“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.” – Cree Saying.

This quote, possibly the biggest cliché in the environmental literature, inspired Jared Diamond’s seminal work “Collapse“. But humans seem to succumb to boredom fairly quickly, so the real crisis, which is after all about something as mundane as food, has slipped off of the radar. The global meltdown of the banks, a grand Greek drama of the folly of the gods if ever there was one, has captured our attention. Have the problems with food thus disappeared? I think not. They are here to stay and getting stronger.

The problems we saw with the huge price rise in 2008 are still around, bio-fuels, huge agri-businesses exploiting market power, and so on. It is a myth that this was driven by increased demand from China and India, downwards pressure on wages in developing countries has actually reduced per capita food intake in the poor majority of these countries. Adding speculation in food markets yields a lovely recipe for population control (Thus Passim). Over the past two years, evidence has grown of the impact of Climate Change on agriculture. An FAO report by Cline in 2007 put agricultural yield losses by 2080 at between 5 and 20% globally. This hid a regional picture where India could lose 30-40% of its yield. As if this was not enough, he pointed out the glaringly obvious problem with equilibrium models, which mean even greater declines in food production.

These models assume systems tending to a steady state, and are used in both agro-economics and climate modeling. They mask extreme events and chaotic systems that refuse to settle down. Extreme weather is a fact of life in India, whose climate is driven by the dynamic monsoon weather system. No-one quite knows how this system will respond to changes in climate, but what we do know is that around 40% of India’s population depend directly on the rain. They live in terror of extreme weather, and this year, with a major drought from failure of the monsoon, India is importing food again. This just after India signed an accord to turn land over to fuel production to help keep American engines going.

Finally, there is sea-level rise to consider, something also not included in Cline’s report. For instance Egypt is facing the loss of much of its prime agricultural lands along the Nile Delta. So worry about the banks that hold in your money all you like, the food problem is not going away.

While Somali pirates are taking hostages, killing and getting killed by the French navy, French trawlermen are blockading Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk. The Somalis claim they have taken to robbery and kidnapping because their traditional fishing livelihoods have been abstracted by factory ships. The French trawlermen are protesting more or less the same thing, except that their fishing methods are somewhat more automated and their temporary victims are a bunch of tourists, truck drivers and ferry operators. I have no sympathy for either group. The French will exact concessions from their government – so far Eur 4 million has been offered in aid – and maybe the EU. The Somalis will probably end up dead. In either case the root cause will remain. If the matelots were protesting about the ghastly English in general or any number of legitimate gripes other than EU fish quotas, they’d have the full power of Thus behind their routine trashing of the UK Easter half-term holiday. But if they win this one, everyone loses. The restrictions to which they object are insufficient, impossible to enforce and arguably contribute more to the problem than to the solution. We need to pay them to stay in port and find them something sensible and dignified to do while they don’t go to sea. Ditto for the Somalis, but that’s another story.

Charles Clover presents a compelling and authoritative account of the overfishing of the world’s oceans, to which I can’t add much other than to urge you to look out for the documentary film, released in June. Scientists agree that while pollution and climate change, environment and food stocks all affect breeding patterns and populations, factory ships, super trawlers and the collateral damage they cause with their catch-all multi-kilometre nets have damaged fish stocks beyond the tipping point. While fishermen themselves are a breed in decline, it is insane to allow them to exercise their right to work by destroying what remains of the planet’s fish populations.

Spain has the biggest EU fishing fleet. Non-EU members Norway and Iceland, combined populations less than 5 million, account for 22% of the fleet.

The current French protest (now halted) is targeted against the 2008 EU quotas, which are are harmful and wasteful, but not because they are too stringent. They encourage fishermen throw back corpses of endangered fish they have caught by accident if it takes them over their quota of a specific species. While increasing net holes has theoretically helped immature fish to escape, trawling is at best an inexact science and the big ships create havoc as they scrape the seas in search of dwindling stocks in a compressed timeframe. Even if EU fleets comply with quotas, non-EU trawlers account for over 28% of the tonnage in European territorial waters. Quotas may be seen as a ploy to avoid the inevitable recognition that without a total moratorium on factory fishing, white fish in particular face extinction in the North Atlantic and North Sea within a maximum of 30 years, perhaps much earlier. Because this is politically unpalatable we will allow the next generation to take the consequences of our idiocy.

The French government offer of EUR 4 million aid to the trawlermen won’t even pay the legal fees of the proposed litigation from the ferry owners whose businesses have been affected by the blockade. According to the European Environmental Agency, France accounts for around 8% of the tonnage of the EU fishing fleet, similar to Britain and Italy, with combined populations of over 180 million. The Netherlands accounts for 6%. At 19%, Spain is the biggest EU member state fleet. Iceland (7%) and Norway (15%) are not EU members and have a combined population of less than 6 million. Both are grudging signatories to EU memoranda. 28% of the fishing fleet is described as ‘other.’

