The current food shortage is going to get worse before it gets better – at least that’s the way the founder of CNN sees it.
Ted Turner was interviewed by CNBC’s Bob Pisani on the April 25 “Closing Bell.” He addressed the recent food shortages causing rationing and riots all over the globe and said it’s just a sign of things to come.
“There are a lot of different problems being caused by an ever-increasing number of people in a finite-sized world,” Turner said. “The resources of the planet just can’t keep up with the demand and I’m afraid this going to be more commonplace. I’m afraid we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. It’s very complicated I do want to say.”
Turner appeared on CNBC to promote the United Nations “Nothing But Nets [1]” campaign to prevent malaria. Turner is the director of the U.N. Foundation, created in 1998 by Turner’s $1-billion gift [2].
Although the organizations under the U.N. Foundation umbrella [3] are supposed to exist to help humanity, Turner railed against the growth of humanity – blaming it for “global climate change and the over-fishing of the oceans.”
“We’ve had warnings for a number of years,” Turner said. “Grain stocks have been dropping every year for the last 10 years or pretty close to that – the reserves. And, the environment in so many different areas is being – the pressure being put on it by the ever-increasing number of people and the number of people using more stuff and more energy – that’s what ‘s leading to global climate change and the over-fishing of the oceans.”
Turner used China as example, claiming that an increase in roads in China is limiting agricultural output, despite China’s large land area of 3,705,405 square miles [4].
“Agriculture is complicated anyway. For instance – China adds more cars, they need more roads and the only place to put more roads in China is over farmland. So you lose farmland as you increase development. We’re doing it even here in the United States.”
But one of the culprits behind the food shortages has been the demand for biofuels, in part artificially inflated by U.S. subsidies for corn-based ethanol. In 2006, Turner addressed a forum held by the World Trade Organization defending agricultural subsidies and promoted the production of biofuels.
“If agriculture were always going to be the same, then the question of subsidies would be a problem without a solution,” Turner said at the World Trade Organization’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, according to the Sept. 25, 2006, International Herald Tribune [5]. "But agriculture is changing.”
According to the story, Turner said “liquid fuels made from plants and trees, including biodiesel for trucks and generators and ethanol for cars and cooking – could do more than fight problems like pollution and global warming.”
On April 2, Turner forecasted global warming would eventually lead to cannibalism [6].
“We’ll be eight degrees hotter in 10, not 10 but 30 or 40 years, and basically none of the crops will grow,” Turner said on Charlie Rose’s PBS show. “Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down.”