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Gas prices are above $4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39% last year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a TKO, a triple whammy from energy, agriculture, and climate-change trends. Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you're shelling out at the pump and the grocery store; but, unless policymakers begin to address all three of these trends as one major crisis, it could get a whole lot worse.
Just ask the North Koreans.
In the 1990s, North Korea was the world's canary. The famine that killed as much as 10% of the North Korean population in those years was, it turns out, a harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe -- though few saw it that way at the time.
That small Northeast Asian land, one of the last putatively communist countries on the planet, faced the same three converging factors as we do now -- escalating energy prices, a reduction in food supplies, and impending environmental catastrophe. At the time, of course, all the knowing analysts and pundits dismissed what was happening in that country as the inevitable breakdown of an archaic economic system presided over by a crackpot dictator.
They were wrong. The collapse of North Korean agriculture in the 1990s was not the result of backwardness. In fact, North Korea boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia. Despite claims of self-sufficiency, the North Koreans were actually heavily dependent on cheap fuel imports. (Does that already ring a bell?) In their case, the heavily subsidized energy came from Russia and China, and it helped keep North Korea's battalion of tractors operating. It also meant that North Korea was able to go through fertilizer, a petroleum product, at one of the world's highest rates. When the Soviets and Chinese stopped subsidizing those energy imports in the late 1980s and international energy rates became the norm for them, too, the North Koreans had a rude awakening.
Like the globe as a whole, North Korea does not have a great deal of arable land -- it can grow food on only about 14% of its territory. (The comparable global figure for arable land is about 13%.) With heavy applications of fertilizer and pesticides, North Koreans coaxed a lot of food out of a little land. By the 1980s, however, the soil was exhausted, and agricultural production was declining. So spiking energy prices hit an economy already in crisis. Desperate to grow more food, the North Korean government instructed farmers to cut down trees, stripping hillsides to bring more land into cultivation.
Big mistake. When heavy rains hit in 1995, this dragooning of marginal lands into agricultural production only amplified the national disaster. The resulting flooding damaged more than 40% of the country's rice paddy fields. Torrential rains washed away topsoil, while rocks and sand, dislodged from hillsides, ruined low-lying fields. The rigid economic structures in North Korea were unable to cope with the triple assault of bad weather, soaring energy, and declining food production. Nor did dictator Kim Jong Il's political decisions make things any better.
But the peculiarities of North Korea's political economy did not cause the devastating famine that followed. Highly centralized planning and pretensions to self-reliance only made the country prematurely vulnerable to trends now affecting the rest of the planet.
As with the North Koreans, our dependency on relatively cheap energy to run our industrialized agriculture and our smokestack industries is now mixing lethally with food shortages and the beginnings of climate overload, pushing us all toward the precipice. In the short term, we face a food crisis and an energy crisis. Over the longer term, this is certain to expand into a much larger climate crisis. No magic wand, whether biofuels, genetically modified organisms (GMO), or geoengineering, can make the ogres disappear.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, "We are all Americans" briefly became a popular expression of solidarity around the world. If we don't devise policy choices that address energy, agriculture, and climate, while replacing the idolatry of unrestrained growth at the heart of both capitalist and communist economies, the tagline for the 21st century may be: "We are all North Koreans."
Through a Glass Darkly
For years, development experts have bemoaned the declining terms of trade that have kept some developing countries, and most poor farmers, mired in poverty. With the exception of the first energy crisis era in the 1970s, between the end of World War II and 2006, food prices never stopped sinking in relation to manufactured goods. Lower food prices are generally a boon for consumers. But they are devastating for the subsistence farmers who make up the vast majority of the world's poor.
However, over the past three years, according to the World Bank, food prices have increased 83%. That may be only an annoyance for wealthy shoppers, but for the poor, who often devote more than 50% of their incomes to feeding their families, such staggering rises can be the difference between life and death.
There are a number of reasons for this recent spike. The price of oil, now near $140 a barrel, has certainly played a crucial role in this, both by driving inflation generally and because of its importance to modern, large-scale agriculture. So has the recent allocation of ever more agricultural land to biofuel production. U.S. farmers, responsible for 70% of all world corn exports, now dispatch one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, which has had the effect of nearly doubling the price of corn.
Global warming, too, has had an impact. Drought in Australia and the eastern United States, severe flooding in China and Bangladesh, rising ocean levels and fresh water shortages throughout the world are all thought to be related to climate change, though climate scientists cannot prove that any given weather anomaly is caused by global warming.
Climate scientists can be fuzzy this way about causality in the short term. Paradoxically, however, they often see the future more clearly. For instance, the top global food policy think-tank, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), predicts that global warming will be responsible for a 16% decrease in agricultural gross domestic product globally by 2020. The Center for Global Development argues that developing countries, in particular, will be hit hard by climate change: By 2080, India, its report argues, will see a staggering 30-40% drop in agricultural production and Senegal will plummet 50%.
In the United States, a much-anticipated, Bush-administration-delayed federal study foresees water shortages, more herbicide-resistant weeds, and more insect infestations as a result of climbing temperatures. The present food crisis, concludes Joachim von Braun of the IFPRI, "foreshadows what climate change will bring us."
