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The single greatest challenge facing our modern economic food chain is the insanely unnatural low cost of food to the consumer, making the simple and necessary act of eating dependent on food that is almost free. The global edifice of cheap food rests on the volatility of a single input; the exponentially depleting supply of easy, cheap oil. We are gorging ourselves at the $1.99 all-you-can-eat oil buffet. Food is too cheap, a “correction” is coming, and there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it.

Eat, or Die Trying

For the most part of human history, the cost of eating was a brutal, hard day of death defying exertion. You found food or you died, and you probably died trying. As civilization advanced, the cost of food fell. Social organization added efficiencies to food gathering, freeing time to reinvest in technology, develop specialists, get drunk, or fight. Commerce grew, trade developed, and the production of food ceased to be simple individual effort, becoming pooled resources that traded food for other commodities in ever increasingly complex exchanges. This primitive separation of end user from producer in no way relieved the individual from contributing to the general pool of wealth – idle laggards still starved to death with nothing to trade in the markets for food. Whether you bartered in kind, or used some form of money, you still had to expend a hard life’s toil to eat. Again, many died trying.

This is what has essentially driven the pace of history; ever-creative ways to produce more food per unit of person labour. It worked well enough. People ate better, mortality rates improved, populations grew, and technology and specialized work gained from the surplus of labour that could be directed their way. In the western world, and in particular England, receding amounts of arable land were required to feed more and more people. By the end of the 13th century, land became fenced and enclosed in a crude form of assembly line privatization; surplus people were forced into small subsidiary “cottage” industries, or streamed by the thousands into the safety of larger communities and cities. The factory, and unemployment, was born. Starvation was no longer reserved for lazy n’er-do-wells and became the providence of the economically displaced. Human exertion and effort became unlinked from the land.

Of course, as private property displaced whole communities, the new landed parvenu aristocracies gained control of the lands complete suite of resources. These new “capitalists” drafted up the economically useless as modern workers, returned to the land now as wage slaves who toiled for meagre subsistence, exchanging the better part of their labour for wretched scraps at the edges of the growing marketplace. The landowner took the rest as personal wealth, which we call profit now. Technology advanced at greater rates and civilization picked up steam…literally.

In 1712, at the Conygree Coalworks in England, the local capitalist – Lord Dudley – was having a devil of a time improving his bottom line. Half-starved and wretched labourers slogged below the earth’s surface in claustrophobic blackness, hacking coal from stubborn seams under his private lands. The mines kept filling with water, drowning his workers and cutting into profits. At this time, a remarkable new device appeared saving the unhappy aristocrat from such frustrating declines in production. Thomas Newcomen had perfected his “atmospheric engine”, a steam propelled device that could pump the water out of the mines with only a handful of dimwitted attendants. Free from the prospect of drowning, workers could now beaver away at an increased rate (we call that productivity now), padding the pockets of the Dudley’s at a pace never before encountered. It was a miracle, and the beginning of the glorious Industrial Revolution. Another separation became enshrined between humans and the earth.

For the first time, human beings were considered as productive chattel and productivity the measure of increasing profits. Commerce exploded and people left the land in droves, crowding into cities of productive convenience where labour became plentiful and the distribution of goods, cheap. Food became one of those goods. The aristocracy of private ownership rejoiced at the gap between sustenance wages and profitable consumer goods. Machines provided economies of scale that allowed a growing middle class to expend only a part of their lives trying to eat, and the aristocrats – none at all.

Law followed. Growing and complex states began to learn how to utilize the expanding power of the marketplace. Trade laws, taxation, and growing defences of private capital grew. Economies of scale visited both the growing hordes of urbanized landless, as well as the increasing foothills of private capital. Conglomerates of vested interests pooled resources, dragging legal scripture behind them. The earliest known “corporation” was founded in the 14th century in Sweden, however the concept of a legally protected business venture with an infinite life of its own quickly spread. By 1602, with the Dutch East India Company established in Amsterdam, the “conglomeration of vested interest” became the principle means by which sophisticated nation states launched the age of exploration and colonization.