EU figures show that the while numbers of ships fell by 10%, total tonnage, engine power and overall numbers of vessels in the combined fishing fleets of member states has remained roughly constant since 1997. Factory ships, which do the most damage, have come to the fore. It is a classic example of EU funhouse economics. Giving the same number of people the right to catch 30% less fish from a naturally-declining supply is bound to cause price inflation and bring misery to all but the most ruthless and best-equipped operators, who cause the most environmental damage. A fishy version of the EU Common Agricultural Policy ‘set aside’ scheme (itself flawed) should be enacted, paying trawlermen to lay up for a significant period while stocks recover. Punitive taxes, based on tonnage, could be applied to the big ships. Klondikers from Asia, Japan, Russia and, it has to be said, Spain, should be made very unwelcome indeed in EU territorial waters and fish markets should be better monitored for smuggled catches.

I have recently eaten gambas in a pictureseque waterfront café in a remote corner of southern Spain, to be informed that they were caught and shipped from Northern Scotland – the local stocks were exhausted long ago. I have heard of Klondike trawlers from the Vladivostok fleet, forced to fish half a world away from home, unloading illegal catches of North Atlantic cod at Lowestoft, Yarmouth and Ipswich, where they fetch bullion-robbery prices. Populations of Atlantic herring have declined by almost 95% over the past two decades. Atlantic salmon smoult numbers have fallen by 70% over half that period. I’m no Cousteau – more of a Clouseau if the truth were told – but I know a red herring when it’s under my nose. EU fishing quotas are dangerous, unworkable and shift the balance in favour of the very factory ships which have destroyed the seas and the livelihoods of ‘traditional’ fishermen.

By John J Kelly.

Over half the 550 whales killed in 2007 were pregnant females, according to the International Humane Society (IHS)

Over Easter it was announced that the Japanese whaling fleet had only achieved 68% of its target of killing 950 Minke whales ands 50 Fin whales, ‘for research purposes.’ Activist groups such as Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society and Greenpeace were cited as playing a key role in disrupting the hunt – or saving the lives of up to 300 harmless mammals, depending on how you look at it. Sea Shepherd, in particular, has been particularly daring and aggressive in its confrontations with the Japanese fishing fleet over the past few months. Captain Paul Watson and his crew regularly sailed across the bows of fishing vessels, boarded ships, sprayed foul-smelling chemicals at crew and were shot at and wounded in return. operations were suspended when it was alleged and rumoured that the Japanese were sending their Navy to ‘defend’ the trawler fleet against the Sea Shepherd. Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith had expressed dismay that whaling had resumed in the Southern Oceans. Australia had designated a section of the ocean a whale sanctuary. His Japanese counterpart, Masahiko Komura, refuses to recognise the protected region and defended his country’s right to kill whales and condemned ‘harassment’ on the part of Sea Shepherd and others.

The International Whaling Commission declared a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, when it became clear that several species were in imminent danger of extinction. Icelandic and Canadian Inuit fishermen claim that their traditional livelihoods depend upon whaling, but their methods are generally in stark contrast to the technologies employed by the commercial ‘scientific’ fleets. In the Northern hemisphere, the Common Minke Whale has recovered to an estimated 103,000 population. Norway famously opposed the ban and has probably killed the most Minke whales since 1993, inexplicably so, since it is one of the world’s and certainly the northern hemisphere’s richest countries due to its oil stocks. It has no need of 1000 or so Minke corpses. The Antarctic Minke population has been estimated as high as 650,000, but the Blue Whale population, which fell to an estimated 600 in 1974, still only stands at 5000. There are less than 16,000 Right Whales in the world’s oceans. Despite the continued moratorium on Humpback Whales, hunted to within 10% of extinction by the 1960s, but now with an estimated population of 60,000, Japan intended to kill 50 specimens this year, but abandoned plans after pressure from the International Whaling Commission.

Commercial whaling is not the sole reason for the decline in the world’s whale population, but, like 19th Century buffalo hunting, unregulated commercial over-hunting led to the virtual extinction of several cetacean species in the past. Several species are still in grave danger: ther are Nowadays there is no real commercial reason to hunt whales, which were sought after in the past primarily for oil, bone and meat. Though there is a compelling case to allow hunting in ‘traditional’ native communities – a similar argument applies to traditional, as opposed to factory fishing – it is equally true that subsistence fishermen do not tend to use radar, GPS and explosive harpoons to stalk and destroy their targets. The hypocrisy of the ‘scientific’ explanation for Japan’s insistence upon its right to kill whales is partly explained by the taxonomy which the International Whaling Commission adopted to glissando round a practice which the civilised world finds generally repugnant. Japan sees the right to hunt whales as an unalienable aspect of its culture, as do Iceland, Norway and certain Caribbean islanders, for example. Yet the Japanese Foreign Minister complained earlier this year that debating the issue on ‘emotional’ terms acted to obscure the argument.

