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Trouble, Trouble, Trouble

weathering the storm

By Alan Caruba Sunday, January 13, 2008

I never fail to be amazed by all the problems there are in the world and the fact that we now learn about them instantly, no matter that they are occurring on the other side of the planet.

One problem is “wheat rust Ug99”. In times past, we would not have been asked to know or learn a thing about this fungus, but a story about it moved on one of the news sites and it turns out that it is now threatening wheat crops in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India. It is a form of black stem rust, first discovered in Uganda in 1999. Now think about it. It has gone from Africa to the Middle East and Asia in just under a decade!

Wheat Crop Management: http://www.randallcounty.org/extension/wheat.htm

It is killing wheat harvests and it is impervious to the usual fungicides or other chemicals applied. It is a variant of Puccinia graminis fungus and that is what Mother Nature does. Just when you get the handle on one threat to the crops, she comes up with a new twist. Famed scientist and father of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, says there are only three weapons available; fungicides, wheat breeding to create a resistant strain, and luck. Yes, luck! How’s that for bad news?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/_belial/760438311/

Translation: the cost of all food products that involve wheat is going to rise, perhaps dramatically, if a solution to this new crop threat is not found and soon. Every current strain of wheat around the world is susceptible to this fungus.

Americans have not been spared bad news this past week in the form of tornadoes showing up in places where they have been considered rare events. The weather got very nasty.

I tell people that Mother Nature has a message for mankind. It’s “Get out of the way! Here comes a tornado, a flood, a wildfire, a blizzard, a tsunami, an earthquake.”

There’s even a volcano in Ecuador threatening to erupt. It’s called Tungurahua and that just sounds like a volcano’s name! It’s 80 miles southeast of Quito and, if it goes off like Pinatubo did in the Philippines, it could change the weather of the planet for a couple of years. It would cool the planet, not warm it.

What is amazing is that there are people who actually claim that they or anyone else can “control” the weather and, thinking long term, the climate. They run around wailing about “climate change” hoping no one will say, “But the climate and the weather changes all the time.”

That’s the pitch, however, that the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and all the rest of the fear-mongers who keep telling everyone. They keep saying that if we just “conserve” energy or switch to some “alternative” form of energy, we will “save” the Earth. Oh yeah?

storm warning

You can’t really “conserve” energy. You either use it or you don’t. Try getting through the day without using it. Imagine being dependent on whether the wind is blowing for a couple of watts from a windmill or the sun is shining so a solar panel can churn out a watt or two?

These planet-savers can’t do diddly when it comes to wheat rust Ug99. They can’t control a hurricane. They can’t stop a blizzard. What they can do is get lots of money from suckers who think they can.

These same suckers don’t have any idea how these environmental groups are working day-in and day-out to impede progress for real farmers, real ranchers, real people who risk their lives to find new sources of oil and natural gas, real people who are trying to build a new nuclear or coal-fired plant. In short, the people that feed us and make sure there’s gas for your car and heat for your home or apartment.

Electricity? Try running your computer without it.

There will always be plenty of bad news and it won’t just be thanks to Mother Nature. Mankind has a pure genius for making trouble. When it comes in the form of a big state government, it comes with a guarantee that individual freedoms will be lost and lots of people will be killed.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/1360

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http://africanagriculture.blogspot.com/2007/04/uper-blight.html

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Super-blight threatens world wheat crop

“This thing has immense potential for social and human destruction,” says Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, the “father” of the Green Revolution, speaking of an infection that threatens muxh of the world’s wheat crop. Wheat feeds more people than any other single food source on the planet. And because of cutbacks in international research, the world is not prepared for Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999.

The famines that were banished by the advent of disease-resistant crops in the Green Revolution of the 1960s could return, Borlaug warns.Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties, and almost no wheat crops anywhere are resistant to it. The strain has spread slowly across east Africa, but in January 2007 spores blew across to Yemen, and north into Sudan. Scientists who have tracked similar airborne spores it will now blow into Egypt, Turkey and the Middle East, and on to India, lands where a billion people depend on wheat.

But there is hope : scientists have begun assessing the first Ug99-resistant varieties of wheat that might be used for crops. However, it will take another five to eight years to breed up enough seed to plant all the world’s wheat fields. The threat couldn’t have come at a worse time. Consumption has outstripped production in six of the last seven years, and stocks are at their lowest since 1972. Wheat prices jumped 14 per cent in 2006.

