RESPONDING TO CAUSES OF GLOBAL FOOD & ENERGY CRISES Most of the present hunger-related deaths on Go…

[Robert M. Service]

RESPONDING TO CAUSES OF GLOBAL FOOD & ENERGY CRISES

Most of the present hunger-related deaths on God’s planet earth are happening in regions with no oil, insufficient food, and unending conflict. Since there are solutions for the causes and circumstances, these deaths are termed preventable. Other needless deaths unfortunately happen daily in third world areas where adequate health care facilities are absent due to an absence of any electric power grid or any alternative appropriate community electric power plants.

While there are a number of causes for the global energy crisis, three of them are core causes. The root one is a global effort by an elite group of national and multi-national corporations to control the primary energy resources including fossil fuel reserves, utilities, alternative energy technologies, and their distribution networks.

The next cause is the work of these special interests to prevent the most liberating new alternative energy technologies from ever being applied on a national scale through any business development strategy. Third, is the failure of innovators to develop new technologies that use free and very low cost waste fuels in electric power systems that are designed and sized for the small community or village. This is the easiest of these causes to deal with.

Then there are the four primary causes of the global food crisis. Again, there is a root cause, namely the corporate, government, and university hidden alliances that work to replace small and peasant farm operations globally with their large industrialized agribusiness operations. Second is the industrialized farm production by monoculture of cash crops for animal feed, commodity markets, and export markets.

Third is the abandonment of traditional and diversified small scale farming, including native and non-hybrid seed. Fourth is the food insecurity brought about by the continuing internal conflicts and civil wars within various nations globally which makes agricultural production difficult, and sometimes impossible. Some of these circumstances have been documented recently in two books written by Mr. Paul Roberts entitled The End of Oil and The End of Food. A magazine article entitled Hunger written by Mr. Timothy C. Morgan and Mr. Isaac Phiri and published in the November 2008 issue of Christianity Today gives a global perspective on the emerging food crisis.

Past responses to human crises have tended to be either the immediate disaster relief ones attempting to provide fast adequate sometimes stop-gap solutions, or the long term community development ones designed to slowly build infrastructure and address ongoing shortages. Each of these solutions is wonderful, but they do not always seek the greatest immediate and long term benefits together, for lack of knowledge, to get the most value for the money spent.

A comprehensive emergency response to a food crisis might, for instance, design and install a greenhouse farm for one community that produces rapidly growing whole food supplements, fish protein, vegetable crops, and ethanol fuel all in one operation, while also giving transported foods to meet the community’s immediate need of foods for direct human consumption. A comprehensive emergency response energy system might provide the electric power needed for a community’s homes, medical facility, and a new greenhouse farm all from using solar thermal backed up with local burnable agricultural wastes that are solar dried in the process.

Some of the most promising developments in alternative energy include small no-head hydroelectric power plants, community solar thermal technology, and community scaled multi-stock ethanol plants. In the food for direct human consumption arena, we can have custom designed community greenhouse farms, fish protein solutions, and the Arthrospira platensis and maxima whole food supplements. Robert M. Service Ministries and R. M. Service & Associates are working to develop and provide solutions in these areas that can be interfaced with applied discipleship training globally. You may look at their report entitled Solutions to Our Global Food & Energy Crises and their online course entitled Building Community.

RMSA [e-mail] 800-873-0679