Not since the advent of the steel plough – when tilling fields moved from dragging a sturdy stick across hard land – had the productivity of food taken such a monumental leap. Where once an individual could feed only himself and his dependents, now organized teams of agricultural workers employing wondrous new machines could feed dozens, and then hundreds of humans with ever decreasing human effort. For the emergent middle classes, less and less time was required working to feed one’s self. With the falling cost of food, more and more people could spend their time and money on other goods or pursuits. Machine made clothes, machine made furnishings, machine made gewgaws of all manner and description (we call that consumerism today). In a very real sense, western humanity was liberating itself from the tyranny of essential sustenance, and investing the freedom in greater liberty – and pointless, mass produced crap. Snow globes sold like hot cakes. Exactly like hot cakes.

The global food chain became organized thus; grow it, ship it to a central location, distribute it back to regional and then local markets and retailers, sell it to hungry consumers. At each step along the way, “value” was added to calories, where value meant profit. Where little value was realized there was malnutrition and starvation, where lots of value was available, there became increasing participation by corporations. By their nature, corporations squeegeed out the inefficiencies and brought increasing amounts of capital to bear. No profit, no food. Or snow globes. As the Industrial Revolution gripped the earth, colonization and mercantilism gave way to capitalism. Market places expanded and stratified, layers of value added enterprise employed less and less people to produce more and more food. Horses gave way to tractors; local farm markets gave way to dedicated food retail chains. Rail lines and steamships moved food across nations, continents, and the globe. Economies of scale at every step lowered the cost of eating along with everything else.

As the 20th century clicked forward, for the burgeoning masses of wealthy western nations, cheap food became a right, and then just simply assumed. Poverty and squalor remained the providence of the economically marginal, as it always had and in that sense, little had changed. However, for increasing members of affluent western societies, prodigious amounts of capital moved away from food production and into all the things that make powerful capitalist states breathless nations of discretionary consumers. Rich meant less and less time feeding one’s self, and more and more time accumulating stuff.

In 1914, western humanity inexplicably took time out to spend three decades denuding the earth of healthy, well-fed men, women, and children. A blind and irrational invisible hand swatted from the earth about 200 million or so. All these human folk had to be properly fed and supplied prior to their excruciating death, and industry celebrated by rising to the challenge. Machines leapt into the breach in a symbiotic reciprocating engine of feeding and killing on a truly industrial scale. “Total war” entered modern lexicon. Airplanes moved food and bombs in alternating waves. With the entire continent of Europe momentarily out of the food making business, America and good old Yankee know how took up the slack. America was an island fortress, island as in thousands of miles away by sea. Transport logistics was born; convoys of hundreds of specially designed ships moved back and forth across the oceans. The costs were staggering, food went short, and rationing was imposed on the rich and middle classes. For the last time in history, the cost of food rose to life and death again. And then peace broke out.

The next great step forward in food history came at the close of global hostilities in mid century. Having invested the no-cost-too-high capital of military supply and distribution, the ships, trains, trucks, and airplanes manufactured in the thousands were returned to civil use. Private, corporate industry vacuumed up legions of military logistics specialists. Transport and distribution costs collapsed around the world. The “container” ship was born. At the same time, complex munitions processes moved into synthetic, inorganic fertilizer production that dramatically increased crop yields. Incredible plenty drove prices down at the same time transportation costs fell. Abundance rejoiced. Farmers went broke. In their place arose massive agricultural conglomerates that vacuumed up the great diversity of the world’s local farms, replacing them with hectares upon hectares of dedicated crops, mechanically worked, industrially fertilized, and hooked by rail, sea, and air to far-flung markets offering the maximum return on investment.

Welcome to the Machines

Today, entire heartlands of biodiversity, countless expanses of small rural farms and communities, have been purchased by syndicates of corporate finance wizards from the urban bowels of Wall Street. Banks, hedge funds, and trusts receive billions of dollars worldwide from the accounts of thousands of scattered investors – most unwittingly – through pension funds and other retirement and savings vehicles. None of whom would recognize a carrot in the ground if it kicked them in the groin. Their only task is to maximize their clients return on investment. And food is a reliable investment it turns out. Once assembled and sold forward to international agri-businesses, hundreds of hectares are mechanically and scientifically ploughed under and replanted with “monocultures” of single crops. Electronically monitored machines prepare and renew the soil with mountains of synthetic fertilizer, more machines plant the crop, and more machines harvest it.