The other major driver of food price increases is certainly rising income levels in key developing countries. With more income, people can, of course, eat more, and eat higher off the hog -- or, put another way, they can eat hog in the first place, rather than the lentils or cassava on which they were subsisting.
Over a decade ago, Lester Brown, the founder of World Watch, suggested that just such a crisis was on the way. He asked whether the world could possibly produce enough grain to feed a more prosperous China. Now, growing middle classes in China and India, the world's most populous countries, are, just as he predicted, changing their eating habits and consuming more meat (and so, indirectly, a great deal more grain, which is used to feed the animals they are now cooking).
Lester Brown was ahead of the curve, but there were ample warning signs of an impending food crisis for those ready to see them. Oil prices have been steadily increasing since 2004 as a result of rising demand. They have been helped along greatly by growing chaos in the Middle East, fed by the Bush administration's foolhardy invasion of Iraq.
Like the North Koreans, we, too, have been trying to squeeze more food out of a limited amount of land: arable land per capita is declining at a steady rate. Falling water tables and dry rivers - think climate change again -- have no less surely pointed to a coming crunch for farmers dependent on irrigation. And don't forget: Critics of biofuels warned time and again that there wasn't enough elasticity in the food supply to take food out of the mouths of people in the Global South in order to fill the gas tanks of the Global North.
Back in the early 1990s, the North Korean leadership failed to grasp the correlation between rising oil prices, declining food stocks, and environmental stresses -- and the political pundits and politicians of the planet conveniently wrote off the resulting catastrophe as uniquely the fault of the world's weirdest country. Instead of taking a timely hint, wealthier governments simply shrugged off the warnings of scientists, development professionals, and energy specialists about future crises.
Responding to Riots
There's nothing like a food riot, however, to get wealthy governments to sit up and take notice. Humanitarian organizations and aid officials may be concerned about people quietly starving to death in remote locations, but only when world security suddenly seems threatened and governments totter do rising food prices translate into a full-blown crisis. Washington, for example, woke up when riots broke out in Egypt, Haiti, and Indonesia, and the militaries in Pakistan and Thailand intervened to protect crops and storage facilities.
In response to the sudden crisis splatting on the global windshield, the United Nations food aid agency, the World Food Program, called for $755 million in emergency contributions. Saudi Arabia, its coffers flooded with oil profits, promptly promised $500 million. The World Bank then announced that it was increasing its overall support of global agriculture by $2 billion in 2009, while Washington offered $5 billion in food aid over the next two years.
Such an emergency response may, indeed, be necessary, but it is also distinctly inadequate. The Director-General of the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization, Jacques Diouf, has called for a minimum of $30 billion a year for a global agricultural restructuring. It's not at all clear who will pony up such sums, which, in any case, will be too late for countries like Haiti whose subsistence farmers needed help before their most recent growing seasons started. Most importantly, though, as an approach, it's too conventional and, in the long run, bound to fail.
After all, the wealthiest countries continue to show little or no interest in altering the policies that have contributed so decisively to the food crisis in the first place. Take the United States. It "ties" -- places restrictions on -- about 70% of its aid. That means recipient countries must use that aid to buy U.S. products, which, of course, will do little to strengthen local economies. Washington has also cut its international agricultural research by as much as 75% at a time when agricultural production is no longer keeping pace with population increases. Add in the $280 billion farm bill that Congress has just passed which, unbelievably enough, provides continued subsidies to "farmers" (read: agribusiness) already benefiting enormously from high food prices. And the European Union, like the United States, is refusing to backtrack on its commitment to boost biofuels produced from grain.
Nor is there much hope for a new Green Revolution. While the campaign to disseminate modern, industrial agricultural techniques that began in the 1960s did increase food production, rural poverty in the developing world remained endemic (which is why the current food crisis is so devastating to subsistence farmers). Today, a repetition of that Revolution's combo of hybrid seeds, intensive irrigation, and the heavy application of petroleum-based fertilizers holds little promise.
Water is scarcer. Oil (and thus fertilizer) is considerably more expensive. The promised next stage of the Green Revolution, the application of biotech advances through genetically modified organisms to produce new, high-yield, insect-resistant crops, generally hasn't lived up to its hype in the developing world.
Yet Western seed companies are taking advantage of the crisis to tout this particular high-tech solution. Oddly enough, all this is depressingly reminiscent of the North Korean leadership's fascination with quick fixes in the 1990s. North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, for instance, touted potatoes as a miracle crop, but the True Potato Seed project sponsored by the U.S. government never panned out. Giant rabbits produced by a German breeder as a newfangled North Korean livestock were a dead-end, probably because the animals themselves consumed as much food as they ultimately yielded. A variety of high-yield "supercorn" hasn't yet revolutionized North Korean agriculture. Neither in North Korea nor in the world at large has anyone yet figured out a technical shortcut to permanent cornucopia.
Markets to the Rescue?
Perhaps the most conventional approach to the crisis has been to rely on market mechanisms. Consider the International Food Policy Research Institute, a product of the Green Revolution and its leading booster, and its eight-point plan for solving the crisis. Several of the steps are eminently sensible, such as expanding humanitarian assistance to food-challenged countries, reversing biofuel policies, and investing in social programs such as school feeding programs and health care. In the mix, however, are more of the same old market mantras. IFPRI recommends, for instance, the elimination of the export bans which 40 countries, including India and Indonesia, recently implemented to keep food from flowing out of the country through trade. And it has tried to revive a dead horse by urging further World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations to reduce barriers to global trade in agricultural products.