The issue of whale hunting, and ‘big game’ hunting in general, is ultimately emotional and certainly moral, involving as it does the right of man to prey on other species, an activity in which every carnivore engages to a greater or lesser extent, but for pleasure – or ‘science’ – as opposed to subsistence. However, there is an immense difference between managed husbandry and untrammelled hunting, especially of animals for which there is no real demand, and it is unscientific in the extreme to pretend otherwise. Several species of sharks, for example, have been hunted close to extinction on the unfounded pretext that they are dangerous to man.

The whaling moratorium has led to substantial increases in whale populations, and should be seen as a beacon of hope for the world’s endangered fish stocks, particularly cod, haddock and herring. Factory fishing has decimated these populations in the North Atlantic. Only a complete and lasting moratorium over a ten year period will serve to replenish stocks to sustainable levels. Side arguments such as the effects of pollution and climate change should not stand in the way of a ‘scientific’ conclusion that conservation and restraint works. A cod, haddock or flounder is not a mammal, and is in no way anthropomorphic or evocative, but we need Sea Shepherds to stand up for the rights of our wet fish too, not to mention tuna, shrimp and the complex food chain which depends upon these species.

John J Kelly

We landed in the middle of the night in Addis Ababa, took a small plane across the highlands to Dire-Dawa then travelled by jeep to Harar, passing vast herds of camels and a few hitch hikers with AK 47s on the road – destitute demobbed soldiers abandoned after the abrupt withdrawal from Somalia, a footnote to the Bush-sponsored ‘war on terror’. Fifteen hours after leaving Heathrow, we drank coffee, picked from the bush, roasted and ground before our eyes by a group of kids who might just hold the key to Ethiopia’s future. That’s what Simon had brought me to see, and that’s why I’m telling you this.

Manufacturing coffee at Webmart Business School, Harar

Simon Biltcliffe is a new age print farmer. His company – better described as a Posse – Webmart, brings buyers and sellers of print together. Webmart (turnover £37 million and rising) is fuelled on can-do, adrenalin and the principle that you make a lot of money if you save people money. Old school Quality, Service, Value empowered by peer-to-peer high technology enables turnarounds and transaction cost savings that would give RyanAir a run for its money (without the sweary CEO and leery attitude towards customers and suppliers). Planned philanthropy is embedded in the business model. Because. That’s why kids in a forgotten region of the horn of Africa were wearing yellow T shirts, learning how to use computers and how to build sustainable 21st century enterprises.

Hyena man and friends

We watched a shaman feed wild hyenas with strips of meat hung on a stick (from his mouth) at dusk outside the ancient Medina walls of Harar, one of the holiest cities of Islam (85 mosques)and erstwhile home of Arthur Rimbaud (he was an arms dealer when he wasn’t a poet). There was nothing remotely Disney about those beasts, the true entrepreneurs of the plains. Contrary to popular belief, lions feast on what the hyena packs leave behind. The Hyena man ekes a living with tips from passing travellers and a stipend from the elders – appeasing hyenas must rank among the most dangerous and unusual of council jobs.

Only 16,000 tourists came to Ethiopia in total last year and very few westerners make it to Harar. Sir Richard Burton (pervy Victorian adventurer and translator of the Kama Sutra, not the Welsh actor) was one of the first westerners allowed into the medina in the 1870s. He stayed a week. A Rastafarian called Solomon showed us round the back alleys (there weren’t that many front alleys). He remembered Geldof fondly – said Bob had stayed for five days back in the ’80s, loved it but hadn’t been back. He asked me about his wife and kids. I didn’t elaborate on Peaches or poor Paula. The Rastas aren’t favoured on account of their worship of Haile Selassie, but Christians, Muslims, Hyena men and folks with sidearms rubbed along together just fine, as far as we could see, contrary to dire western rumours of Islamic militancy and religious conflict.

Ethiopian natural resources

All were united in their need to work out how to survive another day. We had cash, food, shoes. We were lucky. We travelled further east, to Babile, a predominantly Somalian refugee township, where the lucky folk had cut up tyres on their feet. Most kids were missing one or more parent. Some were HIV orphans, others were victims of someone else’s pointless war. Although it rains for three months a year, water is scarce and agriculture is neolithic. The Chinese are building a pipeline and digging wells, but somehow it hasn’t happened yet. Women and kids slave as they have always done. The lucky ones have something to do. Babile’s cash crop is Chat, a mild hallucogenic leaf which men chew to give them energy and help them forget. Nothing much happens before the noonday chat wagon arrives, then men squat, chew and mill about. Our driver, somewhat alarmingly, was an Chat afficionado. He gave me some leaves to try: it would have been rude to refuse. The journey back to Harar was mellow.

