首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Must the Poor Go Hungry Just So the Rich Can Drive? Sports stars like Mo Farah will not change a simple fact: people are sta
Must the Poor Go Hungry Just So the Rich Can Drive? Sports stars like Mo Farah will not change a simple fact: people are sta
admin
2013-09-26
77
问题
Must the Poor Go Hungry Just So the Rich Can Drive?
Sports stars like Mo Farah will not change a simple fact: people are starving because of the west’s thirst for biofuels.
I don’t blame Mo Farah, Pele and Haile Gebrselassie, who lined up, all hugs and smiles, outside Downing Street for a photocall at the prime minister’s hunger summit. Perhaps they were unaware of the way in which they were being used to promote David Cameron’s corporate approach to overseas aid. Perhaps they were also unaware of the crime against humanity over which he presides. Perhaps Cameron himself is unaware of it.
You should by now have heard about the famine developing in the Sahel region of West Africa. Poor harvests and high food prices threaten the lives of some 18 million people. The global price of food is likely to rise still further, as a result of low crop yields in the United States, caused by the worst drought in 50 years. World cereal prices, in response to this disaster, climbed 17% last month.
We have been cautious about attributing such events to climate change; perhaps too cautious. A new paper by James Hansen, head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, shows that there has been a sharp increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers. Between 1951 and 1980 these events affected between 0.1% and 0.2% of the world’s land surface each year. Now, on average, they affect 10% . Hansen explains that " the odds that natural variability created these extremes are extremely small, vanishingly small". Both the droughts in the Sahel and the US crop failures are likely to be the result of climate change.
But this is not the only sense in which the rich world’s use of fuel is causing the poor to starve. In the United Kingdom, in the rest of the European Union and in the United States, governments have chosen to deploy a cure as bad as the disease. Despite overwhelming evidence of the harm their policy is causing, none of them will change course.
Biofuels are the means by which governments in the rich world avoid hard choices. Rather than raise fuel economy standards as far as technology allows, rather than promoting a shift from driving to public transport, walking and cycling, rather than insisting on better town planning to reduce the need to travel, they have chosen to exchange our wild overconsumption of petroleum for the wild overconsumption of fuel made from crops. No one has to drive less or make a better car: everything remains the same except the source of fuel. The result is a competition between the world’s richest, and poorest consumers, a contest between overconsumption and survival.
There was never any doubt about which side would win.
I’ve been banging on about this since 2004, and everything I warned of then has happened. The US and the European Union have both set targets and created generous financial incentives for the use of biofuels. The results have been a disaster for people and the planet.
Already, 40% of US com(maize)production is used to feed cars. The proportion will rise this year as a result of the smaller harvest.
Though the market for biodicsel(生物柴油)is largely confined to the European Union, it has already captured 7% of the world’s output of vegetable oil. The European commission admits that its target(10% of transport fuels by 2020)will raise world cereal prices by between 3% and 6% . Oxfam estimates that with every 1% increase in the price of food, another 16 million people go hungry.
By 2021, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says that 14% of the world’s maize and other coarse grains ,16% of its vegetable oil and 34% of its sugarcane will be used to make people in the gas-guzzling(大量消耗的)nations feel better about themselves. The demand for biofuel will be met, it reports, partly through an increase in production; partly through a " reduction in human consumption". The poor will starve so that the rich can drive.
The rich world’s demand for biofuels is already causing a global land grab. ActionAid estimates that European companies have now seized 5 m hectares of farmland—an area the size of Denmark—in developing countries for industrial biofuel production. Small farmers, growing food for themselves and local markets, have been thrown off their land and deprived. Tropical forests, savannahs(南美大草原)and grasslands have been cleared to plant what the industry still calls "green fuels".
When the impacts of land clearance and the use of nitrogen fertilisers are taken into account, biofuels produce more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels do. The UK, which claims that half the biofuel sold here meets its sustainability criteria, solves this problem by excluding the greenhouse gas emissions caused by changes in land use. Its sustainability criteria are, as a result, worthless.
