Indians still pissed over what smirk said about them

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JE22Df01.html


India puts thought on the table


US President George W Bush's comments early this month that India was partly responsible for spiraling global food demand and rising prices created more than just anger across the country - they helped to stir a searching debate on the real causes for the present crisis afflicting the poor in India and far beyond.

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India's largest opposition party, the Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), responded by threatening to force a parliamentary debate on his remarks. Defense Minister A K Antony called Bush's comments "a cruel joke". The US president's policies were also responsible for the food grain shortage, said Antony, with "official encouragement of bio-fuels responsible for converting millions of hectares of agricultural land in the US for bio-fuel production".

Another minister thundered: "Don't Indians have the right to eat better? Why should the US talk about this when India is producing most of the food needed by its people and when it is well known that the US is diverting farm produce like corn to make bio-fuel? To say that the demand for food in India is causing an increase in global food prices is completely wrong."

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Helping to shore up the bitter response, Bush's comments come at a time when Indian farmers are committing suicide in horrific numbers. As many as 136,324 have killed themselves between 1998 and 2008 due to plummeting grain production and crushing personal debts.

As agriculturists emphasize, it is not India's increased consumption that is driving up food costs but a worldwide slide in food grain production. One factor is prolonged drought across vast swathes of Australia (a major global wheat producer), which has whittled down the availability of food produce in world markets. Growing urbanization in most developing countries has meanwhile reduced land available for growing crops.

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"Food waste is a major reason for fast depleting world stocks," says Subramanian. "In India, for instance, grain wastage happens largely because of a poor supply chain due to inadequate warehouse facilities. Also, in energy-deficient societies like ours, there's a lot of food spoilage due to lack of refrigeration. The US, on the contrary, suffers from the problem of plenty, resulting in a fair amount of waste in restaurants and people's homes."

Subramanian's observation is corroborated by a recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study that estimates Americans generate 30 million tones of food waste each year, accounting for 12% of the total global food waste.

A British report similarly highlights that Britons toss away a third of the food they purchase, including more than four million whole apples, 1.2 million sausages and 2.8 million tomatoes. In Sweden, families with small children discard a quarter of the food they buy, according to one study. Collectively, the rotting, wasted food fuels another problem with global proportions - that of

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And while the debate rages, the world continues to grapple with glaring inequity on the food front - not enough for the poor to eat in the developing countries and too much for Westerners.
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that if it comes out of bush**s mouth it's always ignorant and hateful????

and 6.5 billion people, and the additional few billion coming soon, all wanting, needing, and desiring what everyone else has, there will be no reduction in consumption, or conservation of energy.