85 Trucks of food, 35 tons each, full of money.

Dear Family and Friends,
Headline news on the propaganda mill one day this week was that three trillion Zimbabwe dollars had been raised for President Mugabe's 84th birthday party. I thought about what you could do with that much money but before I could work it out I had to check in a dictionary just exactly how much a trillion was.

My sources say that a billion is a thousand million and a trillion is a million million. This means that for the President's birthday celebration being held in Beitbridge, there is a pile of money which on paper is a 3 followed by 12 zeroes. Even in Zimbabwe's collapsed state, 3 trillion dollars is a huge amount of money. It didn't take long before my kitchen table was littered with bits of scrap paper covered with handwritten sums. Why didn't I just use a calculator you might ask? That's simple, there are too many digits and so this sum had to be done by hand.

The calculations took some time to perform and the results were shocking. For three trillion dollars I could buy three million kilograms of maize meal at the present Grain Marketing Board price of a million dollars a kg. This, of course, is assuming that the GMB had any maize meal for sale, which they say they haven't. Allowing half a kg of maize meal per person, 6 million Zimbabweans, half the population of the country, could have had one decent meal with the President's birthday party money. A friend who is far more mathematically minded than me, and had more patience with all those lines of zeroes, worked the figures out a different way. 85 trucks, each holding 35 tonnes of maize, could have been filled with the three trillion dollars of birthday party money.

Moving away from the dollars, I went in search of ingredients usually found at a birthday party. Three major supermarket chains which have outlets all over the country were visited. The cake came first on my list but there was no flour, sugar, margarine, baking powder, milk or eggs in any of the supermarkets.
Puddings and sweet treats were next on my list but there was no jelly, instant pudding, custard, biscuits or tarts to buy. Sandwiches, I thought, they are good for parties but there was no bread or rolls, no spread, cheese, cold meats or sandwich fillings to buy. What about a hot meal I thought but there was no maize meal, rice, pasta or potatoes and so that idea was also a non starter.

The shopping list and the search for ingredients was a pointless exercise but at least it was easier than trying to understand the latest official inflation figures. In January 2008 inflation was one hundred thousand, five hundred and eighty percent - it is the stuff of hellish nightmares and the reason why we parents can't sleep at night.

Trying to understand three trillion dollars was utterly absurd for an ordinary mum in a collapsed country. Hardest of all though was knowing that half the population of the country could have gone to bed tonight on a full stomach if the birthday party had been sacrificed for the suffering, hungry people of a country whose 84 year old ruler has been in power for almost 28 years.
Until next time, thanks for reading, love cathy.

From Cathy Buckle @: http://www.cathybuckle.com/thisweek.shtml

More about food

I relink the guardian news about food production here, because I think it is very important and its well written and researched. It's a scary piece of news I admit, but I would like to add a few things that are not mentioned in the article. One, maybe a minor one, is the fact that fish stocks around the world are being depleted, that means that fish are being taken out of the water at a faster rate than they can procreate, and this has being going on for quite a few years, a consequence of this is that fish stocks close to developed countries have pretty much maxed out, and in turn our ships go far away, even to underdeveloped countries coast's to 'harvest' their fish, as a result villages and cities that depended a great deal on their fishing have to look elsewhere for food, and that probably means grain imports. (haven't really researched this one, its pure speculation)

Another issue they don't mention is water, as you know, water is an absolute necessity in order to grow food, and intensive agriculture requires intensive irrigation which requires water that many times is sourced by withdrawing water from aquifers faster than they naturally recharge. Result: water tables are falling pretty much everywhere: Citing Lester Brown: "Over-pumping is occurring in an alarming number of countries throughout the world. In parts of the North China Plain, water levels are dropping by ten feet per year, which is particularly disturbing since this region produces half of China's wheat and one-third of its corn. India is over-pumping in every state except in the northeast. There is extensive over-pumping in the southern Great Plains of the U.S. In fact, over half of the world's people live in countries where water tables are falling." And what is one of the effects of global warming? Yes, droughts in dry places and floods in wet places (quite generally).

