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Note: Some platforms warn you about “active content” that could access your computer. If you don’t trust me not to give your computer a virus, you can browse this website without allowing the active content. The only difference is that the buttons below would not be highlighted when the cursor moves over them.
The following text is also prominent on my home page, because it is such an important issue:
Food prices are rising rapidly, particularly for the staple diets relied on in poor countries. They soared 40% from June 2007 to February 2008, and then a further 20% in just three weeks, according to the World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations agency responsible for distributing aid donated by governments around the world, which is demanding extra money from governments to avoid rationing aid. This has triggered demonstrations and riots in many contries, and a strike wave in China. The New Labour government in the UK is trying to restrict public sector pay rises to about 2% (the supposed level of inflation though real inflation is much higher), and is trying to get three year pay deals since it knows inflation is rising rapidly, and it will be necessary for workers here and in other Western countries to maintain living standards. Banks and building societies are increasing interest rates to borrowers so we pay for their crisis and to discourage us from paying more. In the USA, most mortgages are fixed rate for their entire term, so big rises in inflation will cause a massive crisis for banks, and the problem is far worse than just with “subprime” mortgages sold to people with poor credit records. Read my document The food crisis and financial meltdown, an edited version of which was published on the letters page of The Herald (one of the two Scottish broadsheet newspapers) on the 29th of March, for my analysis of these crises and suggestions of what can be done about them (such as strike action before or at the time of the next G8 summit).
You may like to visit my G8 summit worldwide general strike website.
I watched an IndyMedia video in the Autumn of 2004 which showed anarchists locking their arms together with metal bars and getting in front of Sainsbury’s lorries, with police being physically incapable of separating them – at the end, it was announced that all depots in the country had been similarly blockaded preventing fresh Sainsbury’s milk from arriving anywhere. This was a protest against the fact that that store’s own brand dairy products (along with those of every other supermarket apart from the Co-op and M&S) came from cows fed partially genetically modified (GM) feed; as a result there is Cravendale milk in Sainsbury’s and other supermarkets which is advertised as natural, tastes nicer, lasts seven days once opened, and costs about the same price for four pints. [I presume Cravendale is non-GM but I do not know for certain.] I found out about the scandal of GM products being introduced behind the public’s backs at the 2004 Earth First! Gathering, where I saw some leaflets produced and handed out outside Sainsbury’s stores calling for a boycott of that store’s dairy products, by anarchists along with farmers’ groups (including Farmers for Action who led the fuel blockades that forced the New Labour government to back down over petrol prices). It was pointed out that Sainsbury’s had been targeted because they had come out publicly against GM products in the past, but the fact that Lord Sainsbury was a New Labour Minister is perhaps another factor. Incidentally, it is a travesty of democracy that a lord, who has never been elected to any position, can be in the Cabinet
I came to the position at about that time (in time for the 2005 G8 summit when I made an issue of it) that GM food is a form of mass mind control, because they (specifically Monsanto) are not going to introduce a particular GM product without knowing its effects on people’s minds. There are an infinite number of ways food can be genetically modified so trials supposedly proving that GM food is safe (if that is indeed the conclusion) are massively flawed. However, there are many other ways of subduing the population, such as using additives, and GM food is probably less of an issue than I previously thought.
Nanotechnology, which was discussed at the 2005 Earth First! Gathering, has much more capability for mind control (although perhaps I am too influenced by the science fiction comedy series Red Dwarf in thinking that miniscule nano-bots in people’s blood can be used to control our minds).
Note that the following is rather out-of-date:
The TV programme Jamie's School Dinners has created a furore by exposing how children are fed junk food for their school dinners, as forced by the tiny amounts of money many councils spend on ingredients for school dinners – 35p on average according to a recent Soil Association report, about half that spent in prisons. He showed that when children were fed much given much more healthy food and drink, their behaviour at school tended to improve dramatically.
In my response to Gordon Brown’s Budget, I pointed out that he has supposedly promised £12.6 billion for schools, including £9.4 billion over four years to rebuild or refurnish 8,900 primary schools. It is questionable whether it is new money that Brown promised, but in any case, I pointed out that using large sums of money in this way is prioritising handing taxpayers’ money to the private sector via PFI and PPP rather than doing something that will massively benefit children. In the long run, spending some of that money on eliminating junk food from school dinners (which is not a high proportion of the total cost anyway bearing in mind that it costs around £1 per school student to cook the food) would benefit children’s education (as well as saving the NHS a lot of money in treating them for health-related problems while they are children and after they have grown up) and hence the supply of workers to big business, but despite Blair making some concessions to Jamie Oliver’s campaign, he has not promised the funding. It is prioritising short term profiteering by big companies, including those that supply the junk food and those that get involved in the PFI and PPP projects.
Jamie is a multi-millionnaire and public face of Sainsburys and openly stated in the series that he will not send his children to state schools, but he is clearly genuinely concerned about the health of ordinary working class children. I think I can forgive him also for not being a vegetarian...
