With the end of USAID, and the transfer of any remaining functions to State.
Does any one here have any information on current Foid For Peace shipments?
Is tonnage being laid up?
Really?
No one?
Were any US flag ships even on that run anymore? When mine was switched off it in 2013 we were told the program folded and they were going to direct cash transfers instead.
Haven’t heard shit about it since.
It is still in exitance, but threatened. Apparently a lot bigger problem for US farmer than for the few seafarers affected by a shut down:
I’m sure it soldiers on, but once our role in it got axed I never heard much about how things carried on or were going — certainly not now though all this has renewed my curiosity.
I believe 50% of all shipments must be U.S. Flag. A great deal of it is shipped in containers on the box boats, the Maersk Alabama carried some cons with FFP shipments.
As far back as 1967 I was on a ship chartered by Transmar on behalf of USAid.
We carried Texas long grain rice in bags with the famous logo on the coast of South Vietnam:
We loaded from larger ships in Saigon, or off Vung Tau and discharged in several ports up along the coast as far as Hue’.
PS> Our Vietnamese crew refused to accept the rice from the cargo. We had to buy expensive Thai rice on the black market to feed them.
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From a Feb. 5 congressional hearing: America Builds: Maritime Infrastructure | Transportation and Infrastructure Committee
Mr. Schoeneman, you discussed somewhat the issue of PL 480. Have you heard concerns specifically about the Trump administration’s – my questions say changes, I wouldn’t say changes, destruction of USAID?
SCHOENEMAN: I mean, right now for us, this is a major issue. We’ve had, at least I talked to our – our biggest, one of our biggest food aid carriers, and they’ve got ships that are currently sailing. One of them has already been laid up because they don’t have cargo. Another one is on its way back from Africa, and it’ll get laid up when it gets here. And every time they lay a ship up, that’s, you know, 20, 30 jobs for my members and for the rest of the industry. And we don’t know how long the ships are going to be out of service.
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I remember when the Obama admin decided they were “just going to send cash instead of food”. Absolutely inexplicable decision. Who made that call?? I’d love to hear their reasoning on why it just made more sense to send cash in the situation of food aid to starving third world citizens in unstable situations.
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I know how the liberals (including the eco-freaks) are going to scream when I say this:
If you want lower food prices in the supermarket (and lower welfare program costs) in the USA, then stopping giving away our food overseas. Let the law of supply (oversupply) and demand work to lower prices.
As an environmentalist, I understand that nature keeps the ecosystem in balance by regulating the size of the herd of each species through famine and disease. We have too many people, 8 billion (and projected to be 15-25 billion by 2100) on planet earth. Earth cannot support 8 billion, let alone 15-25 billion.
We have interfered with nature’s natural mechanisms to balance of the ecosystem in many parts of the World, but shipping too much food and medicine to areas of the World that are vastly overpopulated.
This overpopulation results in desertification, less vegetation to convert CO2 to oxygen, and global warming.
The three primary factors that drive climate change are: volcanic activity, solar flares, and the size of the human herd.
Things like diesel engine emissions, and solar and renewable energy have only trivial climate impacts.
If we want to save Planet Earth, the first thing we need to do is stop interfering with nature’s mechanisms to control the size of the human herd to keep the ecosystem in balance.
This is a very hard and inconvenient truth. No one likes it, but it is unavoidable.
In the long run nature always wins. The longer we wait to let Nature take its natural course, the worse the human population crash is going to be.
Now you liberal eco-freaks can start screaming that stopping food and medical aid to the overpopulated areas of the Third World to let nature take its natural course is racist.
But just remember, as the atmosphere is degraded and solar radiation becomes stronger, it is the white people who will be wiped out by melanoma and the dark skinned people who will inherit the Earth.
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You’re an environmentalist AND a tug captain?
Food, I can see an argument to be made there. Medicine? You think not sending medicine when there’s an abundance is a good idea?
Aren’t there positively correlated?
So you want to let people die when there’s mechanisms available to save them? Interesting.
So then why wouldn’t you provide medicine/food/aid when possible? This sentence seems contrary to your previous argument that we need to stop interfering with natures mechanisms bc we’re going to ruin it?