The crop is delivered to massive central terminals by rail and truck, where it is rerouted towards regional complexes and ports. Sometimes travelling the breadth of a continent, and sometimes travelling the expanse of the sea on huge ships designed for the purpose, the happy crop is delivered to yet more terminals where it is assembled, packaged, and labelled with paper, tin, and other things – all of which arrive in exactly the same way – for sale to food distributors. Large retail grocery outlets contract to have the increasingly angry crop loaded on yet more trucks, rail, or ships, after which it is finally delivered to urban hubs of people in the form of canned creamed corn, lined up on brightly lit shelves and slathered in marketing. Two cans for under a buck and a hat for your kid.

Millions of western homemakers in mini vans will spend twice that on fuel to drive to the store; pouring out of their urban sprawl like microbes, leaving behind their suburban castles, hot tubs, motorbikes, and heated driveways, bitching about the cost of food the entire way. They will spend twice what they can eat and throw out the rest. They will have money left for IPods and plasma TV’s. Absolutely none of them will toil from sun up to sun set for the single purpose of eating. None. A can of creamed corn from the other side of the planet for nothing more than a few moments worth of inconvenience.

The cost of food is almost zilch.

Humanity may have landed a man on the moon, but nothing compares with two cans of creamed corn for under a buck. It’s a freaking miracle. A miracle when one considers all the open palms that creamed corn had to pass through from seed to plate, throwing off profit into every sweaty one. Food is now corporate, and driven by the bottom lines of dozens of invisible enablers, corporate charters all regulated by law and designed for no other reason than the maximization of each shareholders value. Built atop every golden kernel of corn is a golden edifice of economic interconnectivity.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, US households may have spent as much as a third of their disposable income on food at the dawn of the corporate age in the early 20th century. By 1933, that number had shrunk to 25%. Well into the post war era, 20%. When the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, 15%. Iraq war – 10%. Economic meltdown…9.7%.

Food, clearly, is too big to fail.

Consider then, that all the efficiencies that are the miracle of cheap food rest entirely on technology and mechanization. Consider further, that each and every technological piece depends on – in its turn – nothing more substantive than gooey black oil. No oil, no food. The global edifice of cheap food rests on the volatility of a single input; the exponentially depleting supply of easy, cheap oil.

But of course, oil is infinite – or so we think. We don’t actually believe that, but we think it just the same. To a certain point, we are correct. When we worry about oil, we worry about it running out, which is in all probability not going to happen. However, while we fret away our time worrying about the earth’s supply of fossil fuels we completely miss the point. We will never run out of oil if only because the cost of slogging it out of the planet will become so exorbitant, we may never get a chance to pump that last, precious barrel. As the price of oil rises, and those costs are passed along the conga line of civilization, the real question becomes the effect those rising costs will have on everything. Everything, including creamed corn and snow globes.

The oil community has a name for this – peak oil. Peak oil is the place on the graphs where the easy, cheap to access oil runs out, and there is nothing but expensive stuff ahead. While all agree that the oil supply bell curve is real (the “Hubbard curve”), and that we are very near to conquering the air thin summit of said Hubbard curve, there is dispute about when the actual downward part of the trip will begin. Pessimists argue that we are there now, while sunny optimists say we won’t reach it for years…say about 2015. 2015 as in five years from now, when we will in all probability be bitching and screaming about spending eight or nine percent of our disposable income on food.

Let Them Eat Really Expensive Cake

The cost of food will rise with the cost of oil and the problem with that problem is that our technology won’t save us. Food in the ground can be made cheaper by simply making more of it. However, the issue is that all that food is way over there, and all of us rich westerners live way over here, tightly packed into teeming centers of urban sprawl. Between our food and us is a complex system of oil dependent logistics. Planes, trains and automobiles; combine harvesters, container ships, and mini vans.

