Tag Archives: food supply

October 2020 in Review

In current events, this was just the month that the fall resurgence of Covid-19 exploded in the U.S. and around the world. Just a month when a new, controversial Supreme Court justice was sworn in. Just the last month leading up to the Biden-Trump election, amid a swirl of questions about a peaceful and orderly transfer of power if the voting goes the way the polls clearly say it is going to. Just a month when my home city erupted in “unrest” for the second time this year and the National Guard rolled in. (Incidentally, Joe Biden is also here as I write this on November 1, and I wonder if the National Guard rolling in is entirely a coincidence.)

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Global ecological collapse is most likely upon us, and our attention is elsewhere. The good news is we still have enough to eat (on average – of course we don’t get it to everyone who needs it), for now.

Most hopeful story: We have almost survived another four years without a nuclear war. Awful as Covid-19 has been, we will get through it despite the current administration’s complete failure to plan, prevent, prepare, respond or manage it. There would be no such muddling through a nuclear war.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are at least some bright ideas on how to innovate faster and better.

what’s really going on with the food supply?

The USDA, the UN, and Bloomberg say there is a “food inequality crisis…sweeping the globe”. It sounds like supplies of soybeans and wheat are down somewhat due to drought in some places (South America and Europe) and storms in others (Iowa specifically is mentioned in the article.) In this environment, prices are up, and because incomes are down due to the pandemic, poor countries and poor people are outbid and going hungry.

Of course, no specific flood, drought, or pandemic can be attributed to climate change…blah blah yada yada. Looking at the FAO Food Price Index, the current mini-spike is well below the major spikes of 2008 and 2011. Well, climate change is a long term signal embedded in a lot of short term noise, but dealing with food supply and food price issues in the short term could be a trial run for how we deal with the creeping long term problem before it is too late. The long term problem will gradually keep creeping up on us, embedded in lots of noise, and then some big event or series of events will be the straw that breaks the global food supply camel’s back. Let’s do something about it now.

What should we do? Well, I’m not an expert, but it starts with water. We need to stop overexploiting groundwater, and we probably need to think about shifting food production away from areas that rely primarily on glaciers and snowmelt, coastal areas that may experience saltwater intrusion or outright inundation, and areas expected to experience increasingly severe droughts. We need to pay attention to soil conservation. We need to pay attention to biodiversity, both to protect ecosystem services such as pollination and to make crops themselves more resilient (crops are subject to their own pandemics). We need sustainable fisheries. Maybe we need to move more production indoors under lights powered by renewable energy (or, I hate to say it, nuclear reactors). That might also help us control the nutrient pollution that is choking our coastal ecosystems. Recovering more nutrients from wastewater and farm waste might play a role. We may need to encourage people to eat more plants and less meat. Maybe we need more urban gardens and rooftop gardens and food forests. Finally, biotechnology probably has a role to play, but in my opinion we shouldn’t rely on this but should think of it as icing on the cake made of a mix of all the low-tech ingredients I mention above.