food

Big in the news these past couple of days has been the revelation that some of the major oil companies have reported higher-than-expected profits for the first quarter of this year - in the case of BP, up a staggering 48% from this time last year. What’s been the major contributor?  Why, fuel shortages, of course.

What has also been big in the news of late?  Food riots and shortages.

Oh yes, and hedge fund managers earning billions of dollars. 

They are all connected.

Lots of people earn varying amounts of money treating food as a commodity.  Michael Pollan highlights, in the first section of The Omnivore’s Dilemma , the bind that many American farmers are in, thanks to the system of subsidies and futures that requires them to push their corn yield ever higher while paying them ever less for it.

“Rice is plentiful in Cambodia, and the country has been a net exporter for the past decade.  But it is becoming less and less affordable for the people who grow it. A 2006 survey, well before the spike in food prices, found that 22 percent of Cambodians in rural areas could not meet their own basic food needs.”
------------------
What prompted this blog entry was an article on today’s New York Times front page.  The article has, as I read it, three main points:

1.) Chemical fertilizers led and lead to increased production, which in turn leads to better standards of living.  (As illustrated by the emotion-tugging image of a prematurely-aged, shrivelled Vietnamese woman.)
2.) Fertilizer shortages, combined with the growing demand for food worldwide, lead to food shortages, destabilization, riots, etc.
3.) Therefore, we need to make more fertilizer.

Imbedded in the article is the implied, unquestioned belief that economic growth is inevitable and desirable.  Additionally, as people earn more, they are of course going to want to eat more meat.  There is a passing reference to one - just one - potential environmental problem (dead zones as a result of fertilizer runoff).

But what really, really yanks my chain about the article is that, although the authors state that the increase in worldwide food production (as a result of artificial fertilizers) “was the fundamental reason world population was able to rise to about 6.7 billion today from 1.7 billion in 1900,” they don’t seem to experience any cognitive dissonance between that statement and their assertions regarding increased world population and food shortages.  The conflict is there, to my mind, but I have a hard time seeing it in the article.

Now, for my rant-out-on-a-limb.  The very last quote of the article underlines the authors’ third main point, that more fertilizer is better; indeed, necessary.  But what the article lacks is any recognition of the possibility that these current problems are symptomatic of the unsustainable nature of modern Industrial Agriculture.  The system is unfair: how can it be right that some people become very rich, or even somewhat rich, off of a system that simultaneously means that many other people cannot afford to eat the food they produce?  The system is also necessarily limited.  Chemical fertilizers are currently produced from fossil fuels - natural gas, petroleum, etc.  Now, perhaps I’m confused, but aren’t we supposedly experiencing a gas shortage?  Doesn’t that imply, perhaps, that petroleum production might, at some point, conceivably STOP?  And probably the same for natural gas, another finite-quantity fossil fuel?

So, let me see if I have this straight: we’re experiencing massive worldwide food shortages due in [large] part to increased world population, which was made possible by chemical fertilizers.  So we need to pump up food production - more fertilizers!  That way, nobody starves, everybody’s happy and can go back to reproducing to their heart’s content.

But what about in 50 or 100 or however many years’ time?  When every last bit of petroleum and natural gas on the planet has been used up.  And plants revert to natural levels of production.  And there are billions more people on the planet.  And alternative production methods have not been tried and tested because, back in 2008, “others [said] that those approaches, while helpful, [would] not be enough to meet the world’s rapidly rising demand for food and biofuel.”

What then?
--------------------
Note: I was going to keep going with my solutions, but I ran out of steam after the rant.  So instead of a semi-coheret prose version, I’ll give you as far as I got in note form.  It is as follows:

I am not advocating letting people starve.  What I am advocating is a rethink.

Nowadays, it seems that the pursuit of happiness is usually conflated with the pursuit of wealth.  Yet there are myriad publications and studies out there that posit that riches, beyond a certain level, really don’t have that much of a positive impact on happiness.  Once one is past the basic needs of life, aspects of living such as interpersonal relationships are more important for happiness than wealth.

Why not level things out, then?  Instead of having some people earning billions of dollars a year and others unable to afford basic foodstuffs, why not work on figuring out some way of reaching equilibrium?  It will probably involve a reshaping of the idea of a global market, and probably will mean a return…

(I even petered out mid-sentence!  I meant to go on with something like a return to more old-fashioned ways of living, but that got me thinking about “Things I don’t know what to do about” point number 3.  And I lost my previous train of thought.)

Things to do:

- try to buy locally, when you can, so that farmers can break their dependence on commodified crops
- spend more times with your friends and family, particularly if they are local, as an antidote to the malaise that can creep in without the adrenaline-pump of commercial gratification
- invest - time, your spending power, your word-of-mouth advertising abilities - in alternatives to the status quo.  So, more buses, trains, bicyclists, locavores, free-range farmers, etc.
- TRY!

Some things I don’t know what to do about:

- But what about all those people who earn a living in the commercial sector? If people stop buying, how will they support themselves?
- the “it’s easy for you to say” aspect of me saying all this.  Here I am, living a comfortable life in a developed nation.  How can I not be hypocritical?
- the helpless feeling when I think of the interdependencies of modern life and know that there isn’t any single, simple “fix” or even less than a hundred, a thousand fixes.  The system is too complex.  I don’t want to return to the Dark Ages any more than anyone else.  So I want medicine and lighting and the ability to see my family even though I live thousands of miles away.  But I don’t think things can continue to work like this, and am, at the same time, awfully afraid of taking a wrong step, of inadvertently making things worse whilst trying to make them better.  “The road to hell…” and all that.  Part of me very much just wants to stick my head in the sand and wait for the inevitable meltdown, and just cross my fingers that I will still be around afterwards.  And will be able to deal with whatever comes “afterwards”.