On the week the United States marked its one millionth COVID-19 death and anxious American parents awaited a military airlift for baby formula, Davos Man emerged from his bulletproof office to report all was well in the world of intergalactic finance and handmade shoes.
Well, kinda’ sorta’ well.
There was, after all, a brutal war raging near the Swiss enclave of the World Economic Forum and most key global stock markets remain underwater.
And, sure, China’s economic growth this year is projected to be lower than America’s for the first time since Mao’s death in 1976 and U.S. inflation is, um, high.
Read Also
Budget seen as fairly solid, but worrying cracks appear
The reaction from the agriculture industry to prime minister Mark Carney’s first budget handed down November 4th has been largely positive.
Davos Man is a term popularized in the early 2000s to describe globalization proponents. A conference of these so-called global elites is held periodically in Davos, Switzerland.
Today, there’s plenty to worry about, a Davos attendee told the Washington Post.
“‘There is a real angst about globalization this year,’ said Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University and former Obama adviser. ‘I mean, there’s always angst about globalization, but the big question this year is: How do you get out of any of this stuff?’”
“Stuff” being an academic term for war, famine and–unsaid, of course–hubris.
Take famine. The reporters and editorialists at the Washington Post (“A global famine looms…” April 30), The Guardian (“Apocalypse now?…” May 21), and the United Nations (“Lack of Grain Exports Driving Global Hunger to Famine Levels,” May 19) believe famine will be the next stop on 2022’s bumpy ride.
And it very well might, but not for the often-stated reasons.
The main cause, we’re told, is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, involving two of the world’s key grain-exporting countries.
Indeed, notes economist and essayist Jennifer Clapp in a May 16 post on Civil Eats, 26 countries source more than 50 percent of their wheat imports from the two warring nations.
That fact, however, points to an even larger, but rarely discussed fact, according to the London School of Economics-trained Clapp. Only a handful of nations export food and even fewer international trading firms handle those exports. These firms, she explains, are the “‘ABCD’” of the food trade: “Archer-Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus” who also “hold large reserves of grain, but do not publicly report them….”
Adding to that concentration is that three key crops — wheat, corn and rice —”together provide almost half of the calories consumed around the world.”
These three levels of continuing concentration —too few exportable food choices from too few international sources handled by too few, secretive merchandisers — all but guarantees any minor food access problem anywhere in the world soon becomes a major food access problem everywhere in the world.
And so it is, again, now in this “third food price crisis in 15 years,” writes Clapp. Worse, like the previous two, the world is again promoting temporary solutions for these inherently long-term, multifaceted problems.
For example, on May 26, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will allow farmers to pull their Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) acres out early from their final year of contracts to plant additional crops (most likely winter wheat) to meet shortages caused by “Putin’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine….”
Meanwhile, few in the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, either house of the U.S. Congress, or farm policy circles mention an immediate source of exportable grain now being sent into the global atmosphere as tailpipe emissions: ethanol.
In the 2021-22 corn marketing year, which ends Aug. 31, the U.S. will export 2.5 billion bushels of corn while it converts more than two times that amount, 5.4 billion bu., into ethanol.
That’s a lot of calories (more than 4.3 trillion) that, even if just a small portion were used, could feed some of the estimated 815 million “food-deprived” people around the world this year instead of America’s 275 million cars.
Even suggesting it, however, is farm policy heresy and no ag state politician worth their blue suit would ever take that dive into elective oblivion. Besides, Davos Man, now that he’s resurfaced, needs that ethanol to justify a carbon-hauling pipeline he wants to build.
To where? Back to 1994, presumably.
Alan Guebert is an agricultural commentator from Illinois.
