Friday, April 4, 2008

Soaring Rice Prices: A Global Warming Toll

Rising prices of rice is a result of global warming deception. The United Nations’ sponsorship of anthropogenic global warming is now taking its toll on the rice consuming nations of Asia.

 

Prodded to find a cleaner source of energy that does not emit carbon dioxide –way back in 1986 with the joke of ozone depletion or ozone hole fiasco- local scientists introduced biofuel. Biofuel is the short term of biorganic fuel which is a combination of plant and animal substance that can be burnt as fuel and a replacement to petroleum gas. UN indorsed this biofuel and government representatives embarked on giving farmers more incentives to enhance global production of this fossil oil substitute.

 

Farmers scrambled to planting biofuel crops. Lands usually planted with rice were converted to crops yielding high biofuel. The Philippines switched to jatropha, corn, sugar, and coconut plantations. Indonesia was converted to huge palm oil productions. U.S. converted corn and soybeans; Europe converted rapeseed and wheat; Brazil is sugar cane; China are sorghum and cassava; and India is jatropha. Big companies resorted to cutting trees and clearing lush forest in remote Asian region to plant jatropha and palm oil. Per Agence France-Presse report, in Indonesia alone, 2.1 million hectares of land were planted with palm oil. A few years ago it was only 400,000 hectares.

 

As the demands for biofuels yielding clean-burning energy rose to an unprecedented level across Asia, lands planted with rice remarkably diminished in size. Biofuel waste materials proliferated giving sanctuary to a new breed of virus pestering on rice crops. Vietnam reported of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) that their rice crops were being ravaged by unknown pest sending widespread havocs on their harvests.

 

With the resulting scarcity of the staple food, prices of rice skyrocketed. Thailand, Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, US, and other leading rice exporting countries secured first their domestic consumption thereby cutting their respective rice export markets. These further contributed to the soaring rice prices.

 

Untold miseries were the direct results of premeditated global warming fiasco,.... scam, hoax, humbug or whatever calling it may suit. Just for the simple reason of mitigating carbon dioxide emission which UN directly attributed to the misdeeds of human instead of the natural heating capacity of the sun, peoples of less-developed Asia and Africa are now on their bended knees starving for food. This global warming joke are forcing us to believe that tiny humans in the universe are competing with nature in giving heat more than the sun can emit to warm our earth, lol.

 

And here is the direct and magnified result. Farmers switched to planting crops supporting biofuel from which they earned more. The converted lands to biofuel left the ricelands to a minimum area, as Robert Zeigler , IRRI Director General said: “There is just not enough land.” The remaining land can no longer support the food requirements of the ever increasing world population, hence this rice crisis.

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