> > so what if fuel costs become higher in the short
>> run? can't it just pass them along to the consumer?
>
>Yes, but fossil fuel is one of the main inputs into modern industrial
>agriculture. Passing costs on to the consumer will mean higher food
>prices, perhaps manageable(without massive uprising) in the northern
>countries but will mean starvation in the south where most countries
>haveto import their food using FX.
With regard to the question of food import & export, I recommend Richard Richter's documentary _Hungry for Profit_ (in which Samir Amin makes a brief appearance -- he is brilliant & looks dashing to boot, I might add), available from New Day Films (see <http://www.newday.com/films/Hungry_for_Profit.html>).
For an incisive critique of Western food "aid" & its deleterious effect on local agricultural production, see Ousmane Sembene's magnificent _Guelwaar_:
***** Guelwaar Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum
From the Chicago Reader
Alternately wise and very funny in its treatment of tribalism and in its grasp of neocolonial corruption, Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene's seventh feature (1992), a beautiful piece of storytelling, has so much to say about contemporary Africa that you emerge from it with a sense of understanding an entire society from top to bottom--and from right to left, for that matter. A political activist and Catholic figurehead known as Guelwaar (which means "the noble one") dies from a beating after delivering an impassioned speech against foreign aid and its attendant corruptions, and when friends and family gather for his funeral they're shocked to discover that his body is missing. It emerges that he was accidentally buried in a Muslim cemetery, and the tribal, political, and cultural disputes that arise from this state of affairs comprise the remainder of the story. Along the way, Sembene -- conceivably the greatest of all African filmmakers and a leading African novelist to boot -- has as much to say about the virtue of Guelwaar's daughter, who works as a prostitute in Dakar to help support the family, as he does about the vice of the Mercedes-owning mayor, not to mention the divided loyalties of Guelwaar's European-educated son and a local cop he argues with. (A lot of significance is attached to when the characters speak French and when they speak Wolof, the principal language of Senegal.) The movie is no less attentive in observing the various moral ambiguities and hypocrisies of the local Catholic and Muslim communities. (Sembene was raised in a Muslim family, but his treatment of both groups is refreshingly nonsectarian.) As filmmaking, this may lack the terseness of Sembene's Black Girl, but the flavor of everyday African life it imparts is priceless.
<http://onfilm.chireader.com/MovieCaps/G/GU/04300_GUELWAAR.html> *****
BTW, Sembene studied in the Gorki Studio in Moscow during the 60s. Another seldom-remembered contribution that the Soviet Union made to humanity....
Yoshie