Buried in the news the last few weeks have been a series of stories about the rising price of food. It's not just the inflationary spiral that seems to be gripping the US right now - we're not talking about purple gourmet tomatoes down at the local Whole Foods or Fotex. The price increases are hitting basic grains & cereals like rice and wheat, which are now getting too expensive for the world's very poor to afford to eat.
The result is more widespread hunger across the developing world and less ability for US-based NGOs to deliver aid to these people (the falling dollar and rising costs of food and fuel means that a finite foreign aid budget can deliver less and less to the people who need it).
More hunger around the world is bad enough, but I think this price spike is a leading indicator of something much worse. Price indicates scarcity. So if the most basic foodstuffs are rising sharply in price, it means the world as a whole is having a harder time meeting the needs of the planet's exploding population. Very scary indeed.
There are a few mitigating factors. The world's farms are still not yet producing at full capacity, though the spare capacity is much less than it used to be in the 90s. Even more importantly, rising living standards in parts of the developing world (such as China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia) mean that more people can afford a meat diet than ever before, and raising livestock for meat is incredibly wasteful of grain, compared to feeding that grain directly to people. And growing demand for ethanol and biodiesel is - insanely - pulling corn and other grains out of the global food pool in order to burn it as fuel. Finally, part of the increase of food cost is caused by the rising price of oil, which increases the price of fertilizer and transport.
We can keep going for a while yet. We can farm more intensively, using genetically modified crops to increase yield. We can dramatically reduce the amount of meat consumed in the global diet (some of us in the developed West are already pretty far along this path), and eventually, we can drop ethanol for some real energy alternatives like hydrogen power.
We do have some options to buy us a little more time. But the disaster is still there, waiting for us. If agricultural efficiency had remained at 1950 levels, we'd have had global starvation a long time ago. How much longer can we continue to increase production and delay the inevitable? Quite a while, maybe. If we're smart.
But not forever. You'll remember this. This is how it begins.
Posted by case at April 21, 2008 05:02 PM