Or
Another Sunday, another atrocious story on Weekend Edition.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105381728&ft=1&f=1006
This time the story is about dairy farming in Saudi Arabia.
My first question is: what are those folks doing drinking milk anyway? Aren't they low on the lactase scale? Surely there are food that are both more appropriate both to produce and to the local cultural diet than cow's milk.
Second question: While I guess I can understand why a Saudi royal would want something he saw in California, why twice as big? Think about the stench when driving certain highways in California - stench from dairy and beef feedlots. Now multiply that.
Third question: Do they recycle any of the waste water from this operation - or is it all so polluted with excrement that it would take too much time or room to do so. I'm thinking about all that water used to cool the cows in 120F heat.
Fourth question: Didn't anybody realize that this was the desert, and that aquifers run dry - and won't be replenished given the decreasing rainfall in the desert latitudes?
Fifth question: Have people no sense of justice, of the human right to food? The most appalling thing about this piece was the report that countries like Saudi Arabia, because they've decimated their own natural resources with inappropriate agriculture, are buying tracts of land in places like Ethiopia and Sudan - countries of deep-seated food insecurity. Is no intervention possible to stop this? Will those who have oil buy land, water and food - at the expense of the lives of those who don't?
Or is this just a more blatant form of normal corporate colonialism?
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