In 2008, a year of supposed 'food crisis', we grew enough food to feed 11 billion people. Most of it was not eaten by humans as food, however.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies.
The issue is: $1 trillion or $2 trillion is a lot of money. If our objective is to have stability in the Middle East, secure oil, or extend democracy, you can do a lot of democracy buying for this sum. To put it in context: The whole world spends $50 billion a year on foreign aid.
That's not the way the government works. You can't just take $1 billion from this program, $1 billion from over here, and then put it toward your pet project.
It is no secret that organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
Those of us who think about what we eat, how it's grown, those of us who care about the environmental impact of food - we've been educated by fabulous books, like Fast Food Nation and documentaries like Food Inc. But despite these and other great projects that shine a critical light on the topic, every year the food industry spends literally tens of millions of dollars to shape the public conversation about our food system.
The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.
In addition, California spends nearly $1 billion a year in Medi-Cal services for an average of 780,000 illegal immigrants a month, over and above emergency health services.
Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.
Here are two facts that should not both be true:
- There is sufficient food produced in the world every year to feed every human being on the planet.
- Nearly 800 million people literally go hungry every day, with more than a third of the earth's population -- 2 billion men and women -- malnourished one way or another, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
We are in front of a global scandal of around one billion - one billion people who still suffer from hunger today. We cannot look the other way and pretend this does not exist. The food available in the world is enough to feed everyone.
We are spending millions, if not billions of dollars every year on programs to fight the childhood obesity epidemic while giving almost $2 billion of taxpayer money to the junk food and fast food industries to make the epidemic worse.
A thin safety net, an expansive security state: This is the American way. At all levels of government, the country spends roughly double on police, prisons, and courts what it spends on food stamps, welfare, and income supplements.
The World Health Organization recently published some data showing that each overweight person causes and additional one tonne of CO2 to be emitted every year. With one billion people overweight around the world-of whom at least 300 million are obese-that's an additional one billion tonnes.
He that spends a Groat a day idly, spends idly above 6 l. a year, which is the Price of using 100 l.
Each year, food companies use an amount of salt that is every bit as staggering as it sounds: 5 billion pounds.