Hostile Takeover

While the geriatric trailer park crew raids their Sam's Club for an extra 40 lb bag of rice, we are told that the failure of the wheat crop in Africa- and mebbe Latin America- this year will be "total".

Unless, of course, the Free Market and Monsanto can save the day. Money quote from Pravda:

...With food prices soaring throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, and shortages threatening hunger and political chaos, the time could not be worse for an epidemic of stem rust in the world’s wheat crops. Yet millions of wheat farmers, small and large, face this spreading and deadly crop infection.

The looming catastrophe can be avoided if the world’s wheat scientists pull together to develop a new generation of stem-rust-resistant varieties of wheat. But scientists must quickly turn their attention to replacing almost all of the commercial wheat grown in the world today. This will require a commitment from many nations, especially the United States, which has lately neglected its role as a leader in agricultural science.

Stem rust, the most feared of all wheat diseases, can turn a healthy crop of wheat into a tangled mass of stems that produce little or no grain. The fungus spores travel in the wind, causing the infection to spread quickly. It has caused major famines since the beginning of history. In North America, huge grain losses occurred in 1903 and 1905 and from 1950 to ’54...

Well, certainly, but this isn't what's going on with global food prices right now is it? The surge in the commodities market is due to the action of speculators busy blowing a new shiny bubble.

And once again, we see the shock doctrine at work, and the corporate drive to replace all the crops in the world with food genetically resistant to Monsanto's pesticides and unable to reproduce outside of the industrial agriculture laboratories of Monsanto.