Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

Article Outline

• Abstract
• Speculation and Government
• Climate Change
• Healthcare
• References
• Biography
• Copyright

The Schwartzreport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives.

Have you ever been hungry? I don't mean you wanted a snack, found the cupboard bare, and the store was closed. Nor do I mean a missed meal. Or even a couple of missed meals. And I don't mean fasting. I once fasted for 17 days, but it was entirely volitional, and I was rather proud of myself. Being hungry was part of the experience. What I mean is persistent real hunger, the kind that focuses one's entire being on the search for food, any food. If you are like most middle class Americans you have no personal experience with urgent unrequited hunger, a fact which, in the narrative arc of human history, is very unusual. Perhaps that's why as a nation we don't seem to really comprehend hunger. This begins to touch on what I mean.

I was in St. Petersburg, Leningrad as it was then called, in the 1980s during the period of Glasnost and Perestroika, and was invited to a dinner party at the home of someone prominent in the Russian world of ballet. The other guests were mostly from that world as well. Physically beautiful people in that hypertoned way of dancers even after they have retired from the stage. As we were settling into after dinner drinks I asked around the table how many of them had been in the city during the great siege when the Nazis ringed it, and tried in everyway they could to grind the city down. One by one the older people at the table told stories; they were extraordinary experiences of dogged survival and luck, and all of them involved hunger. One particularly has stayed with me. I was told it by a sophisticated woman in her 50s, a retired prima ballerina, as elegant as a swan.

I was a little girl then, constantly hungry in that way that makes you so fragile. What I remember most is that one day we caught a rat and my grandmother and I peeled the wallpaper from her apartment's walls to boil it to make a kind of soup to which we added the chopped up rat. I don't think I had eaten for three or four days at the time, and I can remember how excited I was.

She spoke calmly of her hunger as something that stalked her, her family and her city like a ninja waiting to strike. The siege of Leningrad began in September 1941. When it ended in 1944, 900 days later, it is believed 632,000 had died mostly through starvation, and the diseases that plague the starving—4000 people starved to death on Christmas day, 1941 alone.¹ As I listened I remembered children I had seen in Africa, and realized that starvation can come to any culture. By most accounts it is coming again, at a frightful level.

One out of seven people in the world today goes to bed hungry every night, and hunger kills more men, women and, disproportionately, children than tuberculosis, AIDs and malaria combined, and it is getting worse. A growing consensus of the world's scientists, as well as analysts and business people who closely follow agriculture, are convinced we are moving into a food crisis of unprecedented scale.

Oxfam International, a confederation of 15 organizations in 98 countries working together on food issues with partners and allies, reports, “The warning signs are clear. We have entered an age of crisis: of food price spikes and oil price hikes; of scrambles for land and water; of creeping, insidious climate change. The 2008 spike in food prices pushed some 100 million people into poverty. Price rises since June 2010 have done the same to 44 million more—equivalent to almost the entire population of Spain. Behind these shocking statistics lie millions of tragic individual stories of suffering as families struggle to cope with spiralling food prices, fall into debt and are left with no money to send their children to school or treat them when they get sick. These crises are spikes— often deadly—on a longer term trend of surging food instability.”²

Much of this starvation can be traced to a world food production and distribution system that is being exploited by speculators, just as real estate was a bubble, created and crashed by speculation, under laws that skew to profit above all other considerations. Looked at that way it becomes clear that millions of human beings are starving so that a few thousand humans can become obscenely rich.

Barbara Stocking, Oxfam's chief executive, said: “The food system is pretty well bust. All the signs are that the number of people going hungry is going up. One in seven people on the planet go hungry every day despite the fact that the world is capable of feeding everyone. The food system must be overhauled if we are to overcome the increasingly pressing challenges of climate change, spiraling food prices and the scarcity of land, water and energy.”³

Food prices have already doubled once in the last few years. In the developing world where, according to the United Nations three-fourths of the population lives on less than $2 a day, when rice or wheat goes up a penny, thousands die. Right now the world's poorest people spend up to 80% of their tiny incomes on food.

