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Is Britain sleepwalking into a food crisis?

April 4, 2018

Is Britain sleepwalking into a food crisis?

Image: Andrew Stawarz, CC BY-ND 2.0

On May 8th the government will end its consultation period on a new agricultural policy for England. Revealingly, its policy document – called ‘Health and Harmony: The future for food, farming and the environment in a Green Brexit’– has more to say about the environment than either food or farming. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) wishes to end the direct subsidies that farmers have received under European Union policies, and environmental schemes are at the heart of its proposals.  The policy seems likely to go through, with firm support from environmental groups.

But this is curious in two ways. Policy for the environmental consequences of agriculture is very important.  As we read this week, “In the past 50 years in Britain, through the intensification of agriculture, we have destroyed well over half of our biodiversity, and the populations of birds, butterflies and wild flowers that once gave the landscape such animation and thrilling life have been utterly devastated”.

The measures will be beneficial and they flow on from those of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), 87 per cent of which in England now goes to agri-environment schemes. However, they mainly concern indirect effects of agriculture. DEFRA has little to say about its immediate impacts on the soil itself and through emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases. The report’s 64 pages make no mention of the damage done to soils by modern industrial agriculture as such.

Soil scientists now understand the varied roles that soil microbes play in these areas and more: nutrient cycling; carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus utilisation; carbon sequestration; methane mitigation; soil fertility; and plant nutrient density. Carbon sequestration means a healthy soil will counter climate change since it absorbs carbon dioxide. This has stimulated a farming method called regenerative agriculture, which rebuilds organic matter and restores biodiversity in the soil, ‘resulting in both carbon drawdown and improving the water cycle.’ But DEFRA says nothing about that.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Culture shift: redirecting humanity’s path to a flourishing future

March 25, 2018

Culture shift: redirecting humanity’s path to a flourishing future

It’s time to build a new worldview around a deeper sense of connectedness.

Honghe Hani Rice Terraces in Yunnan Province, China.. Credit: By Jialiang Gao, www.peace-on-earth.org – Original Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

What do all these ideas have in common—a tax on carbon, big investments in renewable energy, a livable minimum wage, and freely accessible healthcare? The answer is that we need all of them, but even taken together they’re utterly insufficient to redirect humanity away from impending catastrophe and toward a truly flourishing future.

That’s because the problems these ideas are designed to solve, critical as they are, are symptoms of an even more profound problem: the implicit values of a global economic and political system that is driving civilization toward a precipice.

Even with the best of intentions, those actively working to reform the current system are a bit like software engineers valiantly trying to fix multiple bugs in a faulty software program: each fix complicates the code, leading inevitably to a new set of bugs that require even more heroic workarounds. Ultimately, it becomes clear that the problem isn’t just the software: an entirely new operating system is required to get where we need to go.

This realization dawned on me gradually over the years I spent researching my book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. My research began as a personal search for meaning. I’d been through a personal crisis when the certainties on which I’d built my early life came crashing down around me. I wanted my life going forward to be truly meaningful—but based on what foundation? I was determined to sort through the received narratives of meaning until I came across a foundation I could really believe in.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Sweden complicit in war crimes in Yemen?

February 22, 2018

Is Sweden complicit in war crimes in Yemen?

Despite the documented crimes of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, Sweden continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

A Yemeni man inspects the damage caused by an alleged Saudi-led air strike in Sanaa, Yemen, 04 February 2018. Picture by Hani Al-Ansi/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved. Despite Sweden leading a few special UN sessions in response to the acute humanitarian crisis in Yemen, it still has not demonstrated a political appetite to stop its arms sales to the most active warring parties in the Yemen war: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Swedish parliament is due to discussits governmental policies on Swedish arms exports, on the 28th of February – and anti-militarization Swedish groups are demanding that Sweden halts all its arms sales to both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Human rights groups have documented serious attacks committed by both the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis

In the course of the ongoing war in Yemen human rights groups have documented serious attacks committed by both the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis against civilian sites. These attacks appear to have violated international humanitarian law and may constitute war crimes. While the Houthis grew their military power ever since they overtook Sana’a on September 2014, with the support of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Saudi-led coalition’s military activities in Yemen were only possible because of their weapon supplies from several western countries – including Sweden.

The Yemen Data Project reveals that since 2015, nearly one-third of Saudi air raids hit non-military sites; such as schools, hospitals, weddings, funerals among many other civilian targets. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both documented dozens of unlawful coalition airstrikes, some of which may amount to war crimes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Myth and dystopia in the Anthropocene

December 6, 2017

Myth and dystopia in the Anthropocene

The sleeping ice giants of Antarctica are stirring. Will we wake up before they devour us?

Calving front of the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina. Credit: Flickr/Etienne Berthier, Université de Toulouse. CC-BY-2.0.

In the autumn of 1913, Karl Jung dreamt of a monstrous flood of yellow waves cascading down from the North Sea through north-west Europe and down onto the Alps. Later in his apocalyptic dream-vision the swirling yellow seas turned blood red amidst “the floating rubble of civilisation, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands.”

