Armageddon seems to be upon us. In Haiti, little girls are eating cakes made of mud because there is no grain that anyone can afford. Food riots there have claimed the lives of four UN aid workers guarding a warehouse that was overrun by a mob. There have also been food riots in China and Pakistan, which is doubly troubling because these are places thought to have rapidly prospering economies, and because they both have nuclear arsenals and huge armies. Famine is threatening to bring down the governments of the Philippines and India.
The FAO meanwhile, a UN based organization for agricultural policy, has called for more technological support for third world agriculture, including seed, pesticides and fertilizer, to be donated by the West. Their solution, at least for the short term, being more high tech grain farming distributed more deeply into Africa and South America.
As I’ve pointed out before, we’ve become addicted to high tech production as a panacea for unlimited population growth, which forces us always to look at short term emergencies rather than long term solutions. Dealing with the ecological effects of stripping rain forest to plant horizons of corn and flooding the Amazon with fertilizer always takes a back seat to the political instability caused by world famine. And of course the population grows Malthusianly on.
Part of the tragedy is that this recent grain shortage was created by short sighted Westerners, in both the US and Europe, so concerned about losing political clout to oil producing dictatorships that they started burning food in their cars. While this has taken almost no pressure off the oil reserves or fuel prices, even this tiny percentage of diversion has thrown grain prices through the roof, and diverted grain from Haitian stew pots to American SUVs. So all that destroyed rain forest isn’t really feeding anyone new, it just adds soybean oil to the European biofuel program, and profits that fuel Brazilian appetites for pork, where rice and beans used to suffice. Nuclear powered production of electricity and electric transportation isn’t being considered anywhere, even though it has zero carbon emission, because we are afraid of what our hungry neighbors might do if they get this technology for themselves, or even our radioactive waste.
When we see this in the headlines every day we are looking at the worst that human existence has to offer: deadly competition for resources between nations with a total disregard for the suffering inflicted on our neighbors, or our future generations. We want the gas even if it causes African famine. China wants to eat more pork, even if it uses its newfound economic clout to buy the grain its neighbors, like Korea, used to depend on. Each nation uses its wealth to grab what it can from its neighbor’s tables, while the poorest plot military revenge, and sell what little aid they get to buy guns for local warlords.
If that visitor from outer space (from The Day the Earth Stood Still) comes back to pass judgement on us, all we can say is “Klattu, berada nicto”. Which is to say “mea maxima culpa”.
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