famine

selling off grain reserves

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Submitted by antarchi on June 7, 2008 - 16:23.
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In 1998 and 1999, the Malawi government initiated a program to give each smallholder family a “starter pack” of free fertilizers and seeds. This followed several years of successful experimentation in which the packs were provided only to the poorest families. The result was a national surplus of corn...

— Walden Bello

6-7 million people perished

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Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 16:24.
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Over 60 years ago 6-7 million people perished in Bengal and in the neighboring provinces of Bihar, Orissa and Assam in 1943-1945 when the price of rice doubled and then finally quadrupled - those living on the edge who could not afford to buy food simply perished under the merciless scorched earth policy of the racist British colonial administration of British-occupied India

the beastliest people in the world

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Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 16:21.
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There was the general sense of callousness. Churchill permitted himself to make the remark that the Indian population bring it onto itself by breeding like rabbits. And there was another statement of his when he said that he was well aware that the Indian people were the beastliest in the world, next to the Germans. It cannot be said that the central government was full of sympathy.

food not essential for indians

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Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 16:17.
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In the context of homeland Britain Churchill had argued that food supplies were vital for maintaining national morale. He told the War Cabinet on the thirty first of March 1941 that it was essential ‘to import sufficient to maintain the staying power of the people, even if this meant a somewhat slower development of our service programmes.’ But two years later the War Cabinet wasn’t prepared to divert shipping and food supplies to ease Indian hunger.

biofuel madness

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Submitted by antarchi on November 7, 2007 - 20:27.
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It doesn’t get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the county of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks.

dying to export

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Submitted by antarchi on May 23, 2007 - 00:03.
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During the famine of 1899-1900, when 143,000 Beraris died directly from starvation, the province exported not only tens of thousands of bales of cotton but an incredible 747,000 bushels of grain.

— Mike Davis

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