Much of the North American continent is suffering drought. I’ve mentioned before the inevitable, but horrible, effect on corn prices. That’s one of the reasons why as a fellow WP blogger, petrel41, points out some Americans are going hungry this year.
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Thanks for your link
I just wish I could remember that dear kitty and petrel41 are the same person! Which name do you prefer?
petrel41, as Dear Kitty is really the name of the readership of the blog.
See
http://dearkitty1.wordpress.com/about/
The problem about the hunger problem in the US is that there’s more than a few reasons why there’s a hunger problem.
The most obvious part of the hunger problem is this year’s drought. Although it’s really going to make food prices jump this winter, if you take a closer look at food prices over the past 5 years you will see that they’ve been steadily rising each and every year across the board and minimum wage has not kept up with these rising food prices.
The price of fuel has also steadily risen and that’s tied directly to the rising food prices since it takes fuel to run the tractors which both plant and harvest our crops, and run the trucks which haul our crops to market, food factories, and finally grocery stores.
A lot of people want to blame the US’s current troubles on the housing crisis and financial collapse that began about five years ago. They are right to do so but the fullest impact of the financial collapse hasn’t even arrived yet. (I base this on the way the Great Depression of the 1930′s happened.)
The most secret reason of our steadily increasing hunger problem is the NAFTA trade agreement which President Clinton signed into being. When that happened, American factories began to close in ever-increasing numbers and the work went overseas or south of the border. Unfortunately for the American workers who were left behind, few new jobs arrived to take the places of the old jobs and of those new jobs, few paid as much as the old jobs did. What really hurt was the loss of all the service jobs that were necessary to keep our factories open and running: Skilled machine maintenance, trucking, secretarial, inspectors, construction, and management to name just a few.
America’s agricultural situation isn’t in good shape either.
Well, this is all I can think of just off the top of my head.
:[
Thank you for these thoughtful and thought-provoking remarks.
It seems kind of “wrong” to hit “LIKE” for such a post as this. Scary times.
I feel the same when ‘Liking’ a post full of bad news. But I find that it feels great when people do ‘Like’ my words.
I wonder how many people over here in Britain go hungry. Perhaps it’s well hidden.
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