The Lowly Potato

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the Smithsonian magazine about the potato:

Many researchers believe that the potato’s arrival in northern Europe spelled an end to famine there. (Corn, another American crop, played a similar but smaller role in southern Europe.) More than that, as the historian William H. McNeill has argued, the potato led to empire: “By feeding rapidly growing populations, [it] permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.” The potato, in other words, fueled the rise of the West.

Equally important, the European and North American adoption of the potato set the template for modern agriculture—the so-called agro-industrial complex. Not only did the Columbian Exchange carry the potato across the Atlantic, it also brought the world’s first intensive fertilizer: Peruvian guano. And when potatoes fell to the attack of another import, the Colorado potato beetle, panicked farmers turned to the first artificial pesticide: a form of arsenic. Competition to produce ever-more-potent arsenic blends launched the modern pesticide industry. In the 1940s and 1950s, improved crops, high-intensity fertilizers and chemical pesticides created the Green Revolution, the explosion of agricultural productivity that transformed farms from Illinois to Indonesia—and set off a political argument about the food supply that grows more intense by the day.

...

Wild potatoes are laced with solanine and tomatine, toxic compounds believed to defend the plants against attacks from dangerous organisms like fungi, bacteria and human beings. Cooking often breaks down such chemical defenses, but solanine and tomatine are unaffected by heat. In the mountains, guanaco and vicuña (wild relatives of the llama) lick clay before eating poisonous plants. The toxins stick—more technically, “adsorb”—to the fine clay particles in the animals’ stomachs, passing through the digestive system without affecting it. Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a “gravy” made of clay and water. Eventually they bred less-toxic potatoes, though some of the old, poisonous varieties remain, favored for their resistance to frost. Clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them.

...

Continental farmers regarded this alien food with fascinated suspicion; some believed it an aphrodisiac, others a cause of fever or leprosy. The philosopher-critic Denis Diderot took a middle stance in his Encyclopedia (1751-65), Europe’s first general compendium of Enlightenment thought. “No matter how you prepare it, the root is tasteless and starchy,” he wrote. “It cannot be regarded as an enjoyable food, but it provides abundant, reasonably healthy food for men who want nothing but sustenance.” Diderot viewed the potato as “windy.” (It caused gas.) Still, he gave it the thumbs up. “What is windiness,” he asked, “to the strong bodies of peasants and laborers?”

With such halfhearted endorsements, the potato spread slowly. When Prussia was hit by famine in 1744, King Frederick the Great, a potato enthusiast, had to order the peasantry to eat the tubers. In England, 18th-century farmers denounced S. tuberosum as an advance scout for hated Roman Catholicism. “No Potatoes, No Popery!” was an election slogan in 1765. France was especially slow to adopt the spud. Into the fray stepped Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the potato’s Johnny Appleseed.

Trained as a pharmacist, Parmentier served in the army during the Seven Years’ War and was captured by the Prussians—five times. During his multiple prison stints he ate little but potatoes, a diet that kept him in good health. His surprise at this outcome led Parmentier to become a pioneering nutritional chemist after the war ended, in 1763; he devoted the rest of his life to promulgating S. tuberosum.

Parmentier’s timing was good. After Louis XVI was crowned in 1775, he lifted price controls on grain. Bread prices shot up, sparking what became known as the Flour War: more than 300 civil disturbances in 82 towns. Parmentier tirelessly proclaimed that France would stop fighting over bread if only her citizens would eat potatoes. Meanwhile, he set up one publicity stunt after another: presenting an all-potato dinner to high-society guests (the story goes that Thomas Jefferson, one of the guests, was so delighted he introduced French fries to America); supposedly persuading the king and queen to wear potato blossoms; and planting 40 acres of potatoes at the edge of Paris, knowing that famished commoners would steal them.

In exalting the potato, Parmentier unwittingly changed it. All of Europe’s potatoes descended from a few tubers sent across the ocean by curious Spaniards. When farmers plant pieces of tuber, rather than seeds, the resultant sprouts are clones. By urging potato cultivation on a massive scale, Parmentier was unknowingly promoting the notion of planting huge areas with clones—a true monoculture.

The effects of this transformation were so striking that any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S. tuberosum should be ignored. Hunger was a familiar presence in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Cities were provisioned reasonably well in most years, their granaries carefully monitored, but country people teetered on a precipice. France, the historian Fernand Braudel once calculated, had 40 nationwide famines between 1500 and 1800, more than one per decade. This appalling figure is an underestimate, he wrote, “because it omits the hundreds and hundreds of local famines.” France was not exceptional; England had 17 national and big regional famines between 1523 and 1623. The continent simply could not reliably feed itself.

The potato changed all that. Every year, many farmers left fallow as much as half of their grain land, to rest the soil and fight weeds (which were plowed under in summer). Now smallholders could grow potatoes on the fallow land, controlling weeds by hoeing. Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result, in terms of calories, was to double Europe’s food supply.

It is a fascinating story. Go read the whole thing.

Goldman Sachs is Evil

Here is the headline and first bit from an excellent article in Foreign Policy magazine:

How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis

Don't blame American appetites, rising oil prices, or genetically modified crops for rising food prices. Wall Street's at fault for the spiraling cost of food.

Demand and supply certainly matter. But there's another reason why food across the world has become so expensive: Wall Street greed.

It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there's value, there's money to be made. In 1991, Goldman bankers, led by their prescient president Gary Cohn, came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked 24 raw materials, from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known henceforth as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI).

...

But Goldman's index perverted the symmetry of this system. The structure of the GSCI paid no heed to the centuries-old buy-sell/sell-buy patterns. This newfangled derivative product was "long only," which meant the product was constructed to buy commodities, and only buy. At the bottom of this "long-only" strategy lay an intent to transform an investment in commodities (previously the purview of specialists) into something that looked a great deal like an investment in a stock -- the kind of asset class wherein anyone could park their money and let it accrue for decades (along the lines of General Electric or Apple). Once the commodity market had been made to look more like the stock market, bankers could expect new influxes of ready cash. But the long-only strategy possessed a flaw, at least for those of us who eat. The GSCI did not include a mechanism to sell or "short" a commodity.

This imbalance undermined the innate structure of the commodities markets, requiring bankers to buy and keep buying -- no matter what the price. Every time the due date of a long-only commodity index futures contract neared, bankers were required to "roll" their multi-billion dollar backlog of buy orders over into the next futures contract, two or three months down the line. And since the deflationary impact of shorting a position simply wasn't part of the GSCI, professional grain traders could make a killing by anticipating the market fluctuations these "rolls" would inevitably cause. "I make a living off the dumb money," commodity trader Emil van Essen told Businessweek last year. Commodity traders employed by the banks that had created the commodity index funds in the first place rode the tides of profit.

