Surviving and Thriving on Very Little Food. There are over 5,000 known varieties of the potato, but today we eat less than a dozen of them.
There are over 15,000 varieties of beans in existence, but you’ll find only five or six of them at your grocery store. Ever hear of a banana melon? Most people haven’t, and you won’t see them in stores. Yet they were once a prized melon, widely sought after. Emergency Seed Bank : Directive21.com. The End of US Dollar as Global Reserve Currency. Just ahead of the G20 London Summit in April, Zhou Xiaochuan (China's central bank governor) proposed replacing the US dollar as the international reserve currency with a new global system controlled by the IMF.
The main global reserve currency would be represented by a basket of significant currencies and commodities, an extended version of the Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). China's call for an overhaul of the global currency reserve system has been echoed by Russia's President Medvedev as an important building block of a new global financial architecture. Major emerging economies, often net creditors to the rest of the world an with substantial holdings of US government debt, fear the potential inflationary risk of the US Federal Reserve printing money to finance bank bail outs. Their fears may be based on the “Triffin Dilemma” that postulates the necessity of US external deficits as long as the US dollar is the only global reserve currency.