Food-related violence has become regular, the highest number of cases, attacks by Israeli forces in Occupied Palestinian Territories. In Gaza and Sudan hunger has quite consciously been used as a weapon as well as in Yemen and South Sudan. These have included attacks on water infrastructure most recently USA military strikes on water storage facilities in the southern Iranian district of Bemani in a country already facing a water shortage crisis. Elsewhere airstrikes on food markets have occurred in the Jonglei state of South Sudan and Sudan itself, West Kordofan state where an estimated 23 people were killed in targeted military attacks.
These threats to food security come on top of the shortage of and/or price increase of nitrogen-based fertilisers as a result of US-Israeli attacks on Iran and Lebanon. It is well documented that famine is what happens to people who cannot afford to pay high food prices. A similar dynamic is happening to small farmers in Africa and Asia urea fertiliser when the price of the most common has risen by 90%. And when “fertiliser producers outside the Gulf are adjusting export strategies with stronger payment capacity, ”according to a report by the African Network Of Agricultural Policy Network Institute. This means a fertiliser shortage for financial or availability reasons at the crucial planting season and when Africa and parts of Asia facing food insecurity and the consequences of climate change.
The deadly new world screwworm was has been proved to exist for the first time in nearly a decade, posing the latest threat to a USA cattle herd already at its lowest level in 75 years. The USDA is taking measures to contain the parasite and said there’s no reason to believe it will gain a foothold, but the news comes at a time when the price of beef, seen as a food of massive symbolic and real importance to parochial US fascism, ,is at an all-time high.
Mayan communities in |the Yucatan province of Mexico have faced a veritable explosion of industrial pig farming over the last ten years. Their concerns with the contaminating impact of such meat factories on underground water reserves have not been addressed until recently when the country’s Supreme Court at last gave Mayan villages the right to challenge pig factory pollution.
Banana plantations have a history of violent exploitation of labour such as made United Fruit change itself into Chiquita to avoid possible customer revulsion.. Equally monocultural agriculture has a history of soil degradation. In present-day Laos, Chinese and Vietnamese capital investment has created banana plantations for export to China. . They have taken leases with the backing of an internationally powerless state and used chemicals like paraquat. When the land is finally returned, the soil is found to be “compacted”, that is with reduced water infiltration, limited root development and decreased soil aeration. The consequence is that when food crops like rice and cassava are resumed, yields are poor, less than before the plantation leases.