Pundits and policymakers addressing food problems have called for the elimination of government regulations and tariffs ever since England repealed its Corn Laws in the 1840s. In the last quarter century, the removal of trade restrictions of every sort facilitated greater agricultural production globally. Free trade helped large producers grow more and sell it cheaper abroad. But free trade hasn't helped the rural poor -- or poor countries.
Quite the opposite. The increased concentration of corporate farming and the dismantling of state programs that sustained the agricultural sector have driven small farmers out of business all over the planet, while making many of those who remain ever more dependent on expensive chemical pesticides, fertilizer, and seeds. For instance, as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico lost 1.3 million agricultural jobs, forcing many desperate small farmers to cross into the United States as migrant workers. Even more strikingly, the continent of Africa went from a net exporter of food in the late 1960s to a net importer today -- thanks to the World Bank and the WTO riding roughshod through the continent in the same cavalry unit as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The Bank's "structural adjustment programs" and the WTO's "tariff reductions" don't quite have the ring of war, pestilence, famine, and death, but they have been just as devastating.
The quest for perfect markets usually conceals a global shell game in which wealth is redistributed from the many to the few. To even the playing field that markets constantly tilt in favor of the powerful, and to direct funds toward environmental sustainability, governments need to intervene in the economy.
After all, private enterprise is not going to invest in the large-scale improvement of rural infrastructure -- the capital costs are high and profit margins far too low. More controversially, developing countries may need to maintain, or even reestablish, tariffs and subsidies to protect local producers. Since it is both sold and consumed, food should be considered a strategic resource, a matter of national security. It should be left out of trade negotiations in the same way that the "national security exception" allows governments to subsidize and protect their military industries as they please.
On Being Canaries
Any response that doesn't address all three converging trends -- rising energy costs, stagnant per-capita agricultural production, and climate change -- will ultimately fail, just as it did in North Korea in the early 1990s.
Land, energy, and the biosphere are limited resources. And it's not only a peak in oil that we may be approaching. The depletion of oil resources and the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions from their current levels have at least entered mainstream discussion. Less well known, however, are the problems of peak land and peak water.
The last time food prices shot up, in the 1970s, the U.S. response was to put more land into agricultural production. This was the infamous "fencerow-to-fencerow" policy of Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz that Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, has linked to the glut of corn -- and corn syrup -- that has so profoundly affected global diets. But re-Butzing American agriculture is no longer an option. "For the first time in our history, we're pushing up against the edge in terms of quality land," says Otto Doering, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. "We're in a somewhat fixed box."
The same applies to the world at large. Although rainforests are still being transformed into farming plots and pasture -- only increasing carbon emissions into the atmosphere -- humanity is reaching the limits of arable land. Chalk it up to urbanization, climate change-caused drought, and a loss of soil fertility through the application of too much fertilizer. Whether forest or farmland, we are losing productive land at a rate of one hectare every 7.67 seconds. Sure, there's some wiggle room in Africa and Latin America, but bringing this additional land into cultivation will buy us only a little time -- at the expense of the overall environment.
The water situation is even more precarious. The world is facing a declining reserve of fresh water with the depletion of underground reserves in India, China, Africa, and even the United States. (Say goodbye to the Midwest's mighty Ogallala aquifer, which nourishes America's breadbasket). Aside from the 1.1 billion people who already lack safe drinking water, according to the U.N., this crisis threatens farming, which monopolizes 70% of all fresh water.
Global temperature increases will only aggravate the situation. Rising oceans will inflict death-by-salt on increasing amounts of low-lying farmland, while drought dries up once fertile farming regions. Any intensification of the Green Revolution, dependent as it is on chemical fertilizer and irrigation, is only likely to add to the problem. And don't count on the oceans to offset the food that will no longer be grown on land. The catch of wild fish has remained pretty much the same since the mid-1980s, and fish farming, too, requires land, water, and energy.
In the long run, the only realistic response is a comprehensive program to address, in tandem, the triple crises of energy, climate, and land and water resource exhaustion. If policymakers take into consideration only one, or even two, of the components of this trinity, they may well end up doing more harm than good. The making of biofuels from corn, for instance, was an attempt to address the problems of the cost of energy and the dangers of climate change, but it neglected to consider the effect on agricultural production -- hence, the disastrously soaring price of corn. Calls for the next phase of a Green Revolution, which address agricultural production, are guaranteed to play havoc with the energy and water crises.
Such partial approaches don't work largely because they assume unlimited resources. The original sin of unrestrained growth can be found in the economic theologies of both communism and capitalism. In these systems, neither the state nor the market has ever operated according to ecological principles. Now, we must quickly explore ways of boosting agricultural production in fundamentally sustainable ways without, somehow, expanding our carbon footprint.
Certainly organic farming will play a role here. Although Green Revolution guru Norman Borlaug has dismissed organic agriculture as incapable of feeding the world, an important new study published by Cambridge University Press shows that organic systems in developing countries can produce 80% more than conventional farms.