...

Since the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000, there has been a 50-fold increase in dollars invested in commodity index funds. To put the phenomenon in real terms: In 2003, the commodities futures market still totaled a sleepy $13 billion. But when the global financial crisis sent investors running scared in early 2008, and as dollars, pounds, and euros evaded investor confidence, commodities -- including food -- seemed like the last, best place for hedge, pension, and sovereign wealth funds to park their cash. "You had people who had no clue what commodities were all about suddenly buying commodities," an analyst from the United States Department of Agriculture told me. In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was roiling the markets. Food inflation has remained steady since.

Go read the rest of the article.

It is one thing for speculators to bid up the price of art or luxury cars or beach houses. It is another they their greed pushes up the costs for average people through higher fuel costs, higher food expenses, and busted housing dreams. Obama needs to quit playing footsie with these evil financiers and start enforcing anti-monopoly and anti-speculation laws against these insatiably greedy Wall Street types.

Spinning a Food Crisis

This graph should tell you all you need to know about the "food crisis" that doom-and-gloomsters want you to believe is upon us:

Click to Enlarge
The above is from an article by Willis Eschenbach on the Watts Up with That? blog. He examines the claims of professional doomster (oh, I mean "environmentalist") Bill McKibben. What I enjoy about people like McKibben is that they never let a fact get in the way of their prejudices. Go read the article by Eschenbach to see how he demolishes McKibben's claim that:

We’re seeing record temperatures that depress harvests – the amount of grain per capita on the planet has been falling for years.

Those are all lies. But McKibben has been in the business of lies for a long time. From the Wikipedia site:

His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.

Yep, for 22 years he has been telling people that "the end is nigh" because of global warming. I guess it is too much to think that he would give up on that theme since he also pushes the Robert Malthus "we are all going to starve to death because population grows faster than food supply" lie that has been around since 1798, that's 213 years and counting.

Why is there World Hunger?

Superstitious, anti-science thinking is the simple answer. Here's a bit from a UK Guardian newspaper article:

Food prices worldwide were up by a whopping 25% in 2010, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, and February marked the eighth consecutive month of rising global food prices. Within the past two months, food riots helped to trigger the ousting of ruling regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. (It is noteworthy that food prices increased 17% last year in Egypt, and the price of wheat, a critical staple there, soared by more than 50%.) For poor countries that are net importers of food, even small increases in food prices can be catastrophic, and recent bumps have been anything but small.

There are several causes of rising prices. First, large-scale disasters have precipitated localised crop failures, some of which have had broad ripple effects – for example, Russia's ban on grain exports through at least the end of this calendar year resulted from fires and drought. Second, deadly strains of an evolving wheat pathogen (a rust) named Ug99 are increasingly threatening yields in the major wheat-growing areas of southern and eastern Africa, the central Asian Republics, the Caucasus, the Indian subcontinent, South America, Australia and North America. Third, rising incomes in emerging markets like China and India have increased the ability of an expanding middle class to shift from a grain-based diet to one that contains more meat.

And fourth, against this backdrop of lessened supply and heightened demand, private investment in R&D on innovative practices and technologies has been discouraged by arbitrary and unscientific national and international regulatory barriers – against, in particular, new varieties of plants produced with modern genetic engineering (aka recombinant DNA technology or genetic modification, or GM). Genetic engineering offers plant breeders the tools to make crops do spectacular new things. In more than two dozen countries, farmers are using genetically engineered crop varieties to produce higher yields, with lower inputs and reduced impact on the environment.

And this:

In fact, the United States and Europe are diverting vast and increasing amounts of land and agricultural production into making ethanol. The United States is approaching the diversion of 40% of the corn harvest for fuel and the EU has a goal of 10% biofuel use by 2020. The implications are worrisome. On 9 February, the US department of agriculture reported that the ethanol industry's projected orders for 2011 rose 8.4%, to 13.01bn bushels, leaving the United States with about 675m bushels of corn left at the end of the year. That is the lowest surplus level since 1996.

So, what do we know? Bad weather and a virulent new plant pathogen. The weather will change. And science can help develop resistent strains to deal with the new pathogen.

Rising incomes is not a problem. It makes it tough for the world's poor, but rising incomes also gives them hopes that they too will earn more and eat better some day.

Anti-GM quackery is a real problem. This is anti-science at its worst. Mumbo jumbo about what is "natural" and how it goes "against God's will to move genes from one species to another" is nutty. And the lies these fanatics tell! They claim that new breeding programs based on GM need special scrutiny is the same nonsense as the belief that the tomato was a "poisonous food" back in 1590.

Worst of all are the doom-and-gloom crowd so worried about "global warming" that they are willing to sacrifice the poorest billion people so that the "global warming" crowd can tool around in their SUV's using ethanol. That's right. The "global warming" crowd burns food so they can enjoy their yuppie lifestyle and continue to spread malicious rumours about "global warming" while letting a billion or so people starve to death. Talk about misplaced values and skewed ethics! And these hypocrites dare to preach to the rest of the world and spread their vile propaganda, a lie about climate that isn't going to kill anybody. But they are willing to condemn a billion to painful starvation. Hypocrites!

Another Doomsday Scenario

There are a lot of "threats" out there and people love to build up anxiety of doomsday scenarios. But here is one that I think is more real than most. I think it is serious but not hair-on-fire serious. It needs serious scientific study and generous funding (something that in the US will get Republicans to guffaw about "throwing dollars at insects"). Here is a bit from a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) bulletin on the honeybee CCD (colony collapse disorder) and other threats to food crop pollination:

Current evidence demonstrates that a sixth major extinction of biological diversity event is underway. The Earth is losing between one and ten percent of biodiversity per decade, mostly due to habitat loss, pest invasion, pollution, over-harvesting and disease. Certain natural ecosystem services are vital for human societies.

Many fruit, nut, vegetable, legume, and seed crops depend on pollination. Pollination services are provided both by wild, free-living organisms (mainly bees, but also to name a few many butterflies, moths and flies), and by commercially managed bee species. Bees are the predominant and most economically important group of pollinators in most geographical regions.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that out of some 100 crop species which provide 90% of food worldwide, 71 of these are bee-pollinated. In Europe alone, 84% of the 264 crop species are animal pollinated and 4 000 vegetable varieties exist thanks to pollination by bees. The production value of one tonne of pollinator-dependent crop is approximately five times higher than one of those crop categories that do not depend on insects.