And now add to this that energy is more expensive: They do mention as a factor that high oil prices will have an effect on the aid budget, that is obvious. Another fact is that high oil prices (and overall high energy prices) makes irrigation and all the harvesting process even more expensive, possibly pricing out farmers in poorer countries with no access to subsidies, which maybe will turn to subsistence agriculture instead of feeding the locals... that will just increase demand for grains making them more expensive until people will not be able to afford it. Another thing the article fails to mention is that the turn to bio-fuels is actually caused by high oil prices, maybe somebody will think that it is due to global action against global warming and maybe up to some extent it is (although some research has come to the conclusion that growing bio-fuels is actually worse due to the CO2 emitted by deforestation and other factors) , but the main cause is the dependence on the every-day-more-expensive oil imports. And why is that? well fellas, that is one of the first consequences of peak oil. More about this another day.

Well that' enough for now, I know I leave so many things out but I have to get some work done... Please does somebody has anything optimistic to say?

More Nice News on a Very Nice Day

It is a bright sunny day, I feel almost like singing!

So here we go again with the story of the downer cow in a "meat packaging factory" in California.
Nice piece of news which comments on the reality that the meat industry (how an awful and truthful name!) is concentrated on a few hands, which pushes prices down and conditions to animal welfare lower: "Under such conditions, we can expect the meat packers to continue seeing animals as industrial commodities that must be processed as cheaply as possible to maintain profitability. And we can expect more abuse - both of animals and of the safety of our food supply." But I think that what matters is that people in general are not used to question what is on the tip of their forks, or to give a damn about where it comes from, it is this rooted ignorance which keeps the shit flowing... and given the capitalist system that we inhabit I doubt that things can turn around, as the media is controlled by private companies there to make a buck, and believe me when I say that telling people not to eat meat (or that type of meat) is bad business for big business... So draw your own conclusions, but the picture is clear.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/tom_philpott/2008/02/how_now_downer_cow.html

And now for a bit of Cosmology: Space junk, what a laugh!
"According to the space agency Nasa, there are now 9,000 pieces of orbiting junk, weighing a total of more than 5,500 tonnes: old rocket launchers, tools and instruments dropped by astronauts, and pieces of exploded spacecraft."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/feb/24/spaceexplorationspacejunk

Enough for now, gotta get out, enjoy the sun and maybe have a Belgian beer or two... or three what the hell I feel thirsty now!

One more thing, and I warn you that this is not for sensitive stomachs, yes, it's another food factory horror story. I'll post nicer things tomorrow, I promise.

Cookie Pizza

Maybe I should come up with a better name, but it somehow resembles a cookie. This is a dessert pizza, it has mascarpone, Chocolate from a chocolate and chilli Lint tablent, and pieces of pear soaked in rum. It was a worthy dessert for another fine pizza night.

Links of the day

Some news here are last weeks, but are valid anyway....

another food horror story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/feedarticle?id=7317239
A California meatpacker accused of animal cruelty is making the largest U.S. meat recall on record -- 143 million lbs (65 million kilos), the U.S. Agriculture Department said on Sunday. Most of the meat, raw and frozen beef products, probably has already been consumed...
and two vids with footage of what was going on:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-5FUaK3FOM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTZTCNnrUNY
nice uh... just stop for a minute and think that this can't be an isolated case but just a normal consequence of how the meat industry works, i mean, already the way the live can be considered as a torture. and we pay this bastards for this, so we are all responsible...

Government apathy sabotages Britain's shift to a low-carbon economy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/18/energy.economy

Oil firms' output is down, yet profits skyrocket. It all points to the crisis predicted by the peakists
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2252581,00.html

Tesco hits new lows with the £2 chicken

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/tesco-hits-a-new-low-with-arrival-of-the-163199-chicken-778672.html

wow, yeah, the 2pound chicken, isn't it great to have cheap food! check this out then:

and part two:





A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-worlds-rubbish-dump-a-garbage-tip-that-stretches-from-hawaii-to-japan-778016.html