The Food Chain

This article is the first in a series on global food production and its vulnerability. This vulnerability is rooted in a basic assumption underlying economic production: namely, that supplies are limitless and that consumption and, in turn, waste production can also be limitless. These “open chains” of production and consumption have closed. The world is finite, and it has to be cared for. Walter and life.

The great American writer and humorist Mark Twain once said, “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.” Whiskey is a luxury good, optional and pleasurable. Water is life, and there is never enough of it: That is why it is worth fighting for. This is no mere metaphor, as a series of disturbing facts illustrates:

As the planet warms, the climate will grow more humid in certain latitudes and drier in others. This climate change will leave millions of people without a reliable source of water for drinking, irrigating and powering turbines. We will have to contend with droughts in some areas and flooding in others.

Water is increasingly scarce in the parts of the world experiencing the greatest demographic growth – in particular, the Middle East and North Africa. This intensifies conflict between nations.

The two most populous countries on the planet – China and India – are rapidly exhausting their water reserves. In the short and medium term, they will have to import the precious liquid.

The Himalayan and Andean glaciers are receding. As a consequence, water volume in rivers fed by these glaciers will also diminish.
Population growth is occurring faster in drier, less fertile zones. How will this population feed itself? [Reference->http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/business/worldbusiness/21arabfood.html] In very wealthy regions, like California, water is also growing scarce, slowing the rate of economic expansion. [Reference->http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/us/07drought.html?ei=5070&em=&en=4679406dcb1d8575&ex=1212984000&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1212869917-tabyApZgbBEfVFroYuJ2wQ&pagewanted=print]

Artificial irrigation has transformed the once arid province of Murcia, Spain, into a center of fruit and vegetable production for the European market. But the water for irrigation is running out, and Murcia – despite fantasies of becoming “Europe’s California” – is facing the prospect of desertification. [Reference->http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/world/europe/03dry.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/W/Water]

Israel, another artificially irrigated Eden, is exhausting its subterranean water reserves and must recur to increasingly costly desalination procedures. This dynamic country may control a number of geopolitical variables, but the climate is not one of them.

Dizzying economic growth is wiping out plant and animal species at an unprecedented rate. From 30-50 percent of all living species will have disappeared by 2050.

Growth or Depletion?

Our globalized civilization is riding a senseless wave of sustained growth using limited resources, some of which are already drying up. One need not be a genius to appreciate that, without change, our consumption-based prosperity will not last long. Our voracious, wasteful civilization is already on disaster’s doorstep.

At the beginning the nineteenth century, a poor, self-taught traveling salesman set out to project population growth, not only in his native France but worldwide. Just like the Englishman Thomas Malthus, the Parisian reached the conclusion that the world’s population would reach a peak of development in the twenty-first century, before suffering devastating shortages of food and basic resources. This man, whose name was Charles Fourier, said that resources simply would not suffice, in spite of all the industrial, technological and commercial initiatives already underway in Europe at that time.

Fourier maintained that producing more and more, and consuming more and more, was not the path to happiness, but to disaster. He proposed a different kind of social organization, based on what today we would call sustainable local development. But, because the cult of limitless progress held sway in the nineteenth century, Fourier’s proposals were rejected as the ravings of a poorly-informed, utopian madman. Poor Fourier waited his entire life, in vain, for politicians and businessmen to come to his door seeking advice. This street-corner prophet had hoped his writings might convert the wisest souls of his era.

Two hundred years later – faced with rates of economic growth unfathomable in 1830, with the imminent incorporation of those whom the Europeans of Fourier’s era called the “Asian hordes” into the world of wellbeing and consumption, and with a global population estimated to reach 9 billion by 2050 – our oil is running out and our water supply is not far behind. The wisest thinkers of our generation have been obliged to rethink ideas on development, to look for alternate sources of renewable energy and to seek out lifestyles that do not destroy the environment that sustains life itself. The “utopian” vision of Fourier has become logical, the precursor of a new common sense. The first signs of this new sense have shown with stark and brutal clarity: The price of oil has gone through the roof and, along with it, the price of food. At the same time that billions of poor people are climbing toward a new, middle-class, status, hundreds of millions of others do not even have enough to eat and are falling into abject poverty. Partly because of economic and social development, the atmosphere is warming, causing disturbances in all of the natural and social systems that we know and live by. The crisis is total and convergent. The stress is planetary.

Rethinking development

The approaching difficulties amount to more than an objective crisis: They represent a crisis of thought and focus. The economic models that we continue to use even today are based on the idea of open chains, which is applied to everything from supplies for productive processes, to the fabrication of goods, to consumption and its waste products. The chains are open because these models fail to consider the possibility of limited resources, the “secondary” effects of adding value, the impact of consumption on the human condition and the ultimate fate of waste products. All of these things are left out of the equation and grouped under the concept of “externalities.”

This premise of a world forever open has proven problematic, if not flat out wrong. We are in the midst of internalizing our “externalities.” The ends of the chain have looped round, and the linear process has become a closed circuit. From now on, we are not simply consumers: We are consuming ourselves.

Growth: How much and to what end?

In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, demonstrating a lucidity sorely lacking among high- level politicians today, made the following comments on the folly of the contemporary means of measuring the economic “wellbeing” of nations, the Gross National Product: “[Our] gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.” All of these negative factors are treated as positives in the calculation of the GNP. Meanwhile, inequalities of opportunities, income, healthcare and quality of life are left out of the equation.

Kennedy was right but, sadly, things have changed little since then. In the 40 years since that speech was given at the University of Kansas, the American GNP has climbed from $800 billion to $14 trillion. So are people better off now? This is hardly the case if we consider the decline of family incomes in the last decade, the spiraling costs of medical care and worsening social inequality. Nonetheless, we continue to cling to the GNP as the measure of social and economic progress.

From flawed measurements spring flawed policies. On the other hand, if we throw other “intangibles” into the equation – like natural wealth, the beauty of the environment, the fair distribution of goods, and lives lived in harmony with nature – the situation changes. We achieve a new vision, and new policies become possible. For several years, the United Nations has put out its Index of Human Development. Environmental stewardship, the renewal of resources and the rational – as opposed to negligent – use of the natural world require new approaches and new means of measuring wellbeing.

We have to learn to measure not only what we have (or produce) but what is actually worth having (or producing). Fortunately, this new consciousness is gaining converts among some of the best economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, both of whom are Nobel Prize winners. The GNP was a good invention during the great depression of the 1930s, when President Roosevelt had to mobilize an unemployed population and reactivate an enormous latent industrial capacity. But today the GNP makes little sense and leads to undesirable consequences. For instance, the GNP does not measure the distribution of opportunities; environmental damage is equated with growth; and the healthcare system tracks what is spent or invested in treatment rather than the health of the population itself.

The time has come to see the world not as a series of open chains in constant growth, but as an integrated and supremely fragile system. In forthcoming articles, I plan to analyze the global food system, its vulnerabilities and some alternatives. These pieces will inaugurate a new series of geopolitical articles in Opinión Sur dedicated to examining how the world today constructs and deconstructs our survival at its most basic level: at the table. To begin, and to bring the reader up to speed, I suggest the following magnificent [video->http://brunoat.com/globalizacion/la-historia-de-las-cosas/] on the objects that surround us and their chains of production and consumption.

Bon appetit until our next virtual encounter when I will address the origin and destination of foods. To separate the wheat from the chaff, I will begin with a look at the breadbaskets to the world.

_ -Translated by Remy Scalza