Has a “pollinator crisis” really been occurring during recent decades, or are these concerns just another sign of global biodiversity decline? Several studies have highlighted different factors leading to the pollinators’ decline that have been observed around the world. This bulletin considers the latest scientific findings and analyses possible answers to this question. As the bee group is the most important pollinator worldwide, this bulletin focuses on the instability of wild and managed bee populations, the driving forces, potential mitigating measures and recommendations.

From the bulletin, here is a graph showing the decades long decline. CCD began being reported in 2006. Obviously there are many "issues" about bee populations:

Click to Enlarge
From the conclusion of the UN bulletin:

Currently available global data and knowledge on the decline of pollinators are not sufficiently conclusive to demonstrate that there is a worldwide pollinator and related crop production crisis. Although honey bee hives have globally increased close to 45% during the last 50 years, declines have been reported in several locations, largely in Europe and Northern America.

World Food Shortages

In 2008 there were riots and food shortages. Gasoline prices hit $4/gallon in the US, but that was a bother not disaster. The disaster was in the developing world where people starved because of food shortages.

Now 2011 is shaping up to be another food shortage year. Prices are rising. People are worried.

At times like this I like to take a step back and look at the big picture. This number from a SEPP organization's newsletter for Feb 19, 2011:

From 1960 to 2010 wheat production in India went from 10,320 (1000
Metric Tons) to 80,710 (1000 MT) – an increase of 682 percent.

That is a huge leap compared to the population increase in India. So from this perspective, the food shortages will be met by increased production. It won't happen fast enough to prevent this year's starvation, but the future looks good. There is an emerging middle class of hundreds of millions in India and China. The world is becoming more "people friendly" as science and technology allow us to harness human ingenuity to break the contraints of "natural" shortages.

There are pessmists who will proclaim that the future is bleak. Gloom and doom is popular with some people. Two hundred years ago Thomas Malthus wrote a famous essay predicting widespread famine. The 1960s saw group like ZPG proclaim in the book Population Bomb that there would be widespread famine by the 1970s with hundreds of millions starving to death. Today that long tradition of gloom-and-doom is continued by those convinced that we are only decades away from a "heat death" caused by global warming. Funny. the global temperature is actually cooler in January 2011 than the average over the last 30 years. So much for "runaway" global warming.

Inflation and Rising Food Prices

There is a lot of chatter about inflation and how food prices are out of control and how speculators are driving up prices. I suspect speculators are adding to prices, but the chatter over food prices is premature and exaggerated. Here are some graphs from an economics research team at the Bank of Montreal:


That makes it clear that this isn't the "food crisis" of 2008. This is much smaller in scale. They also point out that:

Though market fundamentals differ by commodity, the increase in food prices overall is not likely to be as large as during 2007-08. First, while farm prices have generally risen, the increase is not as broad-based, partly because global stocks of key commodities are expected to be adequate. For instance, prices of wheat, corn, soybean and rice, adjusted for inflation, are still well below their 2008 peaks (Chart 3). Second, whereas a broad global inflationary climate helped to fuel agricultural price gains during 2007-08, the current substantial excess capacity in developed nations should contain prices. The fact that the price of crude oil—closely correlated with farm prices through the bioenergy link—is unlikely to return to 2008 levels also points to a more limited rally.

What should be obvious is that food prices are very volatile, and given the crop failures you would expect prices to jump. But assuming a return to more normal crop conditions, prices should ease back in line over the next couple of years:


So I plan to not get sucked into the gloom-and-doom crowd's excitement about yet another disaster that they see impending. The truth is, food prices are volatile and we just had some bad luck with weather. But there is no reason to extrapolate that into an end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scenario.

Food Crisis 2011

The 2008 food crisis is back because of the Russian heat wave in 2010 and the floods in Australia. Here's a bit from an article in the Washington Post:

Each year, the world demands more grain, and this year the world's farms will not produce it. World food prices have surged above the food crisis levels of 2008. Millions more people will be malnourished, and hundreds of millions who are already hungry will eat less or give up other necessities. Food riots have started again.

Nearly all assessments of the 2008 food crisis assigned biofuels a meaningful role, but much of academia and the media ultimately agreed that the scale of the crisis resulted from a "perfect storm" of causes. Yet this "perfect storm" has re-formed not three years later. We should recognize the ways in which biofuels are driving it.

...

A broad misunderstanding has also arisen from economic models predicting price increases from biofuels that are still far lower than those of the past decade. In fact, these models do not estimate biofuel effects on prices today but those in a future market "equilibrium," which will exist only after farmers have ample time to increase production to match demand. Today, the market is out of equilibrium. Biofuels have grown rapidly, from consuming 2 percent of world grain and virtually no vegetable oil in 2004 to more than 6.5 percent of grain and 8 percent of vegetable oil last year. Governments worldwide seek to triple production of biofuels by 2020, and that implies more moderately high prices after good growing years and soaring prices after bad ones.

And here is a relevant bit from a post by Geoffrey Styles on his Energy Outlook blog:

As long as US harvests were increasing at a rate that kept pace with the growth of ethanol output, thanks to increased cultivation and better yields, that wasn't a zero sum game. Until recently, the corn that went into making ethanol was corn that might not otherwise have been grown. But in a year like this one, when annual ethanol consumption is set to rise by another billion gallons while the corn harvest is 5% smaller than the previous year's, something has to give. In fact, the US Department of Agriculture expects that ethanol plants will take 40% of this season's crop, compared to just 23% in the 2007-8 "market year." That exerts a lot more pressure on corn prices, which are pushing $7 per bushel for the first time since 2008.

If anything, the conclusion of Mr. Searchinger's op-ed downplayed the risks ahead. With output from the nascent cellulosic ethanol industry still minuscule, the EPA will be under tremendous pressure to allow corn ethanol to continue to expand beyond its current 15 billion gallon per year limit under the RFS. That's one reason the industry was pushing so hard to increase the maximum allowable percentage of ethanol in gasoline from 10% to 15%; it needs that headroom to continue expanding output beyond last year's 13 billion gallons. At 20 billion gallons per year--a quantity that I heard one USDA expert suggest several years ago was achievable--ethanol would require the equivalent of 55% of 2009-10's record US corn crop. It's hard to envision that happening without concerns about food vs. fuel rising to a much higher pitch.

The diversion of food to energy production has got to stop. It was an idiotic policy and is now positively deadly in its consequences because of current food shortages. Millions will starve so that the anti-CO2 enthusiasts and the ethanol lobby can go to bed happy each night. But blood will be on their hands. They are murders because they are pushing food prices beyond the ability of the world's poor to pay!

