World Bank chief warns no region immune to Europe crisis

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim on Wednesday warned that most regions of the world will be hurt by the debt crisis enveloping the euro zone and said it was vital to protect the strong economic gains of the past decade in the developing world.

In his first public speech since taking the helm of the World Bank on July 1, Kim said even if the euro zone crisis is contained, it could still reduce growth in most of the world's regions by as much as 1.5 percent. A major crisis in Europe could slash gross domestic product in developing countries by 4 percent or more, enough to trigger a deep global recession, he said.

"Such events threaten many of the recent achievements in the fight against poverty," he said, noting that over the last decade nearly 30 developing countries have grown by 6 percent or more annually.

Outlining challenges for the global poverty-fighting institution, Kim said his priority was to protect development gains from economic risks, such as the euro zone crisis, which has begun to weigh on growth in large emerging economies like China. Read more >>

6 Ways Food is Being Used as a Weapon

Image via WikipediaHungry people will do anything for food, which means that those who have control over food can use it as leverage. In 1974, Henry Kissinger suggested using food as a weapon to induce targeted population reduction in a previously classified 200-page report, National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests. The primary tactic to be applied is that food aid would be withheld from developing nations until they submitted to birth control policies:

There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.

So, food was to be used as just another method of imperial colonization to force countries to conform their policies to those desired by the controllers. Notably, this tactic only works as a blunt weapon on territories enduring a severe economic collapse and with little resources for food production. Today, however, it appears that the entire globe is receiving an arsenal of food bombs as there appears to be a multifaceted attack on people's access to food. In other words, what has been an admitted tactic for nearly 40 years of controlling food aid for regional population reduction has now grown more complex and expansive. More...