Being a Futurama fan, I've always wanted to say this but could not find the propitious moment. Writing about water scarcity & food shortages is taxing and angers me at times particularly when I come across disheartening news caused by blatant greed and callous disregard for our planet.

However, a huge dose of human ingenuity, human creativity and human toil will right the wrongs. I have great faith in humanity and this diary is dedicated to the good folks out there bursting their synapses coming up with novel ways of making the world less dependent on fossil fuels, working out solutions to feed the planet and generally trying to make this earth a better place (if you look at the human brain from say, 150,000 years ago, you will not see much difference when compared with today's brains. Yet the drive to learn, as well as our ability to communicate and work collectively, has lifted our human potential to unimaginable levels.)

While the neo-cons have rapture, the rest of us have rupture, partly due to GWB at the behest of his wingnut cohorts and "special interests". Congratulations George, you have achieved a specious phenomenon: the world is a much poorer place, the arctic ice won't be with us much longer, Iraq and Afghanistan are in a deeper quagmire than your lackeys have imagined, the grand illusion about an Iraqi windfall is just that, an illusion, and the world is largely united against you.

Rupture: noun 1: breach of peace or concord; specifically : open hostility or war between nations; 2: the tearing apart of a tissue <rupture of the heart muscle>; 3: a breaking apart or the state of being broken apart.
Verb 1 a: to part by violence : break, burst b: to create or induce a breach of.

Back in 2003, the Washington Post told us that U.S. embassies around the globe were inundating Washington with cables saying that the world both hates and mistrusts this "dry drunk",

megalomaniac who would be laughable except for the fact that he represents a power structure as demented as he is.

They weren't wrong.

It's official, we are in a Recession. Yes, Ireland was riding high on the back of the Celtic tiger, and he got shot down, felled primarily by outsourcing jobs to India & China (sounds familiar?) and rising prices of just about everything you care to name. That, and a panoply of economic ills will ensure a return to frugality, energy conservation and long hours will be spent working out solutions instead watching the idiot box or playing Nintendo.

According to Wiki:

"in macroeconomics, a recession is generally associated with a decline in a country's real gross domestic product (GDP), or negative real economic growth. According to one widespread definition, a recession occurs when real growth is negative for two or more successive quarters of a year".

I'm not sure which of the two issues is more pressing than the other: food shortages or water scarcity. For the first time in my life (I'm not trying to paraphrase Michelle our belle here) I am scared of what the future will lack. I have kids, as many of you do. What are we going to do when the water runs out? Never mind oil, that's already peaked, besides, a return to donkey carts is not such a bad thing. The more I read about water and its dwindling reserves the more I realize how little prepared we are. Thomas M. Kostigen of Discover:

That is a stark statistic, when as many as 5 million people die unnecessarily each year because of lack of water and water-related illnesses; one-third are under age 5.

In this roundup I'm focusing on the water issues, because without water we can't really grow food though I would alert you to this fact: by breeding for size and abundance, modern agriculture has produced food that contains dramatically lower nutrients than food of just 20-50 years ago. Soils are depleted of nutrients. This is largely due to overuse: agriculture uses up to 70 times more water to produce food than is used in drinking and other domestic purposes, including cooking, washing and bathing.

Due to a momentary lapse of judgment, I have managed to squash my thumb between a wrought-iron bench and the back wall of my house trying to move the damn thing away from the wall! I'm an idiot!

The upside is that I couldn't work today so I had some spare time to look up other idiots and get the following "moran" tales from various sites on "the internets". I feel better knowing that there are some real idiots out there. The frightening thing is that these people walk among us. They reproduce. And they vote - undoubtedly Republican. Enjoy a bit of humor.

Last week I wrote about picnics and today, we're paying a visit to its closest cousin, the mighty barbecue. Having spent close to twenty years in Australia, I can honestly say that I'm no stranger to this social event, must have attended hundreds of them.

Back then someone suggested to me that the history of eating in Australia had been one long, continuous picnic. Chances are that if you're down under for week or so, you will be asked to a "pool party", another local tag for the very popular "barbie". If you head on down to the nearest beach you'll find dozens of portable grills smoking away with an endless variety of seafood, sausages and all kinds of meat cuts. And a huge amount of beer and wine held up in "eskies"! My very first barbecue experience happened a week after I had arrived from a snow-blanketed Paris, a week short of Christmas. I found myself on Manly Beach with a group of degenerates, swilling beer under a murderous sun, pretending to help a very blotto grilling chef as a large rescue boat surfed out of nowhere carrying a jolly-looking Father Christmas in his red coat. On closer inspection, as he stumbled out of the craft, I saw he was wearing red shorts, and guzzling beer. Only in Oz!