A Real Doom & Gloom Story

This is potentially a very disruptive event that is looming. This is something to seriously worry about for all those doom & gloom specialists. From a NY Times article. I've bolded the key bits:

The United Nations’ food agency issued an alert on Tuesday warning that a severe drought was threatening the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock.

China has been essentially self-sufficient in grain for decades, for national security reasons. Any move by China to import large quantities of food in response to the drought could drive international prices even higher than the record levels recently reached.

“China’s grain situation is critical to the rest of the world — if they are forced to go out on the market to procure adequate supplies for their population, it could send huge shock waves through the world’s grain markets,” said Robert S. Zeigler, the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, in the Philippines.

The state-run news media in China warned Monday that the country’s major agricultural regions were facing their worst drought in 60 years. On Tuesday the state news agency Xinhua said that Shandong Province, a cornerstone of Chinese grain production, was bracing for its worst drought in 200 years unless substantial precipitation came by the end of this month.

...

Typically, world food reports barely mention China, partly because many details of the country’s agriculture production and reserves are state secrets. But China, in fact, is enormously important to the world’s food supply, especially if something goes wrong.

The heat wave in Russia last summer, combined with floods in Australia in recent months, has drawn worldwide attention to the international wheat market, because Russia and Australia have historically been big exporters. But China’s wheat industry has existed in almost total isolation from the rest of the world, with virtually no exports or imports, until last year, when modest imports began. Yet it is enormous, accounting for one-sixth of global wheat output. The statistical database of the United Nations’ food agency shows that in 2009, the last year available, China produced almost twice as much wheat as the United States or Russia and more than five times as much as Australia.

Currently, the ground in the country is so dry from Beijing south through the provinces of Hebei, Henan and Shandong to Jiangsu Province, just north of Shanghai, that trees and houses are coated with topsoil that has blown off parched fields.

It looks like China is suffering from a "dustbowl" with heat and drought like the US experience in the early 1930s. This isn't "global warming". It is just normal climate variation. But tragically the world is not prepared because there is no systematic program to build up reserve stocks. (Think of the Biblical tale of Joseph interpreting the Pharoah's dream and building graneries to store grains from the seven fat years to protect the people from the seven lean years.) Sadly, we live in an era where governments are under attack by fanatics who think "the only good government is no government" and who have the fantasy that "private markets can provide everything". They can't private markets don't prepare for once-in-a-century events. These are things that require mobilization across a society -- or in our case today, across the whole world -- and are beyond the scope of "private markets". But ideologues aren't interested in facts or theories. They have the truth by the tail and don't care. On their heads will be the great suffering which is coming for the next year or two.

Global Food Scare

The gloom-and-doom crowd is at it again. With the floods in Australia and problems with crops around the world, they are convinced that food riots will soon break out everywhere and you best pack your gun and head for the hills.

But here is reality:


I found that image in Andrew Revkin's blog on the NY Times. He documents an exchange he initiated between Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba analyst of just about every global risk and trend, and Lester Brown, who heads the Earth Policy Institute and has for decades warned of economic and environmental unraveling. I side with Smil:

There are always speculative food price currents and undercurrents but no end of days as so many of your fellow citizens, being the most scientifically illiterate people who ever lived, think. 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.

There is much in this exchange to please both the doomsters as well as the those like myself who use Julian Simons, author of The Ultimate Resource, as a guide.

Fanatics vs Facts

When I was a callow youth, I was hammered incessantly by ZPG, Paul Ehrlich, and other fanatics telling me that the world was going to hell in a handbasket because of "overpopulation". From Wikipedia:

In December 1967, Ehrlich wrote in the New Scientist that the world would experience famines sometime between 1970 and 1985 due to population growth outstripping resources. He stated that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over ... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also stated, "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980," or "be self-sufficient in food by 1971." He has been criticized as being wrong in these predictions. Ehrlich himself concedes that he did overstate his case here, underestimating the effects of the green revolution, but that part of the reason that there have not been such serious famines has been due to a reduction in birth rates that his book had argued were necessary. He also stated that in some areas The Population Bomb actually underestimated the dangers of high population - it made no mention of global warming, for instance.[9] In 2006, Lara Knudsen[10] wrote that Ehrlich's views were accepted by many population control advocates in the United States and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s.[11] She chose a brief passage from the final chapter of Population Bomb to show that Ehrlich had discussed an extreme solution to extreme cases of overpopulation: "compulsory birth regulation... (through) the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size."

That was the "fanatic" bit, now for the "fact" bit. The following is a graph from data by UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics database and taken from a post by Willis Eschenbach in the blog Watts Up With That?:

Click to Enlarge
Hard to find the deaths of tens of millions, of hundreds of millions, from great famines in the facts, right? But for twenty or thirty years, that didn't stop the fanatics from decrying overpopulation. And they did this while the now famous Green Revolution was picking up steam. In short, they were pushing a fanatical message in the very teeth of the agricultural revolution that was putting the lie to their claims.

But that is exactly how fanatics behave. Facts don't stop them. They "know" the truth and they can't be bothered by facts or discussions or theories or alternatives. It is their way or the highway!

By the way... I find the blog Watts Up With That? to be an excellent antidote to the fanaticism over "climate change" / "global warming". This site specializes in all things meteorological. It also has a number of posts on "climate change". Guess what: the climate is always changing! And as for "global warming", sure it has warmed a bit over the last century, but it isn't doing the runaway global warming that you would expect given the caterwauling that the global warming fanatics have indulged in.

One of the most telling things I've run across lately was a post by Steven Goddard on his Real Science blog with the following table:



He observes that the last time any continent set a record high temperature was 1974. Isn't this fact quite odd? Given the hockey stick graph of runaway global temperatures...

Click to Enlarge
You would expect that all the records to have been set in recent years. But the last heat record was over 36 years ago!

Meanwhile, following up the link to the site with the statistics, you discover that global cold records have been broken on 3 continents since 1976.

Click to Enlarge
During an era of runaway global warming we are setting record lows but no record highs. What an odd kind of heat death that is for planet earth!

Food Fads and Fanatics

Here is a bit from a long post by Denise Minger on her blog Raw Food SOS: Troubleshooting on the Raw Food Diet. She looks at The China Study by T. Colin Campbell which makes claims such as:

The authors introduce and explain the conclusions of scientific studies, which have correlated animal-based diets with disease. The authors conclude that diets high in animal protein (including casein in cow's milk) are strongly linked to diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and Type 2 diabetes. (from Wikipedia)

Minger digs around with the underlying data to look at statistical correlations. They don't pan out. The claims of The China Study are bogus because the data don't support the claims.

Here's one example.

Campbell Claim #6

Western-type diseases, in the aggregate, are highly significantly correlated with increasing concentrations of plasma cholesterol, which are associated in turn with increasing intakes of animal-based foods.

