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In the final two decades of the 20th century, an increase in random violence has occurred worldwide. Gang warfare in the inner cities of the U.S. has reached epidemic proportions. The vocabulary of Americans has recently been expanded to include terms such as "drive-by-shooting," "mass murder," "random violence," and the like. Every day we read stories of unimaginable horror. In the last decade there has been a gradual cheapening of life in industrialized nations. Euthanasia is now legal in many European countries, and it has been approved on ballot measures in a number of states in the U.S. In the last 30 years, more than 30 million abortions have been performed in the United States alone. As a result, the population base of young adults is insufficient to support the Social Security benefits of the aging post-war Baby Boom population. In the inner cities we read of children killing children for the latest style of sneakers. Teenage violence has reached epidemic proportions with stories of murder, rape, and peer torture appearing daily in the print and broadcast media. It seems as if America has lost its soul. Crimes which were once shocking are now commonplace. Shock has been replaced by numbness in the psyche of Americans, and there seems to be no end in sight to the ever-increasing violence. In the last 30 years of the 20th century, despite dramatic technological advances in food production, starvation remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Currently experts estimate that 800 million people—nearly one out of every six—suffer from acute or chronic hunger. Approximately two billion of the world's nearly six billion people suffer from chronic malnutrition of some kind. And if recent statistics from United States Department of Agriculture are accurate, the problem will only worsen in the coming months and years. In the last several years the world's grain stores have decreased dramatically to unprecedented lows. Not since statistics have been kept have the world's grain stores fallen to their current levels. On September 12, 1995, officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated grain stores from data that had been compiled for more than 100 agricultural countries and came to a startling conclusion—that the world's grain stores had fallen to their lowest level in history with carryover stocks for 1996 at only 49 days. The importance of this finding cannot be overstated. Grain is the planet's largest source of food for direct consumption by humans as well as for livestock and poultry. The shortage of grain is compiled by the fact that since 1990 the world's population has grown at a rate of approximately 110 million people per year. This growth has occurred primarily in the countries which can least afford it—the Third World developing nations. Estimates are that at this rate the populations will reach six billion by 1998, eight billion by the year 2019, and 12 billion by the year 2030. Most experts believe that Earth's capacity to produce food is significantly less than that needed to support the estimated population of 12 billion people in the year 2030. 103 VIOLENCE ABOUNDS FAMINES IN THE LAND Adding to the dilemma, studies of the world's water tables have shown that they have