/life/Food Crisis
Update: Some guy named George Monbiot did the analysis better than me: The Pleasures of the Flesh
From Soaring food prices now top threat, IMF says:
WASHINGTON - The global food crisis has pushed aside fears of a recession and mounting banking woes as top priority for the world's economic leaders
Ministers representing 185 countries agreed on the weekend that soaring food prices threaten global calamity and pledged to co-operate on a solution to save the world's poorest people from starvation.
But that solution remains elusive.
Maybe it's just the veggie hippie in me talking, but:
- Put a tax on meat
- Reduce subsidies to CAFO operations
- Let's all give up on ethanol
Boy, those sure are elusive.
There is no food shortage. There is a collosal, immoral, tragic economic misallocation of subsidies and taxes, and thus nutrients and arable land towards 5% to 25% efficient protein and probably negatively-efficient transportation fuel replacements. This crisis is policy-created, and it must be policy-destroyed. Preferably before millions of people starve, riot, and turn back development in some of the most fragile states by many years.
Comments
John Hawkins wrote
Nice post.
Josh wrote
A tax on meat? How about just properly pricing the inputs?
-Josh
Keith Lea wrote
Humans have eaten meat for millions of years without "global food crises." Our economic system has always existed to encourage & reward the amassing of wealth and the destruction of wild food stocks. Yet we pretend to be flabbergasted when poverty stricken families can't feed themselves, and all solutions take the existence of such an economy as a given, as the primary concern of the planet.
Rob wrote
John: Thanks.
Josh: What's the real cost of taking the food out of someone's mouth? Less antagonistically, if you're willing to pay 4x to 20x more for meat than someone who is very poor is willing to pay for corn/wheat/rice, should that be okay? you're right, of course, the first thing to do is to plough through with reducing farm subsidies, i.e. finish the Doha round of trade talks. That should only take another 20 years. In the mean time, a meat tax adds complexity to a horribly complex system of taxes, tariffs, and subsidies, but is quick, and will have the desired effect. I proposed it mostly tongue-in-cheek, though -- the latter two bullets ought to be more than enough to deflate the commodities bubble, from what I can see.
Keith: That's true, though there have been many many "trade-area food crises" -- it just so happens that our trade area is now the world. I'm not flabbergasted that people can't feed themselves, I'm distraught -- especially since the policy instruments to alleviate this crisis are so clear and present. I'm not sure I understand your last two clauses.
Rob wrote
One more very very important clarification: when I say "ethanol" I mean "ethanol as gasoline substitute" not "beer". yeah, oops!
Keith Lea wrote
The solution is to give hungry people food. However, time and again in this culture, preservation of economic production takes precedence over human life. In our heart of hearts we all know that any solution to this food crisis will be short-lived, and will benefit rich Whites more than the poor it intends to serve. And of course this solution will by no means end poverty.
Maybe the IMF & World Bank should drop the act and admit that it hates poor people and does not want them to make it through this crisis (unless of course they learn some trade skills that can be put to use in White-owned factories).
Keith Lea wrote
PS: see http://www.counterpunch.org/summers.html
Rob wrote
If you don't ensure the "preservation of economic production", how do you ensure that next time you'll also be able to "give hungry people food"? That is, I'm all for giving hungry people food, obviously, but it's not like the world has 2x more food than necessary any more, so we have to be careful that whatever we do ensures a sustainable food supply for the ~9 billion people that will all-but-inevitably be on this world, and doesn't cause that number to grow ever larger (an unlikely outcome IMO: better fed people have fewer kids.)
Keith Lea wrote
The safest and most humane solution would be to give people the means to produce their own food, reversing the trend of sucking indigenous people into the world economy and stripping them of their ability to sustain themselves.
As for better fed people having fewer kids, see http://www.panearth.org/panearth/. I suspect the reasons for lower fertility rates in developed countries are more subtle. I'm certainly not going to have children here in the Oakland, mainly because, like most cities around the world, it's a disgusting place to live. Is this really the direction in which we want to be heading, considering the state of population equilibrium that most human cultures exhibited for all of time?
Rob wrote
What state of equilibrium? I don't think I've read much about past populations reaching states of equilibrium any more than we're going to at 9 billion -- i.e in the normal way species reach carrying capacity. Again, history isn't a guide because through most of history we hadn't "filled" the planet.
I don't think most cities are like Oakland; in the "developed" world, most cities I've lived in (Dublin, Toronto, Ottawa) and visited were reasonable places to raise children, "even" in the urban core, and IMO were getting better, not worse.
There's definitely a problem with how people are "sucked into" the world economy. I'm not sure I have the same harsh view of it as you do -- I don't think it's fundamentally broken, just broken in practice.
Keith Lea wrote
Why do you think the !Kung population hasn't exploded to smother the planet? The Ohlone? The Huron? How about cheetahs? Ants?
http://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/graph_month/evolution_nombre_hommes/
Why would members of any culture DECIDE to work in factories instead of sustaining themselves communally with their families and friends? In fact during civilization's initial conquest of America, many European settlers escaped into the woods to live with the natives. Over time, strict rules and even guarded fences were set up to keep people IN the settlements. Frederick W. Turner's "Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness" has some great accounts of this. (Of course this discouragement continues to this day via dams, pollution, deforestation - to name a few.)
Without extreme violence, including the enslavement & death of 100 million native Americans & 100 million Africans, very few indigenous cultures would have joined us. (The Kayapo are a somewhat recent example of this - look for them on netflix if you have it.)
Keith Lea wrote
PS: Dublin, Toronto, and Ottawa are all among top 25 cities ranked in the Mercer Worldwide Quality of Living Survey. And supposedly 1 in 4 Torontonian families are living in poverty.
Jim Meier wrote
Yeah, I read "Ishmael" in high school too.
/travel/canada/Another Sad Trainride
I was on the train back from Halifax when this happened. :-(
