Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Monday, April 21, 2008
Some U.S. consumers may be buying up extra bags of staples figuring the prices will only be going up in the near future. Others are buying up staples in a survival mode.
The so-called survivalists who have previously been viewed as the lunatic fringe are now being seen through what might be called a more pragmatic lens.
The NY Times ran a piece in it’s Fashion and Style section on April 6Th on the ‘new survivalists’. Is the implication it is now ‘fashionable, or stylish’ to stockpile supplies for a crisis?
CNN also ran an articlelast Sunday about ’survivalists’. A ‘former U.S. army intelligence officer’ featured in the piece has a 3 year supply of food stashed on his property; a ranch in an ‘undisclosed location.’
For whatever reason people are suddenly waking up to the fact that life as we know it is teetering on the brink of…not being what we will recognize…deciding to become more self-reliant can’t be a bad thing, or can it?
Of course we should all be responsible for our own survival during times of disaster. Anyone that has grown up in earthquake or tornado country knows there is always a possibility we could be left to our own devices for a number of days or even weeks following either.
Is the new trend toward survivalism going to lead to a nation of stingy, jaded-eye hoarders? Will people start to secretly hide sacks of rice under their beds and potatoes under their floor boards? Will they be looking at their neighbors wondering who among them they will have to fight with to protect the rice under their beds?
Will people become isolationists in their own neighborhoods and buildings in an effort to keep friends and neighbors in the dark about their stockpiles of food? Too few of us don’t know our neighbors now. Won’t the ‘every man for himself’ mentality pit us all against each other even further?
It looks to me like we are in the first stages of a total breakdown of civility. Is this the divide and conquer tactic, and if so by whom are we being divided?
Stories like this one are sprouting up all over. Costco employees snatching bags of rice from customers buggies who try to buy more than the limit. Keep in mind the limit varies. Apparently Costco is looking at ‘prior purchasing history’. At a Costco in Queens there was no limit on rice, but there was a limit on oil and flour.
Each one of these articles I’ve linked to above, reference the same ‘former U.S. army intelligence officer’. No small deal. Maybe he’s gone into the P.R. business in his spare time.
In researching this entry I found about 668,000 matches for survivalism.
Like the Boy Scouts say, “Be prepared”. But, I have to wonder if I’m prepared to defend what’s in my cupboard.
Labels: Costco, Food Crisis, Food Riots, Food Shortage, Hoarding, Rice, Survivalist, survivalism
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Food Shortages and Buying Limits Reach the U.S. Now that Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is full, will she have to shoot her dog to protect it?
Friday, April 18, 2008
On April 9, we published a little entry about bigger families becoming the new status symbol. We mentioned that Ted Turner thinks global warming could lead to cannibalism. Could it be the famous ‘mouth of the south’ got it right?
Market analysts started to verbalize that the cost of food would be taking a sharp
rise as the price per barrel of oil kept hitting record highs. Stories about an eminent lack of food looming on the horizon weren’t being dealt with, not with any sense of urgency at least. No, there was no time for that, not with the U.S. election coverage, designed to send the nation into a collective coma playing non-stop.
Then Ted Turner came out with his comments on too many people too little food and how someday we would all be dead from starvation and those left would be eating each other.
A day or two later the news did mention the Haitians were actually rioting over the price of food. Those riots did result in lowering the price of rice. Then, like a pot that finally boiled over, the stories began to spill out over the Internet. The crisis is still only trickling out over cable news. But, the news about LiLo, the Britster, Obama and Clinton is still abundant. Abundant Hollywood and Washington D.C. news, unlike the world wide lack of food.
Port-Au-Prince, Cairo, the sub-Saharan, and Malaysia. Governments in some Asian countries have too limits on how much rice can be purchased in an effort to limit the hoarding of food by panicked shoppers. Even Thailand which exports millions
of tons more rice than it consumes has taken steps to limit the amount of rice shoppers can buy.
El Salvador’s President Saca calls the impending crisis a scandalous storm that might become a hurricane. “How long can we withstand the situation? We have to feed our people, and commodities are becoming scarce.” Saca also said, “This is a perfect storm,” while attending the World Economic Forum on Latin America earlier this week.
On April 11, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)warned that food riots in developing countries will spread unless something was done about the price of food for the poor. FAO director General Jacques Diouf said at a news conference “The reality is that people are dying already in the riots.”
There are reportedly food riots taking place in 22 nations already. Food riots had already broken out in Indonesia, the Philippines and Haiti plus several African countries. North Korea may be on the brink. Will global warming clean out a cupboard near you?
Labels: Food Crisis, Food Riots, Food Shortage, Global Warming, Ted Turner, U.N. FAO
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Where Has All The Food Gone? Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard; maybe it’s there.