From his book, we know Campbell defines Western-type diseases as including heart disease, diabetes, colorectal cancers, breast cancer, stomach cancer, leukemia, and liver cancer. And indeed, the variable “total cholesterol” correlates positively with many of these diseases:

Myocardial infarction and coronary heart disease: +4
Diabetes: +8
Colon cancer: +44**
Rectal cancer: +30*
Colorectal cancer: +33**
Breast cancer: +19
Stomach cancer: +17
Leukemia: +26*
Liver cancer: +37*

Perhaps surprisingly, total cholesterol has only weak associations with heart disease and diabetes—weaker, in fact, than the correlation between these conditions and plant protein intake (+25 and +12, respectively). But we’ll put that last point aside for the time being. For now, let’s focus on the diseases with statistical significance, which include all forms of colorectal cancer, leukemia, and liver cancer. (Despite classifying stomach cancer as a “Western disease,” by the way, China actually has far higher rates of this disease than any Western nation. In fact, half the people who die each year from stomach cancer live in China.)

I remember reading the Greeks in my youth. Funny how old men get very concerned about their diet. They become convinced that "if only" they ate this and not that, then their digestion would be better, their health would improve, they would get back the vigor of youth. It is an eternal illusion. Pythagoras was wierd about beans. The Classical calls for moderation made sense. But proscribing certain food struck me as odd.

I've since noticed that most people -- when they hit their 50s and 60s -- develop strange fetishes about food. They worry that something is "bad" for them and something else is presumed to have some magical "good quality" and more should be consumed. Funny. Our ancestors on the savannas of Africa didn't have this tendency to culinary quackery. They ate what was available and were grateful for it. Moderation was enforced by scarcity. Their worry wasn't the degenerative diseases of old age but the ever present threat of famine.

Here's an example of a food fanatic, Ray Kurzweil (the following is from a post by Ursula Goodenough on the NPR blog 13.7 Cosmos and Culture):

Kurzweil, in fact, hopes cryonic preservation won’t be necessary. His preferred route being to avoid dying in the first place. To this end, according to Wikipedia, he consumes 150 supplements (down from 250), 10 glasses of alkaline water (to neutralize acidic metabolic wastes) and 10 cups of green tea every day, drinks several glasses of red wine a week to "reprogram" his biochemistry, and is transfused with reprogramming chemical cocktails at a clinic each weekend.

Another approach is extreme calorie restriction. This is a nutty idea based on some fuzzy research on nematodes that suggests near starvation can make you live longer. Here's a bit from Wikipedia.

Doom & Gloom as a Psychological Disorder

Here is a bit from a post by Nigel Calder on his Calder's Updates blog:

... the population scare goes way back to Thomas Malthus (1798), but in its modern guise it has underpinned militant environmentalism for more than 40 years since a butterfly expert, Paul Ehrlich of Stanford, published The Population Bomb in 1968. Never mind that what he predicted turned out to be wrong. That sort of mishap doesn’t matter once you’ve been sanctified by true believers.

Ever been stuck in traffic on a hot night in Delhi? I once was in the 1960s, before I first read The Population Bomb, so I recognised the scene described by Ehrlich:

“The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.”

Yes, I saw it, and was awestruck. The exuberant bustle of what was then a rather hard-up urban population, enjoying the comparative coolness of the night, challenged my cosseted modern Westerner’s view of what human life is all about. That Delhi street was probably not very different from the suburbs of Imperial Rome or even from Shakespeare’s London on a warm evening.

Not so for Ehrlich:

“As we moved slowly through the mob, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel…? Since that night I have known the feel of overpopulation.”

Isn’t it comical – that yearning for the air-conditioned hotel where things would get nearer to Ehrlich’s Californian view of normality? Plainly this self-appointed saviour of humankind didn’t care too much for real-life men, women or children.

I've got to resist generalizing from one case, but my prejudice is that those who want to declare the world will die of some great calamity are psychologically unstable. As Calder points out, Ehrlich was a misanthrope, so his crusade to de-populate the earth makes sense. I wonder how many other crusaders can be unveiled as closet misanthropes whose secret desire to kill off humanity lies behind their doomster predictions.

I remember how Ehrlich's book radicalized a generation. The funny thing was this his doomsday scenario, like all the rest, never came true. But he never stepped up and admitted his mistakes. Once a doomster, always a doomster.

Nigel Calder points out how badly wrong his predictions were:

How deeply flawed Ehrlich’s predictions were! He wrote:

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of the 1970s the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions … hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.

It simply didn’t happen. As Bjorn Lomborg has commented succinctly:

“[Ehrlich] believed that aid should only be given to those countries that would have a chance to make it through. India was not among them. India, however, has lived through a green revolution. In 1967, when Ehrlich wrote those words, the average Indian consumed 1,875 calories a day. Even though the population had almost doubled, in 1998 the average Indian got 2,466 calories a day.”

The 1960s gave birth to dystopians and utopians. The doomsters all painted visions of death, destruction, and hopelessness... completely unrealistic. The hippies painted visions of universal love and peace, back to nature, harmony with the environment... completely unrealistic. Is it a coincidence that these diametrically opposed tendencies were born in the same decade? I don't think so.

They Say You Are What You Eat

Here's a bit from a post by Brad DeLong. He garbled the original link, so I will link to DeLong:

A nondescript building on the edge of Adelaide houses the largest processor of kangaroo meat in Australia: Macromeats. There is no sign on the door. The trucks loading and unloading kangaroos don't advertise what they carry. On the outside, nothing reveals that 3,000 kangaroos are turned into steaks, sausages and minced meat here every day. "I used to be compared to the folks who club baby seals," Macromeats owner Ray Borda said about the industry's image problem. Kangaroos are generally seen as cuddly animals and the mere thought of putting a 'Skippy' on the barbecue appals many Australians. But the attitude they have towards the consumption of their national symbol is changing. "The government used to scorn me," Borda said. "But this year, I was asked to host a kangaroo barbecue in the parliament building." This turnaround is credited to the environmental and health benefits of kangaroo meat compared to sheep and cattle.

How do I feel about this? I'm OK with it but I want to taste before I sign up for it. I've had all kinds of game meat. Some is rank, some tangy, some bland like chicken. I'm all for eating locally (I'm a locavore but I refuse to subscribe the group that turns it into a religion). I doubt I'll ever have kangaroo steaks, but I'm not against it. I figure if my ancestors climbed out of the trees to eat rotting carcasses to start themselves on the road to our current pre-eminence, then I shouldn't turn up my nose at local cuisine.

