Monopolies: World food grab

BHP Billiton's bid for Potash Corporation and Canadian fertiliser company Agrium's play for AWB fit in with the growing issue of food security and food shortages. This strategy by huge monopolies, with money to spare and no intention to waste it on reasonable taxes, is a warning of how food shortages and famine may increase feral corporate power.

In "The Coming Famine", Julian Cribb warns we are headed towards global food shortages in the next 40 years because of scarcities of water, good land, energy, nutrients, technology, fish and, significantly, stable climates.

"The coming famine is also complex, because it is driven not by one or two, or even half a dozen factors but rather by the confluence of many large and profoundly intractable causes that tend to amplify one another," Cribb writes. "This means that it cannot be easily remedied by 'silver bullets' in the form of technology, subsidies, or single-country policy changes, because of the synergetic character of the things that power it."

Elsewhere Professor Cribb writes:

"The fall in Australia’s international standing in agricultural science is reflected the fact that we provided almost none of the 400 scientists asked by the World Bank to report on the challenges facing global agriculture. Only a decade or so ago we were world leaders in this field.

The solutions to this phase of the global food challenge are laid out in the IAASTD report, which Australia has refused to support (along with the US and Canada) because we did not like the claim that GM crops were not the “silver bullet” some insist them to be, especially for poor farmers. We are thus out of step with world scientific opinion about what needs to be done."