Disrupted Balance

Society at Risk

Jan Wouter Vasbinder

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789813239234
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Chaotic Behavior in Systems

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Human society is no stranger to catastrophe, but the challenges the world faces today — a ballooning population, intense global connectivity and the unquenchable thirst of human consumption — have synergised to make disruptions more frequent, intense and far reaching.

Despite the complexity of these problems, the response should not be to give up and surrender to these forces, the crash can be avoided. Humanity does possess the scientific, technological and social knowledge to not just survive, but also to emerge from the tumult by being more resilient and sustainable societies. The most urgent question, therefore, is how can we act on this knowledge.

This book brings together 12 esteemed authors from diverse fields ranging from geology to governance, who have come together to collectively issue a unifying clarion call to action.

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--> Contents:

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Hunting Black Swans and Taming Black Elephants (Peter Ho)
• Gambling with Geohazards (Kerry Sieh)
• Nine Meals from Anarchy (Tim G Benton)
• Governance in a Time of Disruption (Seán Cleary)
• Threats Seen and Unseen (Shashi Jayakumar)
• Thinking the Unthinkable (Sheila Ronis)
• The Risks and Resilience of Cities (David Lallemant)
• Paradoxes and Paradigms in Parasitology (Daniel Brooks)
• Water: The Human Element (Alexander J B Zehnder)
• Sprawl at Risk (Roland Fletcher)
• Thinking the Unthinkable V2 (Nik Gowing)
• From Owners to Stewards (Andrew Sheng)
• Conclusions (Focus on the Future: A Call to Action)
• Acknowledgements

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--> Readership: Researchers and policymakers grappling with the challenges of complexity in human society. -->
Global Connectivity;Governance;Virtual Threats;Risks Disruption00

NINE MEALS FROM ANARCHY

The fragility of food systems in a globalised world

By Tim G. Benton

Since the end of World War II the global food trade has developed to deliver ever more food at an ever cheaper price. But our close interconnectedness masks a fragility that few are aware of.

Our food system is so much more than a conveyor belt of calories; it underpins how our societies work. Food production profoundly influences our environment, our culture and our family life. Food even functions as a bank in developing societies, where families store their entire wealth in a single cow.

By the same token, risks to the food system cut right across society. Malnutrition in the form of over-consumption is a massive health issue, especially in developed societies, while malnutrition in the form of under-nutrition makes both life and social order precarious, especially in developing countries. Food problems are big problems.

When the food system is disrupted, things can go very wrong. Curtailing food availability is the fastest way to create social breakdown. The saying by American journalist Alfred Henry Lewis that “there are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy” is more than just an adage. Only recently, rapid food price inflation fuelled the disorder which sparked the Arab Spring and the ensuing migration crisis, which in turn has disrupted the European Union. This is but one example of the hyper-connectivity and fragility of our food system that we are only now beginning to understand.

The growth and extent of the globalised food system

The food system encompasses the totality of production, how it affects our society and environment, the way produce travels through the supply chain and, in the rich world at least, ends up in a shop. Our choices in those shops affect our nutrition, health and wellbeing. Along the way, waste is created. It is a whole system of loops and feedbacks of demand and supply.

Importantly, it is also a spatial system. The location and movement of food around the world has changed profoundly since World War II. Singapore is at the extreme end, with 90 percent of its food coming from 30 other countries, but almost all nations rely—to a greater or lesser extent—on global trade to feed local people.

It is no accident that every country has come to rely on food from elsewhere. The growth of global food trade was a deliberate policy driven by the US and the UK’s desire to open up markets for economic growth, and to create more consumption by making food cheaper. But we have now become so accustomed to the system that it seems based on imperatives rather than choice. It is part of the larger mindset that we live on a planet with finite resources but expect infinite economic growth. As economic growth has increased exponentially, with it has grown the global movement of food, as well as—and here is the first big risk—our reliance on food transport.

Choke points, concentration and homogenisation

The complex web of food traded between countries resembles the financial banking network just before the 2008 crash: high connectivity, and a few large players exporting to many small ones. So, if something happened to a large player, it would knock on through the network, creating a ripple effect.

In addition to the fragile network of food trade, if you traced all of the food trade routes on a globe, you would see a complex web entwining the whole world, but with the threads pulled tightly together into several very powerful nodes. The Suez Canal is one; Singapore another. These nodes, or choke points, are crucial for global transport, and if something goes wrong, the transport of food would fail. A fragile food trade network is overlain by a fragile food transport network.

These choke points funnel not just raw materials such as meat and grain, but also fertiliser for crops, and processed foods. Half of China’s soy passes through Singapore. A quarter of all cereal travels through the Suez Canal. Blocking the Suez Canal would have the effect of halving supply, because it would take each boat twice as long to make a detour around Africa.