I figure consumption of animal protein marked our divergence from Paranthopus, a distant relative who was less labile in cultural traits and insisted on roots and tubers at the expense of high quality protein. I suspect that branch of the family was the one squeamish about eating putrifying meat. They're now all dead. We're doing well. So kangeroo is on my plate!

Sad Fact, A Great Man has Died

Norman Borlaug has died. From a posting on Watts Up With That:

Renowned agricultural scientist Dr. Norman Borlaug has died at the age of 95. Borlaug, known as the father of the “Green Revolution” for saving over a billion people from starvation by utilizing pioneering high yield farming techniques, is one of only five people in history who has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom ,and the Congressional Gold Medal.

During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people from starvation. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.


Later in his life, he helped apply these methods of increasing food production to Asia and Africa. Borlaug continually advocated the use of his methods and biotechnology to decrease world famine. His work faced environmental and socioeconomic criticisms, including charges that his methods have created dependence on monoculture crops, unsustainable farming practices, heavy indebtedness among subsistence farmers, and high levels of cancer among those who work with agriculture chemicals. He emphatically rejected many of these as unfounded or untrue. In 1986, he established the World Food Prize to recognize individuals who have improved the quality, quantity or availability of food around the globe.

A lot of "celebrities" get written up in the popular media but they are completely forgettable. Borlaug is a man who will be remembers for hundreds of years because he had a major impact in the last half of the 20th century. His life pretty well single-handedly saved us from a Malthusian disaster of overpopulation. Sadly, the popular press don't think dramatic stories like this are "important". Instead they drown you in the pathetic personal details of spoiled Hollywood "stars" and idiots like Paris Hilton.

Update 2009sep14: Here is a tribute/remembrance from Derek Lowe in his In The Pipeline blog. I've bolded a key bit:

Norman Borlaug has died at the age of 95, and he's definitely worth remembering. His tireless work on improving agriculture saved hundreds of millions of people from being born to starvation. And it also kept the world from having to tear up even more natural habitats to plant food crops.

People tend to forget (or have never known) about the way the world has managed to escape the Malthusian trap over the last two or three hundred years. (A Farewell to Alms
is a book that makes this case at length, more here). And the way that birth rates drop once countries become more prosperous holds out the hope that we won't fall into an even greater version of the same thing. I think that once the Industrial Revolution happened, world population was going to explode eventually. Norman Borlaug was one of the key people who helped keep things together while that happened.

But what about natural, traditional means of growing crops, in harmony with the land and all that? It's easy to forget the agriculture is unnatural, and is a relatively recent invention. (In fact, perhaps it was that step, rather than the Industrial Revolution, that set the world on a path to an eventual population explosion. It just did so more slowly). Once we started clearing land and saving seed, we left the natural way of things behind. To put that another way, that's when the human race stop playing only the cards it had been dealt. And using the highest-yielding seed and the most well-thought-out ways of growing it will keep us from having to clear more of the land we have left.

Derek points to an article summarizing Borlaug's life in the Des Moines Register. Here's a bit from that with bolding added:

On Friday, the day before the famous scientist, Iowa native and Nobel Peace Prize laureate died at his home in Dallas, Texas, he had a final conversation with his family.

"I have a problem," said Borlaug, 95, his granddaughter, Julie Borlaug, recounted Sunday. What was that, a family member asked?

"Africa."

...

Borlaug was convinced the Green Revolution could spread to Africa and believed that biotechnology was part of the solution, said former Sen. George McGovern, who won the Borlaug-founded World Food Prize last year for his work in developing an international school-nutrition program. McGovern went to see Borlaug earlier this year for what turned out to be his final birthday. Borlaug, who was born on his grandparents' farm 11 miles southwest of Cresco, died of complications from cancer.

"He was always the optimist," McGovern said. "He always felt we could bring governments around, bring people around."

Borlaug "was simply one of the world's best," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former Iowa governor. "A determined, dedicated, but humble man, who believed we had the collective duty and knowledge to eradicate hunger worldwide."

The Rockefeller Foundation, a major contributor to the Green Revolution and agricultural research since then, issued a statement Sunday calling Borlaug "a force beyond measure."

"The world is more peaceful and humane as a consequence of his work," the foundation said.

...

Borlaug's legacy includes many scientists he inspired, like Gebisa Ejeta. As a new college graduate in Ethiopia in the 1970s, Ejeta was struggling to figure what to do with his life. Then Ejeta's mentor, a plant breeder who had studied in America, told Ejeta he had been inspired by learning of Borlaug's work.

Ejeta decided to study plant genetics himself, earned a doctorate from Purdue University and later learned how to dramatically improve production of sorghum, a staple crop in his home country. Ejeta is this year's winner of the World Food Prize.

"I didn't quite fully understand the power of the work that Dr. Borlaug had done other than the fact that if a person could be given this kind of recognition for serving humanity, I thought this would be a field of study that would be worth looking into," Ejeta said Sunday.

Borlaug's final words, as related by his granddaughter, could be a fitting epitaph.

A scientist and family friend visiting Borlaug on Friday told him about a device he had developed so poor farmers could be sure they were using just the right amount of fertilizer.

Borlaug's response and last words: "Take it to the farmers."

When Will It All End?

The doom-and-gloom crowd always sees a problem:

• Malthus foresaw us outrunning our food resources and all starving. Solution: control the poor to prevent them from breeding.


• The Eugenics crowd saw us breeding ourselves into imbecility. Solution: control the genetically inferior to keep them from breeding.


• Oswald Spengler saw the West in decline. Solution: bring in a strong leader, a guy like Hitler, to shake things up.


• The Population Bomb people told us we were breeding ourselves into a global disaster: let the government impose a one-child policy and of course give the rich and famous an exemption because they are naturally superior. (OK, the last bit wasn't explicit in the policy, but this is typically the thinking of this crowd, i.e. they write rules for others but not themselves.)


• The Club of Rome people yelled that resources would soon run out and we would all descend into brutes fighting over scraps. Solution: go back to the presumed golden age when we lived in harmony with nature by doing hunting and gathering so that we would not be a burden on Mother Earth.


• The Global Warming crowd sees the heat death of earth as we load up so many greenhouse gases that we cook ourselves in our own waste heat. Solution: give up carbon-based energy and live only using renewable resources and, of course, force a cutback on carbon emissions even if this guts the economy. (There is an implicit assumption that technology is the enemy and not part of the solution.)

The Peak Oil people are disappointed today. There is a big new Tiber oil field discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, 3 billion barrels of oil. The doom-and-gloom crowd see it as more evidence that the end is near. The glass-is-half-full crowd see it as proof that ingenuity will continue to allow goodies to rain down on us.

