[davep]

Here's an alternative take on what happened:

State investigates LaGrange organic food business

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '�')��They blocked every effort to try to get information,” including ordering two county health officials off their property prior to the Dec. 1 execution of a search warrant by Lorain County sheriff’s deputies.

Sheriff’s Capt. Rich Resendez denied online reports of a SWAT team being part of the search.

[HeckuvaJob]

If you read the Sheriff Department’s Incident report it makes it sound about as dramatic as returning an overdue library book. I guess it's no surprise that each side would give a biased account of the event, just like you'd see with a car accident, divorce, ...the global war on terror.

[Jenab6]

Apparently, the state became suspicious that a White family in rural Ohio was running a "members only" food cooperative without a license. The state's Department of Agriculture responded by sending heavily armed troopers to hold the family, including grandchildren, at gunpoint for nine hours, while they carted away all the family's food, computers, and cell phones. (Plus, we assume, any trinkets or loose change that might have seemed "suspicious.")

http://www.whitecivilrights.com/governm ... #more-1421

http://www.christianworldviewnetwork.co ... 7/Brannon-

Do you suppose that this policeman is wearing a face mask because it's cold? Or is it because he doesn't want to be recognized, lest antagonized Americans do unto his family exactly what he is doing to someone else's family?

Jerry Abbott

[marq=left]Topics merged by wisconsin_cur[/marq]

[misterno]

why didn't they get a license? Were they violating the law?

[Tyler_JC]

Or it could have been headlined:

"Fraudulent small business has assets confiscated."

It's all about perception.

[mommy22]

A friend of mine knows these people. They were operating as a sort of food coop, and were selling eggs without the blessing of the ag dept. So, apparently, they came in a took all of their food.
My friend kind of gets areound the regs by offering her eggs on a donation basis. They needed to learn the tricks of the trade.

[wisconsin_cur]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')ec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Mike Vis hooks a pump to a grain silo in Minnesota and siphons out enough of his corn to feed 91 people for a year. This batch will fuel vehicles in Houston for 21 seconds.

American roads, hungry for corn in the form of the motor fuel ethanol, never figured in the livelihoods of earlier generations of Rock County growers. In the 1930s, some considered it a sin to burn corn in home furnaces.

“They felt it was a food, and there’s always hungry people in the world,” said Andy Steensma, the mayor of Luverne, the county seat.

Today, burning crops like corn, soybeans and sugar cane for fuel is policy in the U.S., Brazil and the European Union -- while almost 1 billion of the world’s 6.8 billion people are hungry, the most in a generation. About 95 percent of what Vis grows feeds vehicles in the western U.S. -- the destination for ethanol produced in his local plant -- not people or animals.

“It does not make sense to put our food into the gas tank,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who advises the United Nations on reducing hunger. “It’s not a healthy link, that’s for sure.”

[Arsenal]

Not really a food crisis but funny nevertheless.

I was picking up some friends in a Burger King yesterday and found a sign on the door, cash register, and menu, stating that they did not have any burger. I asked my friend and he said it was from an E-coli outbreak but almost every person still asked for a burger. Even with all the signs and some of them were getting pissed. Idiots.

1. Why order ANYTHING from a restaurant that has an E-coli outbreak?
2. Read the freaking signs...
3. Don't eat fast food.

What kills me is that without the health department or some other org stopping these outbreaks, people would still eat it. If things do go down the sh!(#ter, people will eat just about anything because they can't recognize bad food or the symptoms of bad food.

[wisconsin_cur]

BBC$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')lthough prices have fallen from the highs recorded during the unprecedented spike at the beginning of 2008, they have not fallen back to where they had been before the crisis began. And many of the factors that contributed to the rise then are still driving prices up.
These include competition with biofuels for scarce land, worsening agricultural productivity, the increasing proportion of people living in cities, and the effects of climate change threatening harvests.

[wisconsin_cur]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d520cf02-22e0-11de-9c99-00144feabdc0.html

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A') tsunami was the image of choice to describe the blow of last year’s food crisis. Today’s situation resembles more the slow but relentless surge of a tide, gradually dragging more and more people into the ranks of the undernourished.

Almost unnoticed behind the economic crisis, a combination of lower growth, rising unemployment and falling remittances together with persistently high food prices has pushed the number of chronically hungry above 1bn for the first time.

[JJ]

this may have already been posted.
The Global Food Crisis: The End of Plenty
By Joel K. Bourne Jr Photograph by John Stanmeyer
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')t is the simplest, most natural of acts, akin to breathing and walking upright. We sit down at the dinner table, pick up a fork, and take a juicy bite, obliv­ious to the double helping of global ramifications on our plate. Our beef comes from Iowa, fed by Nebraska corn. Our grapes come from Chile, our bananas from Honduras, our olive oil from Sicily, our apple juice—not from Washington State but all the way from China. Modern society has relieved us of the burden of growing, harvesting, even preparing our daily bread, in exchange for the burden of simply paying for it. Only when prices rise do we take notice. And the consequences of our inattention are profound.

[Ronin]

No doubt my friend, I work in long life dept. Opened up a peanut butter carton the other day a card inside written on it Shandong, China.

Not good, methinks

[blukatzen]

Meanwhile, I am off to work at our garden centers here in Chicagoland, (15 this season) and am busy selling lots of vegetable plants, seeds, fruit bushes, trees, strawberry plants, etc. to those who now wish to grow and can and preserve their OWN food themselves!
Enlightenment for some of the masses!

Blu

[mos6507]

That goes to the top 10 of my doomer porn MSM list!!!

[Caffeine]

Anyone else notice the Monsanto advertisement in the article?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')any crop scientists and farmers believe the solution to our current food crisis lies in a second green revolution, based largely on our newfound knowledge of the gene. Plant breeders now know the sequence of nearly all of the 50,000 or so genes in corn and soybean plants and are using that knowledge in ways that were unimaginable only four or five years ago, says Robert Fraley, chief technology officer for the agricultural giant Monsanto. Fraley is convinced that genetic modification, which allows breeders to bolster crops with beneficial traits from other species, will lead to new varie­ties with higher yields, reduced fertilizer needs, and drought tolerance—the holy grail for the past decade. He believes biotech will make it possible to double yields of Monsanto's core crops of corn, cotton, and soybeans by 2030. "We're now poised to see probably the greatest period of fundamental scientific advance in the history of agriculture."

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')any crop scientists and farmers believe the solution to our current food crisis lies in a second green revolution, based largely on our newfound knowledge of the gene.

[Caffeine]

Just to clarify, I certainly don't intend to promote GM crops. I was pointing out that the apparent contradiction between some parts of the National Geographic article and the Daily Mail article.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Caffeine', 'A')nyone else notice the Monsanto advertisement in the article?

[Caffeine]

I'll include some direct quotes from the Daily Mail article, to make the apparent contrast between the two articles more clear:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'V')illage after village, families told how they had fallen into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton seeds.
The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds.

But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that these were 'magic seeds' - with better crops that would be free from parasites and insects.

Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM seeds, traditional varieties were banned from many government seed banks.

[mos6507]

This is a complex topic that is hard to cover in full detail outside of a full book. This article is basically summarizing the faustian bargain of the green revolution. The green revolution has prevented imminent starvation at the cost of sustainability. That's why the article is basically bookended by Malthus. The fact that it tackles the population issue head on is praiseworthy, IMHO.