Monsanto: A Corporate Profile

"Monsanto is a global agricultural biotechnology company that specializes in genetically engineered (GE) seeds and herbicides, most notably Roundup herbicide and GE Roundup Ready seed.GE seeds have been altered with inserted genetic material to exhibit traits that repel pests or withstand the application of herbicides. In 2009, in the United States alone, nearly all (93 percent) of soybeans and four-fifths (80 percent) of corn were grown with seeds containing Monsanto-patented genetics.The company’s power and influence affects not only the U.S. agricultural industry, but also political campaigns, regulatory processes and the structure of agriculture systems all over the world."

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The Future of Food

More on the Food Crisis....escalating prices...from Economist.com

"Influences outside agriculture make matters worse: a weaker dollar makes restocking cheaper in local currencies..."

The Great Food Crisis of 2011

"It is no longer conflict between heavily armed superpowers, but rather spreading food shortages and rising food prices -- and then political turmoil this would lead to -- that threatens our global future..." (Tunisia, Egypt, and others)

Read the whole article, The Great Food Crisis of 2011, by Lester R. Brown

Recovery, Inflation, Food Prices

The Automatic Earth sums up - Recovery, Inflation, and Food Prices in Zombie Money Kills Real People
..."There will be a Keynesian factor which clings to the theory that says it is indeed possible to borrow your way up, but that's a mere mirage, since it would require a surge in real productivity, i.e., outside of the service industry...manufacturing today counts for 10% of US jobs."

..."I'm all for a society, a government, that takes care of the weakest in its midst. I'm all against a government that props up the strongest in its midst, in this case the bankers with bonuses larger in one year than the weaker among us can make in a lifetime, the same bankers who lost more money in bad wagers than the entire country can cough up, and still be economically viable. We're fast becoming zombie societies."

..."What we know for sure is that the zombie money we elected to have flow through our financial systems is going to kill a lot of people this year. Want to plead innocence? How long do you think that excuse will be accepted?

Cue Tunisia.

Where our zombie money kills real people. Today."

World Moves Closer to Food Price Shock

More on the world Food Crisis...

And Its' Back...

taken from Science blogs by Sharon Astyk, January 12, 2011

"The Food Crisis, of course. In fact it never really left - since 2007 we've had more hungry people on the planet than ever before in human history, and while we've seen brief declines in the numbers of the hungry worldwide, those declines were of such short duration that they were essentially meaningless - earlier this year when the UN trumpeted that the number of the hungry had dropped back below 1 billion, it admitted that this excluded the Pakistan flood victims, the impacts of the crisis in the Russian wheat crop and a host of other late-year issues."

"Why is it back? Well a combination of factors..."