Nine months later Jung had a similarly dramatic dream, but this time with a different emphasis: “An Arctic cold wave descended and froze the land to ice…The whole of Lorraine and its canals frozen and the entire region totally deserted by human beings.”

I thought of Jung’s pre-World War One visions when I read of the stirring of the sleeping ice giants of East Antarctica earlier this year. According to recent research, one of those glaciers—the Totten (larger than the state of California)—is moving slowly towards the Southern Ocean as a result of global warming, with the potential  to raise sea levels by 3.5 metres in future decades.

This figure is a worst case scenario, but a sea level rise of even a fraction of that figure could lead to extraordinarily worrying outcomes. In the case of the Totten glacier, warm ocean water is seeping up from the bottom of the sea into the cavity beneath this vast ice giant, which could destabilise the surrounding ice sheet even further. That’s important because East Antarctica has long been regarded as more stable than West Antarctica in terms of its melting ice.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The movement to replace neoliberalism is on the ascendency – where should it go next?

November 27, 2017

The movement to replace neoliberalism is on the ascendency – where should it go next?

Ten years after the crash, the movement to replace neoliberalism is in the ascendency. Well organised campaigns cover everything from the promotion of pluralism in economic curricula to the application of new economic principles in local communities. Academics and campaigners, who prior to the crash were lone voices in the wind, have been joined by a growing chorus of economists and commentators acknowledging that neoliberalism is not working. Importantly, these now include those in mainstream institutions that have become synonymous with the status quo, such as the IMF and OECD. Meanwhile, bottom up movements, surfing a heady mix of social media and dissatisfaction with orthodox economic ideas, are beginning to score political victories across the world.

This is because neoliberalism – the broad set of political-economic ideas and policies which have dominated public life over the last 40 years – has failed, in both theory and in practice. It is in the wake of the global financial crisis that these failures have plumbed new depths. Financial instability looms over economies shackled by insufficient investment. Living standards stagnate and work becomes ever more insecure, shattering the implicit bargain of the entire endeavour. The human costs of this experiment have been enormous, with psychological and non-communicable ill-health becoming the hallmark of a system that cares for little but profit. Inequality, itself linked to ill-health, has grown to levels unseen since the nineteenth century, leading to large power imbalances throughout society. Socio-economic mobility has been further stalled by the erosion of the public realm, from universities to the legal system. Most pressingly, neoliberalism continues to rely on a growth model that is destroying the biophysical preconditions upon which it relies, increasing the chance of collapse in the climate and other natural systems.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It’s time to call the housing crisis what it really is: the largest transfer of wealth in living memory

November 15, 2017

It’s time to call the housing crisis what it really is: the largest transfer of wealth in living memory

Image: Images Money, CC BY 2.0

One of the basic claims of capitalism is that people are rewarded in line with their effort and productivity. Another is that the economy is not a zero sum game. The beauty of a capitalist economy, we are told, is that people who work hard can get rich without making others poorer.

But how does this stack up in modern Britain, the birthplace of capitalism and many of its early theorists? Last week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released new data tracking how wealth has evolved over time. On paper, the UK has indeed become much wealthier in recent decades. Net wealth has more than tripled since 1995, increasing by over £7 trillion. This is equivalent to an average increase of nearly £100,000 per person. Impressive stuff. But where has all this wealth come from, and who has it benefitted?

Just over £5 trillion, or three quarters of the total increase, is accounted for by increase in the value of dwellings – another name for the UK housing stock. The Office for National Statistics explains that this is “largely due to increases in house prices rather than a change in the volume of dwellings.” This alone is not particularly surprising. We are forever told about the importance of ‘getting a foot on the property ladder’. The housing market has long been viewed as a perennial source of wealth.

But the price of a property is made up of two distinct components: the price of the building itself, and the price of the land that the structure is built upon. This year the ONS has separated out these two components for the first time, and the results are quite astounding.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Currency of Localism

August 31, 2017

The Currency of Localism

Image: Mark Simmons

Two or three times a year, I drive back and forth between London and Valencia – a family responsibility that is no less pleasurable for being tiring.  Whenever possible on these three-day journeys I try to spend at least one night at a remote inn I chanced upon some time ago in rural France. Perched on a hilltop in the mountainous  Auvergne region, the inn offers spectacular views of the landscape, plus hosts who are unusual not just for the warmth of their welcome but also for their 100 per cent organic cuisine and their dedication to environmental conservation.  Minimising waste and non-renewable sources of energy, and maximising the use of local produce are their operational guidelines.

