Food shortages
Of course, like any “economics” journal, this one fails to acknowledge the ways in which energy, finance, and food are bound together like a Gordian knot. Nonetheless, this article raises a lot of points obliquely. What is interesting is how the points are raised, the way they are framed. The real solution, that is, permaculture-like, locally-intense, organic food production, is not even in the discussion… just more of the same, technology and chemicals.
Food praxis anyone?
A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club’s 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto on Thursday.
“It’s not a matter of if, but when,” he warned investors. “It’s going to hit this year hard.”
Andrew James:
Hello, all:
This “mud cookie” story from Haiti shows that even countries near the U.S. won’t have an “edge” as oil prices affect food supply.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-01-30-haiti-poor_N.htm
Andrew James
1 February 2008, 9:22 amaudrey:
The article reads a bit like a geometry class where the teacher makes up her own postulates and tells the students that these are the concepts we assume are true, and everything else builds from those.
This sentence makes my head spin:
“The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil; it’s getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does”
Maybe the greatest challenge is getting the middle class to change the way they eat, rather than finding a way to maintain their current habits. Maybe increasing genetically modified foods and chemicals does in fact represent a fundamental change to our diet. Maybe getting food to “the middle class” isn’t the greatest challenge; maybe getting it to those who are already starving has been and remains the greatest challenge - it’s disturbing how he just rendered a vast portion of the population invisible in that one sentence.
The speaker is a global portfolio strategist, though - so perhaps his real greatest challenge is ensuring people continue to frame the issue the way he does.
1 February 2008, 11:39 ampeggy:
Yes, we must eat less. But that would not be to the advantage of the guy who wrote this article.
1 February 2008, 8:43 pmAlso, he forgot about the water shortage.
DeAnander:
less, and differently; more local, more seasonal, less artificial.
the idea that any substantial proportion of the globe can eat like the US middle class is patently absurd, clearly the babblings of Those Who Have Not Done The Math — or who don’t want to, because the factory food system offers them more profit-skimming opportunities (i.e. oppos to defraud both farmer and eater) than any sane, sober food system. as with most human activity under an oligarchical ruling class, the purpose of most people’s time and effort is not to clothe and feed themselves and care for their kids, but to pile up treasure in the storehouses of the elite. just so, the purpose of our food system is not to feed people, but to absorb surplus factory ag production, pad the pockets of enormous numbers of “middlemen” in the industrialised food/transport chain, and return “profits” to investors — not to mention consolidating control of food production and retailing in fewer and fewer hands in the process. the purpose is not to produce high quality food, provide good nutrition, tend and nurture soil and watersheds, or ensure food security. our food system runs in the service of finance capital, not in the service of land, farmer, and eater.
and while I’m on a rant — and repeating myself (sorry) –
the idea that the white industrial middle class is a “middle class” and not a kind of global aristocracy is also mythical, based on the ever-deferred promise of “development” and “progress” (as if the exploited South were ever intended by the rentiers and bosses at the top to catch up with the bought-off quiescent middle class in the N). superaccumulation anywhere in a finite system means super-deprivation someplace — has to. and the “middle class” lifestyle is superaccumulative, in materials and goods if not (by design) in liquid capital.
“growth” is the fictional narrative that masks this basic reality. any global “middle class” will by physical necessity be poorer than the much smaller white industrial middle class, and/or its ascent will sink the global majority into even deeper poverty and resource scarcity… as if this were possible short of [even greater] mass death and [even shorter] reduced lifespan, which are beginning to look ominously probable.
what will it take to rid people of this noxious religion of Growth, a more damaging, lethal, and obstinate fundamentalism than any of the other patriarchal mythologies? I feel like a One-Note Banjo playing this theme over and over again, but it is one of the great hinges of our predicament.
2 February 2008, 12:56 pmLegume Sam:
From Carlo Petrini’s piece in Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed (ed. Vandana Shiva):
Can anyone here find out where the firsthand version of this data can be found?
2 February 2008, 2:15 pmStan:
Predicament is right. Even for the high-input middle-class. Without a tectonic displacement of the whole system, the options left to the middle-class are to continue to march, or to face penury, even homelessness.
What makes a system a system is that it is suprahuman, or at least supra-individual. It has a dynamic that becomes inescapable even by those who flourish within it.
