A discussão sobre tudo o que se está a passar continua: - sobre as causas; sobre as possibilidades dessa crise se repetir; sobre aquilo que se impõe fazer; sobre a futura escassez dos inputs da produção agrícola; sobre o impacto ambiental da utilização desses inputs. Os artigos estão arrumados dos mais recentes para os mais antigos.
Uma nota de caução: a escolha que faço das ligações não é só na base do que concordo ou não concordo, mas de outros factores: informação que careiam; originalidade do que dizem; capacidade de retratarem dadas posições; disponibilidade futura para comentário ou referência.
Isto vem a propósito, nomeadamente, da última nota aqui referenciada: a de Paul Collier - não tenho dúvidas de que o sistema de produção alimentar a nível mundial deve incorporar níveis elevados de produtividade, de inovação, de aplicação científica, no contexto de comércio internacional liberalizado (com salvaguardas), como forma de se poder alimentar uma população cada vez maior. Assim, deve continuar a incorporar traços importantes da agro-indústria mais "desenvolvida" - no entanto, não pode continuar a ser mais do mesmo: intensivo na utilização da energia fóssil; intensivo na utilização de adubos não renováveis (e com consequências ambientais preocupantes); extensivo na utilização da terra. Naturalmente, outras alterções têm de ocorrer na envolvente da produção alimentar: uma, muito importante: o paradigma alimentar tem de mudar.
O problema é saber como conciliar todas esses objectivos e restrições.
- "On lit partout que la hausse violente des prix agricoles tient à deux facteurs qui jouent sur la demande : une population mieux nourrie dans les pays émergents, et consommant davantage de viande, produit qui exige davantage de surface à nutrition identique ; et plus récemment la compétition des biocarburants pour occuper, à coup de subventions, leur lot de terres arables. On mentionne moins un troisième facteur, du côté de l’offre, qui joue de façon plus rampante et peut-être plus pernicieuse : l’urbanisation galopante, notamment dans les pays émergents, qui dévore inexorablement les terres arables."
- "During the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank forced dozens of poor food-importing countries to dismantle these state systems. Poor farmers were told to fend for themselves, to let "market forces" provide for inputs. This was a profound mistake: there were no such market forces. "
- Waste not, want not Comment is free:"It's a big issue, not least because there is a major question mark about future reserves of phosphate. Concentrations of phosphorus that are rich enough to be worth mining are fairly rare and appear to be declining rapidly. It's impossible to make firm predictions, but bodies as diverse as the UN and the International Fertilizer Industry Association have warned that the world's reserves might not survive the century."
- Dani Rodrik's weblog: Does the food price crisis enhance the case for self-sufficiency?"The rise in food prices and the costs it generates have been aggravated, some say, by policies of import liberalization and subsidy removal which the World Bank and economists advocated around the developing world in the 1980s and later. If developing country policies supporting food crops had not been dismantled, this argument goes, poor people in these countries would not have been left in the throes of volatile world market forces and they would not have suffered as much recently."Industrial agriculture currently stands as humanity's big plan for "feeding the world" as global population moves toward 10 billion and the earth warms. Increasingly, as oil supplies tighten and prices rise, we're looking to industrial ag to fill our gas tanks, too. Unhappily, this relatively new form of farming relies utterly on three elements, two mined (potassium and phosphorus) and one synthesized from natural gas (nitrogen). In other words, unless we quickly move toward other agriculture models, we're likely to see increased geopolitical competition for these resources, outsized power for the entities that control them -- and diminishing efforts to control the ecological effects of extracting them.
- 'The Saudi Arabia of fertilizer' Gristmill: The environmental news blog Grist"Several questions arise here. Is it really sustainable to "feed the world" -- much less move its cars -- using technologies that require ravenous doses of finite resources?"
- Prix agricoles : qui perd, qui gagne? Telos"La hausse des prix alimentaires pose des problèmes aux plus pauvres, mais elle peut bénéficier aux petits producteurs agricoles. En même temps, la volatilité des cours n’est bonne pour personne. Les plus pauvres ont besoin d’une assurance contre la variation des prix. "
- Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong
The cage match! In this corner, Megan McArdle and Parson Malthus:
Megan McArdle: Economics of Contempt: Call me crazy, but I think a permanent doubling of food and energy prices would slow our rate of economic growth pretty significantly. How long it would take incomes to recover "at current rates of economic growth" is irrelevant when the doubling of food and energy prices would lower the rate of economic growth. Given that we and all our machines run on either food or energy, it's a pretty safe bet to say that doubling their prices would have a sizeable impact on growth.