But nature always wins? So what’s the harm in sending medical aid if not food aid?
Is that a problem for you? Do you not think the human race is capable or either evolving or inventing ways around this so that it’s not literally a black v white thing?
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You were probably buying the rice through the uncle of the bosun. I thought I was getting a cook and being fond of Vietnamese food I was looking forward to his arrival. I was given a guy whose ability to boil water was questionable, he was related to someone important.
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I agree with the majority of what you said. But you’re not considering the human factor. Let me give you an example. In the last 20 years the homeless population has greatly increased in my city proper. They’re down there doing their homeless thing 365 days a year. Come early October everyone in the suburbs gets flyers in the mail about donating for Thanksgiving meals for the homeless & many people give their annual 20 bucks. That’s it, $20 for a whole year of peace of mind knowing you did your part to combat homelessness. When you see them panhandling on the corner or in front of the grocery store you can ignore them because you donated already. Actually, you didn’t do anything to solve homelessness but you feel good about yourself & that is what is important. Now for Food For Peace. We’re not going to feed the whole world, we couldn’t feed the whole world if we wanted to & we’re not obligated to feed the whole world. Screw’em. But we’re humans, have big hearts & want to have a nice Thanksgiving without thinking about all the starving kids of the world. So we can & should use US ships, manned by US mariners to send them a few dozen ships of US grown food and call it a day. It makes many of us feel good about ourselves & our government. If done correctly, I think it is a bigger win for us than it is for the starving kids. Concerning free cash, free guns, free contraceptives, free womens study material etc., screw all of that. None of that benefits us but giving away a little food is a win for everyone imo.
The only issue with this is it is the Third world people who make the least impact. One could support 20 or 30 people more comfortably in the third world for the amount of resources I use personally. If we really want to help the Earth support more people we should eliminate people in the first world first, as they use by FAR the most resources on a per person basis. We as Americans use more per capita than any nation on Earth, so eliminating Americans would require eliminating the least amount of people while creating the most improvement overall in the conservation of resources.
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First of all that is bullshit.
Are Americans causing the Amazon Rainforest (the lungs of the plant) to be cleared and burned, or desertification in sub-Saharan Africa?
It a lot of the overpopulated Third World people walk a little further every day to cut enough brush to cook dinner at night. Land around the villages is stripped bare. The official population policy of those places is “as many as God sends.” Ever been to any of those places?
To an extent…
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All of the First World use more of the earth’s resources than the Third World. To be fair anyone living in Chicago or Montreal during winter in a pair of shorts and a T shirt ,without power or Fossil Fuel, would be a very unhappy camper.
There is also the speed of the increase of population growth. When I came into this world the population was about 2.5 billion . It is now about 8.2 billion.
What’s bullshit? That American’s use more resources than anyone else per capita? That is incontrovertible fact!
I believe the USA is around 5% of the world’s population and it uses around 20% of the world’s resources. Obviously those are very rough numbers but regardless people in the US do use the most per capita.
I never said that Americans are causing the Amazon Rainforest (the lungs of the plant) to be cleared and burned, or desertification in sub-Saharan Africa.
I said Americans use the most resources per capita, so if we want to preserve resources to support as many people as possible removing Americans would be the most efficient and effective way to get there. We would have to remove many, many more third worlders to get the same benefit that we could otherwise get by removing far fewer Americans.
I’m simply putting forward how we could minimize the loss of humans to get the best result and the best way to do that would be to get rid of Americans, of which I am.
To say that third world people have the worst impact on the planet is pretty silly when there are so many third world people and they each individually use so little in terms of resources.
Yeah, where do you think the demand for lumber and minerals comes from? Is it only the US? No, obviously. But still a large part.
So are you advocating for a one child policy like the Chinese did? Then we can put every female child up for adoption except there just won’t be enough people to adopt them. So instead we should just let them die?
I’m sure most of us who have sailed for any length of time (like 90% of the forum) have been to “those places”.
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So
You advocate that USAID should provide family planning, contraception, and abortion?
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