by Alex Evans | Nov 9, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Here’s Lester Brown’s take:
One of the questions I am often asked is, “How many people can the earth support?” I answer with another question: “At what level of food consumption?” Using round numbers, at the U.S. level of 800 kilograms of grain per person annually for food and feed, the 2-billion-ton annual world harvest of grain would support 2.5 billion people. At the Italian level of consumption of close to 400 kilograms, the current harvest would support 5 billion people. At the 200 kilograms of grain consumed by the average Indian, it would support 10 billion.
Of the roughly 800 kilograms of grain consumed per person each year in the United States, about 100 kilograms is eaten directly as bread, pasta, and breakfast cereals, while the bulk of the grain is consumed indirectly in the form of livestock and poultry products. By contrast, in India, where people consume just under 200 kilograms of grain per year, or roughly a pound per day, nearly all grain is eaten directly to satisfy basic food energy needs. Little is available for conversion into livestock products.
Among the United States, Italy, and India, life expectancy is highest in Italy even though U.S. medical expenditures per person are much higher. People who live very low or very high on the food chain do not live as long as those at an intermediate level. People consuming a Mediterranean-type diet that includes meat, cheese, and seafood, but all in moderation, are healthier and live longer. People living high on the food chain can improve their health by moving down the food chain. For those who live in low-income countries like India, where a starchy staple such as rice can supply 60 percent or more of total caloric intake, eating more protein-rich foods can improve health and raise life expectancy.
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of Brown’s figures – but he’s totally right that the whole question of diet is fundamental to whether we manage to feed the world’s rising population. I’m always struck by how the global food policy conversation often accepts demand projections – such as the World Bank’s estimate that we’ll need to produce 50% more food by 2030 – more or less uncritically.
In fact, as Brown’s final paragraph above implies, meeting these business-as-usual projections also implies that we cheerfully accept continuation of current increases in overweight, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and so on – not just in OECD economies, but increasingly in the developing world too.
Unfortunately, as I noted back in September, no OECD governments are yet making any real headway in nudging their citizens towards diets that are healthier, more environmentally sustainable and more compatible with development and social justice. They need to find a way.
by Alex Evans | Nov 9, 2010 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKkJB8Etq54[/youtube]
by Alex Evans | Nov 8, 2010 | Influence and networks, UK
Back in July, Chatham House and YouGov, the polling organisation, published some data on UK attitudes on foreign policy (pdf). There’s lots of interesting stuff in there, including on attitudes to development, but for me the stand-out story is the extent to which opinion formers and the general public have strikingly different views of which global risks matter most for the UK.
As part of the survey, a group of opinion formers and a random sample of the general public were both read a list of “current or possible future threats to the British way of life”, and asked to select three or four as the greatest threats.
For the opinion formers, the top two risks were “failure of major banks / failure of the international financial system” and “interruptions to our energy supplies, such as oil and gas”. In each case, the percentage of the general public including these risks in their three or four responses was at least 15% lower than for policy elites. For climate change (fourth in opinion formers’ list of worries), the gulf between elites and public is 19%.
The public, on the other hand, is much more worried about hard security threats. While opinion formers rate “international terrorism” third on their list of worries, the public put it top, with 6% more of them citing it. The gap is even more pronounced on “more countries, such as Iran and North Korea, developing nuclear weapons” – 52% of the public versus 39% of opinion formers – and “organized crime, including hard drugs, operating across borders” (42% of rhe public, 23% of opinion formers).
None of this is all that surprising – but it’s kind of a big deal, given that publics actually wield considerable influence in determining how much political space policymakers have to play with when dealing with global risks, and the fact that so many key multilateral processes are currently stalled.
by Alex Evans | Nov 6, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America
Here’s the NYT’s Dealbook column on 11 October:
If you care at all about the future of the world’s food supply, you care — whether you know it or not — about Saskatchewan. A consortium of state-backed Chinese companies and financiers may make a takeover offer for Potash Corp. that rivals a $38.6 billion hostile bid from BHP Billiton, and that prospect has lawmakers in Washington, regulators in Canada and bankers on Wall Street all talking.
The politically charged subtext is this: Do we really want the Chinese to control the company that has the largest capacity to produce fertilizer? If that reminds you of 2005, when the China National Offshore Oil Company, or Cnooc, sought to buy Unocal, until an outcry from Congress stopped it, you would be right.
And the FT two days ago:
Canada has rejected BHP Billiton’s $39bn bid for PotashCorp, dealing a potentially fatal blow to the Australian miner’s 10-week pursuit of the Saskatchewan-based fertiliser producer.
Tony Clement, Canada’s industry minister, said: “At this time, I am not satisfied that the proposed transaction is likely to be of net benefit to Canada [as required by Ottawa’s foreign investment law].”
Mr Clement did not elaborate on the reasons for his decision, but said they would be given at the end of the 30 days. He added: “Canada has a long-standing reputation for welcoming foreign investment. The government of Canada remains committed to maintaining an open climate for investment.”
by Alex Evans | Nov 6, 2010 | Economics and development, Global system, North America
Wondering what the implications are of QE2 (as in Quantiative Easing mark II, not Her Majesty) in the US – whereby the Fed will buy up long-dated government bonds of maybe up to a trillion dollars or so?
Well, Marty Feldstein at Harvard University reckons that it’s “a dangerous gamble with only a small potential upside benefit and substantial risks of creating asset bubbles that could destabilise the global economy”. He notes that expectation of the policy has already lowered long-term interest rates, depressed the dollar and upped equity and commodity prices – and that these consequences create real risks:
Like all bubbles, these exaggerated increases can rapidly reverse when interest rates return to normal levels. The greatest danger will then be to leveraged investors, including individuals who bought these assets with borrowed money and banks that hold long-term securities. These risks should be clear after the recent crisis driven by the bursting of asset price bubbles. Although the specific asset prices that are now rising are different from last time, the possibility of damaging declines when bubbles burst is worryingly similar.
But John Michael Greer has a different concern about the US “printing money to pay its bills”:
There may be an example somewhere in the long history of finance when a country has done this without facing catastrophic economic consequences in the fairly near term, but I don’t happen to know of one. Once a country starts covering its debts by way of the printing press, the collapse of its currency and its economy is pretty much a foregone conclusion. The exact way in which the consequences come due varies from case to case; the hyperinflation made famous by Weimar Germany and, more recently, Zimbabwe is only one of the options, and there are good reasons to think that this isn’t the most likely outcome just at the moment.
My own guess, for what it’s worth, is that we’re headed into a state of affairs that might as well be called hyperstagflation: the economy and money supply both contract, but the demand for dollars drops faster than the supply as holders of dollar-denominated assets scramble to cash in their dollars for anything that might preserve a fraction of their paper value. As in the stagflation of the Seventies, but much more drastically, prices go up while employment goes down until the economy shudders to a halt.
Q.v. the excellent When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyper-Inflation
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