WFP, FAO Warn of ‘Huge Loss of Life’ by Starvation from Now to January

The latest report of the UN World Food Program (WFP) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) identifies six countries with a total of nearly 1 million people starving now, without access to food of any kind. It says, further, that there is a potential “huge loss of life between October 2022 and January 2023” in 19 countries overwhelmingly in Sub-Saharan Africa, but including Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Haiti. The report, released Sept. 21, estimates the number of human beings now facing acute food insecurity at 345 million in 82 nations, the highest WFP has ever reported. “There is now a very real risk that food and nutrition needs across the globe may soon outstrip WFP’s or any organization’s ability to respond,” it says. If, according to the report, WFP is aiding 150 million people in 2022, then at least half of those at risk of starving are not receiving aid.

The report does not provide specifics on deficiencies in world food availability. It does not specify that the U.S. soybean harvest as of Sept. 12 was estimated by the USDA to be down 3%, the corn harvest down 8%, and wheat harvest down 6% from 2021, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Neither is there mention of the decline in livestock production, which is formidable. This results from the failure to deal with 30 years’ intensifying drought by building water infrastructure, and from pricing fertilizers out of farmers’ reach. The same is true in South America, apart from Brazil, which has, as EIR has reported, prioritized increasing imports of fertilizers from Russia. Such details, however, are not mentioned in the WFP/FAO report.

Hurricane Fiona Leaves Devastation in Its Wake in the Caribbean

Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Turks and Caicos, and the Bahamas are reeling from the effects of Hurricane Fiona, which has, as of September 24, continued to do serious damage all the way to Canada. The Caribbean islands and nations of Central America suffered grave destruction because they lack the necessary infrastructure to protect human lives or livelihoods—hurricane-proof housing, decent electric power-generating capabilities (preferably nuclear-based), well-built roads, bridges, schools, and proper water-management systems.

Absent this life-saving infrastructure, the result is disaster, as seen in Puerto Rico, where observers say that Fiona was even more destructive than the 2017 Hurricane Maria, because of never-ending rain. Flooding and landslides destroyed at least hundreds of houses, bridges, power lines, roads, etc. President Biden approved a major disaster declaration and the Department of Health and Human Services declared a public health emergency for the island.

Puerto Rico has never recovered from Hurricane Maria because no serious effort was ever made to rebuild it, particularly its decrepit electric grid. The Sept. 18 Washington Post described its power grid today as “a house of cards: a fragile, decrepit, patchwork system running on old equipment that has failed to substantially modernize” since hurricane Maria. As of Sept. 23, there were still 900,000 people without electricity.

Fiona hit the Dominican Republic with torrential rains and powerful winds. In the eastern part of the country, many people had to be rescued as their houses flooded. At present, thousands are still without electricity. In Bermuda, Fiona knocked out electricity for much of that island before heading north to Canada.

Barbados PM Raises the Real, Anti-Colonial Idea of a New Bretton Woods

Speaking Sept. 22 before the UN General Assembly High-Level Debate session, Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley demonstrated that even the smallest of developing nations are eager to rise out of the sewer of colonial exploitation. She demanded that the multilateral lending institutions of the world be changed in order to provide development credits for 30 years’ repayment at low interest rates to developing countries. This was U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s idea for the Bretton Woods system and the World Bank. “The World Bank and the IMF no longer serve the purpose in the 21st century that they served in the 20th century,” Ms. Mottley said. Therefore the global financial architecture must be reformed.

Under Prime Minister Mottley’s leadership, Barbados, the first slave state of the Royal Africa Company in the 17th century, became a Republic in November of 2021, rejecting the British monarchy and fealty to the Queen. In her UNGA debate speech she used the case of Britain as a leading example of easy credit terms for paying off war debts: “The world recognized this [that development was at least a generation-long credit project] when it allowed Britain to participate in refinancing its World War I bonds, which were only paid off completely eight years ago, 100 years after World War I started.” She also cited Germany’s extensive debt forgiveness at the 1953 London Conference, a much better example, because postwar Germany used it for an economic miracle of reconstruction and industrialization.

Although Prime Minister Motley repeatedly cited the “climate crisis,” she argued that for underdeveloped countries, development must take a priority over it, and that these nations must be allowed to continue to use fossil fuels to develop, without sanctions or threats. “We can make a difference in this world,” she concluded, “and let us do so recognizing that a world that reflects an imperialistic order, hypocrisy and lack of transparency, will not achieve that mission; but one that gives us freedom, transparency and a leveled playing field will allow for a difference.”

Colombian President at UNGA Argues for Dope Instead of Food and Energy

In contrast with those former colonies like Barbados that are getting out from under the Empire’s yoke, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro used his Sept. 20 address to the United Nations General Assembly debate to urge protection for traditionally illegal drugs, even at the cost of reducing energy production and consumption. This is his argument:

“Which is more poisonous to human beings: cocaine or coal or oil? The ruling of those in power has decreed that cocaine is the poison and should be persecuted, even though it only leads to minimal deaths from overdosing, and more from mixtures provoked by its being driven underground, whereas coal and oil must be protected, even though their use could extinguish all, all of humanity.”

He calls his strategy “Total Peace” with the drug cartels, as he defended it at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce forum in New York. He thus backs the generations-long dream of London and Wall Street. He either lied, or doesn’t know that human life rests on the production of energy. While nuclear fission and fusion are budding, the current options are primarily coal and oil—or death. His argument, as irrational as it is immoral, was to defend the Amazon’s “sacred plant,” the coca bush, while ranting against human needs in favor of rallying to defeat the war on drugs.

NATO Steps Up Integration of Ukraine’s CCD into NATO Psyops

NATO brought Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD)—which operates under President Volodymyr Zelensky’s National Security and Defense Council—into its Sept. 5-8 “NATO Communicators Conference” in Skopje, Macedonia. CCD acting head Andriy Shapovalov used these occasions, and his Sept. 8 speech to the 31st Economic Forum in Poland, an annual meeting of top representatives of Central and Eastern Europe business and political circles, to promote the idea that any person, anywhere, who opposes NATO’s war drive is an “information terrorist” guilty of “war crimes.”

The Ukrainian delegation at the NATO Conference “was the largest representation of Ukraine in the entire history of NATO public events,” according to the CCD, and included representatives of the CCD, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy’s Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security. The CCD chose to highlight that the conference included a panel on “Ukraine’s experience in information warfare,” where “representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency talked about practical cases of working on disinformation in the conditions of a full-scale war.”

The CCD then sent a team to participate in the Sept. 13-15 “Counter Disinformation Wargames” in Riga, Latvia, organized by the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (“Hybrid COE”) with the support of the NATO Center of Excellence for Strategic Communications. Seven national teams “practiced countering malicious disinformation disseminated by a red cell simulating Russia, China and their proxies” to practice algorithms and other counters to “threats to national security and national interests.” Their “black lists” of assassination targets were not mentioned.

While in Riga, the Director of the NATO StratCom COE, Yanis Sarts, met Shapovalov and his team privately, with the head of the NATO StratCom Partnership in Ukraine, Ben Heap, a British national who spent six years in British Army Psyops and International Security in Afghanistan before transferring to Riga in 2016.

According to the CCD’s cryptic report: “The participants of the meeting discussed the issue of protection of citizens of Ukraine and partner states from disinformation,” with Shapovalov emphasizing in particular “the need to recognize the term ‘information terrorism’ ” as an official crime, and introducing it into international legislation.

These secret operations will either be overwhelmed by the anti-Imperial forces or by nuclear conflict.