Integrated farming systems that rely on sustainable energy -- solar, wind, tidal -- will also be critical. No-till agriculture can cut down on energy use and soil erosion.
While properly wary of snake-oil salesmen, neither can we afford to be Luddites. New technologies will play a role as well, as long as they reduce fertilizer and pesticide use, don't shackle debt-ridden farmers to major seed companies, and meet strict consumer safety requirements.
Even if global food prices stabilize this year and projections of a record grain harvest hold, the underlying problems will remain.
So it was with North Korea. With emergency assistance, the country pulled back from the brink by 2000. In 2008, however, it is again in a serious food crisis, thanks to high energy prices, flooding, and a shortfall in last year's grain harvest. Once again, North Korea is the world's canary. As we sit in the dark in the deep hole that we've dug for ourselves, will we finally heed its warning?
John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author of numerous articles on food policy and on North Korea.
Copyright 2008 John Feffer
37 Comments so far
Show AllFunny that James Lovelock's "The Revenge of Gaia" isnt mentioned - probably because Lovelock thinks we have already passed the point of no return.
If you add in Peak Water, Peak Topsoil and Peak Arable Land I would say we are past the point of no return in terms of any kind of transition to a new way of life that doesnt include global catastrophe and a horrific die-back of the human population that has way overshot its habitat - earth.
I tried to explain this to the great David Korten but he blew me off and wouldnt deal with this stuff.
So I will say here the same thing I said to Korten:
we all know what needs to be done about things like corporate power and the tremendous amount of wealth being pissed away by the military-industrial complex (and that godamn stupid war!) that could be used to fund a green transition, but…exactly how are we, the people going to stop the insane, regressive power elite when we, the people have no political power because the regressive power elites are not afraid of us, because they know they have the Nancy Pelosi's watching their backs?
Yup Metanoia, I have read Endgames vol 1 and 2 and I would LOVE to see all the progressive writers like Korten confront the issues Jensen raises.
Jensen is one of the few to really confront the fundamentalist pacifists. I wont say that I think Jensen has THE answers, but I do think that if we are going to have any kind of chance as a race, then ideas like Jensen's are going to have to be included in the dialogical mix of mature straight talk so desperately needed. He appears in the doc What a Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire.
But I'll bet he scares the crap out of a lot of professional *progressive*!
It's all Henry Fords fault.
Fear is the ultimate means of psychological control over your rational mind. When someone tells you to be afraid of something, you need to be EXTREMELY skeptical.
There is ample evidence, online and elsewhere, that much of the information in this article is predicated on false beliefs. Please do seek is out.
Energy and food prices are rising primarily because of Dollar inflation and speculation, not a lack of supply or production capacity. We could have cheap energy and food, because they are both in abundance. We are told that we're 'running out', and that more government and lower living standards are the solution. It is a means to increase power for the elite of society.
Additionally, man-made 'global warming' and 'peak oil 'are both hoaxes perpetrated by the elite.
I do strongly urge readers to take a critical look at the phenomenon and doomsday scenarios being presented here.
It is my view that this article is typical 'green' fear-mongering as a means to expand world government control over every nation and human being on the planet.
Here is a site which describes this agenda in detail:
http://green-agenda.com/index.html
The author uses North Korea as an example of a somewhat normal country that had bad luck. This is awful journalism. Cuba is a socialist country with few resources including fertilizer, but they planned their agricultural and environmenal protections ten times better than North Korea.
Strip-farming is when you let your field's
fertile soil wash downstream and suck all the nutrients out of the soil. The article notes denuding of mountainsides for fuel. Both unsound practices can solidify a regime's hold on power in the short run, but they lead to ecological catastrophes later.
Fertilizer is like putting your field on steroids, but poorly applied fertilizer washes away, killing fish, another food source. Pesticides kill off predators so that violent bug explosions become possible as soon as the bugs adapt.
Almost forgot. The oceans are over fished, polluted, and becoming acidified by increased CO2. Hundreds of millions of people depend on this resource.
Using North Korea as a microcosm for the world is a good idea. Despite technology, some resources, and its best planning, in its increased isolation there was no place to go when the crops failed. Many of those plans made it worse.
We only have one finite world, and advances in agriculture, public sanitation, medicine, and resource exploitation have let our population grow and grow. We are again approaching or slightly beyond Malthusian limits, even with modern agriculture. The fossil fuel resources that make it possible are declining. Water is oversubscribed in many places. Climate change and rising sea levels from global warming are starting to effect agriculture.
Put it all together, and we are at the point where any "hiccup" world wide is going to make someone hungry and/or destitue. If we don't control population, conserve water where necessary, and reduce GHG emissions its only going to get worse, and more quickly than we imagined. Millions of lives are threatened. Like isolated North Korea, there will be no place to go for help.
There is no such entity as socialism in one country.
Why? Because the international system is comprised of competing states and international corporations.
So called communist nations tended to be the product of horrendous total wars. Thus the they are usually ranked societies that tended to resemble military establishments based on command economies.
For command economies, pricing and supply mechnisms operate differently than those organizations geared more toward manipulating mass markets for profit.
Command economies emerge when the nation's leadership (and the general population) fear sudden large-scale attacks. The "market" cannot efficiently organize the nation's defensive capabilities and infrastructure fast enough.