Business 101, Harar, Ethiopia

Webmart Business School pays young people to come to learn computer and basic business skills. Even this tiny stipend helps the students and their families – often without parents – eat regularly. The logic and business plan is compelling and ambitious. Given the hurdles to development, it is pointless to sustain stone age subsistence farming practices. You can dole out metal hoes to replace the wooden ones and bring the people into the 18th Century, but Ethiopia needs and deserves access to 21st Century trading and management leadership. And it should be homegrown. The sleekest people driving the biggest trucks were UN workers and NGOs. The only difference between them and the wonderful kids we met was circumstance of birth and access to international aid money. Unchannelled Aid anchors subsistence, dependence and, sadly, enables corruption. In itself, it is as pernicious and harmful as Chat.

In partnership with Alchemy World, a small but perfectly focused social entrepreneurship group, Webmart is funding the development of a cadre of students who can seed a self-help culture in a country which has no shortage of beautiful and intelligent people, but precious little in the way of luck and natural resources. Back in Addis, we watched Obama’s inauguration on TV. Africans were uncritically proud. We met an Alchemy graduate who had made $400.00 in the last month from her nascent travel business. Her father makes $37.00 a month and needs to support a family of seven. Reed Elsevier have given her a stand at World Travel Mart in London in November, and support Alchemy with free advertisements. I for one will chip in for her expenses.

The maths are simple. 1000 Alchemy graduates could permanently transform the lives of tens of thousands of people. If they are obliged to emigrate they get upskilled jobs when they do. If they stay, they have the nous to exploit the undoubted human and natural resources of this extraordinary country. The investment has to be better than waiting for the next sack of UN rice or the Chinese water that never quite makes the last mile. What’s in it for Webmart? Absolutely nothing, apart from knowing that selling that print run just might have changed the lives of people who deserve a chance to help themselves.

John J Kelly.

PS. If you want to help, contact Simon Biltcliffe or Alchemy World.

Foolish people have argued that there is a choice between preventing the worst effects of climate change and adapting to unavoidable changes, despite compelling evidence, such as that produced at the latest meeting at Copenhagen that the majority cannot survive without drastic emissions reductions and even if we do, adapting to a lot of changes. While there is a very lively debate on mitigation, on reducing the amount of carbon in the air, the debates on adaptation have been sidelined, perhaps becuase they are seen as distracting from the serious task of saving the world – or perhaps saving the relatively rich English-speakers having the debate. Most measures supposedly designed to reduce carbon in the air also tend to have a horrible impact on the poor. Bio-fuels, which would allow a kind of business-as-usual in terms of running car on liquid fuels, are a prime example – large scale cultivation will disrupt food production. Indeed, the World Bank claims that 75% of last year’s food price spike was down to this very factor.

Another example is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) designed to get developing countries involved in  Carbon Trading. These are mitigation measures, this money might help adaptation as well, but, under the current system, it won’t.  India’s Center for Science and Environment has been very critical of CDM, which lets the rich buy all the cheap ways of reducing their carbon outputs, forcing the rest to pay more for this later. In addition, the complex process of obtaining carbon credits means it is only really suitable for big companies. So the money won’t go to helping the poor adapt, but will go to the big companies, who do most of the polluting in the first place.

Aided and abetted by consultants from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, business lobbies have managed to get environmental impact assessment laws diluted in India. Bribery and political influence from big companies is so widespread that several activists have been forced to send industrial water pollution samples to the US to get them processed, because no Indian laboratory dares to return results that would upset big business. Are we seriously going to direct more resources at this lobby in the hope that this will reduce emissions? And how exactly will this help the poor to adapt?

Alternatives will need to be fought for. The recent Forest Rights Act has made its way through Indian Parliament and is now being put into practice. It sets an interesting precedent by putting into law a framework of rights to underpin local democratic control of natural resources. This highlights one of the few advantages the poor have in terms of winning real adaptation concessions. Despite the tiny character of their landholdings,  due to their sheer numbers, they command control of a sizeable proportion of the land.

If you combine the recent findings about climate change with likely emissions reductions paths, you see that we little chance of making it through this crisis without taking some of the carbon back out of the air. The global carbon cycle suggests two main ways of doing this: put it into the sea, by seeding the oceans for instance, but the technology is not developed yet. Alternativey, you can put it into the land, either through minerals like Olivine, or through biomass, and turning it into charcoal (Biochar). It has been correctly observed that using charcoal as a global commercialised solution to climate change has the same effect as bio-fuels on displacing food production. However, dismissing biochar out of hand misses an important strategic point.