I know many of my old comrades will accuse me of offering only “voluntarism” as a solution when I say this; but it is not merely unlikely that some organized force (a Party) will take state power and administer/enforce that transformative social paradigm shift — it is categorically not possible for the state to do this at all. The web of relations from a huge plurality of vested interests, civil society, and the state apparatus of the present-day US… and the web of relations between the US, transnationals, the Rentiers, and other political entities in the world, is simultaneously too vast and interdependent to be susceptible to any lesser institution. Moreover, there is NO possibility of a national political Party (or whatever you want to call it) forming that would even have the germ of the capacity to contest for political power in the US… under our current conditions.
The breaks will come; but they will be from the unsustainable contradictions of the system itself. The first question will not be how to begin formation of the revolutionary society; it will be how to eat and sleep indoors. And this will not be accomplished by some survivalist fantasy; but based on the strengths and weaknesses of communities in solving the practical problems that wil confront them as we hit one wall after another of unsustainability.
There are moral dimensions of this that will require struggle, even mass struggle, like resisting exterminist military adventures, standing between Accusers and scapegoats, opposing masculine cults and depridations, et al. The practical dimension, I will argue, merges with the moral dimension, and with the psychological/spiritual dimension (or who will listen to us): The things we have talked about before, learning how to be self-sufficient and building genuine, caring communities, are not only about to be necessary for survival; they are their own reward, and a redemptive alternative to the obsessive-compulsive rat race that characterizes the lives of the so-called middle class.
I think we can argue that there are things people can do that are simultaneously politically efficacious, morally defensible, and that will make people happier. No doubt the alternative is as awful as we know it is. But we also have to say what we are for: respect, creativity, love, cooperation, a sense of belonging in the world, that kind of stuff. These, of course, have their opposites in conquest/domination.
2 February 2008, 6:46 pmpeggy:
Got by email a set of family photos with captions, under the title “World Food Expenditures”. All the families look reasonably healthy. Can’t reproduce the pics here, which show the food each family eats in a week together with each family pic, but can reproduce the captions
Germany: The Melander family of Bargteheide (4 people)
Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07
United States: The Revis family of North Carolina (4 people)
Food expenditure for one week $341.98
Italy : The Manzo family of Sicily (5 people)
Food expenditure for one week: 214.36 Euros or $260.11
Mexico: The Casales family of Cuernavaca
Food expenditure for one week: 1, 862.78 Mexican Pesos or $189.09
Poland: The Sobczynscy family of Konstancin-Jeziorna (5 people)
Food expenditure for one week: 582.48 Zlotys or $151.27
Egypt: The Ahmed family of Cairo (12 people)
Food expenditure for one week: 387.85 Egyptian Pounds or $68.53
Ecuador: The Ayme family of Tingo (9 people)
Food expenditure for one week: $31.55
Bhutan: The Namgay family of Shingkhey Village (12 people)
Food expenditure for one week: 224.93 ngultrum or $5.03
Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp (6 people)
Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23
It’s worth seeing what each of these families actually eats. As one would expect, the highest spenders consume the greatest proportion of highly processed foods and soda. I will forward the whole post with pics to Stan, and maybe he can forward it on to De.
2 February 2008, 9:01 pmaudrey:
Saw this article today:
“Jonathan Stevens and Cheryl Maffei of Hungry Ghost Bakery became interested in what some are calling their ‘little red hen’ idea of giving people wheat seeds to grow locally after a New Mexico baker at a conference eight or nine years ago introduced them to bread made from locally grown grain.
Instead of baking with organic flour grown in North Dakota that gets trucked to North Carolina for milling, Stevens said, it makes much more sense to look at growing wheat and other grains nearby and milling it locally”
I love this quote: “We have to be an agricultural state, because we eat.”
http://www.recorder.com/story.cfm?id_no=4812906
It’s an interesting approach for a baker to take - simply giving away the seeds, and seeing what grows from it.
2 February 2008, 11:15 pmLegume Sam:
Audrey said:
I am busy these days growing a wide variety of different types of mustard plant; soon they will flower, and I will try to cross-pollinate them in an attempt to create a good-tasting, endemic weed to supplement the mallow that grows everywhere around here… mallow is OK but it’s bland…
3 February 2008, 12:39 amLegume Sam:
Weeds, of course, cost nothing to eat…
3 February 2008, 12:40 amaudrey:
That was Peggy’s quote, not mine, but I can supplement it with a link to the photos she was referring to - they came from a Time Magazine: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519_1373664,00.html
3 February 2008, 9:50 amLegume Sam:
Woops! Sorry — yesterday was kind of a lost day for me…
3 February 2008, 12:00 pmxenia:
of course, food in germany and europe in general used to be 2-3 times cheaper a decade ago before the euro…
3 February 2008, 3:03 pmMichael Anderson:
Here’s a link to what Joe Baegent calls the “Rhino in the playpen”.
