I THINK MINING

Can the mining industry do anything about the food shortage?  Here is the problem:

 

Mr Holmes, who is also the most senior UN official coordinating relief efforts, thinks we are just at the beginning of the crisis.  “What we are seeing so far is relatively limited, I’m glad to say, but there have been very severe protests in Haiti, for example. [There have been] riots and deaths in Egypt in bread queues and we’ve seen unrest in different counties in Africa. Most of the stapes of people’s diet – wheat and rice – have risen more than 50 per cent in the last 12 months and they’ve risen even more steeply than that very recently. There are some fundamental factors behind this. This is not just, I think, a sort of quick blip in prices which will return to normal shortly, it’s because there are these fundamental factors of the population rising, crops being used for bio-fuels, more sophisticated diets in places like India and China. [A] lack of strategic grain reserves and maybe also the effects of climate change and, for example, the drought in Australia affecting wheat production in recent years. That’s not helped either.”

I have not been able to find a correlation between the presence (or absence) of mines and the severity of food shortages.  Nor have I been able to find a correlation between the income of countries and their food-riot potential.  Although it is pretty obvious that in ill-governed countries like Haiti and too many places in Africa (Zimbabwe included) people are starving and will only get hungrier. 

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