A poorly thought-out plan, but a plan at least.
I assume you've heard about the global food crisis? Prices for staple foods are rising sharply all over the world and this spells bad news for the world's poor. Already one government (Haiti) has collapsed due to food shortages. This is not good. I don't know if there's ever been a global famine before. They've always ever been local or regional phenomena.
There's plenty of blame to spread around. Some place the blame squarely on climate change. More unpredictable weather means more failed crops in numerous parts of the world. Others blame bio-fuels for gobbling up too much farmland for the sake of burning the crops. It's too bad, really, bio-fuels seemed like such a good idea. It's a closed system- growing plants pull CO2 out of the air, then put the same amount back when they're burned. Either way conventional fuel prices aren't helping- it costs much more now to transport food from the farm to the table. I've even heard the blame placed on China and India. Their rising middle classes are able to afford to eat more food, and (especially in China) more meat, which takes more food to grow than plain old rice and noodles.
I think it's also fair to give some of the credit to globalization. So much food (and for that matter fuel) gets shared around the world now that a famine in (say) the Sahel can easily be solved by shipping in food from somewhere else. But food prices rise everywhere when the Sahel is going hungry.
Who or what to blame for the problem isn't really the issue though, is it? The real question is what do we do about it? In the short term I'm pretty sure there's still enough food in the world that no one needs to starve to death. If only the food we had was better shared amongst everybody. Yeah, right, wishful thinking, I know. But in a global economy, how do we prevent such things from happening in the future? Global food shortages are serious business. Civilizations fall over this sort of thing. In fact some sort of food crisis always seems to be involved in the collapse of civilizations (the only exceptions I can think of are collapses caused by invasions of outsiders, but the Earth has no "outsiders" to invade).
Take the Classical Mayans, for example. They had (and indeed still have) a system of crop rotation that is perfectly suited to the environment. At its height under intensive cultivation the Yucatan was able to sustain many times more than the population living in rural areas there now. But as the population grew, the crops weren't rotated. The soil was depleted and productivity went down. There were other factors in the classical civilization's collapse, deforestation, war, maybe even climate change, but running out of food must have been a major contributing factor.
What, then, can a climax civilization like ours do to make ourselves famine-proof? Call me crazy, but I have an idea. Many cultures, especially farming cultures, have a strange habit of wasting food. They pay grain as taxes to idle nobles who spend their resources building pyramids or massive temples. They waste food by burning it for the gods or giving it to hungry ghosts or pouring out libations of wine at each meal. They give it away at great feasts or potlatches. They store some of it with the possibility of future famines specifically in mind, sure, but I reckon that all this culturally-ordained food-wastage serves a purpose. A starving man will almost certainly think twice about giving his food to some well-fed deity when his family is starving. As soon as famine hits, boom, there's suddenly this extra cushion of food that people can rely on until times are good again. Brilliant.
I'm not sure exactly how our global culture could go about wasting food in such a way. Certainly now is not the time to start planning livestock sacrifices when our crisis is ongoing. But maybe if we can all tighten our belts a little and see the current food shortage through, we can keep those belts tight in the good times and make the next crisis easier to endure.
Yeah, right, wishful thinking, I know.
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jdalton) wrote,