I keep a sharp eye on Australia's CSIRO's travails and other breakthrough biotech research companies throughout the globe, in hope of being able to report some good news on the food front. Biotech firms such as CSIRO strive to bring out new crops using tried breeding techniques as opposed to recombinant DNA. Although genetic engineering has been said to be no different than ancient breeding methods, it is completely untrue.

I read somewhere that genetic engineering is like performing heart surgery with a shovel. Scientists, IMHO, do not yet understand living systems completely enough to perform DNA surgery without creating mutations which could be harmful to the environment and our health. Genetic engineering has created a chicken with four legs and no wings and created a goat with spider genes that creates "silk" in its milk. My own personal view is that GE is a radical technology, still in the experimental stages. It comes down to this simple fact: the GM process causes unnatural mutation and combination of the DNA in our food in a manner which excludes nature out of the process.

Call me old fashioned.

Back in the seventies I recall reading a harsh Australian government warning aimed at the Aboriginal population, which at the time was hopelessly mired in chronic alcoholism: "Adapt or Perish!". Although I thought it heartless at the time (since we not only introduced all things boozy to a people who had never tasted alcohol in their previous 60,000 years, their land was also taken from under their feet) it did convey a brutish, unmistakable message of "survivalism or else". That message, regardless of its bluntness, ought to be hammered, no, etched deep into all politicians' consciousness worldwide as we are facing a number of intractable problems, most of them resulting from decades of bad policies fostered on us by inept, possibly corrupt, greedy & non-visionary leaders.

What's more, the writing has been on the wall for quite some time, and as our own bonddad noted today, "the US’ current economic trajectory is unsustainable in the long run". So is the rest of the world. All it takes is a change of behavior.

Water is Life, yet over 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water and over 2 billion lack basic sanitation. As you know, due to increasingly lower availability of water in many parts of the world, water has more and more become a political commodity.

                     

In fact, quite a few conflicts have been fought because of water. With the horrid news of Mount Kilimanjaros's imminent loss of snow caps and the inexorable march of desertification coupled with inane and unchecked deforestation, political leaders will have to start addressing the question of water shortages sooner than later.

According to food historians picnics evolved from the elaborate traditions of outdoor feasts enjoyed by the powerful and the wealthy. Medieval hunting feasts, Renaissance-era country banquets, and Victorian garden parties seemed to have laid the foundation for today's humble picnic.
                     

Gaston de Foiz, in a work entitled Le Livre de chasse (1387), gives a detailed description of such an event in France. Foods consumed might have been cooked hams, baked meats, and so on. During the Victorian era it entered into the literature as Eliot, Trollope, Austen & Dickens introduced this newly minted social event into their fiction. Painters have also been drawn to the al fresco outings such as Manet, Monet and then filmmakers: my own personal picnic moment is the one with Grace Kelly and Cary Grant sharing a chicken drumstick with Monte Carlo in the background. I'm certain you know the film.

As John McSame clumsily attempts to re-brand himself as an economist, the world’s largest seed and agrochemical corporations are stockpiling hundreds of monopoly patents on genes in plants that the companies will market as crops genetically engineered to withstand environmental stresses such as drought, heat, cold, floods, saline soils etc... BASF, Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, Dupont and biotech partners have filed 532 patent documents (a total of 55 patent families) on so-called "climate ready" genes at patent offices around the world. In the face of climate chaos and a deepening world food crisis, the Gene mongers are gearing up for a PR offensive to re-brand themselves as climate saviors, pushing genetically engineered crops as a silver bullet solution to climate change.

According to a new report, patented techno-fix seeds will not provide the adaptation strategies that small farmers need to cope with climate change. These proprietary technologies will ultimately concentrate corporate power, drive up costs, inhibit independent research, and further undermine the rights of farmers to save and exchange seeds.

It's not all doom and gloom, not just yet! I know I tend to report the bad news like a broken record, but believe me, it's because it is bad, and with peak oil, water & food shortages, overpopulation...and the dopey monkey still in the WH, it doesn't augur well, and I haven't even mentioned Global Warming! Some posters went as far to suggest that being in the richest and mightiest country in the world, not much will happen to the food chain. Well, if you're the head of Exxon or somewhere in that super rich league, yes, you'll still have plenty to eat, but for the rest of us, the hoi polloi, we'll have to find interesting ways to make ends meet within the next two decades.

Scouring the "Internets", I have come up with news that are mostly good news. Not many but then again, I never promised you a rose garden.

Here are the stark numbers today:

Global food prices force about 100 million people into hunger.

High food prices are pushing 30 million Africans into poverty.

About 850 million people are suffering from chronic hunger worldwide.