Oxfam and others argue that Human Rights should be put at the heart of the climate debates, particularly adaptation. However, they are somewhat more coy in public about the fact that rights are generally never given freely by the powerful, but forced as concessions from them by the struggles of others. But what on earth do the rich need the poor for? One area is to get access to land. Tata’s troubles in building a plant to manufacture the new Nano car illustrates that the poor will not give up control of what little land they have so easily. If the rich need to use land for getting carbon out of the air, and if the poor can prevent the rich  from doing so by thwarting their plans, perhaps this gives them leverage to demand more rights over their natural resources.

Despite biochar being criticised as an unreliable way to improve soil quality, there have been studies that show that used correctly it can be a useful input into organic agriculture, as well as offering a credible method for sinking carbon into the soil, especially when considered as a part of strategies to increase tree-cover overall. Can we afford to dismiss Biochar as an option because we fear the implications of its commercialisation? As a potential low cost-technology that the poor could implement to improve their land, and a possible source of some leverage on the rich in adaptation negotiations, it may be rash to dismiss it out of hand. With only $1Bn of the already pitiful $18Bn of adaptation funding having been paid out, current approaches to mobilising those resources are clearly not working. Can we afford to overlook the potential advantage the poor may have in the one resource they may control?

If the Indian Forest Rights model can be extended to support dryland organic agricultural practices within a democratised natural resource management framework, this actually creates a model where subsidy for mitigation, in the form of support of increased tree coverage and use of biochar might be used to build productive assets for the poor that may help them adapt. The experience of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India shows that productive use of subsidy is crucial to prevent the subsidy from undercutting the existing local economy, especially agriculture. Thus the issue of having a rights regime to protect access to the environment and thus local economic activity is crucial to any adaptation approach. There is almost no chance of realising such regimes unless the poor have some real leverage to exercise in order to get them.

 Anyone see any other leverage out there?

When the Food and Agricultural Organisation says that another 40 million were pushed into hunger in 2008, what images spring into your mind? Is it possible to imagine that many people starving? Well imagine it or not, we had better get used to it. Because the other thing that the FAO announced was that to bring the truly mind-boggling 973 million people who are starving now into the land of plenty, we need to double food production by 2050. Quite a challenge, bearing in mind we also have to totally rejig our energy systems in the meantime.

Global food markets are effectively trade in water. Tony Allen coined the phrase “Virtual Water” to point out that water mainly travels around inside other things. And these other things are mostly food: a tonne of which takes 1000 tonnes of water to make. Another thing the food trade uses a lot of is oil. We are talking (in 1974) a calorie of oil to grow a calorie of food, and then you have to ship it. And even though a thousand times lighter than the water it embodies, food is still bulky. Think about the heaviest things that regularly come in and out of your house. It is lugging food shopping in and waste out that breaks up our sedentary lifestyles.

All that bulk gets moved around, a sample shopping basket of 26 imported organic items having travelled a total of 150,000 miles, or six times around the Earth. The US food system alone uses  as much energy as France and 80% of this is used outside the farm in transport and processing. This huge oil-driven industry is a way of redistributing water across the globe, albeit guided by purchasing power. The dry parts of the world rely on the food trade to a very great extent, and as it gets harder to grow food in the tropics under climate change, this dependency is likely to increase.

The IEA now forecasts that the production of conventional oils is likely to peak around 2020. That’s only 12 years away, and is likely to drive the price of energy up sharply across the board, as people try and substitute on type of fuel for another. This is bound to affect the food trade, partly because of the oil that goes into food,  but also because it makes it ever more tempting to use land for growing fuel.  The food price rises in 2008 were 75% caused by the increased demand from bio-fuels. It all adds up. The extra 40 million hungry in 2008 was with an oil price peaking around $100 a barrel. But the coming oil peak, dubbed “The last oil shock”, could raise the price to $300 a barrel. So this international trade in food (AKA water) is likely to get a lot more expensive. We could be seeing a lot of inflation (Thus Passim).

Countries will find it increasingly expensive to buy in the food they need. This will mean an increasing need, in the tropics especially, for countries to rely on the water they have in order to grow food. If you combine this with population growth in places like India, you get a worrying picture of massively declining amounts of water available per person even as you need more of it.

As if this were not enough to put you off your muesli, take a look at industrialisation. The US uses as much water for industry as it does for agriculture, and the EU uses twice as much. These are both areas with tight environmental regulations, particularly in relation to water pollution: This was the original cause celebre of the environmental movement, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” And let’s not forget Erin Brokovich.

