Food fight

I read this post a bit ago & when it had rattled around in my mind for a while, I decided that the difference between the optimist & the pessimist isn't really in what they think the facts are.

 

Nor is it really in whether they each think that magic has to happen to avoid disaster.

 

Brown says:

I don’t think this current price rise is temporary. There will, of course, be fluctuations in the grain prices, but they will be around a rising trend. Grain and soybean prices, and food prices more broadly, are moving up. There is not anything in sight to reverse this trend. If the world were to have a poor grain harvest this year, there could well be chaos in world grain markets by late summer.

 

Speaking of which, consider the floods in Australia:

Heavy rain across eastern Australia, the fourth-largest wheat exporter, in recent months had already cut much of the grain quality to feed grade, according to analyst estimates.

 

From elsewhere, I have read that the Australian wheat exports are about 11% of the global exports & that up to half of it could be lost.

 

The optimist, Smil, says:

Just look at #1, China: imports less than 5% of its food and CONSUMES more food per capita than Japan!!!

Nothing has changed since I wrote that closing chapter of my 2000 feeding the world book: if China can do it, anybody (but Somalia) can [*]. Nor is India “starving.” Any food shortages are 95%+ a matter of poor or no governance, not any “extreme” climate and “gunwale inching”… Queensland does not grow wheat in any quantity, just check the wheatland map of Australia, and as always you newsie guys have exaggerated the story, both south and north of the state are open for business; no end of Australia.

 

I would say that 11% of global exports for Queensland does amount to important quantity.   It may be that China consumes more food per capita than Japan, what that mainly suggests is that China is a place where a lot of people still do strenuous manual labor.

 

Brown wrote a book entitled "Who will feed China?" in which he pointed out that as the Chinese move up in the income scale, they are likely to increase their total consumption of agricultural products, even if their per capita calorie consumption goes down, because one of the first things people do as they get more money is to eat better.

 

Smil feels that people really shouldn't eat meat when they get richer, because, well, they just shouldn't.   It would make it harder to feed everyone, so they should not do it.   But will India somehow get a good government that provides food to everyone?   Will the Chinese not eat meat because Smil thinks they should not?

 

I think the main difference between the optimist and the pessimist is how sure each is that magic will happen.  :-)

 

BTW, The blog poster starts out by saying:

Experts who repeatedly, and less sexily, note that humanity, on the whole, has always overcome shortages and found ways to produce ever more food even as mouths multiply and rising incomes move families up the food chain from grains to meats and dairy.

 

Or, you know, not always.   There is a reason we remember Malthus.

 

 

 

The cause of the civil war

I started reading a book containing a set of essays on the American Civil War.   The first one is on why the war happened.   It claims that the reason was (as the popular idea has it) slavery, but makes a comment that I was looking for -- why the North decided to oppose slavery.

I can understand why and that the South was sufficiently attached to slavery to succeed in response to a threat.   What is less clear to me was why the North needed to oppose it and why it would fight to stop it.   I understand the idea that the people of the North were so moral that the idea that slavery would continue in this country was abhorrent -- it's a nice idea, but I doubt most people in the North would die for this ideal.   Certainly some would (e.g. John Brown), but the ordinary person -- I have a harder time imagining this.

However, the fight was not only about the morality of slavery, but also about the difference between "free labor" and slavery.   This is a big deal.   The idea was (probably correctly) that slavery and "free labor" were incompatible.   I think what they mean by free labor is what I would call working for wages (more learning to come).

This was the time of the factories, in which people were working 12+ hour days from early ages to produce goods for (miserable) wages.   I read once that these people were actually less expensive for the factory owners than slaves would have been.   They worked for very little money, but the owners had no capital tied up in hiring (versus buying) them, plus the owners did not need to provide for their room and board.    There was a large supply at the time, since Europe had a sizable excess population, many of which decided it was better to come up with the price for the trip across the ocean for the chance at a better life in the new world.

This "free" labor -- free in the sense of not being slaves -- would move into an area and take jobs if there were jobs to be had.   If the possible jobs were held by slaves, they would not move in.   If they had no jobs to go to, this immigrant population would be a liability, rather than assets, to the new country.    Thus, the management class of the North, who were making fortunes from this immigrant labor, had a motive to want to encourage this to continue and grow.

This was also the time when Britain decided to stop the African slave trade.   It was indeed morally right, but the same kind of analysis applies.  Britain had a large population of people it had no ability to employ.   Stopping the slave trade would have the effect of providing jobs --- in the colonies -- for this lower class.

I am totally on board with the idea that slavery is bad, but less so with the idea that the average person would feel as passionately about it as John Brown did.   One's economic opportunities, otoh, are much more existential.