The Food Bubble Economy

Global warming is happening; and at a much faster, more abrupt rate than projected by the International Panel on Climate Change .

The news media have been filled with reports of heat waves, floods, droughts, hurricanes, accelerated melting of the polar ice caps and sea levels rising. And yet, they may be missing the most serious consequence of climate change that’s staring us in the face: a collapse of food production on a global scale; or as Lester Brown of Earth Policy Institute puts it, “the bursting of the food bubble”.
The economy must be restructured at “wartime speed”, Lester Brown says, because we have built an “environmental bubble economy”, where economic output is artificially inflated by over-consumption of the earth’s natural resources. He adds: “the destruction wrought by terrorists is likely to be small compared with the worldwide suffering if the environmental bubble economy collapses.”

This same warning was first put forward no less forcefully by Edward Goldsmith and colleagues in A Blueprint for Survival published in 1972, and echoed by many since; notably Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce (1993) and David Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World (1995).

What’s new in Lester Brown’s message is that the most vulnerable economic sector may be food. Food production is facing imminent collapse unless the urgent problems of water shortage, overpopulation and rising temperatures are tackled right away. (And no, he does not think GM crops are the answer to feeding the world.)

Institute of Science in Society