Archive for the ‘China’ Tag
Another World Food Crisis?
Filed under: All Those Other Places, Economics and Business, Food, Media | Tags: China, Grains, World Food Crisis
Leave a Comment The United Nations’ food agency issued an alert on Tuesday warning that a severe drought was threatening the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock.
China has been essentially self-sufficient in grain for decades, for national security reasons. Any move by China to import large quantities of food in response to the drought could drive international prices even higher than the record levels recently reached.
My biggest concern is that such droughts could trigger another world food crisis. Of course, you can’t evaluate how likely that scenario is, because there’s no mention of the food crisis of ’07 and ’08. People in the U.S. are more or less completely oblivious that for most of the developing the world, economic catastrophe started before the ’08 financial crisis. The ’07-’08 food crisis is one of the biggest unreported stories of our times. That’s not going to change anytime soon with our current media.
Brazil Interested in F-18 Aircraft for the São Paulo
Filed under: United States | Tags: Brazil, China, Military, Naval Forces, United States
Leave a Comment The government of Brazil is contemplating the purchase of 28 F/A-18E/F Super Hornet Aircraft, to upgrade the fleet on their aircraft carrier, the São Paulo. (Brazil bought the São Paulo from France in 2000.) I think strengthening the US-Brazilian bilateral relationship is important and military cooperation is a part of that, but I have to wonder if Sino-Brazilian military exercises on the carrier is going to affect whether this sale could get approved by the Pentagon. It seems the chances of the Chinese looking under the hood at US military technology to be pretty high if they are training on a carrier stocked full with F-18s.