Quick fact: it can take as much as 50 barrels of oil to produce a single calorie of food energy. Healthy people need about 2100 calories a day. If that seems ridiculous, consider that the average American calorie travels over 1500 miles, or that nearly 70% of seafood products are imported. Nearly 10% of beef stocks are also imported, and all those rump roasts require 35 parts of energy to produce a single unit of beef food energy. Grain is grown in one place, cows in another, fertilizer in another, and mountains of manure are collected and shipped to yet another. Think about all the things that have to happen, and all the places and people your Big Mac passes through in order for you to eat for under five bucks. Think about how many of these people, places, and things are powered by oil in some way. All of them – including you, the consumer. You don’t need to be an economist to get it; as the price of oil rises, the cost of food will keep in step. One only need think about it.

Oil prices must rise, and food prices must rise with them. What does that mean? It means that we will have less disposable income because we have to eat. We just have to, and so we will have to pay the price no matter what. We will have less money for other things. Less for cars. Less for plasma TV’s. Less for Target, American Eagle, and Home Depot, all of whom will have their own oil/price issues. Our growing food expense, which is not negotiable, will cannibalize our spending on everything else. If you are thinking at all about it at this point, you will quickly realize that you will be working more for food, and less for gewgaws. America is a gewgaw nation, and so you are also starting to realize that even more jobs will disappear, more companies fail, more banks will go broke. Banks that aren’t in the food business at least.

All that technology, all those machines and synthetics and drive and energy and Yankee know how that are directly responsible for food production are not owned by the humans that depend on them. Every link in the modern food chain is owned and operated by legal bundles of contracts and agreement called corporations. Absolutely every one of which is required by law to increase profits and return on investment. Not one is going to take a “haircut” on food. Not one cares who eats, and who does not. Instead, guaranteed an end user who must purchase by a separate law of nature, all will simply pass along the costs, no matter what they become. Falling purchases of calories will simply be made up by increased margins from smaller and smaller pools of rich folks who have the wherewithal to pay. History will regress and retrace its steps, back to times when great swaths of humanity spent the better portion of their lives simply trying to eat. Or more correctly, paying to eat.

For several generations now we have taken food for granted, its collapsing cost ensuring that it became a small but necessary evil every grocery day. Spending even 10% of our hard work on the necessity of food was too much for us. Our scorecards are measured in the amount of useless crap we can consume, free of the burden of eating. The sudden reversal of that historic trend, and its effects on every other facet of our consumer societies, is indeed the greatest challenge facing us today. Food is too cheap, a “correction” is coming, and there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it.

Think about it.

Aetius Romulous, Historian, Economist, Accountant, Writer, and blood sucking CEO. Born at the wrong end of the Baby Boom Generation – too late to enjoy the ride, too early to have missed it, and stuck in the middle with the mess. Aetius writes and blogs from his frozen perch atop the earth in Canada, spending the useful capital of a life not finished making sandwiches and fomenting revolution. t’s a living.

http://screambucket.com/aetiusromulous@rogers.com

(NaturalNews) Victory gardens are popping up all over. Last seen during World War II, these gardens now represent our fight to regain control of our lives and our health. They are the first battlefields against the increasing corporate tyranny, a battle that may end with us throwing off the philosophy of every man for himself and a realization that we are all together in this thing called life.

World War II united people and allowed them to reach into the depths of themselves and pull up a resourcefulness they didn’t know they had. During this time of horror and hope people realized that they were living out a great saga in their lives, and in this saga they all had a part to play. The world was a violent and dramatic place, yet also an awakening happened, a vision of unity and understanding. The victory garden has come to symbolize this unity and vision.

What’s a victory garden?

It was emphasized to urban and suburban dwellers that the produce from their gardens would help provide the nutritious food needed by the soldiers to keep them fighting strong. It would also help keep the price of that food low, so the War Department would have more money to spend on other military needs. The victory garden would also help solve the shortages of labor and transportation that made it difficult to harvest and transport produce to market. One poster from the mid 1940′s reading, “Our food is fighting” portrayed the high sense of patriotism so characteristic of the time.

The Department of Agriculture along with agribusiness corporations distributed booklets providing information about basic gardening techniques. In 1943, 20 million gardens were producing 8 million tons of food. Victory gardens were planted in backyards, apartment building roofs, vacant lots, backyards, and pretty much every available patch of dirt and container throughout the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Neighbors pooled their resources, planted different kinds of foods and formed cooperatives, doing whatever had to be done.