A world map of where this food is travelling from would show you that the world’s calories come from farming in a small number of ‘breadbasket’ regions. This concentration in space is thanks to another economic sacred cow: comparative advantage. Countries produce and export what they are best at producing, and buy the rest from other countries. However, the few ‘winners’ crowd out everyone else, leaving a few production areas where farming is very large scale and intensive.

Each of these breadbasket areas specialises in growing what they can grow well, and what they can grow is a small handful of commodity crops. Today, over three quarters of the world’s calories come from just eight crops: wheat, rice, maize, sugar, barley, soy, palm and potato.

The concentration of crops and calories is driving another significant risk to our society: the global homogenisation of diets. Since the 1960s we have moved from a globally diverse diet to eating more or less the same thing: a similar range of calorically dense but nutritionally poor commodity crops. This homogenisation creates pressures on our health systems that are difficult to overstate. There are now more obese people in the world than underweight. The ‘hunger challenge’ is being replaced by the ‘obesity challenge’. In total, under 50 percent of the human population is now what is considered a healthy weight.

Our food system is looking increasingly fragile: it concentrates risk in space, from the small number of breadbaskets, to growing a small number of crops, to funnelling transport through a small number of choke points. It increasingly undermines, not supports, good health. And, as demand for food grows, its resilience decreases as it gets more specialised, efficient and concentrated.

At the same time, demand for food is growing. The world’s population is likely to expand by a projected 50 percent by the century’s end. As well as there being more mouths to feed, the demand for calories will rise along with incomes. Already, an average person demands 3,000 calories a day. Supplying these calories requires an additional 6,000 calories to be fed to livestock. Will our system cope?

Growing threats to the food system

We tend to believe that international food trade is a good thing, and generally it is. Food is cheaper and famine is rarer. But we are only just beginning to recognise the serious risks in our food system, which exist at three levels.

The first risk is one of reliance. Almost every country relies on other countries for its food. So ingrained in our thoughts is this reliance that we do not stop to ask what will happen when it is disrupted. Yet our food supply could be disrupted by small events anywhere else in the world. That is the second risk—the super-interconnectivity of our food system.

The third, the risk of volatility, is the very reason we are finally recognising the risks in the system. In the past decade we have seen at least two big spikes in food price and availability, following a long period of relative stability.

Both spikes were factors in outbreaks of civil unrest. The 2007–2008 price spike helped drive people into the North African streets, sparking the Arab Spring. The 2010–2011 spike created food riots around the world. Some evidence suggests that a long-running drought in rural Syria contributed to migration to the cities, creating social conditions that contributed to civil breakdown in 2011. Hence, the volatility of food prices and the interaction with climate change are absolutely connected to global order.

Several other factors are cumulating into dark clouds that hang over our food system. One is soil degradation. The Green Revolution rapidly increased agricultural yields over the last 40 years, at great expense to soil health. Twenty-five percent of the world’s soils are degraded enough to undermine yields, and analysts predict that some areas of intense agriculture only have 50 to 60 harvests left. When fields failed in the past we could simply move on. But studies show little spare capacity in the globe for new agriculture. If we lose a significant breadbasket, it is hard to imagine how we would replace it.

The biggest risk: climate change

Exacerbating the various risks to our food system is the biggest risk of all: climate change. The Paris Agreement commitments, at the moment, put us on course for an expected 3.3-degree Celsius change by 2100. As an analogy, the UK with a climate about 4 degrees warmer is like a whole other country: Spain. Adjusting to this temperature rise would require huge changes in the way we live and farm.

While these changes will no doubt alter our ways, we could gradually adapt. But in the coming decades, a perhaps greater risk lurks which could tip our food system over the edge—the risk of sudden and stepwise climate changes.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a global oceanic conveyor of heat from the tropics to Northwest Europe, delivering 6-8 degrees of warmth. Scientific modelling suggests that it is as likely as not to turn off over the next two centuries if we do not tackle climate change. There is a small but significant risk that it will cease this century.

If it does, European temperatures would plummet, leading to deeper winters, more storms and shorter growing seasons. Other areas would be affected—the Indian subcontinent might lose its monsoons, and the productive Cerrado in South America would dry out. Food production would suffer enormously on a global scale. And this change could happen over a mere decade.

In addition to changes in climate, our stretched food system is vulnerable to one-off shocks from extreme weather, which is getting both more extreme and more frequent. This vulnerability is not least due to the interconnectivity of the food system. Giant storms in one breadbasket area affect productivity and prices the world over.

In 2017, there were an unprecedented number of Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic; in 2015 two of the world’s strongest ever storm systems occurred in different hemispheres within a few days of each other. In 2012, maize and soy were hit by drought in the US Midwest. There was a drought in Eastern Europe, yields were hit in Northwest Europe by prolonged rainfall and a very wet summer, and even rice production was impacted by changing rainfall in the Indian subcontinent. Had 2012 been even just a little worse, there would have been the potential for multiple breadbasket failure and significant loss of global production.