Black stem rust itself is nothing new. It has been a major blight on wheat production since the rise of agriculture, and the Romans even prayed to a stem rust god, Robigus. It can reduce a field of ripening grain to a dead, tangled mass, and vast outbreaks regularly used to rip through wheat regions. The last to hit the North American breadbasket, in 1954, wiped out 40 per cent of the crop.

In the cold war both the US and the Soviet Union stockpiled stem rust spores as a biological weapon.After the 1954 epidemic, Borlaug began work in Mexico on developing wheat that resisted stem rust. The project grew into the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, known by its Spanish acronym CIMMYT. The rust-resistant, high-yielding wheat it developed banished chronic hunger in much of the world, ended stem rust outbreaks, and won Borlaug the Nobel peace prize in 1970.

Yet once again Borlaug,now 93 and fighting cancer, is leading the charge against his old enemy. When Ug99 turned up in Kenya in 2002, he sounded the alarm. “Too many years had gone by and no one was taking Ug99 seriously,” he says. He blames complacency, and the dismantling of training and wheat testing programmes, after 40 years without outbreaks.

Now a Global Rust Initiative (GRI) is under way at CIMMYT. It’s head, Rick Ward, blames the delay on cuts, starting in the 1980s, in CIMMYT’s funding for routine monitoring and maintenance of crops and pests.”CIMMYT was slow to detect the extent of susceptibility to Ug99 [because] it didn’t have the scientific eyes and ears on the ground any more,” says Chris Dowswell of CIMMYT. “Once it did, it had to start a laborious fund-raising campaign to respond.”

Ward is now being promised adequate support as fears grow in rich wheat-growing countries, but meanwhile Ug99 has got worse. It was first noticed because it started appearing on wheat previously protected by a gene complex called Sr31, the backbone of stem rust resistance in most wheat farmed worldwide. Then in 2006 it acquired the ability to defeat another widely used complex, Sr24. “Of the 50 genes we know for resistance to stem rust, only 10 work even partially against Ug99,” says Ward. Those are present in less than 1 per cent of the crop.

The first line of defence is fungicide, but the poor farmers who stand to lose most from the blight generally cannot afford it, or don’t have the equipment or know-how to apply it. CIMMYT is considering “fire brigade” spray teams armed with cheap, generic fungicides in poor areas. However, they will be competing with the rich for fungicide, and depending on where Ug99 strikes, stocks could be limited.

Even rich countries face problems. The US has been fighting soybean rust with fungicide ever since spores blew in on hurricane Ivan in 2004. If Ug99 arrives as well, the US could be in trouble because it doesn’t make enough fungicide for both crops.

Ultimately, says Ward, the only real answer “is to get new, resistant varieties out there.” CIMMYT has been working on this by taking countries’ top-yielding varieties and crossing them with wheat from its seed collections that does resist Ug99. For two years now the crosses have been tested for resistance at field stations in Njoro, Kenya, and in Ethiopia, where it is safe to release Ug99 as it is already there. Resistant strains are sent back to CIMMYT in Mexico and assessed for yield and other qualities, then sent out again for further tests.

Resistant lines are now being grown on 27 plots in Nepal, India, Afghanistan and Pakistan. So far so good, but the real challenge is multiplying up enough resistant seed so that if Ug99 hits, there will be enough to plant the next crop. This takes time - and it will only happen if the new resistant varieties match or exceed existing yields. Nor is it an exact science. No one knows why wheat that looks good in Mexico might grow as well in Egypt, say, but fail in China unless it is crossed with a local variety.

There is nothing for it but to do the tests, says Ravi Singh, the GRI’s chief wheat pathologist. The resistant lines must be just as good as the ones people are growing now, he says, or farmers won’t use them, and government-owned seed companies that dominate the wheat industry in developing countries won’t sell them, no matter what new disease the scientists say is coming. Singh calculates that if he can get countries to devote 3 to 5 per cent of their wheat-growing area to resistant varieties, the seed harvest will be enough to plant the whole country with resistant wheat if Ug99 hits.