In June, CNN ran a report noting, “The majority of people in most countries surveyed by international aid agency Oxfam said they're no longer eating the same kind of food as they did two years ago, with 39% globally blaming rising food costs.”⁴

Jeremy Hobbs, Executive Director of Oxfam says, “Our diets are changing fast and for too many people it is a change for the worst,” said “Huge numbers of people, especially in the world's poorest countries, are cutting back on the quantity or quality of the food they eat because of rising food prices.”⁴

It is estimated that across the globe 44 million people have been added to the estimated 1.2 billion already living below the poverty level of $1.25 a day according to the World Bank. This can be directly traced to the increase in food prices since 2010.

An increase in the price of what can be obtained, when the difference between sustainable and catastrophic is this small, is not just an individual tragedy. When thousands or even millions face such a reality it holds the potential to create massive social disorder. It should have surprised no one—although it seems to have surprised nearly everyone—that when the tipping point through a small price rise moved ever so slightly this Spring toward catastrophe, riots and uprisings erupted around the world, particularly in the Middle East. Hunger in the rest of the world will touch even the well fed because it is going to change the world. The American media hardly noticed, but the Egyptian Spring began not as a drive for democracy but as a food riot.

The bipolar geopolitical reality most of us have known all our lives ended in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it has taken 20 years for it to become obvious. We are moving into a multipolar geopolitical world and, for the first time in 500 years—since Henry the Navigator—Caucasian cultures will not run the world. A different set of values will obtain, and many of those emerging countries will be profoundly changed by what hunger and its social unrest does to them. Our markets, our livelihoods, our lives, will feel the effect.

As with much of the developed world America's affluence has buffered a critical mass of us from such extreme sensitivity to supply and cost. But, because we have such a paltry and perverse social safety net—a situation almost unique in the developed world—that does not mean we are unscathed. Feeding America, the largest food program in the country, reported in 2010: “that hunger is increasing at an alarming rate in the United States, and our network is expanding its reach in response.”⁵ Unpacking that a bit produces the following documented reality:

And yet, in the face of this want, in 2009, Americans sent approximately 40% of their food to the garbage. Food wastage per person in this country has increased 50% since 1974.⁶ We suffer from a severe disconnect when it comes to food.

Back to Article Outline

Speculation and Government 

The United States and the developed world in general, seems unable to control speculation, whether it is oil, food or, increasingly, water. This inability traces directly to the failure of elected representatives to enact legislation that places the common interest above the interest of the few. It is not hard to work out why this happens, and why it is unlikely to change.

In January 2010, in a landmark decision reversing decades of law, the activist conservative Supreme Court, ruled in favor of the conservative Citizens United pressure group and against the Federal Election Commission.⁷ The Court, in a startling new interpretation of the First Amendment, found that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited. In the conservative 5-4 configuration that has ruled the court for some years, the guts of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act was discarded. The Court struck down the provision of McCain-Feingold that had prohibited both for-profit and not-for-profit corporations, as well as unions from broadcasting “electioneering communications.” This was followed in May by the decision by Republican U.S. District Judge James Cacheris, who citing Citizens United, ruled that corporations have a constitutional right to contribute unlimited money to political candidates.

Taken together, these two legal decisions not only extend the concept that corporations are, in essence, a kind of super individual, but make what amounts to bribery of politicians legal. Of course that's not the way a jurist or politician would put it, but try this little thought experiment: imagine you are a politician struggling to hold onto you seat in a hotly contested campaign and a lobbyist for a corporation offers your political action group a quarter of a million dollars, while, at the same time, another friendly corporate lobbyist offers to buy you a million dollars worth of campaign advertising. Do you think that when they came to your office six months later you might be inclined to make time for them; to listen just a little more attentively to what they have to say; to be more disposed to do them a favor? Does this constitute bribery? You decide.

How does it affect food and hunger? Given a system rigged as this one is, one does not have to be precognitively gifted to say it is far more likely the laws will be changed in favor of speculator donors, whether individuals or corporations, and this will be done even though it is against the best interests of the country as a whole. Policies that have proven to be poor choices will continue, and regulatory oversight will decrease.