In this corner, Greg Clark: China, India and Malthus - Los Angeles Times: Thomas Malthus warned in 1798 that population pressures would forever keep food and energy scarce and incomes low. In the 200 years since, world population has grown sevenfold, to 6.7 billion. Yet food and energy have become cheaper and more abundant. Malthus's dystopia, it seemed, belonged in history's junkyard. But, suddenly, rapid growth in China and India and the consequent scramble for increasingly scarce resources has revived the Malthusian specter.
By 2050, 9 billion people in a world where all have U.S. consumption standards would need eight times as much oil and five times as much food than the planet current uses. Is the future a world of $10-a-gallon gas and $20 Big Macs? Two things allowed growth to occur from 1750 to 2000 with declining commodity prices. First, only a small fraction of the world grew rapidly.... The West was alone in its voracious appetite for raw materials and energy. Second, fossil fuels cheaply substituted for land in agriculture by increasing crop yields.... What will happen depends on the race between technological improvement and growing demand.... [N]o one can predict which force will win. A "full world"... may also be one of cheap and abundant commodities. But suppose the worse. Suppose [commodity] abundance is over. Must we fear that? The answer is no. First, the share of modern U.S. consumption devoted to raw food and energy purchases is small: 1.4% for food raw materials, 7% for energy. The U.S. economy can withstand enormous increases in food and energy costs with little damage because food and energy are even now so extravagantly cheap that most of both are squandered in uses of little value.
In my town -- Davis, Calif. -- there is a traffic jam outside the main high school each morning as healthy teenagers are ferried by car or drive themselves a few miles to school. They are ferried from houses that are heated, air-conditioned and lighted, most of which rarely gets used by people. Currently in the U.S., we consume the energy equivalent of six gallons of gas per person per day.... Danes, for example -- whose public policy mandates expensive energy -- use the equivalent of only three gallons.... The Danes are not suffering.... Given that we can easily reduce consumption when costs go up, a permanent doubling of the prices of food and energy would reduce income by less than 6%. At current rates of economic growth, incomes would recover from such a shock in less than three years. After that, onward on our march to ever greater prosperity.
I call this one for Greg Clark. I am a utopian neoliberal optimist.
Common Wealth - Jeffrey D. Sachs - Book Review - New York Times
The timing for Jeffrey D. Sachs’s new book on how to avert global economic catastrophe couldn’t be better, with food riots in Haiti, oil topping $120 a barrel and a gnawing sense that there’s just less of everything — rice, fossil fuels, credit — to go around. Of course, we’ve been here before. In the 19th century, Thomas Malthus teased out the implications of humans reproducing more rapidly than the supply of food could grow. In 1972, the Club of Rome published, to much hoopla, a book entitled “Limits to Growth.” The thesis: There are too many people and too few natural resources to go around. In 1978, Mr. Smith, my sixth-grade science teacher, proclaimed that there was sufficient petroleum to last 25 to 30 years. Well, as Yogi Berra once may have said, “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”
And yet. Even congenital optimists have good reason to suspect that this time the prophets of economic doom may be on point, with the advent of seemingly unstoppable developments like climate change and the explosive growth of China and India. Which is why Sachs’s book — lucid, quietly urgent and relentlessly logical — resonates. Things are different today, he writes, because of four trends: human pressure on the earth, a dangerous rise in population, extreme poverty and a political climate characterized by “cynicism, defeatism and outdated institutions.” These pressures will increase as the developing world inexorably catches up to the developed world.
By 2050, he writes, the world’s population may rise to 9.2 billion from 6.6 billion today — an increase of 2.6 billion people, which is “too many people to absorb safely.” The combination of climate change and a rapidly growing population clustering in coastal urban zones will set the stage for many Katrinas, not to mention “a global epidemic of obesity, cardiovascular disease and adult-onset diabetes.”
Watch out, they spit Free exchange Economist.com:
"FREE EXCHANGE has been keeping an eye on the many unexpected consequences associated with rising food and energy prices. It is remarkable to see the interconnectedness of the economy in vivid relief. Today's story, from the Financial Times and courtesy of Greg Mankiw, involves the cross price elasticity of demand between oil and...well, just read for yourself [camelos]:..."
