The Chinese account for 20-percent of the global population. Would you like to pause for a moment and picture the huge difference to the world between these two scenarios: in one, the Chinese are well-fed and able to feed other nations; in the other, they are starving and need the world to feed them.
Fortunately, we are currently in the first scenario; however, the situation could reverse in a very short space of time if the Chinese authorities adopt a proposal made by a private but high-profile economic research centre.
The centre is headed by an old man surnamed Mao, who is said to be a professor and has a long track record of sharing his dreadful wisdom with the rest of the Chinese. A few days ago, Professor Mao held a press conference in Beijing and announced a new research finding by the centre: there is no direct link between the size of the cultivated land area and the total crop yield each year. Based on this assumption, he challenged the wisdom of China’s policy that protects 120 million hectares of highly productive farmland from urban sprawl.
“There is enough food produced by other countries and available for purchase on the international market,” exclaimed Professor Mao earnestly, which makes his press conference feel more like a sales pitch for the world’s leading wheat-export country, namely the United States. (The biggest wheat export nations: rochedalss.eq.edu.au/wheat.htm)
But is our world really such a wonderful place where food is abundant for everyone to share year-round? If so, why do Haitian mothers make mud cookies to feed their families? Maybe it’s because they are too poor, and according to the “Law of the Jungle” – commonly held in the West and religiously followed by Professor Mao – these people are the losers in Social Darwinism, and losers should not expect too much from life.
But what about those affluent nations with plenty of hard currency to spend? Will they also be affected by a global food crisis? And above all, is there still a chance that the world will experience a global food shortage from time to time? The following passages, from a news report titled Biggest Grain Exporters Halt Foreign Sales (by Javier Blas in London, Isabel Gorst in Moscow and Lindsay Whipp in Tokyo) published in the Financial Time in April 15, 2008 (www.ft.com), may provide some hints to help answer the question:
The global food crisis intensified on Tuesday as Kazakhstan, one of the world’s biggest wheat exporters, halted foreign sales and rice prices shot to a record high after Indonesia stopped its farmers from selling the grain abroad.
In another sign of turmoil, a big food company in Japan, Nihon Shokuhin Kako, said high corn prices had forced it to buy cheaper genetically modified corn for the first time, breaking a social, though not legal, taboo and signalling that opposition to GM foods could weaken in the face of record food prices.
Now, here is another question: is it possible that the self-proclaimed food security researcher and “professor” Mao Yushi is totally ignorant of the facts? If so, he must have faked his professional qualifications. But if that is not the case, then why does he deliberately mislead his fellow countrymen, as he has frequently done in the past, in such an irrational way? Many Chinese believe he has no choice because his research centre is funded by the Ford Foundation; thus, there is a direct link between his income level and the amount of funding the Ford Foundation is willing to transfer into his bank account.
Ford Foundation of the United States is well known for its special links to the CIA, in fact, many in America and in the world view it as a public face of the secret agency.
The following are excerpts with Chinese translation from articles that explore the special relationships between the two:
The Ford Foundation and the CIA:
A documented case of philanthropic collaboration with the Secret Police
The CIA uses philanthropic foundations as the most effective conduit to channel large sums of money to Agency projects without alerting the recipients to their source.
Good taste, American style:
Ford Foundation, a philanthropic facade for the CIA
The largest philanthropic organization in the world was in fact providing a respectful facade for CIA financial and contact operations. This role was even more possible by the fact that the same persons designed and directed both organizations.