In many tropical countries there is not much water to spare. In India 80-90% of the water demand is already from agriculture. Whilst there are a lot of good environmental laws on the books, the enforcement is weak, what with all the corruption. In 2006, pushed on by the World Trade Organisation, the Indian government rushed through 2 new laws. The first allowed major sections of Industry to self-certify their environmental impacts, which is a bit like asking them nicely for a confession, pretty please . The other was a directive that all natural resources should be exploited to the maximum benefit of “the people”. How the people will get a slice of the profits is not made clear.

This all seems a bit schizophrenic, because the same government is so concerned about water shortage that it is proposing the largest development project in the history of humanity. This is a 1 billion US$ proposal to link all of India’s rivers together.  The joke being that without enforced environmental regulations, this is likely to turn into a national pollution network. So what to do? Buy food from abroad? Fat chance.

Well one thing is to get the existing environmental regulations enforced. This is a global problem, as the food-oil-water link indicates, so a global treaty about the enforcement of environmental regulations in international trade looks ever more urgent. Otherwise international organisations will keep on lobbying to weaken the laws that protect the increasingly scarce water in the tropics.

The other way is from the ground up. There are plenty of traditional crops in Asia and Africa that have been displaced by markets for “modern” “luxury” food. Millets and Ragi in India have suffered this fate, replaced by water-guzzling rice paddy. Promoting these crops, which can get by on 5 times less water than wheat, is one way towards food security. Another is to reduce oil dependence in food production, especially in poor countries like India, where farmers already face huge problems with debt.

However, until international policy-makers wake up to these issues, and moderate the market fundamentalism that got us into our current mess, these types of solution are likely to remain drops in the ocean. Doing things mainly by markets and purchasing power means it is cheaper to let the poor starve. So don’t you know, we’re talking about a revolution.

Normal service will not be resumed

We may have reached the tipping point where humans have become slaves to consumerism. If so, it’s time to question why we’ve allowed a bunch of self-interested geeks to ruin the world and force us into penury along the way, not to give them a second chance. Globalisation has partly succeeded in its promised a redistribution of wealth. Usurers, oil barons and arms dealers, technology monopolists, media monsters, (Murdoch now owns the Wall Street Journal, now spectacularly rancid in a very short period of time), the Russian mafia, Chinese tatmakers and certain politicians who promised democratic change and equality but delivered the opposite, have done very well. Their meretricious shamens, economists, have held their coats. Few now question the authority of the dismal science, even if we disagree with approaches – Marx, Keynes, Stuart Mill, Friedman and Weber (my favourite) are pertinent examples. None owned a 3G phone. Free Market principles (has anyone noticed the implicit oxymoron of that term?) include dismissing morality as a religious concept (bad thing), while the ‘protestant’ work ethic (good thing) underpins the neo-capitalist flim-flam game (which is the same as the work ethic, but without the work part).

It may be the case that the economics of globalised consumerism have become so embedded that there is no alternative but to ‘bail out’ the greedy and wasteful financial ‘institutions’ which lend the illusion of prosperity and push the problem round the plate. But if so, we are almost certainly prolonging and accelerating misery for all but a few. That’s why, twisting and turning and blustering, ‘world leaders’ are re-nationalising the tools of the free market – capital, the means of production and, covertly, freedom of expression, and preserving monopolies which paradoxically arose out of this whole flawed experiment in global enslavement.

Now the elites whose business it is to promote this destruction as a benefit are in a spot of bother. Globalisation has not brought prosperity for all: in fact the global economy is in real danger of implosion. The gap between rich and poor has grown, particularly in the developed world, where it was supposed to achieve the opposite result. Most of the third and fourth world still lives in destitution, reproducing at alarming rates while losing their rights to the land and skills as to its husbandry. There will be a bigger spot of bother if serious civil unrest ensues. In some places, it has already started. Poverty, gross inequality and desperation, not prosperity, are almost always the root causes.

No, I haven’t seen the Che Guevara biopic yet (another flawed idealist whose theories were adapted by people whose intent, by and large, was spoiling it for the rest of us). If economics wasn’t a willing hostage to free market dogma, another set of truths might become self-evident. For example, the credit crunch is a symptom, not the cause of the crisis of capitalism. Measures such as ‘quantitative easing‘ are not solutions, they merely prolong the illusion that money is the end, not the means, of production. We are experiencing the consequences of rampant materialism, hyper-inflation of values and of pretending for too long that we could become a ‘(financial) service economy’, when logic suggests that this is a ridiculous notion. Money is an enabler, not an output. Now we need moneylenders in order to live beyond our means. Global materialism requires us to waste resources, donate up to 15% of the price of a product to value-subtracting fripperies such as advertising and packaging, chatter on expensive mobile phones, drive and fly to places where we stay in hotels largely identical to those in the places we left, while kids in the third and fourth worlds wear leftover tyres on the feet to walk ten miles to a school on an empty stomach – the lucky ones have tyres to wear and schools to attend. If we want to prolong the illusion that we live to consume, and can do so not by producing but by bamboozling, we’ll either need to print more Monopoly money and carry on creating MacJobs or consider downsizing to lifestyles we, and the planet, can afford.