Vegetables come fresh from the garden, meat and cheese from nearby farms, wild mushrooms from adjacent meadows. Breakfast includes home-made yoghurt, and bread baked at dawn by the hostess using wheat from the valley below. The inn is small – a work in progress emerging slowly from what was, a few years ago, a ramshackle assembly of ruined farm buildings. Guests are never more numerous than can fit comfortably round the rustic dining table in the main house, and since the inn lies at the end of a steep, narrow road and requires persistence to find, these often turn out to have an exploratory turn of mind and to be interesting conversationalists – as indeed are the hosts.  I have dined there in the company of university professors, journalists, musicians, architects, archeologists and even a couple of aid workers on leave from French West Africa.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Beyond the Zombie Economy

July 17, 2016

Beyond the Zombie Economy 

The present day metaphor is the ‘Zombie’ economy depicting the economic system as an unthinking monster in relentless pursuit of a single objective. Part of the Anti-Austerity and Media Activism series with Goldsmiths.

Flickr/S
J Pinkney. Some rights reserved.

Economic metaphors are important to illustrate the distinct features of specific economic systems that exist at particular times. The Great Depression, for instance, uses a psychological framing of ‘depression’ to depict the dynamics of an economic system incapable of recovering from financial collapse. The present day metaphor is the ‘Zombie’ economy depicting the economic system as an unthinking monster in relentless pursuit of a single objective – here, short-term profits are synonymous with human brains. This builds on from the well-used ‘Zombie Banks’ metaphor made popular in the 2000s to describe the Japanese financial system, in which endless public subsidies to banks resulted in systemic erosion of economic vitality – the lesson was feeding the Zombie only breeds more.

There are, of course, other metaphors used to describe contemporary capitalism; like the ‘Vampire Squid’ used to illustrate the role of financial institutions in sucking the life out of the global economy. Sanguineous metaphors are very popular historically for depicting the role of finance within the economy as ‘bleeding it dry’; the Vampire, like the Zombie, is a monster with a singular rational objective ‘to feed’ and the humans are always its prey. Of course, Keynes preferred the ‘animal spirits’ metaphor to explain the same inhumane aspects of markets that must be controlled to sustain a market civilization.

Two books in particular articulate different aspects of the Zombie economy metaphor. The fist is John Quiggin’s Zombie Economics: how dead ideas still walk among us, which systematically unpicks how defunct economic theories are clung to by policy makers and politicians.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Moral economy: a different way of thinking about the future

January 24, 2016

Moral economy: a different way of thinking about the future 

The current economic system has ‘wealth extraction’ masquerading as ‘wealth creation’ to the long-term detriment of everybody, even the super rich. New thinking is needed.

Coal shovels at work in Randolph County, Illinois c. 1970. Katy McClelland/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)You know something is grotesquely wrong when the 80 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population, when the combined wealth of the 1000 richest people in the UK is nearly five times the size of the annual NHS budget, and when unending growth is assumed to be possible in a finite, rapidly overheating planet. But conventional approaches to economic matters can’t explain what is wrong.

To understand these problems we need a radically different approach that goes back to basics. Most basic of all is this: the point of economic activity is simply to enable us to live well. Economies are systems of provisioning—ways of providing us with the wherewithal to live a decent life—and of course some ways of doing this are much better than others. Provisioning involves two kinds of relations:

    1. Relations between people, whether as buyers and sellers, employers and employees, lenders and borrowers, landlords and tenants, citizens and governments, or as providers and beneficiaries of unpaid work.
    2. Our relations to the environment, as all material wealth ultimately depends on this. Looking after the environment should make economic sense, degrading it does not.

No one ever got rich or poor outside these two sets of relations. ‘Moral economy’—unlike mainstream economics—focuses on these and examines whether they are fair or unfair, functional for provisioning or not, and sustainable or unsustainable. Particularly at this time of economic and environmental crisis, it can provide us with signposts to a different way of doing things.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bread, circuses and inequality – a dishonest bargain

November 21, 2015

Bread, circuses and inequality – a dishonest bargain 

How does consumerism undermine democracy?

Flickr/dcmaster, CC BY-NC 2.0

China leads the way

the Chinese people surrender democratic citizenship for the promise of individual gain through private consumptionOver the decade of the 2000s I visited China several times. At some point on each trip a Chinese acquaintance would assure me, unsolicited on my part, that “the Chinese” were not interested in democratic rights. Rather, their priority was material improvement, greater incomes for greater private consumption.

Whatever the validity of this interpretation of collective will, it summarises the governing strategy of China’s dictatorial regime. It involves a bargain in which the Chinese people surrender democratic citizenship for the promise of individual gain through private consumption. 

The iron link between dictatorship and private consumption goes far to explain 1) the obsession of the Chinese rulers with maximising economic growth, and 2) the political role of the middle class. Given the clear absence of policies to reduce inequality, rapid growth becomes the necessary mechanism for the state to deliver its part of the consumerist bargain. Far from being a force for democratisation, the rise of a consumerist middle class provides the political support for dictatorship, albeit a minority support.

The bargain of democratic rights for material gain that we see in China is not limited to dictatorial regimes. On the contrary, it serves as the mechanism for the transition from representative democracy to disenfranchised dictatorship.

Consumerist route to tyranny

The disastrous effect of consumerism on global environmental sustainability is well documented. The private automobile represents the most obvious example of the triumph of consumerism over making the planet fit for human life.

Consumerist ideology treats society as a collection of individuals, each seeking to maximise their private consumption

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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