by J. Michael Wheeler
The honor of calling oneself a foodie presupposes the fact that one has enough to eat. The choice to buy natural, free-range, organic, farm-stand, or artisanal is meaningless if the markets have no food on their shelves. What happens when food prices escalate too high for those whose daily sustenance hinges on staples like rice and corn? What happens when there just isn’t enough food produced? Global food shortages threaten social and economic chaos from Nigeria to India. We have already seen marches and protests against rising food costs. We have seen food riots.
Follow the Money
I’m no economist, but like Tip O’Neil’s comment on politics, all economics is local economics. How does feeding corn to your car affect the price of tortillas in Chilapa, Mexico? When Vietnam, the rice powerhouse of Southeast Asia, decides to withhold exporting rice to conserve it for it’s own people, will Wal-Mart be forced to ration its rice sales?
The Wall Street Journal (June 25, 2008) reports that Monsanto, the world leader in agricultural biotechnology, has had sharp increases in its price and earnings growth. Its stock has soared 22%. The company is expected to report a 35% third-quarter profit from a year ago. The Journal attributes part of this profit increase to Monsanto’s “engineered foods.”
Monsanto seeds produce insect-resistant, drought-tolerant crops. It has pledged to double crop yields by 2030 for corn, soybeans and cotton and to reduce the need for water, land and energy by 30%, as an effort to position itself as a solution to concerns about mounting strain on the global natural resources.
The Journal article begs a larger question though: can we bring green practices to a world where food abundance is not assured? Is an “organic movement” a luxury that the world cannot afford? Is our industrial-agriculture part of the food shortage problem, or are “franken-foods” the only way out?
With another nod to Tip, Is all agriculture, global agriculture?