A clear example of this can be seen in ethanol. There is now an abundance of evidence showing that corn is a very poor plant for ethanol conversion in comparison with other “second-generation” choices ranging from grasses to algaes.⁸ There is also clear evidence that using a major food crop for fuel pits the profit interests of energy against the human need for food, both directly and indirectly.⁹ Directly in the increase in the cost of corn, thus the increase of corn based human foods; and, indirectly, in the cost of corn feed to chickens, pigs, and cattle, subsequently consumed by humans. Higher costs mean fewer people can afford to eat.

We are collectively paying to harm ourselves through our taxes. As things stand 40% of the corn grown in the United States goes to ethanol. It can also be argued that there is a second and third ring of injury. Ethanol takes almost as much petroleum to produce as it saves. This kind of corporate agriculture, run as it is, requires tremendous amounts of fertilizer, which produces massive runoff pollution. Environmentalists blame the algae bloom in the Gulf of Mexico on ethanol production. If we continue on this line there will also be significant issues with water in the very near future.

Back to Article Outline

Climate Change 

You have probably noticed an increase in extreme weather events everywhere. Ask anyone who lives in Joplin, Missouri. Ask a farmer whose crop has just been wiped out by historic flooding along the great rivers the Mississippi, and the Missouri.

Francesca Rheannon, writing in Reuters, spells it out. “Residents in Iowa displaced by flooding may not be able to return to assess the damage for 10 weeks. Parts of Nebraska and Missouri are, as of this writing, receiving dire predictions that levees will be overtopped in the near future. One lawmaker called it a ‘slow-motion tsunami.'”¹⁰

Forest fires sweep across tinder-dry Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico as I write, consuming over 3 million acres so far. The powerlessness of government was explicitly acknowledged by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who declared a three-day period of prayer for rain, calling on divine intervention to save his state. The fires exist because there has been no rain. Texas is moving toward a hotter more desert-like climate. Yet the State's policies reflect the climate change denier views of the governor and his legislature. Somehow the Deniers just cannot seem to understand that Nature bats last.

In Australia, one of the world's largest banana exporters, 75% of the harvest was lost to drought. In 2010, the Russian wheat harvest failed because of the worst heat wave and drought since record-keeping had begun more than 130 years ago. At the same time Canada experienced massive floods, while the Ukraine exported far less than had been expected because of its own climate mediated issues. It was these failures and the 90% increase in price that triggered the uprising in Egypt, the world's largest wheat importer.

Tony Coleman is the chief Risk Office & Group Actuary for Insurance Australia, presents the conundrum facing insurers everywhere. “Weather and climate are ‘core business' for the insurance industry. At its most basic, insurers underwrite weather-related catastrophes by calculating, pricing, and spreading the risk and then meeting claims when they arise. A changing, less predictable climate has the potential to reduce our capacity to calculate, price, and spread this weather-related risk.

The role of insurance in underwriting weather-related risk is an important component of the national economy. Any reduction in the industry's ability to underwrite weather-related risk will have serious ramifications for the economies of those vulnerable regions where climate and weather risk is greatest.

But insurance companies acting alone or even collectively will have limited positive impact because whole-of-global-economy action is required. Climate change makes a compelling case for the need for business, governments and community groups to work together to find sustainable solutions to 21st century challenges.”¹¹

The effect of climate change on the issue of insurance will profoundly affect America, as much as it affecting Australia. How many farms will continue to operate along the Mississippi if this kind of flooding becomes a more frequent event, and farmers cannot get insurance? Extreme weather events are already negatively effecting the production of food all over the world. This is happening as the world's population is going up. The increase in hunger is inevitable unless we change our world view.

In 2007, Dr. Larry Brown at Harvard's School of Public Health headed a multiuniversity team that carried out the first study ever done on the straight economic cost of hunger in the United States. In their report they say:

This report is the first analysis of the total cost burden of hunger in the United States—what it costs the American public to tolerate hunger and food insecurity in our nation. Each year around 35 million Americans live in households that do not get enough to eat. The personal cost of hunger to a child, or to families who cannot afford to feed their children, might be difficult for many to imagine. This personal cost has been analyzed and discussed in numerous academic and lay publications. But what, we might ask, is the economic cost to the nation when we permit so many of our fellow citizens to go hungry? What are the costs of the charity that is required to help families get through another day? What are the costs of impaired educational outcomes that scientific research has linked to children not getting enough to eat?¹²

Back to Article Outline

Healthcare 

With good reason when it comes to food in the United States the healthcare emphasis has been focused on obesity and illnesses such as Type II diabetes, and heart disease. Look at Table 1 and you can see a number of outcome measures, showing how food, hunger, and healthcare are clearly linked.

Table 1. Cost Burden for Selected Outcomes

Source: from Brown et al.¹²

But the Brown report does better than this. It directly addresses the economic burden of inadequate nutrition and hunger:

And what is the bill for the mental and physical illnesses that are linked to inadequate nutrition? This analysis calculates the cost burden of hunger in the United States at a minimum of $90 billion annually. This means that on average each person living in the U.S. pays $300 annually for the hunger bill. On a household basis this cost is $800 a year or $8,000 over a decade. And because the $90 billion cost figure is based on a cautious methodology, we anticipate that the actual cost of hunger and food insecurity to the nation is higher.”⁷

The coming food crisis, like so many of the changes we face in a perfect storm of transition, are the results of years, decades, of bad policies, many begun in ignorance but continued in the service of special interest greed. We need a new model. One that places human well-being first and profit second. This is not an argument against profit. It is simply that this cannot be the first consideration. Just as research tells us that the world's food supply and distribution is moving into crisis he shows us that it is possible to create societies that are compassionate and life-affirming.

A Newsweek study of “health, education, economy, and politics rank's the globe's true national champions.”¹³

Here are the first 20:

Our relatively low position stems principally from our poor showing in healthcare (26th—which is better than the World Health Organization's estimate which is 37th), Education (26th), and our political environment (14th).

We need to stop lying to ourselves, and to do what we used to be renowned for, reinventing ourselves to the benefit of the greatest number, including a measure of decency even for the poor. The Food Tsunami, like the extreme events of climate change is coming. The question now is how are we going to respond?

Back to Article Outline

References 

1. The Siege of Leningrad. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/siege_of_leningrad.htmAccessed June 9, 2011
   • View In Article
2. Averting Tomorrow's Global Food Crisis. Oxfam Int. 2011;June 1:2
   • View In Article
3. Milmo C. World's Food System Broken, Oxfam Warns (The Independent). http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/worlds-food-system-broken-oxfam-warns-2291469.htmlAccessed June 1, 2011
   • View In Article
4. Thompson N. World changes eating habits as food prices soar (CNN). http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/06/15/oxfam.food.prices/index.html?hpt=hp_t2Accessed June 15, 2011
   • View In Article
5. Hunger Study 2010 (Feeding America). http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-studies/hunger-study-2010.aspxAccessed June 3, 2011
   • View In Article
6. Hall KD, Guo J, Dore M, Chow CC. The progressive increase of food waste in America and its environmental impact. PLoS ONE. 2009;4:e7940
   • View In Article
   • CrossRef
7. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. 558 U.S. 08-205 (2010).
   • View In Article
8. Faille C. Ethanol, the Next Generation: Why corn is out and cellulose is in. Daily Finance. February 2, 2011;http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/02/02/ethanol-fuel-the-next-generation-why-corn-is-out-and-cellulose/Accessed June 9, 2011
   • View In Article
9. Abayomi K, Luo D, Thomas V. Statistical Evaluation of the Effect of Ethanol in US Corn Production: A Flexible Test for Independence on a Constrained Sum. Department of Industrial Engineering, Georgia Tech www2.isye.gatech.edu/∼kabayomi3/papers/…/abayomisubmissionnew.pdf
   • View In Article
10. Rheannon F. Can the insurance industry survice climate change? (Reuters). Jun 13, 2011 3:25pm EDT http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/13/idUS238251745220110613Accessed June 13, 2011
    • View In Article
11. Coleman T. The impact of climate change on insurance against catastrophes. insurance Australia Group. Undated.
    • View In Article
12. Brown JL, Shepard D, Martin T, Orwat J. The economic cost of domestic hunger. June 5, 2007. The Sodexho Foundation, in partnership with The Public Welfare Foundation and Spunk Fund, Inc.
    • View In Article
13. The World's Best Countries. Newsweek. June 12, 2011;
    • View In Article