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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Date: 2008-04-22 06:32 pm (UTC)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.