Magazines printed stories about victory gardens, and women’s magazines provided instructions on how to grow and preserve garden produce. Sales of pressure cookers to use in canning skyrocketed as families were encouraged to can their own vegetables. Home canners used non-toxic glass mason jars. The government as well as businesses urged families to make gardening a group effort. At the peak of the effort, 9-10 million tons of produce was produced, an amount equal to all commercial production. Even children and teenagers willingly took part in the work of the garden.

The victory garden was clearly a victory on many levels.

Why victory gardens are back in style

Today we are again involved in fighting a battle, but this time the battle involves how to stay healthy and live genuine lives in a world where everything is increasing stacked against us.

Today’s commercially grown produce comes from soils depleted of the minerals and nutrients so necessary to keep us healthy in our polluted and stressful environment. Plants grown in depleted soils are less healthy and able to resist attack by pests, so the use of pesticides is more prevalent than ever. Much of our big agribusiness produce is now being grown in foreign countries not subject to highly controlled use of pesticide. Today’s big food corporations choose the cheapest, most effective pesticides, not the ones that are least toxic to humans and other life forms. Along with pesticide residues, our produce contains residual amounts of soil depleting synthetic chemical fertilizers which are toxic to our livers.

Parabolic gas prices are estimated to increase wholesale food prices by 30 percent in the coming months. We wonder how we will be able to continue buying quality foods to keep us healthy. Fruits and vegetables are on the road for 1500 miles on average, before they reach the supermarkets. Produce is picked without having a chance to ripen so it can withstand the long trip to market. During this process, even more of the nutrients are lost. When it finally reaches the supermarket, produce can sit in cold storage for a week before being put out for sale.

We want to have access to health promoting fruits and vegetables during the winter months without them having to be flown in from other parts of the world. Asparagus from Argentina in January is a luxury few can afford. Yet we are told that our commercially canned produce contains carcinogenic and toxic bisphenol-A.

We’re short on money to put gas into the SUV to drive our children around to their programmed activities. At the same time, we are realizing that our children are not really learning what is important in life. We yearn for projects and activities that will bring our families together.

We are stressed out and overworked trying to get the money to buy all the stuff that corporations have decided we must have. Our closets and homes are filled, but our bank accounts are empty. We are so busy that we seldom see our family as a whole or do activities in which the whole family participates. It’s time to say ‘no’ to the big corporate food sellers and big oil. It’s time to reach inside ourselves again and rediscover that kernel of resourcefulness. It is still there.

Victory gardens and the new age

A victory garden is a manifestation of new thinking, new vision and an explosion of new understanding. We not only live in this world but we help create it. We can choose to participate in unity and renewal, and to become part of the higher forms of consciousness. We are at the point now where evolution can become conscious of itself.

We can choose to participate in a new age of creative intelligence and love. This new age is like a rising tide which may wash away those who seek to go on working in accordance with that old law of every man for himself. It is a movement just beginning like the emergence of a tiny shoot in spring. You can tear out that shoot or stomp on it, but there is no way that you can hold back the coming of spring.

We have had enough of the old ways of thinking, and we are here to take back control of our lives, our health, our resources, and our futures. We are resisting the control of destructive governmental and corporate forces. We are developing an energy and enthusiasm that characterizes new values, new ways of living, new survival techniques, and new experiences.

A garden that symbolizes our part in this evolution is a challenge and a source of immense hope. If a family or group is able to achieve this, others will follow and the movement will grow. In a time of famine for many and threatened famine for many others, the victory garden is an indication of a new way the earth can be made more fruitful. We must have a vision.

We realize with horror what the human race in its greed and arrogance is doing to the earth, and the life forms on it. Our ignorance of the realities of nature has led us to follow all sorts of practices which hurt and alienate. We are at the juncture where we may either come to be parasites upon the planet, or we may come to a new enlightenment. The choice is ours.

A victory garden can be our symbol of the victory of the decision to be part of the new enlightenment. It can provide us with a way to re-establish a positive relationship with nature as we are called on to love life-giving plants, to cherish and nurture them, to talk to them, and thank them for all their work for us. When we have reached out to do this, we are breaking down barriers within our minds, and our resistance to this new age will dissolve. We are readying ourselves to go forth openly toward nature with a loving attitude.

