I have already noted the BBC story based on an interview between Faisal Islam and World Bank boss David Malpass. There is another dimension to this. As the BBC noted, the emerging world food crisis is set against the backdrop of another emerging crisis:
The World Bank chief also warned of a knock on "crisis within a crisis" arising from the inability of developing countries to service their large pandemic debts, amid rising food and energy prices.
"This is a very real prospect. It's happening for some countries, we don't know how far it'll go. As many as 60% of the poorest countries right now are either in debt distress or at high risk of being in debt distress," he said.
"We have to be worried about a debt crisis, the best thing to do is to start early to act early on finding ways to reduce the debt burden for countries that are on have unsustainable debt, the longer you put it off, the worse it is," he added.
I am sure that this is true, and it is being made much worse by the bizarre response to inflation in the US and elsewhere, where interest rates are being raised when there is already a shortage of demand in the economy and squeezing those already facing household debt crises can do nothing whatsoever to solve the problems that we now face.
These rising interest costs do make the debt crisis of developing countries much worse. Most of their debt is denominated in dollars. Increasing interest rates simply makes their position even more difficult.
It is very likely that the debts incurred by many countries in the world in currencies other than their own to pay for the Covid crisis cannot be repaid now that there is a food and fuel crisis as well. Crises are not meant to come in threes (unless that is the neoliberal global economic order is collapsing, when that outcome is predictable). This time they have. And the result is going to be unpayable debt, made worse by inflated demands created by rising interest rates.
Who will bear the cost of this failure? It depends on who owns the debt. Some will be government-owned. More may be bank owned, in which case a banking crisis could develop for this reason. And a significant part, as Faisal Islam notes for the BBC, is owed to China whose reaction is unpredictable as this has not happened to them before.
No one can be quite sure how this debt crisis will develop. That it will is the one certainty that we face on this issue. That the issues arising could result in chaotic financial shocks is likely.
Whatever happens in the domestic UK economy in coming months as the reality of unaffordable bills hits home an international banking crisis looks to be in the cards, and the only way out of it will be debt rescheduling, or waiver, which is a Jubillee by any other name. The world does not look like a happy place right now.
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It’s very worrying, Mr Murphy. See https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/04/20/this-time-really-is-different/
Getting more concerned every day.
That’s an interesting read, though what people tend to miss when discussing the cost of energy is the huge opportunity for efficiency improvements. The vast majority of current energy is just wasted because of e.g. inefficient buildings, poor transport policy, poor (and legacy) industrial design etc. Although I’m less pessimistic about the cost of things like solar and wind (there being plenty of room at the bottom, and new cheap and abundant technologies like perovskite PVs), the big gains can and will be made in just using the energy we have in a much better way.
Now would be a good time to remind ourselves of how much food is casually thrown away too.
As countries around the globe have become more prosperous, or in reality a few individuals within those countries, the desire for more meat in their diet has increase. This has caused significant loss of crop growing as raising animals for meat needs land, and also the loss of crops diverted for animal feed. This, presumably, has led to less grown foods and higher prices.
The easy answer is to cut down on the amount of meat consumed around the world, but who am I to suggest this. Myself I only eat a little fish, which is bad enough.
We have massively reduced our meat consumption, and eliminated mammals entirely. We do eat fish.
I think this massively important in terms of the environment.
It also is a lot cheaper.
And frankly, I am not missing mammal, at all.
Will we go wholly vegetarian? I don’t know. But it is the direction of travel.
I’m not sure switching from livestock production to non-animal production would produce much of a net gain in food production or improve the economics of it: in essence livestock eats the stuff humans might themselves eat, but the humans eat the animals? If you take the animals out of the equation then human demand will rise for grains etc to much the same extent as extra grain is available from reduced livestock demand?
The evidence is all against you
It’s very boring to have nonsense of this sport presented and I will be deleting more like it
No wonder you would not out your name to it
More to the point, ruminants eat stuff we can’t eat (grass, gorse, heathers etc.) and we can then eat the ruminants. It’s a system which works well. What doesn’t work well is monofarming which is wrong in so many ways. We need always to make distinctions between the two farming approaches before condemning the idea itself.
It isn’t nonsense, Richard, and I don’t appreciate your tone.
Seems you missed the use of question marks.
I am fully behind rationalising food production and preventing climate change, btw. I’m merely doubting the rationale that switching from livestock production to plant-based diet would reduce price of edible plants for human consumption.
It’s a perfectly reasonable question.
I don’t like your tone much either
Politely, your claim is laughable, IMO, when food is easier to produce from plants and protein can be delivered
You can happily farm ruminants on land which wouldn’t support crops. There are plenty of farms which detail their day to day lives on the web which expand on regenerative themes and making the best use of land. I suspect we’d all do well to abandon the idea of lawnmowers and lawns and let our gardens go wild then get the local Goat Guy in to loose his goats on it, periodically. Once a year or so, we’d eat the goats. That would be sensible and pragmatic while neat trim lawns is a conceit left over from the middle ages (or thereabouts) when having a lawn signified you were so wealthy you could afford to have land which you didn’t need for agriculture. Lawns were and are an affectation. We can’t afford them any longer. I’m reading too we could soon see mass egg production stop in this country as while the costs of egg farming are going up and up the supermarkets are refusing to pay more for them, calling the viability of the industry into question. Unthinkable I know, but sadly, these are the times. We need to adapt.
Egg production will not stop
Pricves will change
Sorry, but let’s stay within the boundaries of reality here
I live on a Welsh hill-farm involved in sheep production. Whilst I doubt the viability of your goat project the point about animals eating grasses that humans cannot eat is a sound one: if there are obvious viable food products that could instead be grown on this marginal land (rather than grass->sheep) I’d be interested to know of them.
The environmental and healthcare benefits of plant-based diet seem fairly obvious, however the idea that shifting to plant based diet would reduce price of grains etc seems much less so, as there would be a substitution effect (switching from lamb meat to grains, say). That would raise demand for grains, obviously. And significantly so. It isn’t at all obvious that a massive shift to plant-based diets would lower the price of such a diet, though it would have other very large benefits (healthcare, greenhouse gas emissions etc).
Have you read George Monbiot?
Daughter is vegan. My digestive system can’t tolerate it. We eat a little fish and a little chicken, with the emphasis on little. Primarily, our diet is vegetarian.
I doubt I could do vegan
I have been forced into a non-dairy diet by an allergy to milk (not lactose intolerance). No cheese and no chocolate is a bit of an issue but I’m adjusting. What to put in my latte to lots of trial and error.
Overall I don’t think that it is reasonable to expect people to take a sudden extreme shift away from the traditional British (for instance) diet to a strict vegetarian or vegan diet. If good numbers of us followed your path the difference would be significant if not enough to please to more committed.
To me there is something really sinister about this.
Robert Reich (Clinton’s ex- Sectretary of Labour in the U.S.) has observed that the amount of credit available in the world is roughly the equivalent to the amount of wages that the economy has lost over the years.
If wages and incomes continue to fall (as highlighted also by U.S. economist Louis Hyman) then we are heading for a perfect storm of debt problems.
However, for the wealthy who will be supplying the ‘investment’ in the credit system – well, this sounds absolutely fantastic to them and there lies the problem methinks.
One thing that makes me really unhappy is those with capital, particularly of the unearned/rent based type, using their financial leverage to further disadvantage the poorer end of society. I had begun to list a few of my favourite hates here but doing so only made this reply look like a rant.