posted 24 April 2008 by Paula | link to this
tags: food crisis, free trade, globalization
If you will be so kind as to indulge me, I’d like to take just a moment to say: we told you so.
Currently the world faces its worst food crisis in the last three to six decades, depending which talking heads one prefers. Skyrocketing prices are causing food riots in developing nations, bans on grain exports, and rice rationing at Costco among other things — including an absurd display of privilege from the Wall Street Journal, which recently urged readers to trade their US dollars for food stockpiles as an asset protection measure. (Feel free to join me in a collective ‘WTF?’)
It is hard not to feel anger over this situation. It has been clear to many of us for a long time that a globalized economy is unsustainable — not just environmentally unsustainable, but economically and in every other way unsustainable. Any system that reduces node diversity and increases hub dependence is vulnerable to ever-smaller perturbations, and prone to amplifying those perturbations throughout the system. Such a move is especially stupid when the frequency and impact of perturbations are growing measurably. But such has been the path of globalization: regardless of dwindling energy supplies, regardless of steadily increasing evidence that global warming is accelerating, the powers-that-be have insisted we inhabitants of this little planet continue to consolidate the world’s supplies of critical resources into fewer and fewer hands, deliverable through fewer and fewer outlets, to use them up ever more frantically, and to never ever question the sheer unmitigated stupidity of this plan.
National, regional, and local economies that are not chain-ganged together are able to withstand various kinds of shocks in the same way that a forest with a wide variety of trees, plants, animal and insect species is better able to withstand the capriciousness of nature. One drought, one particularly brutal winter, one hailstorm does not fell the entire forest, because its diversity ensures that many species survive to rebuild their interdependent networks. This is also the exact reason financial advisors tell their clients to diversify, diversify, diversify their investment portfolios. And yet on the grand, planetary scale, we are told that putting all of our eggs into one gigantic globalized basket will somehow be the wise and smart thing for everyone.
Food security does not come from one or two monstrous agribusiness corporations growing three or four crops on all the world’s arable land and shipping it all over the world. Food security comes from a wide, decentralized assortment of farmers growing whatever grows locally, according to methods that ensure the land will be able to grow crops again next year, and distributing these goods primarily within their own regions. A drought that takes down one region doesn’t mean the whole world starves… it means the remaining regions will pick up the slack by providing suitable substitutes. It means the world’s food supply isn’t subject to market speculators driving up its price, because regional food systems aren’t large enough to command that kind of investment. And it means that if one or more nations decide they’re not going to export, other nations experience the disappearance of a few specialized, exotic foods — not the entire dry goods section of the grocery store.
If there is an up side to any of this, it’s that the high price of food will assuredly lure more people into small farming. Already this is the case — in case you missed it, the Wall Street Journal published quite an interesting article about a new breed of suburban “minifarmers” tearing up their whole yards, and their neighbors’ yards as well, to grow food. (Incredibly, the neighbors bitch about the absence of lawn.) The current food crisis is horrifying, but as is often the case, a crisis is often the only way to catalyze much-needed change. The centralized, fossil-fuel dependent global food system is imploding on itself, and the only way for us to feed ourselves is to actually do the work of feeding ourselves. If there is anything to be thankful for amid the soaring food prices — for those of us in the Northern hemisphere, anyway — it’s that the crisis is unfolding in the midst of spring planting season. I’ll be growing a bunch of food in my apartment this summer, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.