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/02/nine-billion-li.html
like Joe….he is Gonzo & truthful, and shares the same sense of guilt that I have…
8 February 2008, 4:57 pmJosiah:
In response to Deanander, I think that the concealment of this zero-sum-game aspect of the global economy depends, above all, on a kind of Social Darwinist teleology. Everyone’s status is a reflection of their their individual, micro-level decision-making, which is in turn a reflection of their immutable Nature; forget about history, inheritance, or institutional socialization. So if you read someone like David Landes, the “Rise of the West” is to be seen as a grand unfolding of the inherent middle-class qualities of its rational, acquisitive citizens. The causal linkages between the wealth of the Northern “triad,” the brutal conquest of 85% of the globe between 1492 and 1945 (with reversal and retrenchment since), and the lives of the four billion on the bottom of the world economy are reversed in such fairy tales. “We” are not on top because we conquered the world; “we” conquered the world because we were always on top.
I think it’s kind of like a trophic pyramid gone wrong. I’m no ecologist, but as I understand it the pop. density at each node in a food chain is determined by energy efficiency, so there are always more plants than herbivores, more herbivores than small predators, and more small predators than big predators. Kind of like how in every pre-industrial agrarian civilization 90% of the people were peasants; an expanding class of “big predators” raking in taxes and booty is arguably a consistent cause of collapse. You could argue that George Kennan’s call to establish a set of relationships allowing “us” to preserve the disparity with them is a recognition that Western Europe and Japan could be “big predators,” but any other successful industrial development (like trophic level-jumping) had to be smashed or the whole thing would fall apart.
According to the UN, 10% of the world’s population now has 85% of the wealth, and 2% has 40%. The working class in the “triad,” who make up the demographic majority (but economic minority) of that upper 10%, are like a class of frightened small predators competing with very big predators, and who live on the scraps left by the latter’s unsustainable slaughter of huge herds of herbivores. They have a short-term interest in an arrangement which is against their long-term interest. “Development” means some push others out of the way to get a bigger piece; but the pop. density at different trophic levels is fixed by finite energy flows. And I think climate change is showing more than anything else right now how this whole thing is a zero-sum game, with (to hugely oversimplify) most of the energy flowing North and most of the entropy flowing South.
Sorry for the hazily developed thoughts, but your post had me rethinking some of these things.
8 February 2008, 10:55 pmDeAnander:
@Josiah, interesting ideas and I have been thinking along similar lines, especially after viewing recently some of those gorgeous BBC nature productions with Attenborough narrating; the similarity between foodsheds in the sea and on land is remarkable and represents deep energy structure. Massive herds of herbivores harvested by smaller carnivores who may in turn be harvested by larger carnivores, with the numbers thinning radically towards the top. Humans want to be the top of the food chain, but we also want to exist in larger numbers than any other life form. Can’t be done. It’s lonely at the top, and it has to be lonely at the top, or the whole food chain collapses. Which, in fact, it is doing, right before our eyes.
Argh [bangs head on keyboard]…
Also implies things about the ecosystem w/in a human culture. Severe hierarchy can actually be sustainable; what seems to kill off kingdoms and empires is the inevitable multiplication of aristocracy so that there are, again, too many large predators and not enough herbivores; that and the obsession with abiotic goods like gold and jewels which can be preserved and hoarded forever (this enables a level of wealth concentration simply not possible by hoarding furs, dried fish, potatoes or anything els biotic except perhaps honey).
Of course there is a whole other model, that is, the model of the mycelium and the coral reef: massive nutrient sharing by a sort of neural network of cooperating individuals. This model packs more life into a smaller space than any other. These sharing networks are the basis of all the world’s wellsprings of life: grass, forest, coral reef…
If humans want to be as numerous as we are then we can’t continue thinking and acting in a predator mindset. If we insist on acting and thinking in a predator mindset then our numbers will be culled, either by our own elites in their hissy fits of outright genocide and/or deliberate starvation of others, or by a resource crash so extreme that it takes even the elites down too.
Anyway, that is a very cartoonish outline but it is one possible model of our predicament: that we have to start thinking like mushrooms and peasants rather than indulging in grandiose fantasies of being “lions and tigers and bears o my.” I guess we could see our current predicament as an evolutionary watershed for our species; either we learn to think like mushrooms, or we crash.
Faites vos jeux madames et messieurs.
9 February 2008, 3:04 pm