Remember, this is not somebody’s thought out plan. It is a phenomenon and an expression of the living energies for renewal that are sweeping through our society. This is a creative energy to renew in many facets, the garden being just one of them. The garden is an expression of a community filled with energy, enthusiasm and love for all life.

A garden teaches us the secrets of creation in various ways. Once we make the decision to pull back from the getting and spending lifestyle, we learn the power within us to create our world by the choices we make. We realize that we no longer have to be controlled by the power of events, but that by our power of thought, we control events. We can bring about what is in our thoughts.

When this is our direction we will have the confidence to succeed in the garden. Gardening is about the relationship we have with the plants. When we love and cherish them, they will return the favor. Plants are like our children. A child who is loved thrives no matter what the conditions are, but a child who has no love dies. Gardening is never about technique or the color of your thumb. It is about what is in your heart and spirit.

About the author

Barbara is a school psychologist, a published author in the area of personal finance, a breast cancer survivor using “alternative” treatments, a born existentialist, and a student of nature and all things natural.

Reprinted from NaturalNews.

Forecast growth in 2008 cereal production could ease tight global supply.

The cereal import bill of the world’s poorest countries is forecast to rise by 56 percent in 2007/2008. This comes after a significant increase of 37 percent in 2006/2007, FAO said today.

For low-income food-deficit countries in Africa, the cereal bill is projected to increase by 74 percent, according to the UN agency’s latest Crop Prospects and Food Situation report. The increase is due to the sharp rise in international cereal prices, freight rates and oil prices.

International cereal prices have continued to rise sharply over the past two months, reflecting steady demand and depleted world reserves, the report said. Prices of rice increased the most following the imposition of new export restrictions by major exporting countries. By the end of March prices of wheat and rice were about double their levels of a year earlier, while those of maize were more than one-third higher, according to the report.

FAO has launched an Initiative on Soaring Food Prices (ISFP), offering technical and policy assistance to poor countries affected by high food prices in order help farmers boost production in the coming agricultural seasons. Farmers can achieve higher yields and increase production areas if they have access to inputs such as improved seeds, organic and inorganic fertilizer and water. Field activities are starting in Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal. FAO will also help governments prepare actions and strategies to increase agricultural production. In collaboration with the World Food Programme, IFAD and other partners, FAO will enlarge its food market information system to pull together and analyze various data sources at local, national and international levels and to disseminate this information. FAO has allocated US$17 million for these activities.

Domestic food prices spur social unrest

Prices of bread, rice, maize products, milk, oil, soybeans and others basic foods have increased sharply in recent months in a number of developing countries, despite policy measures — including export restrictions, subsidies, tariff reductions and price controls — taken by governments of both cereal importing and exporting countries to limit the impact of international prices on domestic food markets.

Food riots have been reported in Egypt, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar and Haiti in the past month. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to avoid seizing of food from the fields and from warehouses.

“Food price inflation hits the poor hardest, as the share of food in their total expenditures is much higher than that of wealthier populations,” said Henri Josserand of FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning system. “Food represents about 10-20 percent of consumer spending in industrialized nations, but as much as 60-80 percent in developing countries, many of which are net-food-importers.”

2008 forecast: production up

According to FAO’s first forecast world cereal production in 2008 is to increase by 2.6 percent to a record 2 164 million tonnes. The bulk of the increase is expected in wheat, following significant expansion in plantings in major producing countries.

“Should the expected growth in 2008 production materialize, the current tight global cereal supply situation could ease in the new 2008/09 season,” the report said.

But much will depend on the weather, FAO cautioned, recalling that at this time last year prospects for cereal production in 2007 were far better than the eventual outcome. Unfavourable climatic conditions devastated crops in Australia and reduced harvests in many other countries, particularly in Europe.

“Favourable climatic conditions will be even more critical in the new season because world cereal reserves are depleted,” the report said.

According to FAO’s forecast, world cereal stocks are expected to fall to a 25-year-low of 405 million tonnes in 2007/08, down 21 million tonnes, or 5 percent, from their already reduced level of the previous year.