Food prices have hit the highest levels in real terms in 30 years.

Price of rice has gone up by 75% globally.

Global food prices rose by 43% in 2007 alone.

The US has diverted about 40 million tons of maize to produce ethanol.

An acre of maize produces only 50 gallons of gasoline.

EU plans to get 10% of auto fuel from Bio-energy by 2020.

Food riots and food wars are not just taking place in the streets of Egypt and in Mexico, they are taking place in the corridors of the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN)

From the earliest point in man's existence on Earth, water has played a vital part - earliest settlements were often established along the banks of rivers or lake shores to ensure a ready supply of water was obtained. Mesopotamia, the so-called cradle of civilization, was situated between the major rivers Tigris and Euphrates. For without water, where would human life be? It is the element of all people since our bodies are mostly made, anywhere from 55% to 78% of water, depending on body size. This connectivity and dependence upon water is started from the uterine protective waters of the mother's womb.

Our bodies may be able to survive up to a month without food, but without water, we can only last a week. Water is needed, not only to re-hydrate ourselves, but also to keep our muscles and other parts of our bodies (ie eyes) operating properly. We all need between 1 liter and 6 liters a day, in extreme weather. Because of this importance we need to look after our precious resource as not only our own lives depend on having fresh clean water, but also the lives of all other inhabitants on the planet. If I sound a little too "New Age", so be it, it's crucial that we start to address food & water shortages. Now, not once we've run out.

If you were to define Thai cuisine, you could say that it is essentially an alliance of centuries-old Eastern and Western influences cleverly meshed into something undeniably Thai. Their national style of cooking has garnered a well deserved place in global culinary culture due to its uniquely combined spicy-salty-sweet-bitter-sour taste of this very special Asian cuisine. Not all Thai food is spicy. In some dishes, such as fried noodle (Phad Thai), spices are optional although the majority of Thais love spicy dishes, such as curry, (Gang), Thai style soup (Tom Yum), and Thai style salad (Yum).

The basic Thai staple is rice, either ordinary or glutinous, accompanied by a variety of dishes that can be eaten in almost any order, and seasoned to individual taste with several condiments such as fish sauce and tiny green (Thai)chili peppers. Alongside will be a soup of some kind, a curry, a steamed or fried dish, a salad, all served with an array of prepared sauces. Desserts may consist of fresh fruit or one of the many traditional Thai sweets.

In today's world, where so many wake up in poverty and go to sleep hungry, each of us should ask: "how can I change this?" It is a sin to waste food while others do not have enough to eat. Every year the food waste in America alone can feed over 50 million people per year. Another example: if a farmer grows 100,000 pounds of tomatoes, usually about half of them (50,000 lbs) must be thrown away. This is because if a tomato is slightly misshapen, discolored, too small (or too big), or blemished in any way, it will not meet the consumer demand for a "perfect" tomato and will therefore be rejected.

This is true for many fruit and vegetable crops. To prevent trucks of produce from being rejected, crops are "culled" (hand sorted) after they are picked. About half goes into the truck on its way to the store. The other half goes into the truck going to the dump, or destined to be plowed under and sprayed with insecticide. The food being thrown away is not rotten or bad in any way.

"This is a fight we cannot afford to lose, the enemy is hunger", so said Ban Ki Moon yesterday in Rome. However his words fell on deaf ears. So far only a measly 3 billions has been "promised" to feed the 900 million who are on the verge of starvation. Yesterday I reported that a figure of an annual 30 billion has been calculated by the UN as the ballpark figure to address world hunger. Unfortunately this conference has been highjacked by a brace of tyrants, namely the odious Mugabe of Zimbabwe, and the bearded buffoon from Iran, Ahmadinejad, who  both managed to accuse the West for their ills. Additionally, Latin American countries are refusing to sign a declaration on dealing with the world food crisis, delegates at a UN food summit have told journalists (this is still developing) as a final declaration had been set to be released at 1500 GMT. Don't hold your breath.

The primaries are over! Now is the time to solve the real problems as world leaders gather in Rome for the second day of talks on food price escalation and, with luck, to settle on a common strategy to deal with the crisis, the FAO has put a price on eradicating hunger: $30bn. Yep! That's for one year.

In his opening presentation, FAO director general Jacques Diouf pointed out that, in 2006, the total amount spent by nations on arms was $1200 bn. Here are some horrifying figures: just one country could waste as much as $100bn, and excess consumption contributing to global obesity amounted to $20bn.

Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, said the solution to the current world food crisis had to include financial support for African farmers.

Attending the conference in his new role as the chair of Agra, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, he said the African farmer was the only farmer in the world that still took all the risks, often operating without financial support, expertise or safety nets.