Food shortages threaten global political stability

From barely making an appearance on the world's political horizon, climate change and the challenges of securing enough food and water to survive should now be taking a front seat.

The theme at a Fair Trade festival held yesterday goes beyond food security. This year's Worldfest by Kooperativa Kummerc Gust is part of a campaign for all people to have the right to safe, nutritious food, and the ability to sustain themselves with food-producing resources such as soil and water.

Earth Policy Institute president Lester Brown wrote this month in Scientific American magazine on how food shortages threaten global political stability.

The potential for food crises in poor countries causing government collapse is jacked up by rising demand and ever worsening environmental degradation.

The economic crisis pales in comparison.

On the demand side, global population is swelling by 70 million people yearly, while the food supply side is threatened by falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures. Massive intervention is needed to reverse these three environmental trends.

Higher temperatures mean lower grain yields. Human-induced climate change is melting glaciers that have been sustaining major rivers and irrigation systems in China and India over the dry season for millennia. If the meltdown continues at current rates, major rivers like the Ganges could become seasonal, devastating wheat and rice harvests.

A backlog of unresolved problems is growing as the world fails to solve existing ones. Markets are not telling the ecological truth as the price of fossil fuels does not reflect the cost of climate change.

Brown warns that a restructuring of the global energy economy "similar in scale and urgency to the wartime restructuring of the US industrial economy in 1942" is what the world needs now.

Ten per cent of world scientists still dispute or doubt that the present rate of climate change is caused by man-made activity. Green MEP Claude Turmes, on a visit to Malta last month, compared it to fiddling while the planet burns.

"If you know a plane has a 90 per cent chance of crashing you do not board the plane," he said.

There is no doubt that the climate is changing fast. On this point everyone agrees.

Speaking at Circolo Gozitano, Mr Turmes said the economic downturn was a symptom of more than just a financial crisis - it was a system crisis. Since the mid-1980s we have had enough scientific evidence that greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, would "deregulate" the earth's climate.

At the 1992 world summit in Brazil, world leaders were advised to carry out economic development in a different way. Then came globalisation, with finance deregulated and all barriers to trade dismantled. This put in the deep freeze the discussion on using resources more sparingly.

Short-term thinking in economic development was the order of the day, and growth was accelerated beyond a sustainable balance. A moment of clarity came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

"For the first time, in the US, the citizen understood that climate change could bring a disaster," said Mr Turmes.

The scale of future scenarios is difficult for the broader public to accept, but the political elite may be the slowest group to take the enormity of climate change on board.

The close link between high oil prices and the price of food comes about partly because agri-industry invests in systems dependent on pesticides and fertilisers. The developed world's oil-based economy is now being copied by countries like China. But the mainstream model adopted from the developed world is based on inefficient use of finite resources.

Mr Turmes sees the days ahead as the last chance for humankind to make a soft transition to a greener way of orienting the economy. He predicts that if the economy is not transformed, wars will break out over dwindling resources. Niger and Chad are already fighting over uranium deposits. Part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a fight for control of water.

Technology helps buy time. Mr Turmes advocates long-termism over neo-liberal overshoot which is "making money without caring for the world".

Small economies like Malta and Gozo can adapt more quickly but they are also more fragile. MEP candidate Edward Scicluna pointed out that while small islands can adapt more quickly to the challenges of climate change, the impact on their fragile economies is also larger.

Moderately hopeful that the world will listen, Prof. Scicluna noted the impact that the Stern report had on the UK Parliament. When the political time horizon is so short, getting governments to take a problem seriously is a challenge in itself. Despite all the predictive modelling available, no one could predict the wave of migration we are seeing today.

MEP candidate Arnold Cassola drew attention to the June deadline for applications for intelligent energy projects to tap this €100 million fund, and promised help to anyone wishing to apply. Bureaucracy still plagues those wading through paper mountains to access funding for their projects.

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