We can live without credit. We can live without oil. We cannot live without food.
This article by Eric deCarbonnel, predicts a catastrophic fall in food production, partly based on objective factors such as droughts, strongly related to trends in climate change:
“After reading about the droughts in two major agricultural countries, China and Argentina, I decided to research the extent other food producing nations were also experiencing droughts. This project ended up taking a lot longer than I thought. 2009 looks to be a humanitarian disaster around much of the world.”
However, it is important to understand that the coming food crisis has also been engineered by neoliberal reforms, as explained in this analysis by Mack Frankfurter, which is reviewed here.
London Banker writes that:
“Mr Frankfurter reviews the history of “securitized commodity products” and the development of commodities as speculative investments, distinct from their role in production and consumption within the economy. He suggests that something “systemic and possibly more insidious” has altered the benign role of speculators as providers of market liquidity and ties this change to the ill transparency of OTC derivatives arising from The Enron Loophole. I recommend reading the whole series.
We begin to see a pattern emerging. Free market policies and liberalised regulatory regimes promoted rapid concentration of a sector into a global oligopoly which could control supply. Free market doctrines and trade liberalisation enabled predatory targeting of markets to undercut domestic production and smaller producers, reinforcing the concentration of the market and the pricing control of the oligarchs. Free market ideologies and innovative financial derivatives promoted domination of market pricing mechanisms by speculative investors able to accelerate steep price gains regardless of supply and demand fundamentals.
Whether it is credit, oil or food, we are all going to suffer from bad policies which promoted free markets as risk reducing rather than risk enhancing. In the US and the UK we may hope that our food insecurity does not worsen to the point of riots, looting, political instability and the starvation of children, but many parts of the world will not be so fortunate.”
These are scary predictions but Bloomberg News confirms that the agricultural markets are broken.
See also George Caffentzis take on “Starvation Politics”
However, there are of course many counter-movements growing that offer an alternative to simply acquiescing to the dysfunctional financial engineering, which I’ve monitored through the special tags on food and agriculture.
For example, this most extensive comparative study yet which compares organic agriculture with its toxic and soil depleting counterpart:
“Organic farming can yield up to three times as much food on individual farms in developing countries, as low-intensive methods on the same land—according to new findings which refute the long-standing claim that organic farming methods cannot produce enough food to feed the global population.”
More information on alternatives from our Ecology section:
* Agriculture Supported Communities
* Agro-ecological Approaches to Agricultural Development
* Anil Gupta on Appropriate Technology for Agroinnovations
* Community Supported Agriculture
* Food Sovereignity Movement
* Food as Common and Community
* Grass Commons
* Guerilla Gardening (see also: Richard Reynolds on Guerilla Gardening)
* Land as Commons
* Micro Eco-Farm
* Open Source Agroecology
* Open Source Permaculture
* Serve Your Country Food
* Urban Farming Platform