Here's a bit from Geoffrey Styles' blog posting:

1. There's still life in the old dog. While the US has been drilled like a pincushion for 150 years, we have still not found every barrel of oil that nature provided us. Don't be misled by proved reserves data that seem to show that we have less than 12 years of oil left at current production rates. In point of fact, the US has produced a cumulative 200 billion barrels of oil from reserves that never exceeded 40 billion barrels. Not only do we continue to find new resources in the manner of Tiber-1, but we continually learn how to extract more oil from the reservoirs we've already found, revising their reserves steadily upward over time.


2. A discovery like Tiber doesn't mean we've merely added two weeks worth of production to reserves. US oil production, like global production, is comprised of the contributions from thousands of oil fields and hundreds of thousands of oil wells, with the most productive 20% or so accounting for roughly 87% of output. If initial guesses of recoverable oil are right, then the Tiber field could yield on the order of 100,000 bbl/day of oil for 20 years--2% of US production for a generation. If we turn up our noses at that, then we surely ought to think twice about wind power. In 2008 all the wind turbines in the US generated 52 billion kilowatt-hours, backing out natural gas power generation equivalent to just 245,000 bbl/day of oil, or 5% of US oil output.

Geoffrey Styles will not be popular with the gloom-and-doomsters. He tries to thread a middle way through the contending factions:

Although finding more oil may look problematic from a greenhouse gas perspective, oil is not our worst fuel, and it remains the hardest to displace, because of its unique combination of energy density and portability. I share the vision of many for a future made up of electrified cars and low- or no-emission power plants, but we're going to burn hundreds of billions of barrels of oil getting there. For reasons including national security, national pride, and our balance of trade, it matters whose oil it will be, as we make the long transition to a more sustainable energy economy. If we ignore that principle, we're likely to end up even more reliant on unstable foreign suppliers, before we arrive at the elusive promised land of energy independence.

Demographic Disaster

Malthus had a point but his doomster scenario didn't occur because it was made just on the cusp of the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions which empowered humans to provide themselves with a better standard of living and more reproductive control. Africa, however, is something altogether different. From an article in the Economist:

Africa is still something of a demographic outlier compared with the rest of the developing world. Long berated (or loved) as the sleepiest continent, it has now become the fastest-growing and fastest-urbanising one. Its population has grown from 110m in 1850 to 1 billion today. Its fertility rate is still high: the average woman born today can expect to have five children in her child-bearing years, compared with just 1.7 in East Asia. Barring catastrophe, Africa’s population will reach 2 billion by 2050. To get a sense of this kind of increase, consider that in 1950 there were two Europeans for every African; by 2050, on present trends, there will be two Africans for every European.

There are three main reasons for pessimism. The first is that even today it struggles to provide for its people. ... Africa today produces less food per head than at any time since independence. Farms are getting smaller, sometimes farcically so. Dividing village plots among sons is like cutting up postage stamps. The average smallholding of just over half an acre (0.25 hectares) is too small to feed a family—hence the continent’s widespread stunting. Africa’s disease burden extends to its animals and crops. ...

... the second reason for pessimism: Africa’s families are under greater strain than Asia’s or Latin America’s were when their demographic transitions first began. That means, pessimists fear, that African countries may fail to navigate the virtuous cycle of industrialisation, growing employment, increasing productivity and prosperity. ...

The third reason for pessimism is Africa’s political violence, corruption and weak or non-existent governing institutions. ... In the worst cases, civil war has meant that the demographic transition has not even begun. Fertility in Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone—all torn apart by internecine fighting—has barely fallen. In Congo the rate is still six, just as it was in 1950. In the worst places, fecundity tends to track instability. Africa’s highest fertility rates are in the refugee and internally displaced camps in Sudan and Somalia, then in those countries recovering from war, then in famine-pocked patches of desert and scrub stretching from Mauritania to Kenya.

Go read the article. It has interesting details and facts.

If you can't feed yourself, you certainly shouldn't be multiplying your population. Africa is a mess. Decades of "relief" have produced nothing. There needs to be an indigenous revolution, new ideas, that drive those populations toward a new vision of the future. The current path is a disaster.

Instead of all the talk about "help" and "relief", the only real help the developed world can offer Africa is to drop all tariffs on every kind of Africa product whether agricultural or industrial or even services. It is hypocritical to offer "aid" and then put up barriers that inhibit growth. The rest of the world needs to drop barriers and offer education to future leaders, but otherwise stand back and let Africans solve their own problems. It should police its own population to make sure no person from a developed country exploits Africa by selling weapons or doing "oil deals" or even "aid projects".

The developed world really needs a "hands off" policy. Sadly, China is now busy "developing" Africa like the West has done, i.e. exploiting Africa by doing deals with political elites to the disadvantage of the local population.

My personal viewpoint is that Africa will collapse because of demographic explosion, government corruption, and rampant disease. I'm pessimistic.

How Models (Ideas) Mislead

There's a short article on the Economist website that points out how the doomsayers keep misleading us. Their reasoning is seductive, but it overlooks human ingenuity. This point is made at length 27 years ago by Julian Simon in his book The Ultimate Resource.

The Economist article is a nice antidote to the current gloom-and-doom crowd. It discusses Malthus and his misleading ideas and the current food shortage scare. But the authors point at the more general problem of letting our models of how the world works mislead us because of their seductive simplicity:

Although neo-Malthusianism naturally has much to say about food scarcity, the doctrine emerges more generally as the idea of absolute limits on resources and energy, such as the notion of “peak oil”. Following the earlier scares of the 1970s, oil companies defied the pessimists by finding extra fields, not least since higher prices had spurred new exploration. But even if oil wells were to run dry, economies can still adapt by finding and exploiting other energy sources.

A new form of Malthusian limit has more recently emerged through the need to constrain greenhouse-gas emissions in order to tackle global warming. But this too can be overcome by shifting to a low-carbon economy. As with agriculture, the main difficulty in making the necessary adjustment comes from poor policies, such as governments' reluctance to impose a carbon tax. There may be curbs on traditional forms of growth, but there is no limit to human ingenuity. That is why Malthus remains as wrong today as he was two centuries ago.

The Green Revolution is in Retreat?