Consumerism has become the default position from which we view the world, yet the objects of our desires are exacting a huge price, not merely in terms of the consumption of raw materials and energy, but also in terms of the stress, greed and strife which results from their pursuit. Here in the UK, we grow 15% less food than we did ten years ago, pay more as a percentage of our earnings for housing, food, fuel, water, heating and electricity, public services, entertainment (TV licence) and communications. We have outsourced the management of our utilities to foreign-owned companies whose pricing does not reflect the 50% drop in energy prices over the past year. While we may we pay less for clothing, cheap bling and plastic washing-up bowls, but that will change as the impact of the exchange rate and Chinese downturn impacts. 

We are involved in two costly wars, in countries which posed us no threat. The US has spent $3 trillion to manufacture a war which killed over 100,000 civilians, and accelerated its involvement in another conflict which they cheerfully acknowledge played a key role in the ruin of the former USSR. Pardon my naivety, but since the Us is the engine of the entire capitalist free market system, shouldn’t we be asking why? This is not a pothole on the road to Shangri-La. It’s the path to Perdition.

As I write, the pudding-faced Billy Big Time who told us, with a straight face, that he had ended boom and bust cycles, then that he had saved the world’s banks (Thus passim), is reading out Mandelson’s Bilderberg cant to a bunch of fellow blowhards in a grotesque double act with the hapless Ban Ki Moon, who has proved as useless as his equally oddly-named predecessors. (Why are we not surprised?) The Davos ‘elite’ should try some extreme off-piste skiing.

I’m going on an economist drive – paying no further attention to the witterings of economists. This slump is deep, we’re in for a period of prolonged austerity and I’m not prepared to pretend it’s part of some greater plan. The rich world needs to force prices down by refocusing on values. The poor, as ever, have got no choice, apart from revolution. They wouldn’t do that now, would they?

John J Kelly.

The only way out is to win a quiz show

Aravind Adiga’s Booker winner White Tiger and Danny Boyle’s Golden-Globe-harvesting film Slumdog Millionaire (based on Indian Diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel Q and A) illustrate a “Shining India” that has long shown up in the statistics of those critical of the Globo-glorifiers. It bears repeating (Thus Passim) that 70-80% of India’s population cannot afford to feed themselves to international minimums, that is 2400 calories of cheap stodge per day, assuming they spend on nothing else.

Yet in the UK we continue to talk about “the poor” as if they live on council estates, and as if all they need is the chance to show how bright they are in order to climb up into our middle class paradise. Meritocracy may imply that the less intelligent ones should stay where they are, but what if they were dulled by malnutrition? The world is not made up of a series of Westminster villages, but being good nationalists, the policy makers and pundits seem reluctant to acknowledge this.

The implication of this is that national governments tend to live in a room full of mirrors, where all that they see is themselves, especially in rich OECD countries. Almost everyone uses the poor to justify their policies and positions in these compassionate days of media-conveyed suffering, yet our policy and political debates do not at all reflect their circumstances. This is a flaw of the Left as well as the Right. The legacy of Marx and the Union movement is that we see emancipation of the poor in terms of workplace rights, yet only around 8% of people in India have formal employment contracts, so this is mostly irrelevant and this is probably the case in most poor countries.

If people cannot feed themselves in the cash economy, as the numbers show, then they have to be feeding themselves in the non-cash economy. How can this be so? Where does food come from if not from shops? That’s because the poor are in the environment. Either an urban one, scavenging the remains and polishing the shoes of those visible to us, or a rural one, growing or gathering food under unpredictable conditions. But since policymaking is largely about economics, and economics largely about the cash economy, and the cash economy about people with purchasing power, and not the environment or the poor, these humans (of whom there are rather a lot) remain largely invisible. But what is the problem with them, and their environment, remaining invisible to policy makers, particularly in the rich world?

It gives us a totally misleading sense of the future. Economists, particularly historically oriented ones, write as if it is the swing of a pendulum that determines economic history.  Presumably this means that after this latest desperate burst of neo-Keynesianism we will turn back to more liberal and less risk-averse approaches once times are good again. But that invisible thing, the environment, is changing, and it will impact on all of us, but mainly on those other invisible things, the poor, so that our whole perception of risk, and thus how to organise ourselves, will have to change. We are not going back to a nice cosey stable world with seemingly unlimited natural resources, and we are not replaying the Industrial Revolution in countries like India, even if our policy makers have been Oxbridge-raised on a diet of social thinkers from the steam-engine age. We can talk about public spending as a way of stabilising things until we are blue in the face, but how do we propose to get money to those really at risk under our undoubtedly changing circumstances?