Reconfiguring a more resilient system

We are beginning to recognise problems in our food system, but we will likely remain complacent because we are not used to seeing how these problems interact. We need to develop frameworks that are systemic and holistic. We need to break down the traditional silo thinking, where an agricultural person looks at yields, an energy person at oil prices, a health person at diseases, a climate person at weather, and an economist at prices and trade. The functioning of the system, as well as understanding how risks and shocks affect and propagate through it, requires all views combined.

In 2008, a production blip in drought-stricken Australia, a minor contributor to global stocks, caused global prices to balloon. The world’s food stocks were already low thanks to high oil prices incentivising biofuel crops over food crops. Exacerbating the problem, governments intervened to protect their people’s food security by implementing export bans, which further intensified the demand-supply imbalance. The 2008 experience shows that our food system, which evolved during global stability, is reaching its limits and is liable to break when we hit turbulence.

Governments may have a false sense of security that the market will smooth out food shocks. This sense fails to account for how unprecedented shocks, or tipping points—whether they be the switching off of the AMOC or dustbowl events caused by changing climates and degraded soils in breadbasket areas—might impact global productivity and market responses. Even if some dangers have a low probability over the next decades, they could happen at any time.

The first step in building a more resilient global food system is to recognise the risks and prepare for plausible, if unprecedented, events. Our governments, notoriously plagued by present-termism, need to understand how to respond appropriately rather than lurch into poorly thought-out responses such as food export bans in a crisis.

Research can help us build better understanding and develop red flags. Better modelling of the food production chain will tell us how production shocks translate into short run price impacts. It would also help to identify critical geographical pinch points in international trade, and how to address their vulnerability, such as through investment in infrastructure.

Governments could bolster national resilience to market shocks by, for example, increasing self-sufficiency, building food stocks or diversifying food sources. They should also build international cooperation, for example through rules to limit unilateral food export controls. We should also explore coordinated risk management, with contingency plans, early warning systems and agreed response protocols, as well as coordinated management of emergency and strategic reserves.

Fundamentally, we need to reconfigure our food system so that it delivers nutrition for healthy diets, grown in a sustainable way, from a system resilient to shocks. In the past, we have focused on efficient agriculture and cheap food. But this has created an inefficient food system which is increasingly fragile.

Currently, a third of the world’s calories goes to feed livestock, and a third is wasted. Further, about a third of the world overeats by about one fifth each day. If you add these loss factors together, only 40 to 50 percent of the world’s food is being used efficiently for healthy human nutrition.

Emissions from the agri-food system are the equivalent of emissions from lighting, cars, travel, washing machines, heating and cooling combined. Changing our diets is a more powerful way of decarbonising our economy than targeting lights or cars. If we halved the amount of meat produced in the world, it would be the equivalent of taking every internal combustion engine off the road.

If we ate less meat, wasted less food and ate less in general, we would make the food system more efficient. This would require less land and water, and would create less emissions and thus slow climate change. We would free up land, so we could farm less intensively. We would enormously reduce the pressure on the food system and make it less fragile to shocks; indeed, the shocks would be smaller as climate change is reduced. Eating less and better would also improve health and well-being for many.

Professor Tim G. Benton is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Chatham House and Dean for Strategic Research Initiatives at the University of Leeds. From 2011–2016, he was a champion of the UK’s Global Food Security programme, which undertakes systemic analysis and horizon scanning aimed at providing sufficient, sustainable and nutritious diets for all. He has published over 150 academic papers, mostly on the core themes of agriculture’s environmental impact, and, more generally, on how systems respond to environmental change.

GOVERNANCE IN A TIME OF DISRUPTION

Why the world needs a new consensus

By Seán Cleary

We face an array of challenges across multiple fields in a highly connected society, and there is an unprecedented increase in the scale of the knowledge we need to address them. It’s thus no surprise that decision makers are overwhelmed.

If individual scientists struggle to solve specific challenges in their fields of expertise, how then do we expect presidents and prime ministers—politicians without specialised knowledge in many areas they must address—to choose the right trade-offs in these many interlocking arenas?

The seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed upon by the General Assembly of the United Nations as global targets for 2030 provide an indication of the range of challenges we face. Reaching consensus on these goals took a three-and-a-half-year multinational effort, a remarkable achievement that we should celebrate. But the complexity of the goals, and the indicators associated with them, is enormous. It is clear that no individual fully grasps what their delivery across the 193 countries in the United Nations would entail.

The other side of the coin in a complex, highly connected world is what are called global catastrophic risks, events or processes that would lead to the deaths of a tenth of the world’s population, or have a comparable impact. The persistence of such risks also derives from the inability of policy makers to address problems of great magnitude timeously and intelligently.

In thinking about how to govern in the face of these challenges, however, we should look to three principles that have underpinned great civilisations, and that have been embodied in all faith traditions, over millennia.

The first principle is the need for a measure of personal freedom within society. This is necessary to enable innovation, because it i...