In fact, the world's largest command economy is the Pentagon. Ironic, hey?
However, since command economies are actually a form of mercantilism, they eventually reorganize themselves to fit the international capitalist system.
Just observe the intricate web of private contracting the Pentagon is involved with.
So, the above diatribe against something labeled socialism is off the subject. It doesn't face the problem of mass starvation or hunger in many countries designated as "capitalist" and it certainly doesn't admit that a system based on profit-before- people may be the bases of our present dilemma.
We have to rethink the whole profit system and the fossile fuel industrial system and constant innovation trajectory within which we find ourselves.
And the genie that let the fossile fuel machine out of the bag was when the intellectual discipline of natural philosophy (which evolved into science) mated with one of society's basic method survival: technology.
Before the industrial revolution, science was a branch of speculative philosophy safely tucked away in the halls of academe or aristocratic parlors.
Technology, in constrast, was the domain of the craftsment. Their innovations were usually unplanned responses to changed situations.
And since social change was not rapid, these changes had to be filtered through all of society's institutions before there was widespread application.
In fact, many Europeans gained their last names from the technological field they tradtionally followed (or product they produced): miller, smith, wright, farmer, cooper, carpenter, zimmerman, fassbinder, shumacher, fisher, etc.
Craftsmen were organized into guilds, and guilds kept their technological skills and applications secret.
Secrecy both kept their monopoly in tact, and it was the only way illiterate people could orally control the passing of these skills to the next generation.
When craftsmen were destroyed by industrialization, and scientists started to use the latest technology to empirically investigate Nature, the next step was to establish this marriage of unlikely partners with the research and development lab.
We've been on a roller-coaster ride ever since.
However, many are now wondering if the roller coaster ride is actually safe. And where is it taking us?
This article misses on a couple of points... first of all, it doesn't mention GM plants at all, which result in 10% lower yield. It also mentions warming as a problem, which of course it would not be, and the increased CO2 in the air is acting to help plants grow faster and require less water. Warming will not be the problem anyway, cooling is going to be the next weather related problem.
metanoia, thanks for your beautifully expressed thoughts. Yes, we must elevate the health of communties above the accumulation of wealth. Sometimes I have hope that a global shifting of consciousness (toward sanity and compassionate cooperation)will reach a tipping point soon enough to enable some of us to survive.
Grow a colony of bacteria in a petri dish and the graph of bacteria population vs. time will be very much the same as that of the human population over time. At first there is slow but steady linear growth. Next there is a period of exponential growth. A short plateau of steady population and then a quick collapse of the entire population. Humans appear to be nearing the end of the exponential growth period and entering the short plateau of steady population. Likely the plateau will come very soon and not at nine billion. What happens after that depends on how much smarter we are than bacteria.
NOCs are NOT socialist. And Marx didn't advocate a planned economy.
Feffer is suggesting a holistic approach to solving holistic problems caused by the impossible assumption of unlimited growth, which would include population. His suggested remedies consist of reinvigorating local food and energy production by utilizing techniques unprofitable thus dismissed by corporate appologists or blocked by their allies in governments and institutions. Cooperation, not competition, is the ticket, with the ejido as a model. Also, the original idea of the soviet at the village and urban worker level before it was corrupted is another workable model. Initial Christian communities also incorporated these communitarian concepts as did the Israeli kibbutz.
A large implied problem is what to do about the death of megacities due to exaustion of carrying capacity and the resulting waves of migration. This exists primarily in Eurasia and is not pleasant to contimplate. In this regard, Feffer is right in using the North Korean experience as an example of things to come.
Nitrate Fertilizers have put us in a deep dark hole, food-wise. Along with all the other problems with them, they are the single largest cause of the ocean dead zones. The ease of their use has farmers not bothering to put organic material (manure, say) back on their land....so the soil has no crumb and one of these days will just blow away. The mid-west farms on about 6" of topsoil...and when that is gone, we are gonna get mighty hungry. Read Jared Diamond's 'Collapse', he has a real good handle on what is coming down the pike, based on what has happened to other cultures down through history. I found his disclosure that human bones with 'pot marks' from being cooked are a constant with during collapse times interesting.
There is no reason for oil prices to be what they are, because there is no shortage. If there were a shortage, there would be rationing and/or gas lines. In 1979, the price of gasoline increased from 69¢/gallon to 99¢/gallon, that with an OPEC embargo. That was an increase of 43%. With no embargo, why has oil gone up over 125% in the past year
The "Enron Exemption" has enabled the kind of under-regulated commodities trading that is happening in energy and food markets.
It's very obvious what must be done.
Futures trading of commodities must be regulated and limited to only those who take delivery or sell directly to those taking delivery. This wipes out the speculators. JP Morgan today for example is the leading holder of oil future contracts. Their offices must use a lot of energy and I wonder where they store the oil.
Cartels, Big Oil and Agribusiness must be broken up under existing anti-trust laws. This brings competition back to the market place. However, since most of these cartels are made up of multi-national corporations, some of which are based on Europe, the cartel break up will need to be global.
Mentioning North Koreas economic woes without mentioning sanctions and trade restrictions imposed in order to facilitate regime change is amazing.
stateless wrote:
"While food and energy production are in the hands of the capitalists, and while we are all saddled with enormous debt and enslaved to our useless information technology jobs, I see little hope of us humans getting out of this pickle."