“Any major shortfalls resulting from unfavourable weather, particularly in exporting countries, would prolong the current tight market situation; contribute to more price rallies and exacerbate the economic hardship already facing many countries,” the report said.

FAO urges all donors and International Financing Institutions to increase their assistance or consider reprogramming part of their ongoing aid in countries negatively affected by high food prices. A tentative estimation of the additional funding required by the governments to implement country projects and programmes for dealing with soaring food prices ranges between US$ 1,2 and 1,7 billion. The release of these funds can provide important support for poor farmers, including access to inputs and assets, to enhance the food supply response in the next agricultural seasons.

Worldwide, 37 countries are currently facing food crises, according to the report. Click here for the complete list of countries in need of external assistance.

Reprinted from FAO.

Now that the dismissal of climate change is no longer fashionable, the professional deniers are trying another means of stopping us from taking action. It would be cheaper, they say, to wait for the impacts of climate change and then adapt to them. They have the figures to prove it. It is tempting to prove them wrong. Given the new projections of major drought in continental interiors, of a possible global food deficit, of sea level rises with the potential to affect billions of people, it should be easy to demonstrate that the price of waiting for the catastrophe is higher than the price of reducing emissions. But it’s a temptation we should resist. Such calculations use costs which simply cannot be compared. The most famous exponent of the comparison is the Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg. In his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, he argues that the cost of doing nothing about climate change – of letting nature take its course – is $4,820 billion. The cost of stabilizing global temperatures at 2.5° above the 1990 level would be $8,553 billion; and the cost of stabilising them at 1.5° above the 1990 level would be $37,632 billion. He warns that ‘with the best intentions of doing something about global warming we could end up burdening the global community with a cost much higher or even twice that of global warming alone’. It would be better to use our money to make investments with higher returns, leaving ‘future generations of poor people with far greater resources’.

Many environmentalists have taken him to task, claiming that his costs for taking action are too high and his costs for the impacts of climate change are too low. But they have been drawn into a fake debate. For while the costs of taking action can reasonably be measured in dollars, most of the costs of climate change cannot.

We are told, for example, that the financial costs of Hurricane Katrina, which may have been exacerbated by climate change, amount to some $75 billion, and we can use that number to help derive a price for carbon pollution. But does it capture the suffering of the people whose homes were destroyed? Does it reflect the partial destruction, in New Orleans, of one of the quirkiest and most creative communities on earth? Does it, most importantly, measure the value of the lives of those who drowned?

In other words, is it possible to place an economic price on human life? Or on an ecosystem, or on the climate? Could such costs, when rolled out around the world, really be deemed to amount to $4,820 billion, give or take the odd dollar? Such figures are not just wrong. They are meaningless.

When economists have tried to put a price on such things, they have simply exposed the limitations of their science. In 1996, for example, a study for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that a life lost in the poor nations could be priced at $150,000, while a life lost in the rich nations could be assessed at $1.5 million. The researchers produced these figures by estimating how much people would be prepared to pay for the adaptive measures that would save their lives. Unsurprisingly, they discovered that the lives of rich people were worth more than the lives of poor people.

These days, economists are less prepared to expose themselves to ridicule. So anything that cannot be quantified is simply excluded from the balance sheet. What this means is that the loss of all the really important things – a functioning ecosystem, human communities, human life – is overlooked. Because they aren’t counted, they don’t count.

It would be wrong to blame only Bjørn Lomborg and the economists whose work he promotes for taking this line. Almost everyone feels obliged to attach a price tag to global catastrophe. The British Government, for example, has decided that the ‘social cost’ of carbon emissions is somewhere between $60 and $250 per tonne, with a middle value of $120. We might reasonably ask what the heck this means. Does the British Government really believe it can put a price on the people of Africa? On Bangladesh?

The answer appears to be yes. In its White Paper on aviation, it washes its hands of responsibility for the 235-per-cent growth in flying expected in Britain between now and 2030. The massive boost to greenhouse gases this will cause should be remedied, it says, by encouraging the airline industry to ‘pay the external costs its activities impose on society at large’. But how? Should a steward be sacrificed every time someone in Ethiopia dies of hunger? As Bangladesh goes under water, will ministers demand the drowning of a commensurate number of airline executives?

