Date:   10/23/2007 9:07:29 PM ( 17 y ago)
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URL:   https://www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=1027468

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US Food Riots Closer Than You Think

By Robert Felix

I spent about thirty years working in commercial agribusiness. My
main job was to purchase ingredients, mainly grain, for flour mills
and animal feed mills. As a part of my job, I was forced to
understand the US food supply system, its strengths and weaknesses.
Over the years, I became aware of some things that nearly all
Americans are completely unaware of. I am going to make a list of
statements and then you will see where I'm going.

-- 1% of the US population grows all of the food for all Americans.

-- Nearly all Americans know essentially nothing about where the food
they eat every day comes from. How it gets from the ground to them.
And they don't want to know about it. It's cheap, as close as their
local store, and of high quality. So no worries.

-- The bulk of the food we eat comes from grain. Although they raise
a lot of fruits and vegetables in California, Arizona, Florida,
Oregon and Washington, those things don't compose the main part of
the average diet. Half of what a meat animal is raised on is grain so
when you eat meat you are really eating grain. And, of course, we eat
grain directly as bread, bagels, doughnuts, pasta, etc. Milk (and
milk products like cheese) comes from cows that eat grain. A lot of
grain. And the grain they eat is not produced where the cows are
located.

-- The lion's share of grain produced in the US is done in a
concentrated part of the US Midwest (Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri
is the center of this area). The grain is moved to the coasts (where
70% of the population live) by only TWO (2) railroads.

-- Nothing is stored for very long in a supermarket. One day grain
travels (by rail) from Kansas to Seattle to a flour mill. The next
day the flour mill makes the flour and sends it to a bakery. The next
day the bakery makes it into bread (and other baked things) and the
next day it is at the store where it is purchased that day. Nobody
stores anything. The grain is produced and stored in the Midwest and
shipped daily in a single railroad pipeline to the rest of America
where the people live.

-- Up until the 1980s there was a system that stored a lot of grain
in elevators around the country. At one time, a whole year's harvest
of grain was stored that way. But since taxpayers were paying to
store it, certain urban politicians engineered the movement of that
money from providing a safety net or backup for their own food supply
in order to give the money to various other social welfare things. So
now, nothing is stored. We produce what we consume each year and
store practically none of it. There is no contingency plan.

Now for my take on what this means for us.

-- If a drought such as has lingered over other parts of the US where
little grain is grown were to move over the grain-producing states in
the Midwest where few people live, it would seriously damage the food
supply of the country and the apples of Washington, the lettuce of
California, the grapefruit of Florida and the peanuts of Georgia
won't make up the difference because grain is the staff of life and
most of it is grown in the Midwest.

-- Americans are armed to the teeth. In LA people burned down their
own neighborhoods to protest a court case.

--In order for riots to break out the whole food supply doesn't have
to be wiped out. It just has to be threatened sufficiently. When
people realize their vulnerability and the fact that there is no
short term solution to a severe enough drought in the Midwest they
will have no clue as to what they should do. Other nations can't make
up the difference because no other nation has a surplus of grain in
good times let alone in times when they are having droughts and
floods also. It takes two or three months to raise grain, yet people
have to eat usually at least once a day, usually more than that.

So, basically, we have in place a recipe for a disaster that will
dwarf any other localized disasters imaginable. The important thing
to note is that there is no solution for this event. There is no
contingency plan for this. People living in certain parts of the US
will fare better than others (which is another story) but those who
live in big cities, where most of the US population live, are done
for. The only people who know about this are those who are involved
in the production and distribution of the food supply and there are
very, very few of them number-wise. And most of them haven't put two
and two together yet, either.

It's likely too late for the government to do anything to prepare for
such an event, so it probably won't do any good to try to lobby them
for a solution. If they hopped right on it they could store up enough
grain to be ready, but they won't. They're more concerned with urban
political issues and invading other countries than they are about
preserving the security of their own food supply. I guess the people
who could prevent it have bunkers so that they can hide in when
the 's' hits the fan.






 

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