During the food price spike and since, one of the things just about everyone (including me) has agreed on is the desirability of scaling up access to social protection systems, safety nets and so on. They’re a much better way of dealing with food security issues than, say, economy-wide subsidies, price controls or (horror) export bans: targeted at the people who need help most, more affordable for the government concerned, and without big inflationary impacts or distorting effects. At the moment, only about 20% of the world’s people have access to any kind of social protection.
But in the background lurks a question that troubles me, and it is this. What happens if scarcity issues develop to the point at which social protection systems prove insufficient for protecting poor people? Because when you stop to think about it, it’s actually not that hard to imagine conditions in which even universal social protection coverage might still leave many poor people unable to cover their basic needs.
Imagine, for example, a future recurrence of the conditions that led to the food price spike of 2008, but with some or all of the following additional elements, all of which are feasible or even predictable in the next two decades:
– global population of a billion higher than today;
– global average warming of 2.5° Celsius, with reduced crop yields in high as well as low latitudes;
– volatile swings in precipitation patterns, including an outright failure of the South Asian monsoon;
– global oil production down to 75 million barrels, with significant unmet demand and dramatic knock-on consequences for fertilizer costs, the economics of biofuels.
In this situation, poor people with access to basic social protection could nonetheless still find themselves priced out of the market for key foodstuffs. The issue would be less one of absolute poverty than of lower relative purchasing power in conditions of scarcity – in other words, a problem of inequality coupled with a context of limits.
Social protection provision might be better than nothing in such circumstances – but it would be no substitute for a collective will on the part of policymakers and publics to face up to the much deeper issues of fairness involved. Progressives and social democrats keep forgetting: discussions of equity start to look very different once you start putting limits in the equation…
