Starvation by Design
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what they’re selling
and what we’ll get
The WSJ has yet another report on the catastrophic effects of Sri Lanka’s ban on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Europe will be next, then the U.S.
The ban on imports of agricultural chemicals took effect in May 2021, and the rice harvest the following March was down 40%, according to government data. Prices soared. Sri Lanka, which had been largely self-sufficient in rice, was forced to use some of its fast-dwindling foreign reserves to import the key staple. Other crops, like tea, an important foreign-exchange earner, have also suffered. In May, the country defaulted on its external debt.
Nearly 6.3 million Sri Lankans lack access to adequate food, the United Nations World Food Program reported last month, and well over half of households are cutting back on meals or eating less-nutritious foods. Food inflation crossed 90% in July, according to official data.
“Never before in modern history have we faced famine of this scale,” President Ranil Wickremesinghe said last month.
…
Sanath Sisira tried sprinkling cow and chicken manure onto his fields, which helped his guava plants some but had zero effect on his rice crop.
“You can’t just throw food waste into the fields,” he said. Without chemical pesticides, he added, bugs have devoured his melon crop. He says trucks hauling crops are trailed by flocks of crows, as they are crawling with insects.
Hold onto that image; you’ll be seeing it soon.
Back in 2018, NPR interviewed Alex de Waal, a professor at Tufts who has studied and written about famines for three decades. It’s a fascinating interview, and I recommend reading it in its entirety, but here’s the takeaway relevant to this post:
Famine is not a natural disaster — it's primarily man-made.
…. de Waal argues … from his analysis of famines over the last 150 years,[that] few of them were due to natural disasters such as drought or flooding or simply an inability of a place to produce enough food.
Instead de Waal found that 70 percent of the deaths occurred in famines that were fully man-made, meaning they were created by government policies that were either recklessly incompetent (exhibit A is the Great Leap Forward) or expressly intended to starve people in the vein of the Nazi Hunger Plan.
Is what we are about to receive caused by government policies that are “recklessly incompetent”, or “expressly intended to starve people”? What difference, now, does it make?
And here’s one more related thought:
The world’s food supply is being attacked by one amorphous group of “environmentalists” aiming at different targets but with the same goal of reducing the world’s population down to a tidier, more manageable size of 500,000 (with reserved seating for themselves). One subset of the global warmist swarm is the organic fooders, who try, usully successfully, to terrorize the proletariate with tales of cancer-causing chemicals. Thanks to incredible advances in technology that can now detect nanoparticles of chemical compounds, we now hear horror tales of deadly toxins present in quantities measured in parts per trillion.
While we’re busy banning those deadly poly-fluoroalkyl substances, for instance, and condemning farmland that holds trace particles of them, the general population might want to step aside from the screaming headlines on their television to consider what a recent study found:
Just sayin’.