So it’s a race, and who wins depends on what Ug99 does now. Stem rust can arrive in a new area and lurk for years before it gets the right conditions for an outbreak. “It won’t suddenly explode everywhere. It will be like a moving storm,” says Dowswell. However, Ug99 has another ace up its sleeve. The spores blowing in the wind now are from the asexual stage that grows on wheat. If any blow onto the leaves of its other host, the barberry bush (Berberis vulgaris), they will change into the sexual form and swap genes with whatever other stem rusts they find.

Barberry is native to west Asia. “As if it wasn’t challenging enough breeding varieties that resist this thing,” laments Ward. “All I know is that what blows into Iran will not be the same as what blows out.”What’s more, Ug99 will find agriculture has changed to its liking in the decades stem rust has been away. “Forty years ago most wheat wasn’t irrigated and heavily fertilised,” says Borlaug.

Now, thanks to the Green Revolution he helped bring about, it is. That means modern wheat fields are a damper, denser thicket of stems, where dew can linger till noon, just right for fungus.Another worry is that travel has exploded in the past 40 years. There have now been several documented cases of travellers carrying rust spores on their clothing. Some fear Ug99 will hitchhike as much as it flies - and its spread need not be innocent.

Even at 93, Borlaug is looking to the long term. Eventually, scientists will have to create wheat with a wide spectrum of resistances. The genes may be hiding in other grains and grasses. “Why has rice had no rusts for millions of years?” he asks.For now, Borlaug says, we have to rely on fungicides, wheat breeding and luck. “We’re moving as fast as we can now, but we started three years too late,” he says. “We’d better have some good luck. Governments think this is still small and local, but these things build up.”

New Scientist

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Photograph by Royalty Free/CORBIS

February 20, 2008

http://survivalacres.com/wordpress/?p=1231

Until I Depart… Famines May Occur Without Record Crops This Year

Filed under: General, Collapse — admin @ 10:36 pm

I’m still here… hacking and coughing my way through the day. My recent warning about closing up sparked some interest and concern. Let me clarify this point I raised a bit more and see if it helps:

We all depend upon suppliers to keep us running, I’m no different, except nobody needs me. What I offer is a service, but it’s not a replacement or even an essential service.

Eventually, we’re all going to need to learn to grow our own food, my service is to provide food for when you can’t (and should) or it’s simply too late to try, or too dangerous, or just too far until the next harvest and on and on. There are a lot of good reasons to store food. Food storage is really a necessity. Right now, somebody else has actually been doing this for you your entire life. Those days are fast going away.

It is the existing food supply chain, from tractor manufacturers to farmers fields, to grain silos and warehouses and distribution centers from coast to coast, worldwide actually, to the grocery store shelves that are at the present time, keeping billions and billions of people alive (and the hundreds of thousands of semi-trucks). I’m one of the little guys out there who’s a part of all that, with a more unique value of having long-term storable food that can last several decades.

The stuff I have is for when you can’t get food anymore, because of it’s lack of availability, increased cost, or increased shipping. For some, including myself, it’s food I eat everyday. I save a bundle over the supermarket and eat a lot healthier too when I avoid them.

I believe food storage is incredibly essential and even more so now since this supply chain is now seriously threatened. I’ll be “here” doing this as long as I safely can, but after that, no, of course not. And I do not know know when that date of departure will be, nobody does. Our world keeps spiraling down, in time enough dominoes will fall where companies like mine will be put out of business or even outlawed. At least, that’s my best guess. And from the news I’m reading (remember, I don’t make the news), it’s a pretty accurate guess.

Found this over on Cryptogon today, but it’s really a Bloomberg article:

Famines May Occur Without Record Crops This Year, Potash Says

Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) — Grain farmers will need to harvest record crops every year to meet increasing global food demand and avoid famine, Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. Chief Executive Officer William Doyle said.

People and livestock are consuming more grain than ever, draining world inventories and increasing the likelihood of shortages, Doyle said yesterday in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Global grain stockpiles fell to about 53 days of supply last year, the lowest level since record-keeping began in 1960, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“If you had any major upset where you didn’t have a crop in a major growing agricultural region this year, I believe you’d see famine,’’ Doyle, 57, said in New York.

“We keep going to the cupboard without replacing and so there is enormous pressure on agriculture to have a record crop every year,” Doyle said. “We need to have a record crop in 2008 just to stay even with this very low inventory situation.”

