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Saturday, May 21st, 2022

The Banks Collapsed in 2008 — and Our Food System is About to do the Same

Author:     George Monbiot
Source:     The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date:     Thu 19 May 2022 02.00 EDT
 Link: The Banks Collapsed in 2008 — and Our Food System is About to do the Same
Stephan:   The richest nation in the world doesn't have enough infant formula to feed America's babies. Doesn't that strike you as weird? Why is that happening? When you cut through all the commentary and misinformation what becomes clear is that these babies don't have the food they need because four corporations have a kind of monoply and control the infant formula business in the U.S. and the largest of them, Abbott, allowed one of its plants to become toxic and rather than upgrade it, they gave the money to shareholders and increased senior corporate pay packages and just closed the plant. Why do I mention this? Because four corporations control 90% of the global grain trade, and as George Monbiot, lays out in this piece, the same economic dynamics seem on the verge of collapsing the world's food system. Demonstrating once again that vampire capitalism always puts profits above wellbeing.
Illustration Eva Bee / The Guardian

For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.

While financial collapse would have been devastating to human welfare, food system collapse doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet the evidence that something is going badly wrong has been escalating rapidly. The current surge in food prices looks like the latest sign of systemic instability.

Many people assume that the food crisis was caused by a combination of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. While these are important factors, they aggravate an underlying problem. For years, it looked as if hunger was heading for extinction. The number of undernourished people fell from 811 million in 2005 to 607 million in 2014. But in 2015, the trend began to turn. Hunger has been rising ever since: to 650 million in 2019, and back to 811 million in 2020. This year is likely to be much worse.

Now brace yourself for the really bad news: […]

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1 Comment

  1. Rev. Dean on Saturday, May 21, 2022 at 10:29 am

    Even though it was difficult to read, I did finally get to read the whole article and it is correct in stating that things have to change. We need to get as many of the small farms, especially organic ones, and expanded so more farmers or would-be farmers back up and running on their own smoothly and get rid of the large farms entirely.