Even second-generation biofuels are an environmental disaster, either extending the cultivated area or removing the straw and stovers(干草)which protect the soil from erosion and keep carbon and nutrients in the ground. The combination of first- and second-generation biofuels—encouraging fanners to plough up grasslands and to leave the soil bare—and hot summers could create the perfect conditions for a new dust bowl.
Our government knows all this. One of its own studies shows that if the European Union stopped producing biofuels, the amount of vegetable oils it exported to world markets would rise by 20% and the amount of wheat by 33% , reducing world prices.
Preparing for the prime minister’s hunger summit on Sunday, the international development department argued that, with a rising population, " the food production system will need to be radically improved, not just to produce more food but to produce it sustainably and fairly to ensure that the poorest people have the access to food that they need". But another government department—transport—boasts on its website that, thanks to its policies, drivers in this country have now used 4. 4bn litres(升)of biofuel.
Of this 30% was produced from recycled cooking oil. The rest consists of 3bn litres of refined energy snatched from the mouths of the people that Cameron claims to be helping.
Some of those to whom the government is now extending its "nutrition interventions" may have been starved by its own policies. In this and other ways, David Cameron, with the support of various sporting heroes, is offering charity, not justice. And that is no basis for liberating the poor.
To produce more food sustainably to feed the poor, the food production system need to be______.
选项
答案
radically improved
解析
本题考查为了能可持续地生产供穷人食用的粮食,粮食生产体系需要怎么做。根据定位句可知,不仅是为了生产更多的粮食而是能可持续地生产供穷人食用的粮食,粮食生产体系需要彻底改进。原文和题干中都出现了need to be,故radically improved为本题答案。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/B227777K
0
大学英语六级
相关试题推荐
Hesuggeststhat______(图书馆借的书要在到期前归还).
Mostpeoplewouldbe【C1】______bythehighqualityofmedicine【C2】______tomostAmericans.Thereisalotofspecialization,a
Mostpeoplewouldbe【C1】______bythehighqualityofmedicine【C2】______tomostAmericans.Thereisalotofspecialization,a
Nowadays,incominggenerationsreallyrelynowonthepowerofthe"Internet"whenitcomestosearchingforinformation.Justt
Nowadays,incominggenerationsreallyrelynowonthepowerofthe"Internet"whenitcomestosearchingforinformation.Justt
Nowadays,incominggenerationsreallyrelynowonthepowerofthe"Internet"whenitcomestosearchingforinformation.Justt
CrowsareprobablythemostfrequentlymetandeasilyidentifiablemembersofthenativefaunaoftheUnitedStates.Thegreatn
BecauseSouthAfricansaregenerallysobubbly(热情奔放的)andtalkative,silencesaysalot.Theyarepoliteaswellandifyouare
CrowdsourcingaBetterWorldThecrowdsourcingconcept—collectingcontributionsfrommanyindividualstoachieveagoal—was
随机试题
报纸的产量以___________为单位,与产量有关的其他统计指标也以千印张为基本单位。
可引起QRS波群振幅降低的原因是
关于四环素牙的描述,哪项是错误的
为了限制系统短路容量,简化继电保护,环式配电系统应采取开环方式。()
背景资料:某城市地铁标段,包含一段双线区间和一个车站,区间隧道及风道出入口采用暗挖法施工,车站的主体结构采用明挖法施工。区间隧道上方为现况道路,路宽22.5m,道路沿线的地下埋设有雨污水、天然气、电信、热力等管线,另外还有一座公共厕所。隧道埋深
与客户权益变动相关业务的经办人员之间,应当建立()机制。
是否具备()是衡量教师职业道德素质高低的重要标志。
以下所列各项活动中,属于实践活动的是()。①学生听课做作业②教师给学生讲课③经济政治体制改革④中美进行钢铁贸易谈判⑤第六次人口普查⑥蜘蛛织网,蜜蜂采蜜
WhatdoAmericansliketodo?Americansliketolaughand______.
A、Thevalueofknowinghumanhistory.B、Theimportanceofsharinginformation.C、Howtobringbackthreatenedlanguages.D、Whye
最新回复
(
0
)