25000 tons of pumpkins for Haloween lanterns whilst 1/2 the world starves!!

[*_ash_*]

I was watching the BBC news a couple of days ago and they had a feature on pumpkin farming. One farm alone was harvesting around 5 millon pumpkins a day purely for the Haloween lantern market. Virtually non of the pumpkins are eaten and yet vast tracts of prime Lincolnshire farmland was turned over to growing them. In this country alone we were producing 25,000 tons of pumpkins destined for the green bins whilst half the world is starving.

In a months time 1000s of tons of wood and rubbish will be burned on Bonfire Night releasing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere despite the fears of global warming.

 

Do we have our priorities wrong?

 

Yeah, but, bonfire night is a great night though, if you go to the right party.

 

If you recycle your Sheffield Stars, you will feel so much better. Just avoid looking at CO2 figures for other countries, it will sour your 'betterness'.

[Bassman62]

But we import it by buying it...we dont import it for free....

 

So where does our money go? or what does it go on?

Corrupt regimes where the corrupt leaders live in luxury and the people starve on the streets, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia come straight to mind.

[Bassman62]

My father was a tobacco broker in Zimbabwe before he was forced out by Mugabe. The farms would produce and store huge crops of tobacco and sell it to the world through an efficient infrastructure. That infrastructure was deliberately destroyed and most of the white farmers harvested crops burned in the barns after harvest.

Many of the farms have been broken up and land is not used as the likelyhood of harvesting a crop is remote. What tobacco crops remains are poor quality grown in small amounts that are largely not worth grading, even if there was an infrastructure to market it.

And there are some who would have us believe that these people are the same as us.