Writing on the Wall

Food is something we can no longer take for granted. The recent forth IPPC report on climate change, as well as pressure on land use from Bio-fuels, increased meat consumption and a growing freshwater crisis all point towards ongoing problems with food supply to the poor. Add to this the rising cost of oil, and the pressure on the price of oil-based inputs to agriculture, like most pesticides and fertilizers, and you can see that we need to think carefully about how to stabilize food supply, as well as protect farmers from price shocks.

One of the key issues impacting on the poor is that their right to food is being compromised by market mechanisms. The enormous purchasing power of the rich, for meat, bio-fuels as well as luxuries like sugar is being pitted against the pitiful purchasing power of the poor, who are being priced out of food markets, and thus out of existence. Thus there is a need to try and provide the poor with affordable food. One way to do this is for countries to subsidize food on a national level. But this does nothing for global justice…
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Graham Thompson writes about neo-liberalism off the back of a conference at SOAS on corporate social responsibility. However, whilst articulating that neo-liberalism has moral content, he does not go very far in exploring the implications of that morality:

Responsibility and neo-liberalism | openDemocracy

My commentary was as follows:

Thompson argues coherently that neo-liberalism has become internalised into a form of governmentality, where a certain kind of personal responsibility works hand in hand with the outer forms of governance.

However it is important to remember that this internalisation of responsibility is neither new, nor unique to neo-liberalism, and that what are significant are the specific forms these internalisations take.

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Johnathon Freedland, one of the few journalists out there with a good grip on global goings on, calls for optimism for lefties worldwide, in the face of a drubbing in Europe:
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Dont be fooled by Europes mood. Globally, the left is reawakening

My comment was that the need for left wing thought globally is certainly there:

There is an obvious risk of revolution world wide. When people have nothing to lose they will take to the streets. If global warming goes above 2 degress there is a good chance of poor people starving all over the world due to a hike in food prices. This trend is already emerging with biofuels.

The left’s big problem has been one of scale: Corporations have gone international, but Unions, and politics have not, hence Blair’s surrender to globalisation.

But social problems are global too, and that is catching up on us. It is currently only the left that is campaigning for a global politics to reign in this ludicrous inequality, and so provide support to the weaker parts.

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There is a very interesting article on Open Democracy, where bean counters have looked at various forms of assymetric warfare (between state and non-state actors, with radicaly different levels of power and resources) and, from the way they have gathered and treated their data set (caveat emptor), they have found that non-violent revolution is more effective:

Madrid11.net | Does terrorism work?

This is pleasing to me, considering the bashing I took for making a stand against violent methods as the best way for the Palestinians to respond to Isreali occupation and ethnic cleansing.

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The Reith Lectures this year are given by Sachs. He’s an economist, and an American, but he actually seems sensible: He is having a good go at putting a picture together.

BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2007 Summary

Also, the BBC seems to be wising up about open source and is offering the lectures as an MP3 podcast. You can even subscribe via iTunes!

Looks like parts of the mainstream are actually starting to wake up to what is going on.

Here is a reponse to a comment piece in the Guardian, from UN official, about the upcoming IPCC report on the impacts of climate change, particularly in the tropics:
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Tide of suffering

What needs to be borne in mind in this is the high proportion of earnings that the cost of food represents for the poor.

When we talk about climate change, we seem to forget that all these effects, rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, an overall drying trend globally, will all tend to impact on food production, and thus the price of food.

This is already happening: The world has been in net food deficit for the last couple of years: Not just because of climate change, but because of various forms of environmental degradation, that climate change is likely to make worse.

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The biofuels issue is part of a wider issue of Global food supply, which in turn has some frightening implications in terms of the politics that may accompany insecurity.

Even the most hardened climate sceptics acknowledge the climate is changing. All forecasts seem to agree on one thing at least: That these changes are likely to damage food production in the tropics, and also, on balance, reduce food production globally.

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | George Monbiot: If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuels
Even without biofuels it is hard to see the price of food remaining stable.
There have been prodictions of global drying from the Met Office, as well as a range of predictions about impacts on tropical agriculture:

see: http://sedac.ciesin.org/giss_crop_study/CCMresources.html

What is clear is that the price of food is likely to rise, as food production falls. This is likely to lead to both civil unrest and environmental refugees, as well as disruption of the cheap labour sources that currently underpin the global interdepenencies of production. India, China and Pakistan are likely to be hit hard, all of whom are nuclear powers.

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New Statesman - Trident: Why Brown went to war with Labour

There is another theory as to why trident is being renewed, being advanced by a long term Canadian defence analyst, Gwynne Dyer, with a pretty long academic track record in the area.

Planners do thought experiments to work out future scenarious, especially military planners. So lets go on a little journey. What happens if we miss our Global warming targets, and have a more than 2 degrees c rise?

Well Gwynn Dyer claims that military planners in the UK have noticed that our land area will allow us to support 60 mllion people under such conditions, wheras continental Europe’s agriculture will most likely largely collapse. This raises the prospect of lifeboat Britian collapsed by hungry environmental refugees from the mainland.

But how to keep them out? Well, a nucear deterrent might help.

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The two people who mind the garden in our house, between them they earn 2000 rupees a month. That’s about £25-30. Funny thing is that the housekeeper, who makes 1000 rupees a month (for half-time work, that’s a relatively good deal for the market she is operating in) questioned why they struggled to get by on that money.

The answer came back that so many people come and eat at their house. In other words, on that kind of money, they are acting as a form of local social welfare, and it would be seen as strange if they didn’t do so. Upshot of it is that the wife of our care-taking couple has arthritis and needs 30 rupees (50 pence) to get on a bus to the local state hospital. I suspect that this is true, but actually don’t care if it is not. It is almost harder to deal with their honesty than with being ripped off.

Funnily enough I just read a piece by John Gray in the New Statesman about human agency, and the wierd take poltical philosophers tend to take on it. It was incidentally about Nazi Germany.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120045

Gray, as ever, was taking a pop at our weird image of enlightenment man being able to transform the world at will. OK John got the message. He also had a plug to his latest book , something characteristically morose and pessimistic. His point being that people often don’t have control over their lives.

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Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The point of no return

The sense of resignation is more than troubling, it speaks of a collective cynicism. It seems that government is publically saying it will try and stop climate change, but privately admitting to itself that it cannot summon the political will to challenge vested interests.

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