I’m a serious as a heart attack about the collapse of civilization and why it’s happening. My own warnings about this fact are being broadly ignored (not here) by the “uninformed” (clueless?) masses despite the actual news sources I quote from.

If the above happens, the other domino to fall will be me and all the people that make me possible. And I won’t be alone, we’ll all “disappear”, lost in the background noise of collapse and personal survival. Scramble mode will be on, in full-force as we all depart our current way of life and go do something else (stay alive). In other words, those that are planning on food storage had better get their asses in gear. Plain enough?

It’s my best guess that we’ll all be here through 2008, but I really don’t know. I am as much at the mercy of the markets, climate and economy as anyone else (and the fascist Empire). When it all goes south, so do I. And I’m planning on that, actually. Always have. A multi-layer approach to life and living is always a good idea when things don’t go as hoped, especially when you know things are going to change quite dramatically in a very short span of time.

My confession as it were, was honest, and should be taken as another “dot” for everyone. Your job is on the line and your way of life too. How many of us have admitted to the pending reality of this fact? Unfortunately, absolutely nothing of any significance is being done about it, we’re all being left to figure this part out on our own.

It’s truly staggering in its implications when you think about. All the hopes, dreams, plans and efforts of millions upon millions of people, who are all living their lives without the realization it’s almost over…. If this doesn’t make you shudder, then I don’t suppose nothing will.

A long time ago, several decades in fact, I more or less “took a stand” against the status-quo, and the lies that were being spouted back then. My point being, I’ve been doing this a long time and it’s cost me far more then anyone here has ever realized. You don’t stand on the edge of the abyss without getting burned from the hell-fires below. Our world has been built upon illusions and dreams, almost none which are based upon reality. I do not know of any writer, author, speaker or outspoken person who has taken a stand against any of this that has not been burned. It comes with the “job”, but only because our world and it’s inhabitants is so out of whack with reality, truth, honesty and integrity that anyone who displays these characteristics immediately becomes a target.

I have always believed that a life worth living was a life worth living right. And by right, I mean truth and honesty and calling out the liars and the lies when you see them. This is most often perceived as a soapbox, and it is, but that doesn’t make it wrong either, it just makes it annoying at best, and dangerous at worst to those who don’t like what you’ve got to say.

Our world has been bamboozled into believing that we are individually voiceless, powerless and ineffective. Much of this is in fact true, but it’s only true because of our acceptance, which has led to our defeat. You are defeated when you’ve given up, but while you’re still alive, you can still hold to your principles and values. You might be beaten, but not defeated. I’ve been beaten, several times in fact, but never defeated. Inner strength and resolve is not dependent upon the external, all these things come from within.

We have all been beaten, browbeat into “acceptance” by the facts of their being “no choice” into being a part of this insane culture and society. Believe it or not, there is a breath of relief headed our way and it’s called collapse. While fascism and a black-boot police state is on a meteoric rise, we ourselves will also find something that we have long missed - resolve. When our backs are to the wall, some of us will finally grow the spines we’ve set aside and get on with the program of saving ourselves and dealing with what’s going on.

And it will not matter if we are defeated, because this is not the measure by which we live, and I think many will discover that, despite their apparent “defeat”. We have capabilities within us that remains yet to be discovered, of that, I am absolutely sure. And we’re going to need to discover these — if we intend to survive.

I have often pondered if my messages actually make sense to you. I am not the most articulate, well versed or skilled in crafting the words that I’m trying to convey. There is spirit and life in words, if done rightly, and that’s what I’m trying to do here often enough. When talking about collapse, it is in these things that we will need to find the strength to continue and they are spirit and life. We are facing the most terrifying time of mankind’s history, and we’re totally unprepared for this in reality.

It’s been said that this is “impossible to plan for” which is actually true, and because of this, we can only do what we can, when we can, while we can, but from within we are still going to need to find the resolve, the integrity, the truthfulness and the honesty to do the right thing, when, while and where we can.

Or we can become barbarians, arrogant, uncaring, unforgiving and insensitive to the suffering that will lie all around us. We are all known by the same measure we mete out and it will be no different in the future. The only difference will be when your measure causes the death of someone else — or even yourself.