On the contrary, energy production is largely in the hands of socialists. 90% of the world's liquid oil reserves are controlled by governments or state-owned companies. Exxon Mobil, the world's largest privately owned oil company, owns only 1.08% of the world's oil reserves, and the five largest private global oil companies together own only about 4% of the world's oil reserves.
Our best hope lies in getting energy production out of the hands of socialists and into the hands of capitalists, who have a much better record of pursuing exploration projects, expanding production, and extracting and distributing oil more efficiently.
PissantNobody wrote:
"Anyone who sincerely studies history and philosophy cannot help but arrive at a Marxist formula for international socialism."
How can you study the last 100 years and not realize that international socialism was a complete failure? It lead to totalitarian governments and miserable citizens. The quality of life grew much faster in free market economies, which is why country after country has rejected socialism and embraced capitalism. One of the last socialist holdouts is the subject of this article: North Korea. After reading this article, how could you possibly arrive at the conclusion that socialism is the best way to deal with energy and food crises in the next 100 years?
Yes, in the LONG RUN the world will face a crisis due to increased population and increased consumption of dwindling nataural resources.
Yes, in the LONG RUN the current pattern of production and consumption is not sustainable.
But please note that I said in the LONG RUN, however the CURRENT sudden
sharp rise in energy and food prices and also the credit crunch and the
sharp rise in home foreclosurs and the resulting hardships and hunger
are all the result of speculations and gaming the system by the big guys.
What is happening NOW is pure speculation and gaming the system.
So, please people now it is not the time for concentrating on plans for the distant future. First think about solutions for NOW.
Think tank John Feffer proclaims:
"So it was with North Korea. With emergency assistance, the country pulled back from the brink by 2000. In 2008, however, it is again in a serious food crisis, thanks to high energy prices, flooding, and a shortfall in last year's grain harvest. Once again, North Korea is the world's canary. As we sit in the dark in the deep hole that we've dug for ourselves, will we finally heed its warning?"
****************
Or will we examine more closly another "canary" smitten by a Marxist planned economy model dependent on Soviet and Chinese aid that has managed to sing?
I am speaking of Cuba which faced identical problems to N. Korea and found a way to prevail. Sometimes it wasn't very pretty and they still are dirt poor but rumors of the demise of the Cuban people or their revolution are certainly premature.
It turns out that relationships among the people and a determined sense of unified community found a way to survive. If you are interested you can find out more information at:
http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid...
Why does everyone avoid mentioning the obvious cause of the problems we face? It is that there are too many people. Six billion now and projected to be nine billion by 2050, I believe. Will there be any move to do something then, when the likelihood is that half of them will be malnourished? Or will we wait another fifty years to compound the problem still further?
The shame of it is that by 2050 we could reduce the population to a more manageable level by the simple expedient of having only one child per family.
Gloom,
"It has an eruption pattern of once every six hundred years. It has now been six hundred forty years."
It's 640,000 years, not 640 years. And, this is a very rough average; and, massive calderogenic eruptions like the event 640,000 years ago are usually mark the end of the volcano's violent phase of life. The follow-on volcanism will be the non-explosive basaltic variety like the the younger lava flows in Idaho to the west - but were talking geologic time scales. "Any time now" means "sometime in the next couple million years".
The temperature of the earth's atmosphere has nothing to do with earthquakes.
There are bigger things to worry about.
Stilba: "I wonder how Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain could possibly turn our big beast of a system toward sustainability when everything is against it …our culture is against it, our economy, our foreign affairs, even the way we think! And the "developing" world is only catching up as fast as it can …how could the US possibly tell them "Stop, hold it, we need to re-think this." We've had what, two centuries since the Industrial Revolution began?"
I think the answer is when "Main St", both sides of it, gets it and demands of their congresspersons "sustainability" as the nonnegotiable benchmark for all future legislation. (And then, we at the local levels will deal with it.)
www.StudentsForTheEarth.org
balakirev: Want to see natural irrigation, you need go no further than New Mexico where there is a culture evolved around sharing and maintaining the acequia.
"In the long run, the only realistic response is a comprehensive program to address, in tandem, the triple crises of energy, climate, and land and water resource exhaustion."
Very good, but what exactly is that response, Mr. Feller? Perhaps you are unaware that there is no solution to poverty (and war) within imperialism? I doubt that, but your convenient failure to mention the obvious marks you as another weak-kneed (or profoundly cynical) journalist. Anyone who sincerely studies history and philosophy cannot help but arrive at a Marxist formula for international socialism. I guess it is more important that you remain employed, though...
Why is it always PissantNobody who has to say the forbidden obvious? Can someone out there give me a hand?
Triple whammy? Not!!! As the Earth heats, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and resulting pestilence visit us as well. Not to mention the super volcanoes presented recently on Nova. The American super volcano rests under Yellowstone. It has an eruption pattern of once every six hundred years. It has now been six hundred forty years. The ground there is bowing from the pressure. If it blows it will launch a cloud of sulphuric acid that will cover the entire United States and possibly the world. The death of plants and animals will be nearly incalculable. It may bring on a new ice age. I suggest we not worry about oil and not burn another drop of it. What food, there won't be any food!
