LaRouche: World must double food production

Citizens Electoral Council of Australia
Media Release 7th of May 2008

“We have gone from three meals a day to two. Then it will be one meal. Then we will die. Why is the world taking corn for fuel? It will mean the death of many people.”

This was the blunt statement made by Yoseph Yilak, the head of the Ethiopian grain traders association, to the visiting head of the UN's World Food Program. Questioned as to what should be done about the problem, Yilak shot back: “The best solution long-term is massive production of food.”

In the face of this unprecedented global crisis, which the Asian Development Bank estimates puts one billion Asians at risk of starvation, and a further billion people among the poor of Africa, South America and other countries, but for which the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation cannot even raise $10 million for seeds for poor countries, Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche has issued a global call for action:

“HUMANITY IS IN MORTAL DANGER! Instead of Wars of Starvation, Let Us Double Food Production.” (Click here for statement)

Australia must respond to this call, through a massive expansion of food production in a country which could be one of the great food bowls of the world.

The Commonwealth Government must take two immediate measures:

• Halt its criminal policy of shutting down food production on fraudulent “environmental” grounds, including restoring water allocations to irrigators in the Murray-Darling Basin, and ending tax breaks for the managed investment schemes which have diverted prime agricultural land into tree plantations.

• Embark on large-scale water infrastructure projects, such as the revised Bradfield Scheme in Queensland, the second stage of the Ord River Scheme in WA, and the Clarence River Scheme in NSW; the Clarence scheme and an extension of the Bradfield Scheme into the headwaters of the Warrego River will pour enormous volumes of extra water into Australia’s food bowl, the Murray-Darling Basin.