
raphi sternfeld
in New Social Europe (577 views and 2 comments)
Tags: elderly, food crisis, welfare
File:
Hungerkrise_DE.pdf
Published Monday, April 14, 2008 at 14:46
by
Pierre_Kanuty
in EU in the world (641 views and 0 comments)
What a cruel joke
and what a fundamental question we are confronted with today:
just switch on your television set or read your newspaper, and
you will see how much the prices of raw materials have increased.
This in turn has led to an explosion of violence in the
developing countries, with what we now call the 'hunger riots'.
Let us not forget that the same kind of riots often led to big
revolutions in the past.
Since then, democracy has allowed us to generate the necessary conditions to anticipate these problems in order to solve them with all parties involved. If the weapon of the hungry and the poor remains violence, it is because politics and democracy are not part of these processes. Indeed, for a long time, the functioning of international regulatory bodies has been put into question. As socialists and social-democrats, we are not calling for their abolition but rather for their democratization. The work launched by the French socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) follows this rationale in a will to better represent emerging countries. The idea is that the IMF should no longer be the 'banking police of rich countries' systematically oppressing those nations in need.
We are working on the PES manifesto for the 2009 elections and in a couple of weeks, the Socialist...
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