http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/455931

Toronto Star

 By Alec Crawford

 July 8, 2008

 On April 13, a patrol of Canadian Rangers arrived at Eureka, a remote
 weather station in the southwest part of Ellesmere Island.

 For more than two weeks the patrol had been trekking across Canada's
 northern archipelago as part of Operation Nunalivut ("this land is
 ours"), a now-yearly exercise carried out by the Canadian Forces to
 assert the country's sovereignty in the High Arctic.

 A month later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Minister of National
 Defence Peter McKay unveiled the latest iteration of the Canada First
 Defence Strategy.

 The war in Afghanistan remains the focus. But the defence strategy also
 underlined a commitment to augmenting the Canadian Forces' capacity to
 "protect Canada's Arctic sovereignty and security."

 While this hearkens back to the country's more traditional security
 concerns, it has been brought about by a very new security threat: that
 of climate change.
...

With climate change increasing access to the Bering, Chukchi and
 Beaufort Seas, lucrative fisheries will develop as the ice recedes and
 cold-water fish move north.

 The exploitation of the area's mineral deposits will become more
 cost-effective, and the region's vast oil and gas resources - which are
 believed to account for one-quarter of the world's undiscovered reserves
 -- will ironically become more accessible due to climate change

...

 Successive Canadian governments have argued that the Northwest Passage
 is Canadian territory, and in the interest of North American security
 (and the environment) Canada should control traffic in the passage, as opposed to allowing unfettered access.

 The government's position stands in contrast to that of other maritime
 countries. The United States, for example, believes the Northwest
 Passage should be open to international traffic, and that vessels need
 not obtain consent from Canada before travelling through the strait;
 acceptance of Canadian sovereignty over the strait could set a dangerous
 precedent for other, equally strategic waterways such as those in the
 South China Sea.

 To back up its stake, the Canadian government is investing heavily in
 equipment and staff to bolster its presence in the region. It has
 committed to building six to eight navy patrol ships to guard the
 Northwest Passage, and in August 2007 the Prime Minister announced plans
 to build two military bases in the region: an army training centre for
 100 troops in Resolute Bay, and a deep-water port at Nanisivik on Baffin
 Island.

http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/37605

From: , Organic Consumers Association, More from this Affiliate
Published July 9, 2008 09:21 AM

NOTE: Some people say Bush's "biofuel" boom constitutes a greater crime against humanity than even his Iraq debacle. The interaction of the Bush led ethanol boom with the crisis of speculation, characterized by a chronic bubble economy, has been utterly disastrous in terms of its impact on the poor and hungry, never mind its negative environmental impact and other knock on effects as governments go into panic mode. Here's the view of a stock analyst.

EXTRACTS: If you fill up with ethanol, every time you pull that SUV into the gas station and pump 22 gallons, you starve a poor person for six months.

World food shortage and the ethanol bubble
by Kevin Kersten
InvestorsObserver.com, July 7 2008 http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2008/07/07/world-food-short...

We had the internet bubble and the real estate bubble and now, there is the ethanol bubble. Recently, I ran some numbers on ethanol and to my amazement realized that it is - too use a catch phrase from the environmental world -- not sustainable. Turning food into fuel is just plain silly; and when oil prices come down the ethanol bubble could pop big.

I ran did a little research and found some numbers:

*47% of the Mexican diet is corn
*it takes 2.4 pounds of corn a day to feed a hungry person
*it takes 22 pounds of corn to make one gallon of ethanol
*there are 42 gallons of refined gas in one barrel of oil

Now, a little basic math can be very enlightening. To replace one barrel of oil, it takes 42 gallons of ethanol or (42x22)=924 pounds of corn. That is enough corn to feed one hungry person for (924/2.4) 385 days - a little more than one year.

If you fill up with ethanol, every time you pull that SUV into the gas station and pump 22 gallons, you starve a poor person for six months. Another way to look at a barrel of oil is that it has enough energy to feed a person for the entire year. Using that logic, the much debated Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- with at least 3.2 billion barrels of oil -- contains enough food to feed the entire world for six months. If you think my estimates are wrong, you're right; the real math is actually worse.

So what does that mean for investors? When the public and politicians own up to the fact that food for fuel causes world food prices to rise and starve the poor, all those companies currently flying high on ethanol could come crashing to earth. A few of the companies that have been running on the recent ethanol excitement include Monsanto (NYSE: MON), Potash (NYSE: POT), Mosaic (NYSE: MOS), John Deere (NYSE: DE), Archer-Daniels-Midland (NYSE: ADM) and Bunge (NYSE: BG).

Kevin Kersten is a Stock and Options Analyst with InvestorsObserver.com. Disclosure note: Mr. Kersten owns and/or controls a diversified portfolio of long and short positions that may include holdings in companies he writes about.

By David Axe

GORE, Jul 9 (IPS) - Clarisse Larlombaye was nearly ruined when a herd of cows got into her rice field one night. The tiny 900-square-meter plot, outside the U.N.-run Gondje refugee camp in lush southern Chad is the sole source of income for Larlombaye and the two other Central African refugees she shares it with.

In recent years, Larlombaye and her co-farmers each have gotten an average of 225 kilogrammes of rice per year from their small plot. Larlombaye said she and her family usually eat two-thirds; the other third she sells for around $.75 per kilo at local markets. But the marauding cows left her with just 70 kilos last year, barely enough to feed her and her family.

Larlombaye's brush with catastrophe is all too common in southern Chad, where 60,000 Central African refugees compete with local residents, and with each other, for land. The growing crisis parallels escalating tensions in eastern Chad between 250,000 Darfuri refugees and local residents over scarce water and firewood.

Ravenous cattle intruding on farmland is not a new problem in Chad. But incidents are becoming more frequent and contentious, especially in and around the southern refugee camps.

Despite the tension, the U.N. has heralded its four southern Chad camp complexes -- which house refugees fleeing unrest in northern Central African Republic -- as models of agricultural self-sufficiency, especially compared to camps in the east, which still rely heavily on food donations funneled through the U.N. World Food Program.