The only suggestion it makes is that aviation fuel might be taxed. The implication is that a payment in pounds or euros would somehow cancel out the ‘external costs’ of rising emissions, which means death and ecological collapse.

Taking action, in other words, must be a moral decision, not an economic one. Either we decide that it is right to spend a lot of money seeking to prevent catastrophic climate change or we decide that it isn’t, but we must make that decision on the grounds of how much we value people and places as people and places, rather than as figures in a ledger.

This is not the only way in which different kinds of costs have been conflated. The denial industry also manages to mix up money actually spent with money that might have been made if regulations suppressing climate change weren’t in place. But spending money that really exists and not having money that might have existed are costs which are felt quite differently.

At the moment, all of us ‘suffer’ economically as a result of the ban on psychotropic drugs. If this trade had been legal, it would have increased the size of the economy, which means that on average we would be slightly richer today than we are. But, with the exception of a few people who have been hoping to sell these items legally, we do not walk around under a cloud, lamenting the fact that money which might have entered our pockets has been denied to us. The impact of this constraint is real, but it has not been felt by us. No-one’s bank account is emptied by what might have been. The political impact of the two kinds of ‘cost’ is very different.

Even when taking action means spending real taxpayers’ money, it is not always true that this always represents a genuine social cost. It depends on how the money would otherwise have been spent.

One of the arguments made by those who claim that we should take no action is that if the same amount of money were spent on relieving hunger, or supplying clean water, or preventing AIDS or tuberculosis or malaria, it would save more lives. This approach tends to overlook the fact that climate change is likely to cause more hunger, more water stress and more communicable disease, thereby raising the cost of addressing them. But this is not the strongest response to their argument. Behind their case is an unfathomable assumption: that money spent on preventing climate change is money not spent on foreign aid. In other words, it supposes that the climate change budget is in direct competition with the rich countries’ foreign aid budgets, rather than with any other kind of spending.

If the rich countries were already doing everything in their power to help the poor, this argument would carry some weight. But it is hard to think of a national exchequer which has ever been endangered by its foreign aid spending. The governments of Europe have agreed that by 2015 – a mere 35 years after the date they first set for themselves – they will give 0.7 per cent of their national income in foreign aid. The US currently spends 0.17 per cent of gross domestic product – just over $19 billion – on aid. Britain spends 0.36 per cent, or about $7.5 billion.

In other respects these governments are more generous. Britain’s budget for the widening the M1 motorway is $6.3 billion. This is nearly seven times as much as it is currently spending every year on tackling climate change. In his book Perverse Subsidies, published in 2001, Professor Norman Myers adds the direct payments US corporations receive from their government to the wider costs they oblige society to carry, and arrives at an annual figure of $2.6 trillion. This is roughly five times as much as the profits they were making at the time his book was written. As well as the annual $362 billion the 30 richest governments were paying their farmers when Perverse Subsidies was published, they were spending some $71 billion on fossil fuels and nuclear power and a staggering $1.1 trillion on road transport. Worldwide, governments pay companies $25 billion a year to destroy the earth’s fisheries, and $14 billion to wreck our forests.

In the European Union, according to the European Environment Agency, direct and indirect subsidies for the coal industry amounted to $17 billion in 2001, and subsidies to the oil and gas industry to $11 billion. In the US, Joseph Stiglitz, the former chief economist at the World Bank, and Linda Bilmes, an economist at Harvard, calculate that, on ‘very conservative’ estimates, the war in Iraq has so far cost their country between $1 and $2 trillion.

This is not a choice between state spending on climate change or state spending on foreign aid and essential public services. It is a choice between state spending on climate change or state spending on coal, oil, roads, farm subsidies, environmental destruction and unprovoked wars. We could reasonably ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it.

So please don’t take the ‘costs’ of climate change – either its impacts or action prevent it – at face value. Even when teased apart, they mean less than economists claim. We cannot use a spreadsheet to decide whether or not to act. We can only use our conscience.

George Monbiot‘s new book Heat: how to stop the planet burning is published by Penguin. He has also launched a new website – www.turnuptheheat.org – exposing the fake green claims of corporations and politicians.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.

Reprinted from New Internationalist (NI)