Via NGOs? Well they are not coping well with spending the fraction of the 0.7% of GDP put to aid budgets efficiently. Via business? Well their track record of behaving well in the absence of strong regulation is not so good. Via governments in poor countries? To quote Aravind Adiga’s lead character in White Tiger, “what a fucking joke.” Survival of the fittest in a world where pro-poor leaders in the poor world, particularly those that interfere with rich world access to natural resources tended to “dissappear” has left a legacy of governance that does not exactly channel funds to the needy as a first priority.

We can perhaps hope that our rich world “Social Mobility” thesis works in poor countries, and the poor can suddenly help themselves. Sadly the post-industrial boom in India seems not to be creating lots of jobs, so the whole 1950′s rich world idea of mechanising agriculture and shunting people into the cities is creating shanti towns rather than a lovely unionised industrial base. Also, it takes rather a lot of planets, at current levels of inequality, to lift the poor out this way.

So we have a big problem that our current policy debates are simply not up to addressing. We don’t know how to think about the dependency of the poor on the environment, or how to support them in the face of environmental change or indeed how, in short, to stabilise the world through the coming times of trouble (Thus Passim). There is the  Keynsian idea of a “Green New Deal”, but this is not a cyclical issue we are facing, actually the problems are likely to grow gradually but inexorably over time, so a short-term spending strategy won’t do it (though long-term rural employment guarantees may help a bit, even if dogged by corruption).  Maybe we in the rich world should look to the artists for answers, because right now, it looks like our wonks are all out of ideas.

A surefire sign that something's wrong

India and China sit on an awful lot of coal, and there is a heated debate going on amongst agonized environmentalists that Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactors might be necessary to avoid it all going up in smoke. Carbon sequestration – capturing the carbon as it leaves the chimney and then storing it underground-  sounds like a good idea, but it is a long way from being commercially viable, and there is not a lot of time left. The Greenpeace energy plan for India avoids coal and nuclear, but leans on “biomass.” This means plants mainly, and it raises the same problems as bio-fuels, namely that it becomes more economic to power machines than feed poor people.

One thing that has become clear with the recent nuclear deal is that the chances of the US stopping India from further developing its military nuclear capability are next to zero. So in this version of events, the risk of nuclear proliferation is a sad side-effect of what has to be done to stop us from cooking ourselves more slowly.  However, in another version of the story, proliferation is the main event. It involves a dark place, deep underground, where a small yellow bird sits in a cage.

Before the invention of the Davy lamp, canaries were used by miners because they are sensitive to gas. When they died, the miners knew they had to get out. Today’s canaries are the poor, such as subsistence farmers. When they start to perish in accelerating numbers, we know that there is a calamity upon its way. This makes the recent slew of farmer suicides in India a bit worrying. Actually a country with 80 odd percent of its people at or below starvation incomes – the 27% poverty figure you see for India is based on snide statistics –  can only really be described as a Canary state. India uses 90% of its freshwater for irrigation, and looks set to get drier. Tweet, tweet.

Canaries are useless if you don’t pay attention when they start expiring. Indeed, if recent trade rounds are anything to go by, the rich world seems unconcerned about the fate of Indian farmers under climate change. But here’s the twist. The US has just given India what looks like a license to power up their nukes.  So India is now unlikely to go out with just a chirrup. It also has nuclear-enabled neighbours, China and Pakistan, who are not going to sit on their hands as India tools up. So we have probably got the best part of Asia cooking up a nuclear storm.

Forget Africa, with its huge land area and tiny population (ten times the area and 200 million less population than India alone.) The subsistence farmers in Africa are not hugely dependent on chemical inputs, and thus on Oil prices as in Asia, and they have a lot more space to move around in, with a huge North-South gradient to traverse in search of the weather they need. No, it is Asia with its incredible population densities supported by mechanised agriculture that will feel the pinch between Climate Change and Peak Oil. And that is where America has been is tending its nuclear flower bed.

So things are bound to change a bit: Rather than valuing the Canaries based on their “willingness to pay” for their lives (THUS passim), we have to start thinking about what happens to their nuclear-armed governments if they show a strong willingness to riot. Ironically, this means that George “W” is an accidental hero. Having upped the ante, the world now needs to work hard to ensure that India is not forced into a situation where food riots lead to catastrophic nuclear proliferation, enabled by the US. In the words of another great American, Forrest Gump, “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.”