.Executive Intelligence Review Online
World Grain Shortage:
Famine Ahead without Glass-Steagall Shift
by Marcia Merry Baker

May 13—The level of worldwide yearly utilization of grains (all kinds)—for direct human consumption, livestock rations, seed carryover, biofuels, wastage, etc.—now exceeds the volume of global production; the gap can't be made up. This means just what you think it does: We are in trouble. The policies behind this are insane. Allowing them to continue means that there is no hope for the billion people already going hungry in the world, and no hope for the future anywhere.
Figure 1 gives a snapshot of the grains production/consumption crisis; it was released May 9 by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's ``FAO Cereal Supply and Demand Brief.'' The agency reports that total world grains (cereal) production for 2012-13 is expected to be 2,306 million metric tons, which is less than the 2,332 mmt expected utilization. This isn't the first-ever occurrence of such an imbalance, but with effectively no reserves, no recourse, and no policy change, the import is deadly.
Bad weather in several key farmbelts (as the FAO reports) is a contributing factor to seasonal shortages. But the global vulnerability of present-day agriculture to weather extremes has been a deliberate aspect of the ``free markets'' regime foisted on the world for decades by globalist financial, commodity, and political networks best known as the British Empire. Their intention is food scarcity and depopulation. A recent expression of this appeared in a December 2012 report from London's Royal Institute of International Affairs ...
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