I can only barely convey the difficulty the lies before us all. But we need to dwell long and hard on who we are and what we are as we ponder our future and our past. Are we chattel? Or just mere cattle? Do we stand for anything? Or nothing? By what value do we measure our own self-worth or lack thereof? Most importantly, what do we hope to gain in the future, in a collapsing world? Anything? Anything at all? What about truth? What about perspective? Will we walk in balance, or will we tip the world into a irrecoverable disarray and doom the entire human race?

Hard questions, hard choices, but all true. Questions we should be asking now.

Who are you? Are you the same person now that you will be then? Why not? Will you stand up then, but not now?

Impossible words — words that should not be asked, or should they?

You are known already… we all are. Not only by each other, your friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, but even by the “other guys”, the ones who are making profiles and lists, and checking them twice… there is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed… know this — and ACT accordingly.

I ponder many things, even words which I do not dare convey because they are so often and so easily misunderstood. Looking back over life, what do you see? And looking ahead, what do you find?

If there is to be any dignity in our lives, any meaning, or any purpose and any reason for our existence and our day to day struggle to simple live, it will be found from within ourselves, irregardless of what is going on in the external world.

I watched a very disturbing movie last night, titled “Rendition” and I thought of the barbaric nature that now characterizes much of this country. This is not us – this is NOT what we have become, not what I have become. It is what THEY have become or always were.

We are already beset on every side by evil men and woman cloaked in phony robes of righteousness and “public service” — we see warnings of this evil in the news every single day and it’s growing worse. There is a terrible sick darkness that is creeping over this country and it is not just “collapse”, it is a moral bankruptcy coming from a deluded religious rightwing extreme that claims a self-righteous superiority over life, over entire nations, over peoples and races, and over lands and everything that lies within them. I know it’s roots and from whence it came — and many of you do too. I’ve studied it for decades and it’s culminating just now.

Harvesting Wheat
(Courtesy of Tradestone International)

Collapse signifies far, far more then just “survival” of the physical, but the moral, the spiritual and the sense of self and balance in the world, and it’s all coming under attack. Those that oppose this evil will be attacked, physically and spiritually. It’s already well underway, you can cut it like a knife. You’ll have to be as ready and as resolved as you can be to deal with this. I can only equip you with words, but it’s my hope that they will impart something of worth to your defense.

A terrifying ‘reaction’ is about to happen in America — do you know what I’m speaking of? A lot of dreams and false hopes are about to be shattered beyond all recognition… it’s not just the collapse, that’ll be a big part of it, but something far deeper in the American psyche and throughout the world. It will be the loss of faith, hope and future.

Religion will fail. Hope will fail. Future will fail. The dreams and ambitions of everyone will fail. In it’s place will be anger, desperation and rage. And despair — bucket loads and bucket loads of despair on every hand.

Imagine a giant slinky stretched taught, almost to its breaking point and then suddenly released. That describes the situation in the world today, about to be released with a resounding craaaaaackkkk. That crack will destroy everything in it’s path and everything that was built upon that stretched spring. It’s our civilization and our culture and our way of life and everything these terms represent. Gone.

It will be replaced with what I’ve long said — anger, reaction, wrath, control, fascism, police state, confiscation, nationalization, imprisonment. We’re already well on are way there now.

Dead along the way will be the institutions that have held us up (or held us back) to be replaced with new false gods. The god of Consumerism will be replaced with the god of Obedience. The god of Independence will be replaced with the god of Informants, Freedom with Fascism, and on and on. It’s happening right now, it’s in the daily news!

America is crafting a new religion, not many can see it yet, and it’s polluting the entire world. You – you are stuck in the belly of the beast. It’s not a very comfortable place to be, in fact, probably one of the worst places on Earth, but that is what it is. Most of us have decided to stay for one reason or another and it’s doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is how we choose to live. We are NOT them.

I wish I had words to unify and create the community and the cooperation that is so desperately needed, but I don’t. We have not suffered enough yet. We’ve got a long ways to go before that will happen and there will be many cast aside first in this brave new world of fascist folly and desperate acts of delusional madness. My ‘hope’ as it were, is that we brace ourselves as best we can, because it’s coming and there’s not a lot we can do about it.

Until I depart… I remain here, planted in reality — for now.