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Caribbean-Latin America

Haiti's Prime Minister Fired After Deadly Riots Over Food Costs

2008-04-13

Haitian Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was voted out of office by the country's senate today after violent protests over rising food prices, news agencies reported.

President Rene Preval, who called the no-confidence vote ``unjust,'' announced a 15 percent cut in the price of rice, which had doubled this week to $70 for a 50-kilogram (110-pound) bag, Agence France-Presse reported. No replacement for Alexis was announced. Haiti is the latest country to suffer unrest from soaring costs for basic foods, joining a list that includes Egypt, Mexico and Ivory Coast. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the director of the International Monetary Fund, said today that rising prices for wheat, corn and soybeans could wipe out a decade of progress in the developing world.

Posted by:Fred

#1 Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the director of the International Monetary Fund, said today that rising prices for wheat, corn and soybeans could wipe out a decade of progress in the developing world.

There are many reasons for food prices to grow so rapidly. Chief among them are these:

1. The high price of oil. It takes oil and oil products to grow, harvest, transport, market, and deliver food.
2. The European blather about "genetically modified foods" that keep yields down and losses high for many small farmers and subsistence agriculture.
3. The action on the part of the Europeans and Chinese to reduce the value of the American dollar. This has played a large part in rising food prices, since the US is the breadbasket of the world.
4. The conversion of food into "fuel" through the "biofuels" fiasco. If we want to convert vegetable matter into something that will burn in an automobile, let's do it with something that doesn't have another, more important use.
5. A constant increase the numbers of mouths to feed. The muslims and their "baby factories" may yet outnumber us, or they may ALL starve for lack of food. It doesn't matter if you have a population of 10 billion, if 9.9billion of those are so malnurished they can't perform even the simplest jobs, or suffer from severe mental retardation from lack of proper foods.

A lot of people seem to see the high cost of food as something that "just happened". Actually, human intervention has done considerably to bring about the current problem.

Posted by: Old Patriot 2008-04-13 22:30

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