How Goldman Sachs Created The Food Crisis

More reasons to hate bankers :-)

Seriously, the inventions of the financial sector have consequences in the real world. The problem is that no-one in the financial sector is responsible for assessing or avoiding negative consequences before launching new products. No one in government has effective oversight or enough power to prevent launches. And once the products are launched and people are making money from them, everyone is very reluctant to give them up. I'm sure there will be plenty of flakes ready to swear that these products are absolutely essential to motivate the production of food, despite the fact that agriculture is around 9000 years old these products have existed for barely a decade.

Here's my suggestion : whenever the financial sector wants to launch a new type of product, it needs to go through a public approval process before it's allowed. (Just like a new medicine.) The approval process should include both academics hired by the government, but also a completely public process where the descriptions, financial models, an dpredictions are published online and any interested party (blogger, economist, freelance mathematical modeller) can comment and raise concerns.

Big Society in Action

So, the UK government no longer feels it necessary to ensure people have enough food, and hands off responsibility to a charity.

This makes me VERY angry indeed. Someone posted that this is "collapse". But it's nothing of the sort. There is not sense whatsoever that the government can't ensure that there's enough food, distributed fairly enough, that no-one goes hungry. It can simply commit money to bulk buy enough food for the UK in the next year if it wanted to.

That it doesn't is a political decision.

Geoffrey York :

It’s the hidden factor in the Somalia famine: not just drought and civil war, but the quiet hand of the marketplace in triggering a painful rise in food prices for millions of vulnerable people.

The prices of local food staples in Somalia have soared by up to 240 per cent in the past nine months, exceeding their record highs of 2008 and contributing to a worsening of the humanitarian disaster in the country, the World Bank says in a new report.

Can't quite decide if this is a great idea or a horrible one.

There's something awefully spiritually ersatz about sub-contracting your organic gardening to someone else, to do in mass. OTOH, in reality, if it funnels more money and resources into organic horticulture, and creates more empoloyment for people who are actually good at it, why not?

Jamais Cascio :

If Bill Gates manages to head off global famine for what amounts to pocket change (for him), all is forgiven.

I'm getting interested in Solar Cooking.

Apparently there was a project in Brasilia last year. (pdf)

1 in 10 US citizens on government food-stamps.

hat-tip Kaunda: Food backed local currency.

Interesting biofuels research project.

Update : It's worth highlighting this :

Q. What is your assessment of the current national conversation on biofuels? Is public understanding of the topic more nuanced than, say, a few years ago?

A. Unfortunately the press is not very good at distinguishing between the many different kinds of biofuels. Currently "biofuels," in public discourse, means corn ethanol, sugar-cane ethanol, and rape seed or soybean diesel. We're not actually in favor of three of those four. We think that sugar-cane ethanol is environmentally positive; we don't think the other three are.

It would be real useful to make a change in the lingo. We'd like to find a way to distinguish what we're doing from what's currently considered "biofuels" — because we're actually not in favor of some of those things. We're specifically not in favor of biodiesel, or much of it. If you have some used cooking oil or tallow kicking around, putting it into biodiesel is environmentally attractive. But manufacturing if from rape seed or soybean — that's actually a bad use of land.

For a hectare (2.47 acres) of soybeans, for example, you can get, maximum, about 200 gallons of biodiesel. From a hectare of miscanthus you can get 2,000 gallons of ethanol. And that hectare of soybeans also requires a lot of inputs, and has erosion and runoff. With a hectare of miscanthus, on the other hand, there's no runoffs that we're aware of, no emissions. I think it's irresponsible to use soybean acres to produce tiny amounts of fuel, diverting land away from food production. For the energy crops that we're interested in, we envision they'll be growing on land that doesn't compete with food production.

Is this true? Hell of a statistic if it is.

Every one of us needs to know that the grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV tank with ethanol would feed one person for a year.

BBC :

The number of people living "on the edge of emergency" has nearly doubled to 220m in just two years, one of the world's biggest aid agencies has said.

Wow! The BBC's web-research labs are taking The Archers to a new level.

Total respect, of course. The BBC is a major innovator in "old-media". (Aside. One reason the UK music scene is so good : 1-XTRA, a state-sponsored radio network which tracks and feeds the ever shifting fashions and inventions of London's pirate radio ecology.)

Update : of course there's a hint of SemWebishness about this (made explicit at the end of the blogpost) but nothing that stands out. The live-rolling soap format could be made to work equally well with the SynWeb, and there's no indication which they're actually using.

Couple of Brazil related links on oil and food.

Compare and contrast : Brazil's coming golden age with what's going on on the ground.

Great rant against the idiocy of buying bottled water.

Of course, people buy bottled waters because they're addicted to branding. So, what's the answer? Here's a Viridian Design challenge : to design a trendier re-usable water bottle. One that looks good and makes a statement. If the iPod can make pirating music trendier than buying CDs, why can't a "tethered" aquaPod? NO! Nestlé already got there first with that branding. It *is* a bottled water :-(

Need a better name too, then.

Biofuel use 'increasing poverty'

(Hat-tip Zbigniew)

Important point. It's not "biofuels" in themselves that are a problem. It's the idea that we can somehow keep our energy consumption at current rates and just shift from using exhausted oil to biofuels. Oil and coal were always more concentrated and energy rich than biomass alternatives. Biofuels are better at smaller local scales because they consume as much carbon while growing as they emit while burning, and they are available everywhere (you don't need a mass creation and distribution system).

But if you just try to reproduce the current petrol system of mass centralized production, worldwide distribution networks and mass consumption, then of course you'll have 90% of the problems of the existing system.

ThoughtStorms:IsMassNatural?

Umair's in righteous, all guns blazin' form.

Consider this. When the last bubble was in internet technology, welfare was minimally affected – jobs were lost. When it shifted to housing and credit, welfare was affected more – houses and saving were lost.

Today, it’s shifting in large part to energy and food. What happens when hypercapitalism causes a food bubble? What happens when the masters of the universe in Greenwich bid up the price of food for India, China, and Africa's huddled masses?

Update : interesting comment

hat-tip Darius ... couple of interesting links on food prices.

UN continues it's campaign against biofuels.

John Robb links a scary graph of the increase in the cost of rice over the last 5 years.