FT.com The Economists’ Forum Food crisis is a chance to reform global agriculture#comment-11083 de Paul Collier (ver em May 2nd, 2008 at 10:03 am Report this comment How not to address the food crisis Free exchange Economist.com uma informação sobre esta nota).
"The sharp increase in the world price of staple foods is an inconvenience for consumers in the rich world, but for consumers in the poorest countries, especially in Africa, it is a catastrophe. Despite the predominance of peasant agriculture, most African countries are net food importers and food accounts for over half of the budget of low-income households. This is the result of decades of agricultural stagnation combined with growing populations. Although many of the net purchasers are rural, evidently the problem is at its most intense in the urban slums. These slums are political powder kegs and so rising food prices have already triggered riots. Indeed, they sow the seeds of an ugly and destructive populist politics. Why have food prices rocketed? Paradoxically, this squeeze on the poorest has come about as a result of the success of globalization in reducing world poverty.
As China develops, helped by its massive exports to our markets, millions of Chinese households have started to eat better. Better means not just more food but more meat, the new luxury. But to produce a kilo of meat takes six kilos of grain. Livestock reared for meat to be consumed in Asia are now eating the grain that would previously have been eaten by the African poor. So what is the remedy? The best solution to a problem is often not closely related to its cause (a proposition that that might be recognized in the climate change debate).
China’s long march to prosperity is something to celebrate. The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market. To give one remarkable example, the time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, in effect the downtime for land, has been reduced an astounding thirty minutes. There are still many areas of the world that have good land which could be used far more productively if it was properly managed by large companies. For example, almost 90% of Mozambique’s land, an enormous area, is idle.
Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago.
Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited to innovation and investment: the result has been that African agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model. Indeed, during the present phase of high prices the FAO is worried that African peasants are likely to reduce their production because they cannot finance the increased cost of fertilizer inputs. While there are partial solutions to this problem through subsidies and credit schemes, large scale commercial agriculture simply does not face this problem: if output prices rise by more than input prices, production will be expanded because credit lines are well-established.
Our longstanding agricultural romanticism has been compounded by our new-found environmental romanticism. In the United States fears of climate change have been manipulated by shrewd interests to produce grotesquely inefficient subsidies for bio-fuel. Around a third of American grain production has rapidly been diverted into energy production. This switch demonstrates both the superb responsiveness of the market to price signals, and the shameful power of subsidy-hunting lobby groups. Given the depth of anti-Americanism in Europe it is, of course, fashionable to criticize the American folly with bio-fuels. But Europe has its equivalent follies.
First, the European Commission is now imitating the American bio-fuels policy. At present the programme is small enough to be unimportant, but we need to pull it back before it does real damage. We have surely learnt enough about European agriculture to realize how important it is to kill this incipient scam before we are engulfed by it. But the true European equivalent of America’s folly with bio-fuels is the ban on GM. Europe’s distinctive and deep-seated fears of science have been manipulated by the agricultural lobby into yet another form of protectionism. The ban on both the production and import of genetically modified crops has obviously retarded productivity growth in European agriculture: again, the best that can be said of it is that we are rich enough to afford such folly. But Europe is a major agricultural producer, so the cumulative consequence of this reduction in the growth of productivity has most surely rebounded onto world food markets.
Further, and most cruelly, as an unintended side-effect the ban has terrified African governments into themselves banning genetic modification in case by growing modified crops they would permanently be shut out of selling to European markets. Africa definitely cannot afford this self-denial. It needs all the help it can possibly get from genetic modification. Not only is Africa currently being hit by rising food prices, over the longer term it will face climatic deterioration in the context of a rapidly growing population. While the policies needed for the long term have been befuddled by romanticism, the short term global response has been pure beggar-thy-neighbour. It is easier for urban slum dwellers to riot than for farmers: riots need streets, not fields. And so, in the internal tussles between the interests of poor consumers and poor producers, the interests of consumers have prevailed.
Governments in grain-exporting countries have swung price favour of their consumers and against their farmers by banning exports. These responses further politicize and fragment an already confused global food market. They increase the risks of investing in commercial-scale food production and drive up prices further in the food-importing countries. Unfortunately, trade in agriculture has been the main economic activity to have resisted being subject to global rules. We need stronger and fairer globalization, not less of it."
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