The other day, Luigi suggested investing in watermelons now that the credit crunch has made banks go bust and stocks worthless. Hold on. Maybe the watermelons will also go belly up, as the BBC reports that we are also heading for an eco-crunch. This unwelcome news is based on The Living Planet Report, produced by the WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network. “The global footprint exceeded the earth’s biocapacity by 25% in 2003, which meant that the Earth could no longer keep up with the demands being placed upon it.”
I am torn. Yes, we are depleting our resources. Yes, it is scary. But this is also déjà vu all over again. The predictions made in Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb, and many other gloomy predictions from the 1960-70s, have turned out to be incorrect. Human creativity has outsmarted perceived physical limits; but there are real physical limits too…. Have we really reached them?
In The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich predicted that in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. Not a strange prediction given the famines that occurred in the years before the book was written. But it never happened; we got the Green Revolution instead.
Food shortages, or at least high food prices, were all of a sudden back on the front pages this year. Is the end near then? Not yet. Now that speculators are retreating, and farmers have responded to higher prices by producing more (25% more wheat produced in Europe! Perhaps largely because the ‘set-aside’ subsidized fallowing policy expired?). Food prices are tumbling again. For how long?
So what should be the focus of human creativity this time?
In a sense, the Green Revolution made the world more vulnerable to market bubbles. FAO had impressive numbers about the increase of food security a few weeks ago (I guess they have gone down now).
More people depend on the market to get food and food has become a global commodity.
I think that a great deal of human creativity should focus on market governance. And that closing borders and stocking up grains is not an effective response. What do we know about local, regional and global market monopolies and monopsies in grain markets?
“FAO had impressive numbers about the increase of food security a few weeks ago”
increase of hunger is what I meant
Don’t tell me. We don’t want more market governance. We want smarter market governance. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that in the past few weeks, and a solid mattress under which to put the result, I wouldn’t be worrying so much about my retirement fund.
Yes, smarter.
But not in terms of money or votes, but in terms of food security.
What about more or smarter eco-governance?