Where is Sharon Stone when you really need her?
A book I would suggest reading is Derrick Jensen's 'End Game Vol. 1 The Problem of Civilization'. Definitely no light reading, but it will open your eyes nonetheless. He is a brilliant writer, and one of my very favorites.
http://www.endgamethebook.org/
Metonia, nicely stated and nice to read a voice that offers some depth of understanding outside most of the contributors you find on this site. Well done.
Reading this article I can't help feeling that we have to think and act locally , conserve, and work in harmony with the earth. The ancient civilizations somehow knew how to do it. Take the aborigines in Australia. They were able extract food and water from an apparently barren desert, without destroying their environment.
While food and energy production are in the hands of the capitalists, and while we are all saddled with enormous debt and enslaved to our useless information technology jobs, I see little hope of us humans getting out of this pickle.
I'd like to buy as much food as possible from the local farm cooperatives. I'd like our community to plan and build a local solar, wind, geothermal, or other renewable energy source. I'd like to buy clothes and household goods made locally from locally obtained materials.
Sadly, some a**hole somewhere will tell me that it won't work because there's no profit in it and therefore no incentive. Geez, maybe we should be wiped out.
Stilba-
I wonder what it will take to turn the ship. I have a feeling its not going to be pretty, but thats partly why I think we need to envision/create the alternative instead of just focusing on all the ills. Its easy to point out whats wrong and a lot harder to figure out what something better is.
I don't have a lot of expectations for our new President. I think that people place too much blame/responsibility on politicians, in part because its taught and in part because its easy. It absolves them of taking action themselves. Thats not to say that they don't share a heap of credit for the approaching shit storm, but part of the reason the world has reached its current state is because people have been complacent, especially in the U.S.
balakirev -
How right you are. There is much to learn from our ancient ancestors, and the time is running short to apply the lessons. What I was trying to get at is that the past is gone, it cannot be changed, or resurrected. That doesn't mean there isn't anything useful to be gained from it, just that it isn't very useful to wish for the past to have been different (something I have been guilty of ).
This is a good time to read "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn.
Humans have lived sustainably for millions of years. The social structure they used was called a tribe. We have a new social order called civilization. Civilizations ALWAYS collapse.
All we need to recall are the lessons we've known for millions of years.
Humans aren't the problem, civilization and our current social structure is.
metonia
The past is not dead.
If we, in all humility, approached the pre-capitalist past and learned from it we may still survive.
For example, Peruvians have been rebuilding and refurbishing the Inca irrigation infrastructure and the many once abandoned farming areas are again producing food for local consumption.
What we need to do is study the more successful ancient irrigation, water collection and use, sewer, and land use practices and put them to use.
Remember, many of their practices used the natural gravity of the land, or, if needed, water pressure was increased by increasingly narrowing water pipes. Thus water could go uphill.
Their practices were not perfect, but they were developed for other reasons besides profiting international companies, investment banks and speculators or political elites. And they were developed to function without the aid of fossile fuel/electric machinery or engines.
Maybe we should also dismantle the electronic virtual media. Without it, we may learn social and craftmen skills that have been destroyed by this media.
Anyway, an electric guitar or synthesizer uses much more electricity and destroys the musical skills one can observe when watching flamenco guitarists, or old Mississippi delta blues troubadors, or ....I can go on.
It is the electronic virtual world that separates us from Nature and from the consequences of what we do to the ecological system.
And, last, it separates us from making domestic items and cultural products with our hands. Many times, when one becomes a craftsman, one starts developing an appreciation and love for the Natural materials he or she works with.
To relearn these skills, we have to go to the past. To relearn pre-fossile-fuel pre-industrial designs and the appropriate aesthetics underlying these designs, we have to go to the past.
Today, the design patterns that rule our lives are based on profitable short-term fashions and, as a result, they are not an authentic product of a long-term culture connected to a land or a place.
Authenticity is beyond the perview of the electronically powered virtual media.
Without an authentic culture, how do we become authentic human beings?
Without the ability to make our culture and the things that we use, how do we maintain our humanity?
Didn't we evolve because we were able to make a wide range of tools, objects and cultural products using our hands, minds and creativity?
Rimpinths,
perhaps the diff is that S Korea has the ability to pay for imported food. The problem the article points out is that we are running out of the fuel that makes moving food economically viable. We are running out of the fuel that makes food surplusses possible. The earth itself is running out of places where that food can be grown. Without a surplus of food, the population begins to starve. Starving populations either start revolutions or suffer strict repression. Neither option is a good prospect for those who benefit from the way the world works now. Indeed Revolutions seldom work out well for those who launch the things either, even when successful.
Rationing can be introduced on a short term basis (like what the Brits put up with during the 40s and 50s; yes, they rationed after the war had ended) but to expect people -especially yanks- to put up with a never ending rationing system is to believe in a tooth fairy.
Beware of telling people 'let them eat' whatever, giving that advice didn't help M. Antoinette keep her own head.
If North Korea's political economy did not cause the famines there, then how do you explain why South Korea has not had any problems feeding its population, even though the two countries have similar geography and weather patterns? I can't believe that this article did not mention South Korea once. Two countries adjacent to each other on the same peninsula and their primary difference is their political economy. If North Korea is a great case study for the 21st century, then North Korea vs South Korea is a great comparative study for which political economies are best equipped to deal with the 21st century. Which country has the better environmental record? Which country has done a better job of dealing with droughts and floods? Which country has consistently improved the standard of living of its citizens?
