A rolled gold disaster: Food crisis & petrol prices
Impeding food crisis in Pakistan
Can biotechnology help solve the food crisis?
Global food prices on a boil: Do we need to panic?
Food crisis in RP feared to last till 2010
I would usually try to say something witty. Something clever or penetrating. This topic is just a little too serious for my usual intellectual flippancy.
I do not know who it is that keeps their eyes on these things. There are a million different acronyms and organisations travelling around the world running programs and studies and meetings and conferences. WTO, UN, WFP, IMF, the World Bank, the WHO, and many more besides. Their eyes have been well and truly off the ball with the current evolving catastrophe of food and petrol and, ultimately, of the global environment and broader problems of the sourcing of energy.
These organisations are likely to employ some of the best and brightest academics, diplomats, economists, futurists and political scientists. Why, oh why do all of these organisations runs around like chickens with their heads chopped off after the world goes into crisis and catastrophe ? These organisations should be the watchdogs who warn us. Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodios ? (Who watches the watchmen ?)
Or is it that hoary old nut of "enlightened self-interest" (i.e. greed) which is running this show ? Individuals, organisations, corporations and countries are all out to get what they can and screw everyone else before they get screwed. It's just ridiculous. There have to be enough resources for everyone on this planet. The international financial system is self-evidently a dog's breakfast of an organisational catastrophe and the ever-so-pretty patchwork quilt of after-the-fact repairs that all of these organisations and governments engage in to try to fix or cover over the problems that their ignorance, selfishness, greed or sheer apathy have created - it's just not good enough.
In terms of crisis like the one which is emerging right at this moment we can probably look to history for likely outcomes of the unsettled dynamical system of international economy. We could imagine either a forced global restructuring of the financial (and, yes, the wealth) system or some form of global revolution. Considering the deeply insecure state of many cultural, political and religious systems at this current historical moment, we would be doing little better than kidding ourselves that it could not amount to such a potential fundamental reshuffling of the cards in this global deck of power and money.
In an analysis of physical systems we can often see that a system far from equilibrium is likely to more or less spontaneously flip over into a new configuration of it's elements. Consider the way a solid becomes a fluid and then a gas and then plasma. These are phase transitions; caused by adding energy to the system to the point of disequilibrium. In global economic terms - consider that this energy is the complexity born of sky-rocketing petrol prices, of food riots, of political and cultural instability. It would be nothing less than a sheer egoistic arrogance to imagine that vastly complex human economic and political systems were not liable to just such changes. And this is a world far from equilibrium.
