UN: Food Price Rises Threaten Global Security
April 9th, 2008This situation is maddening. I’ve been reading our Bill Mollison permaculture books again (Intro and Design) and the path to abundance is right there. I have to conclude that the governments involved want the chaos they’re experiencing, or are about to experience. Rather than yielding some control to localities and supporting smaller, integrated animal/garden/food forest systems, these states are trying to do the old top-down command economy nonsense, and the result is totally predictable: famine.
Remember the one about give-a-man-a-fish vs. teach-a-man-to-fish? What happened to that?
Oh yeah, I remember. If the man is out fishing he’s not working in a mobile phone factory, etc…
What I find most amazing is that we made it as far as we have, as long as we have, without system wide failures. I’d like to think that people will get together and say, “F&@$ this, let’s produce our own food instead of waiting for it to arrive in a plastic bag on a military convoy.” Hint: Don’t wait for that day to come.
What’s going through Bill Mollison’s head right now, in the twilight of his days, as he sees all of this crap unfolding? Is it weird to have seen this coming for 30 years, to have dedicated his life to building and teaching people about other realities, and then, well, watch this unfold? I’ve seen some interviews with him, none of them recent, and he comments on agricultural devastation in a matter-of-fact, detached way; sometimes, with a hint of a smile and benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people.
Via: Guardian:
Rising food prices could spark worldwide unrest and threaten political stability, the UN’s top humanitarian official warned yesterday after two days of rioting in Egypt over the doubling of prices of basic foods in a year and protests in other parts of the world.
Sir John Holmes, undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, told a conference in Dubai that escalating prices would trigger protests and riots in vulnerable nations. He said food scarcity and soaring fuel prices would compound the damaging effects of global warming. Prices have risen 40% on average globally since last summer.
“The security implications [of the food crisis] should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe,” Holmes said. “Current food price trends are likely to increase sharply both the incidence and depth of food insecurity.”
I think a big part of the problem is that human beings at this point in our evolution are very easily led, up to and including the point of being led over the edge of a cliff.
Perhaps maddening in your neck of the woods where there’s a culture of small-scale agricultural, but here in my part of the USA, I say it’s more a Morton’s Fork or Catch-22 situation.
Say, I go through the expense and trouble to purchase a plot of land large enough to sustain my family that’s within a reasonable drive to my downtown workplace (can’t stop working). There will still be a population of 1,000,000+ within a 75 mile radius of me.
So, the way I see it, as long as food is available at a reasonable cost, the worst is that we’ll be looked upon as hobby farmers and most likely pay handsomely for that privilege vs. buying our food from the local co-ops and farms. But if a crisis erupts that makes food unavailable or too expensive, my little plot will be ripe for poaching by the hungry and disenfranchised unless guarded 24/7. Since I already have the skills necessary to grow food, I can’t include the education gained from the experience into the equation.
But one shouldn’t entirely despair as necessity is the mother of invention. My grandparents (and their neighbors) grew vegetables, raised chickens, and even had a cow on their small urban lots. And in WW2, there was such a thing as a Victory Garden. After the initial crisis, things will settle down, and the survivors will do what’s necessary to survive.
BTW – This is an interesting link regarding Terra Preta (an Amazonian process that creates topsoil):
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/terra_preta/TerraPretahome.htm
I’ve been reading Mollison as well lately. I suspect I’ll do a small game about permaculture in the near future, it could only help.
I think rural parts of NA, Europe, Central Asia and NZ might be able to patch together a decoupled ecology of permacultures, but I think South America is going to be the most ready for this out of any region overall. These people live in huge megalopoli too, but they have a rural population base which is still highly localized – as Micheal Ruppert noted about Venezuela.
Argentina’s got lots of food, water, and low population density, seems like a decent bet.
I think people will begin to “wake up and produce their own food.”
Like jon, I’m in an exurban area, and what I hear from local people is a concern that commercially available food is no longer safe to eat, being laced with hormones, pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics–and produced under filthy conditions and using poor practices, so that we are sold the meat of diseased and dying animals.
That’s the stated concern. Rising prices probably underlie much of this concern. People are beginning to want to grow their own food. They struggle with time constraints as well as lack of knowledge and experience. And, of course, many people have little or no land available to them.
People are waking up. I’ve started an organic gardening club, and it seems like there’s a lot of interest in it now that it’s spring. We’ve talked a little about the need for people to “grow their own” and the problems of doing so: Lots of work, costly initial inputs, and a steep learning curve.
I’ve been reading “Under the Tuscan Sun,” which centers on a largely self-sufficient community in Italy. All the food seems to be locally grown; there is a vibrant local economy and community, and a local cuisine of mythic greatness.
This is the stuff of a “best case scenario” in the way of outcomes of the food and energy crises. I posted a similar comment on Kunstler’s site, and one respondent commented he/she “SO missed the post-apocalyptic undertones of that movie.” Indeed. But there it is. You want a model? It already exists.
The key thing is to get people on the land. Land reform. But it can’t happen until that’s what people want.
@ pdugan
I’ve actually dreamed about having a Permaculture “sim” game. Of course, it’s probably easier to build it for real than it would to make a game about it.
But…
It would be VERY cool to be able to try things and let them run over time. Load different geographical locations with different temps, rainfall, plants, animals, etc. Test stocking rates of chickens to achieve desired devastation of unwanted groundcover (weeds). How many eggs will I get on different types of forage? From different breeds of chickens?
A “guild” construction set, with a soil chemistry readout.
Oh yeah, a project like that could turn into a black hole.
Thinking about it kinda brings out my latent D&D nerd side from over 20 years ago… I can see why some technical people are interested in permaculture. It’s an API with fuzzy specifications. You can drive yourself insane trying to think about the possible interactions, which is what computer people normally do anyway… for fun, or because they can’t help it. That same illness/talent can be put to great use in permaculture systems, I think.