John Vidal reports that “Fertiliser prices have mostly doubled and in some cases risen by 500% in 15 months as US farmers have rushed to plant more biofuel crop”…

”There have been fertiliser riots or demonstrations in Vietnam, India, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan and Taiwan in the last few months. Last week one man was killed in a stampede at a government handout of fertiliser in Hyderabad, India”.

GM crops are pretty much the vegetable world’s equivalent of Hum Vees – they need plenty of petrochemicals to keep them alive. So many inputs they’re a rich man’s crop.

Read what the UN has to say about this chapter of the World Food Crisis in The Guardian. Click on this link.

Perhaps we are witnessing the first stages of the collapse of food growing with agrochemicals…and maybe the beginning of the return to reliable, robust locally grown crops using open pollinated cultivars.

Jerry Coleby-Williams
15th August 2008