'Seemingly, Disparate World Events Appear to be Connected to an Approaching World Crisis'

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South African Journalist Issues Urgent Plea to U.S. and Global Officials on Drought Crisis 

A SPECIAL GUEST COMMENTARY

The following commentary was submitted by a South African resident and journalist to call attention to the drought crisis in the United States and how the dire situation will impact Africa and the global community. 

As per the resident's request, From The G-Man will consider this contributing writer a source and not reveal their identity. They intend to submit commentaries and special news reports on the social and political situations that are having an adverse effect on Africa and its inhabitants.

A Comment from Down South 

Drought in US is set to have dire consequences for the poor in Africa, and everywhere else.

We all grew up with the specter of one kind of doom or another looming over our lives. Many of us remember the Nazi’s, the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall, and more recently, the Jerusalem Wall. It’s something you learn to live with over time, and most of them tend to sort themselves out one way or another.

Well, this week is a bit different. It might be better not to look at the news from the past few days, what with bits of the Arctic falling off and Greenland melting completely in the unprecedented space of four days. These all pale into insignificance as the current disaster threatens to overshadow all the others put together.

The week began with a seemingly innocuous series of articles about the drought in the Midwest. To most people this is a fairly normal state of affairs. Droughts happen. Always have. And probably always will. Only this one gives cause for alarm. Why? Well for one, it’s big. Massive, in fact. The continent stands to lose millions of acres of maize. Most of the losses are due to poor land management practices. For years soil scientists, organic farmers and other observers have warned against the monoculture ‘factory farming’ methods utilised by modern agriculturists. These methods force production of more and more food from less and less land using increasingly debatable means.

Massive failure of maize crops across the United States could have dire consequences for the rest of the world. The ongoing drought is precipitating an impending crisis which is set to see prices rise around the world as the US imports maize that it should otherwise be able to produce at home. This could cause a worsening of the situation in Africa for one, where 80% of the population rely on maize as their staple diet, as the US will be forced to import maize from there and elsewhere in the world. South Africa is a major producer of maize with roughly 60% of the total arable land devoted to the production of maize. The price inflation will have severe consequences for people already stretched to the limits of human endurance.

The sad fact is that the majority of the maize required by the US market will go not into basic foodstuffs, but into the production of corn syrup to feed America’s sweet tooth, as well as the controversial production of ethanol from what is essentially a food crop.

The US, the shining light of the democratic model, appears to be leading the way in the ecological disaster business too. Environmental scientists, historians and farmers have been warning for decades that another Dust Bowl event in the US was merely a matter of time. Well, it appears that the time might be approaching again: a repeat of the 1930’s crisis in America, by when 850 million tons of topsoil had blown into the sea to be lost forever. It takes many centuries for an inch of good topsoil to be formed, and sources say that the US lost about five inches of it at the time. Man fought nature then and lost. Badly. We need only look back at the ruins of Mesopotamia, India and Greece to see our current model will fail just as those did.

Seemingly disparate world events appear to be connected to an approaching world crisis, which, although predicted in the literature of many cultures around the world, appears to have been entirely man-made and preventable.

It was our fault that time and it’s going to be our fault again, unless we radically change the way we do business with the Earth.

Editor's note: From The G-Man is proud to have this foreign correspondent's article showcased as its 2,000th posting of 2012.