Unintended Consequences Watch: Food Crisis
posted by Frank Pasquale
Could a misguided response to global warming be the main reason for current global food shortages? That’s the apparent conclusion of an incendiary internal study at the World Bank recently leaked to the Guardian:
Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% – far more than previously estimated – according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian. . . . [P]roduction of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.
If this report is true, it should be a sobering reminder for progressives that “raising consciousness” about a particular problem is useless in the context of “politics-as-usual.” Many voices warned about the consequences of food/fuel competition for grains, but were dismissed as Cassandras and neighsayers. Consider this view from Lester Brown in 2006:
Now, almost everything we eat can be converted into automotive fuel. And once the price of oil surpassed $60 a barrel last year, the business of transforming wheat, corn, soybeans and sugarcane into fuel for cars instead of food for people became hugely profitable. As crops that have long sustained us are diverted to provide fuel, we [are setting up] a battle between the world’s 800 million automobile owners, who want to maintain their mobility, and the world’s 2 billion poorest people, who simply want to survive.
$60 a barrel–would that were possible now! In any event, the food/fuel crisis is a stark indicator that go-along, get-along politics in Washington (and the corn/car/oilman alliance that drives our energy policy) can have deadly consequences. It also teaches that inequality is the most important narrative frame and context for major policy decisions. Neoclassical economic thought tends to treat the fact of inequality as secondary, and it certainly isn’t comfortable for average drivers to recognize their complicity in troubling trends worldwide. But if progressives don’t keep the harsh facts of inequality foremost in their environmental advocacy, they risk creating sham crises which provoke “cures” that are worse than the disease they purport to cure.
By the way, the report “The Death of Environmentalism” suggests some ways this can be done:
In a written statement, Pew’s Josh Reichert said, “Ultimately, the labor movement in this country needs to become positively engaged in efforts to address climate change. They need to recognize that, if done properly, reducing greenhouse gases will not be detrimental to labor. On the contrary, it will spawn industries and create jobs that we don’t have now.”
The unspoken assumptions here are a) the problem, or “root cause,” is “greenhouse gases”, b) labor must accept the environmental movement’s framing of the problem as greenhouse gases, and c) it’s the responsibility of labor to get with the program on global warming.
The problem is that environmental leaders have persuaded themselves that it’s their job to worry about “environmental” problems and that it’s the labor movement’s job to worry about “labor” problems. If there’s overlap, they say, great. But we should never ever forget who we really are. . . .
The tendency to put the environment into an airtight container away from the concerns of others is at the heart of the environmental movement’s defensiveness on economic issues. Our defensiveness on the economy elevates the frame that action on global warming will kill jobs and raise electricity bills. The notion that environmentalists should answer industry charges instead of attacking those very industries for blocking investment into the good new jobs of the future is yet another symptom of literal-scleroris.
Combine a “preferential option for the poor” with Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s thought, and we may begin to see a response to global warming fully cognizant of the buying power externality.
July 8, 2008 at 8:37 am
Posted in: Environmental Law
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