World Facing Huge New Challenge on Food Front,

[RedEarth]

A fast-unfolding food shortage is engulfing the entire world, driving food prices to record highs. Over the past half-century grain prices have spiked from time to time because of weather-related events, such as the 1972 Soviet crop failure that led to a doubling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices. The situation today is entirely different, however. The current doubling of grain prices is trend-driven, the cumulative effect of some trends that are accelerating growth in demand and other trends that are slowing the growth in supply.

The world has not experienced anything quite like this before. In the face of rising food prices and spreading hunger, the social order is beginning to break down in some countries. In several provinces in Thailand, for instance, rustlers steal rice by harvesting fields during the night. In response, Thai villagers with distant fields have taken to guarding ripe rice fields at night with loaded shotguns.

.......

Business-as-usual is no longer a viable option. Food security will deteriorate further unless leading countries can collectively mobilize to stabilize population, restrict the use of grain to produce automotive fuel, stabilize climate, stabilize water tables and aquifers, protect cropland, and conserve soils. Stabilizing population is not simply a matter of providing reproductive health care and family planning services. It requires a worldwide effort to eradicate poverty. Eliminating water shortages depends on a global attempt to raise water productivity similar to the effort launched a half-century ago to raise land productivity, an initiative that has nearly tripled the world grain yield per hectare. None of these goals can be achieved quickly, but progress toward all is essential to restoring a semblance of food security.

This troubling situation is unlike any the world has faced before. The challenge is not simply to deal with a temporary rise in grain prices, as in the past, but rather to quickly alter those trends whose cumulative effects collectively threaten the food security that is a hallmark of civilization. If food security cannot be restored quickly, social unrest and political instability will spread and the number of failing states will likely increase dramatically, threatening the very stability of civilization itself.


Copyright © 2008 Earth Policy Institute

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2008/Update72.htm

[sam sarrha]

1. eradicating Poverty will mean eradicating Corporate Capitalism and its mistress,..Fascism.

[GliderGuider]

2. Do you think so?

In any increasingly complex, hierarchical society the concentration of wealth seems to be an intrinsic part of the system dynamics, no matter what kind of political or economic principle the society follows. There is no political/economic system you can point to for at least the last 500 years that did not:

a) have material growth as its core ideology;
b) increase in complexity as a result; and
c) exhibit increasing wealth concentration leading to enrichment at the top and impoverishment at the bottom.

I claim that every political/economic system in the modern (and even medieval) world has followed this template. I further claim that it's inevitable as long as material growth is the core organizing principle. The increasing cost of managing the growing complexity guarantees it. A society cannot grow itself out of poverty.

The only truly egalitarian societies in human history have been very simple, non-hierarchical, and economically stable (or static, depending on your POV). There aren't any of those left, but they may undergo a resurgence over the next century as the limits to growth finally kick in for us.

[thunder rising]

3. broccoli is the answer!!

[XemaSab]

4. Times like this make me sad I changed my avatar

:(

[Nihil]

5. Ah, but the memory still remains ...

... of that smiling green semi-phallic object ...
:pals: