The Weekly N&C for October 27th, 2008

If you are what you eat…

Many, if not most, discussions of National Security (in any Nation) focus on easily observable threats and reactions. Lines on a map are discussed as being “defensible” or not; Numbers of troops, armaments, and the ability of a State to move and supply them are totaled and compared; Networks and alliances are compared and analyzed in an attempt to determine who will stand with who if a crisis emerges. Resources are counted as well. To cite a recent example, the analysis of the Lebanese Army’s ability to effectively fight the Fatah al-Islam militants in May of 2007 quickly identified that the Lebanese Army would be functionally out of ammunition if a prolonged besiegement was necessary, so allies and supporting Nations were actually offering additional supplies before they were openly requested. Fuel needs, ammunition needs, these things are readily calculable and always are, unless incompetence rules the day. The modern conflict is still perceived as, and in some ways is, an industrial contest of logistics. Perhaps that is an improvement over the perception that the depth of a Nation’s military manpower pool was the measure of strength, or at least a measure of how many casualties that army could endure, as it was in the decades leading up to World War I…

Many, if not most, discussions of National Prosperity also focus on easily observable measures of wealth and productivity. Gross Domestic Products are compiled; Industrial output and the resources demanded to fuel that industry are tabulated; Reserve currencies, tax revenues, disposable incomes, stock market valuations, all are brought to the counting house and duly entered in the books. Perhaps that too is an improvement over the days of mercantilist authorities piling up gold bullion in treasuries to measure how successful their efforts to sell without buying were progressing…

It has all gotten rather complicated, and that is meant in a good way more than in converse. The wonderful, and at times astounding, interdependencies of the systems man has wrought are part and parcel of the way civilization has advanced. The issue that moves counter to that, however, is that in so advancing it is far too easy to allow the memory of more basic structures to fade. Those memories need not be tossed away, but need to be considered with all the unintended complications that the interdependencies bring with them.

Let us take a brief moment and begin to refresh that memory just a bit, with a look back at needs. Maslow, in his 1943 hierarchy of needs, quantified what had been observable throughout the human experience; that the needs of survival (physiological) and safety would trump lesser desires and motivations in all but the most uncommon circumstances. To put it in simpler terms, that (to pick one of the survival needs) “It is quite true that man lives by bread alone -- when there is no bread.” The same could be said of the city-dweller who responds to an interruption of the water mains by seeking bottled water from a store, only to find that the shelves are empty. The entire focus of that person’s needs are likely going to be securing some water, or getting to a place where water is available.

Did I mention that, world-wide, roughly half of the human race now lives in cities virtually dependent upon the means of logistical supply for sustenance?

The image gets far more foreboding when scaled up to the level of Nations rather than municipalities. Rather few of the Nations of the world are by gross measure self-sufficient in food production. Fewer still have the combination of a self-sufficiency of staples and sufficient stockpiles of grain reserves to endure any major disruption. Yes, total world production of food and per-capita world production of food have both steadily risen since the 1960’s, and yes, that has occurred while the number of farmers in developed countries has steadily fallen. Higher yields and constantly improving mechanization of both farming and transport will do that. To pick the example of the United States, roughly 2,000,000 people are “farmers” (less than 1% of the population) and they work 92% of the available farmland in what is still considered the greatest breadbasket nation in the world. The remaining 8% of farmland is taken out of production by government intervention (price-supporting and land preserving policies). But think for a moment about what has just been said: higher yields; mechanization and transport; government intervention…

Japan has mastered the protection of rice production (and farmer’s incomes) by a combination of having fabulously high-yielding crop strains and a TRQ tariff scheme that functionally supports the price at between 4 and 5 times the world market price for short-grain rice. The results are 100% self-sufficiency in rice production, produced from roughly 60% of available wet-field farmland, growing strains of rice that *can not* survive without agricultural chemical applications, at a price that absolutely precludes any viable export market for excess production. This may seem reasonable in light of how utterly incapable Japanese agriculture was until recent times of providing any reasonable livelihood to farmers or any reliable supply to the urban areas, but once again there are the warning signs of dependence upon something more than just growing the crops and the (in this case all-powerful) hand of government intervention …

Having sufficient food is a basic security. But how gets it, and at what cost in resources, can and does create other insecurities, locally and abroad. Energy costs, now at least temporarily receding, can play havoc with the production and transport of food. Financial instability and “credit crises” can at a moment’s notice disable the ability of global markets to move food from supplies to needs. Criminal and kleptocratic activities can deny the ability to transport food, and in particularly imbecilic cases actually destroy the ability of an area to produce food in any meaningful quantity. Corruption is even more endangering, for in places that still suffer under a corrupt culture that considers adulteration of foodstuffs to be a part of meeting goals, the trust of the entire market public is endangered. Now no one country has a monopoly on such conduct through history; that example given is just the most currently discussed one, and it is noteworthy in its effect on international relations in addition to the damage it has caused in the country.

Which brings this matter to its conclusion; that the continued insistence of central administrative authorities (that would be the government intervention cited above), most commonly by unelected bureaucrats and nationally chartered collective officers, that they and only they are the arbiters of wisdom is only defensible if said authorities are fully cognizant of the inter-relationships and dependencies of the almost comically complex system of supplying sustenance that has come to be the way the world feeds itself.

Some things can not, and should not be changed. Unless one was to be considering reprising the madness of forcible relocation of the urbanized masses during the Pol Pot regime on a global scale, the fraction of the population of the globe that is urbanized will likely only increase further in the near term. Not all lands are suited for agriculture, and no amount of government wishing can change that. The desert may well bloom for a time with enough money thrown at mega-scale irrigation projects, but that is already proving to be beyond reason from Southern California to the Valley of the Jordan.

Water demands for agriculture and “agriculture based” industrial activities have also compromised sustainability, with a myriad of examples through history, but recent demands are over-pumping aquifers in China and India foreshadowing falling levels of food security in two countries that are also most capable of participating fully in a global food market should they chose to.

The Doha Development Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks has broken down after failing to meet any agreement on reducing agricultural subsidies and tariffs. It is not even scheduled to reconvene until 2009.

Unless one is willing to face the very real possibility that those States that have money and need food will balk at the cost and continue to denude their own lands in the pursuit of some temporary security, that the Nations that have exportable quantities of petroleum will consider it imprudent to continue to provide the energy and chemical feedstocks essential to how the developed world has chosen to grow and transport its food without some economic compensation in the form of availability-at-cost-not-subsidized-cost, and that the impoverished lands of the world will simply be bankrupted (again) the next time the farm futures markets of the developed world panic over the diversion of food to biofuel production or the credit markets seize up internationally…

Unless one is willing to continue to create such *insecurity*, then one had best be getting the hand of government off the scales of trade as much as is possible, world-wide.

If there is one international forum that should be reconvened as soon as possible, and pursued to a resolution with good faith, it is the Doha Round, and getting it restarted should be one of the first things on the agenda as of now.

Because National Security and National Productivity are still determined by needs.

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End Notes:

All direct citations are embedded as links.

Additional material can be found in the references cited and the summaries given in the following Wiki-p entries, linked here for convenience. The usual caveat applies: check the sources.

2007-2008 World Food Crisis

2008 Chinese Milk Scandal

World Water Crisis

The Doha Development Round of the WTO