There is an interesting blog entry at Marginal Revolution that points out how technology has allowed us to feed ourselves. The following picture summarizes a very key point:
Norman Borlaug, the "father of the Green Revolution", makes the following very interesting point. I would call this the "Clarence Thomas" point (note: Thomas is the black judge on the US Supreme Court who benefited from affirmative action as his ladder up but who then pulled the ladder up behind him by making judicial decisions that outlawed affirmative action):

Extremists in the environmental movement from the rich nations seem to be doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks. Small, but vociferous and highly effective and well-funded, anti-science and technology groups are slowing the application of new technology, whether it be developed from biotechnology or more conventional methods of agricultural science. I am particularly alarmed by those who seek to deny small-scale farmers of the Third World - and especially those in sub-Saharan Africa - access to the improved seeds, fertilizers, and crop protection chemicals that have allowed the affluent nations the luxury of plentiful and inexpensive foodstuffs which, in turn, has accelerated their economic development.

A commenter on the blog, "Cassandra", emphasizes a key point about the lunacy of the anti-technology, "organic", green movement:

Most people do not have any idea how much the yields have increased over the course of the 20th century. Corn yields in Nebraska now top 210 bushels per acre. Even the best organic is only able to produce about 70 bushels per acre. To produce the same amount with organic farming therefore requires more land.

I love the debate in the comment section of the blog. The greens are aghast at the praise given for growing more on less land. All they can see is "greater consumption" and "more people" and "more environmental damage". Their obvious solution is the old Roman one, decimate them (literally kill every 10th person). That certainly helps cut down on consumption. Of course, I'm waiting for the eco-nuts to fight over being that special 10th person, the one who does the necessary self-sacrifice for the good of us all. Meanwhile, pragmatists notice that humans can fix their problems without radical solutions.

This commentary about solving things with "smaller population" and "eat less meat/become vegan", etc. reminds me of the intellectual furor when I was a kid:

1. Paul Ehrlich and the "Population Bomb" eco-nuts were demanding Zero Population Growth and moaning "we are all going to die in a horrible famine". Well, it didn't happen. Neither the famine nor the Malthusian runaway population. Most first world countries today have a population deficit problem that is only solved by immigration to keep the population from falling due to the low birth rate. What does this teach us? It tells us that the solution wasn't the "decimate them!" cry of the purists. Instead it was seeking to increase wealth that, in turn, gave people the education and tools to control their own reproduction.
   
2. Similarly, visions of us dying is a miasmic swamp of pollutants hasn't happened. The solution wasn't "decimate them!" to rid the pure world of those impure souls who insist on defecating and allowing their machine exhaust to sully Mother Earth, instead it was to increase wealth that, in turn, allowed us to develop cleaner technologies that reduce pollution and/or treat pollutants rather than release them directly into the environment.
   

I get depressed by religious fundamentalists who have simplistic solutions. Similarly, I get depressed by green activists who have their set of simplistic solutions. Enough of self-appointed "messengers" telling us what to do. Let the people find their way to a solution. Most real solutions require a pragmatic "feeling your way" approach that evolves toward a solution. Beware of people who knock you over the head with simplistic solutions.

Pigs and Global Warming, What's the Connection?

Sometimes the world is just too ridiculous. You have to fall down laughing.

On the one hand we have riots around the world from food shortages. On the other hand, the Canadian government is going to spend money to destroy pigs in order to create a shortage.

In what is being called an unprecedented move, the federal government will pay Canadian pork producers $50 million to kill off 150,000 of their pigs by the fall as the industry teeters on the brink of economic collapse.

The animals are being destroyed at slaughter plants and on pig farms in a bid to cull the swine breeding herd by 10 per cent.

Most of the meat is to be used for pet food or otherwise disposed of, but up to 25 per cent of it will be made available to Canadian food banks.

Great! So the pets get a cheap meal. The poor and homeless will get free food. But the working stiff is expected to suck it up and watch while the government spends tax dollars to make sure that the price of meat stays high. Why not let the pork producers send the pigs off to slaughter and let the retailers lower the price to clear the market and give the population to enjoy cheap meat?

By the way, why are the pig producers having to kill their pigs in such a rush? Here's the official government reason:

Producers are weighed down by the cumulative impact of low prices, increasing feeds costs and the high value of the loonie. They are also facing new country-of-origin labelling rules for meat products in the United States that are to go into effect later this year.

There's a lot of hogwash in there. The real reason is hidden in the middle: "increasing feed costs". Because of the worldwide food shortage, prices of all agricultural foods have doubled and tripled. So a pig farmer can't afford to pay big bucks for food for his pigs. So farmers need to rush the pigs to slaughter to reduce costs. Of course that means we'll all pay a whole bunch more for meat next year. In the interim, the Canadian government is going to short circuit the whole thing by using tax dollars to remove the meat from the human consumption market to "raise" prices. Thanks Mr. Bureaucrat. I elected you to make my food costs higher! Yeah, sure.

If you want to see an economist get hyperbolic about the coming crisis, watch Don Coxe, an economist with Bank of Montreal be interviewed about the global food shortage. He paints a very grim picture. He's more worried about the food crisis than he is about the financial crisis. He foresees governments falling and the rise of "Hitler-style autarky" as the crisis leads beyond riots to crowds overthrowing governments.

Meanwhile, the Canadian government is not looking past its nose. It is fixated on the short term, the "need" to clear the market of excess pork, and not seeing the longer term problem: higher costs for feedstocks will cause pig farmers decimate their herds by selling off animals at whatever price they can get to the cut their costs which means that meat prices will go sky high next year because the herds have been decimated and the costs of feedstocks are double, triple, or quadruple the traditional costs. With government bureaucrats "solving" a non-existant problem (short term drop in prices as pig farmers panic to clear stocks) while ignoring the real problem coming down the track: sky high prices as all agriculture products a rising astronomically. (This kind of government shooting itself in the foot reminds me of the Nixon government doing a secret deal to sell large amounts of food to Russia and thereby causing food costs in the US to go sky high right in the middle of the "stagflation" of the 1970s.)

Step back for a second:

Is there any reason why we've run into this agricultural problem at this time? As Don Coxe points out, for 50 years the governments in the developed world have been busy running programs to pay farmers to not grow crops. But now that the warehouses are empty, nobody has noticed and changed policy. The trigger has been drought in a few areas (Australia). And it can get worse. As Don Coxe points out, the corn crop is already two weeks late in being planted in North America. Why? Oh, because last year was the coldest in a long time, a full 0.7 degrees below normal, so the growing season is shorter. He traces this to the low sunspot activity. (He doesn't mention La Nina, but that is also playing a role.)

I laugh myself silly because we have governments running around trying to set up programs to deal with Global Warming when in fact the weather (at least short term) has gone cold and crops are failing and we will have mass starvation. So again, bureaucrats are firmly dealing with the wrong problem.

This is all so ludicrous you wonder, could anyone create this story and be believed? No! It is just too crazy. Just too silly. Just too much incompetence. But, sadly, this is the real world.