You say "We are all North Koreans." I say "Let them eat Juche."
Metanoia: "The scale and complexity of the problems facing the world are quickly becoming untenable for even the most brilliant of leaders."
Right you are. And you could have written that ten years ago and it would have been true. Now its closer to an epitaph.
I wonder how Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain could possibly turn our big beast of a system toward sustainability when everything is against it ...our culture is against it, our economy, our foreign affairs, even the way we think! And the "developing" world is only catching up as fast as it can ...how could the US possibly tell them "Stop, hold it, we need to re-think this." We've had what, two centuries since the Industrial Revolution began?
The scale and complexity of the problems facing the world are quickly becoming untenable for even the most brilliant of leaders. And the solutions that are proposed are based on the very same thinking that gave rise to the problems in the first place. Instead of looking at problems and solutions, a shift must be made to understand the system that has spawned these calamities and fundamentally alter our relationship with everything around us. No small solution, but infinitely more likely to succeed if sincerely undertaken.
The trifecta of global energy, global food, and global warming will never be and can never be solved by corporations or corporate controlled politicians, though companies and government must play key roles. The only way that the world will undertake the Great Turning, is if WE the people wake up from the nightmarish insanity of Western "Civilization" and declare once and for all that the health of communities are more important than the accumulation of wealth...and back that declaration with direct participation in local economies, and local government.
Instead of sitting in front of a computer or television day after day, to leave behind the technology and get to know our neighbors, our enemies, our friends, our co-workers and have the difficult conversations about what a different culture looks, feels, smells, and tastes like. Instead of cataloging the great ills of this culture, to forge a new one based on a vision of the future where there is great prosperity for the many, not just the few, and not a prosperity that is defined by pieces of paper or digits in a bank account.
The only way that any of the problems that face the world can be addressed is to forget the zero sum game that says it is every man and woman for themselves. The realization that we each are infinitely connected to every other thing must be the teaching that we endow every child and adult with. Our fate is a shared fate, our death a shared death, our lives a shared life. I cannot separate the air I breath or water I drink or food I eat from myself any more easily than I can cut off my arm and call myself whole. We share all that makes us who we are with every other living creature, and that ensures that we have an obligation that transcends mere self interest.
It starts with each of us, walking a different path, making each moment an opportunity to live a simple life, so others may simply live. "The past is dead, the future imaginary, live in the ever present Now moment". Ken Keyes Jr.
We, as in you and me, might heed the warning, but he giant international capitalist finance and agribusiness could give flying ...
balakirev June 18th, 2008 2:22 pm
A very interesting post. I had understood if agriculture was returned to organic method, non use of machinery, the volume of production would fall to pre industrial levels and about 65% of
the world would starve.
Do you have any information on this problem? Could the studies I saw be a bit on the pessimistic side?
joneden June 18th, 2008 3:47 pm
balakirev: "Want to see natural irrigation, you need go no further than New Mexico"
True. Is the real problem of food production going to be in our water supply? I remember Lester saying that would be our ultimate problem.
kayaker, lovely post. Hope dies last.
Parallax, I agree. And it's an abomination that so many of the religious right are pushing ever larger families and actually promoting the notion that if people don't have more and more babies, the human race will somehow expire. As the late, great Kurt Vonnegut said, (paraphrased) human beings are a virus on the face of the earth, and the earth's immune system is fighting back.
In view of rising food and fuel costs, one way to combat this is to grow your own. Yes, it's a drop in the bucket, but buckets can be filled one drop at a time. I live in a rural area, so it is definitely easier for me than suburban or city dwellers, but even a very small plot can produce an amazing amount of food. (And I'm originally from a city, so it's not that I grew up producing my own food.)
Just as one small example, I have a lettuce bed that takes up about 4'X 6'. I spent about $3.00 on seeds, and I have so much lettuce, I am begging people to take it. I eat salad every couple of days, I have given away 5 or 6 bags of lettuce a week to friends and coworkers, and it's hard to even tell that any of it was picked. In addition, I dug up several small plugs to transplant for family members when the lettuce first started to come up, and they are now harvesting salads too. By July the lettuce will be bolting, so I'll have to move on to whatever else is in season.
My main garden plot is about 50'X 50' - much larger than most people have access to, but I grow so much I have to share it or lose it. I still have green beans and tomatoes in the freezer from last year that will not be used before the fresh ones come in this summer. Come August, I'll be looking for unlocked cars to dump my extra zucchini in. I have a good friend who lives in town and has a much smaller area to plant. She is the one who inspired me to grow my garden because she's had such great success with hers. Anyone with even a small yard can grow a few tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, or pole beans.
More and more, I am making an attempt to buy locally. There are local farmers who sell beef for very reasonable prices. I got mine for $1.49 a pound! Any rural area has people who grow chicken for the eggs, which they are happy to seel (and many smaller cities have rural areas surrounding them). It takes effort, that's for sure, but it's worth it to become more independent and locally focused.
The more we do this, the less dependent we are on big agriculture to determine what we are going to eat and how much it costs.