This took a bit of thinking about. The credit crisis will impact on charitable donations, and therefore people being hit by the food crisis. But, as the famous Cree proverb says - "Only when the last tree has died & the last river has been poisoned & the last fish has been caught will we realise that we can not eat money".
I think for this house a food crisis would be more upsetting, given the amount we chomp through. Also, Pete assures me that crunchy credit == houses we can actually maybe afford. I'd still rather have food, though. :P
You forgot the fuel crisis. You know, the one that's just starting to happen in Scotland and the north of England just now as the Grangemouth refinery is being shut down because there's a strike happening this weekend.
You don't have a car any more so it won't be much of a deal for you. I barely noticed the last one, apart from having to cycle around the cars queueing up to buy petrol.
Of course, if it goes on so long that food can no longer be delivered to the shops, that would be a more serious matter.
The last one was the week before Kathy was born, and the midwives were sleeping on each others' sofas because they couldn't get home. Which is Not What You Want. And Asda brought in anti-hoarding rules saying you were only allowed to buy two loaves of bread, which is Not What You Want either when you're buying against the possibility of an emergency Caesarian and six weeks of not being able to drive. (Not that that happened.)
Driving was wonderful, though, when everyone else wasn't 8-)
It's a single refinery, arguably localised strike (last seen heading for ACAS), just happens to have national impact. The degree of expected crisis depends on how much scaremongering one reads and believes; certainly, there was no sign whatsoever of any trouble at the pumps as I went by.
The food crisis is only just beginning: this year's export bans and punitive tariffs have sown the seeds (so to speak) of reduced planting and reduced yields next year. The 'price signal' to produce more is being systematically suppressed; this is dangerous when so many of the inputs - fuel, fertilisers, pesticides - are doubling in price.
If prices are not permitted to rise faster than costs, then they are effectively a signal to produce less.
Thst's not a comforting thought - it's bad enough that people who need to eat are being squeezed out of the market - but farmers being squeezed out, too.
Barring fortunate weather, the next two years will see less crops planted and much of what is sown will be weakened by reduced fertiliser and pesticide use. This, in a world of adverse climate or even outright drought, and the looming menace of fungal blight.
That's the short term. The medium term is that increasing demand from the affluent will continue squeezing out the poor: demand for grain ethanol, demand for 'second dollar' food as newly-prosperous industrial workers move up from subsistence staples to expensively-fattened meat animals, and the decadent wealthy will continue displace efficient farming with set-aside subsidies and inefficiently-grown organic crops.
Above all, we have become an urban species: in the First and Second World, this urbanisation followed (or was driven by) collectivisation or brutal processes akin to The Enclosures, in which agriculture became an industry. So the long-term situation is a 'continual crisis' of small famines and conflicts: subsistence farming is going to be displaced everywhere, partly by the power of the city-dwellers' money buying out the last remaining crofters in the global rationalisation of agriculture - more often by coercion and appalling abuses by landowners than by land reform - and, for the greater part of the world where the roads don't link the fields to the urban marketplace, by starvation or mass migration. Because hunger is rather more about lack of money than lack of rainfall - food is unaffordable rather than unavailable, and there has never been a time when the world grew less than a survival ration for every living human - but we distribute it unfairly and the poor are by definition the losers in any competition defined in monetary terms.
Which is to say: get used to the crisis: it's the way things are going to be from now on. Munitions are now a better bet, for the cynical investor, than they have ever been: our own urban history shows that food shortages are always accompanied by large-scale civil disturbances, and we are going to see a lot of it in the megacities of the developing world.
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The food crisis, that's real.
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Of course, if it goes on so long that food can no longer be delivered to the shops, that would be a more serious matter.
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Driving was wonderful, though, when everyone else wasn't 8-)
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62% of British Kids have had underage sex
64% of British Kids are overweight
So who's fucking all these fat kids?
NB: His live DVD (The Tooth Fairy) is superb - far better than what he does on TV.
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Mind you, putting up the price is the right thing for shopkeepers to do, to discourage hoarding.
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The food crisis is only just beginning: this year's export bans and punitive tariffs have sown the seeds (so to speak) of reduced planting and reduced yields next year. The 'price signal' to produce more is being systematically suppressed; this is dangerous when so many of the inputs - fuel, fertilisers, pesticides - are doubling in price.
If prices are not permitted to rise faster than costs, then they are effectively a signal to produce less.
Thst's not a comforting thought - it's bad enough that people who need to eat are being squeezed out of the market - but farmers being squeezed out, too.
Barring fortunate weather, the next two years will see less crops planted and much of what is sown will be weakened by reduced fertiliser and pesticide use. This, in a world of adverse climate or even outright drought, and the looming menace of fungal blight.
That's the short term. The medium term is that increasing demand from the affluent will continue squeezing out the poor: demand for grain ethanol, demand for 'second dollar' food as newly-prosperous industrial workers move up from subsistence staples to expensively-fattened meat animals, and the decadent wealthy will continue displace efficient farming with set-aside subsidies and inefficiently-grown organic crops.
Above all, we have become an urban species: in the First and Second World, this urbanisation followed (or was driven by) collectivisation or brutal processes akin to The Enclosures, in which agriculture became an industry. So the long-term situation is a 'continual crisis' of small famines and conflicts: subsistence farming is going to be displaced everywhere, partly by the power of the city-dwellers' money buying out the last remaining crofters in the global rationalisation of agriculture - more often by coercion and appalling abuses by landowners than by land reform - and, for the greater part of the world where the roads don't link the fields to the urban marketplace, by starvation or mass migration. Because hunger is rather more about lack of money than lack of rainfall - food is unaffordable rather than unavailable, and there has never been a time when the world grew less than a survival ration for every living human - but we distribute it unfairly and the poor are by definition the losers in any competition defined in monetary terms.
Which is to say: get used to the crisis: it's the way things are going to be from now on. Munitions are now a better bet, for the cynical investor, than they have ever been: our own urban history shows that food shortages are always accompanied by large-scale civil disturbances, and we are going to see a lot of it in the megacities of the developing world.