The Big Problem We Need to Face

Chapter 2 of Regenesis — Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot

I highly recommend reading Regenesis. In order to fully understand the complexity of the ideas and remember it all, I wrote a summary of each chapter. I did it for myself and I am sharing it with you. Longer quotes from the book are in italics.

Monbiot begins the chapter with the discussion of complex systems — that “they are all in some ways alike” and possess emergent properties. This means that their components, however simple they each might be on their own, behave in complex ways when they come together.

Unfortunately for us, sometimes our solutions to problems in a complex system just makes them worse. He gives an example from the Grapes of Wrath.

In 1939, just as complex systems first began to be described by scientists, John Steinbeck, in The Grapes of Wrath, instinctively discerned how they had begun to dominate our lives. ‘It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.’

Monbiot explains that complex systems can collapse, flipping to an entirely new stable state.

Because this new state, in many cases, has it’s own self-reinforcing properties, which stabilize and secure it, a flipped system can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to flip back.

Our complex world systems have become so intertwined and dependent on each other that we find ourselves in a very precarious state.

Our efforts to improve the performance of our own small corner of a system often weaken the system as a whole. Enhancing the efficiency of a business or process is another way of saying that we are reducing its redundancy. Connecting a business more strongly to others might be essential to its economic survival, but it can make the network more fragile… Creating a network of networks, an oft proclaimed aim of governments, banks, tech firms and corporations seeking mergers and acquisitions, could scarcely be better designed to spread contagious collapse.

Looking at our food systems, Monbiot asks, ‘is the food system resilient?’

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Paradoxically, while many of us have access to a much wider range of foods than our grandparents knew, globally our diets have become more alike.

Some crops are more easily grown in certain parts of the world creating a system where

every individual decision, may be economically rational, but the result is a system that has become less resilient.

Monbiot provides an incredible description of the problem.

As diets converge, and the farming methods that supply them converge, the biggest players globalize their businesses and destroy their smaller competitors. Corporations that supply the universal seeds, machinery and chemicals enjoy ever greater economies of scale. So do the companies that trade and process the universal farm products.

Market power translates to political power: the companies use their wealth to lobby governments and shape trade treaties. They secure intellectual property rights (patenting seeds and breeds as well as chemicals and machinery). They gain permission to merge and swallow each other. Their products then achieve even greater dominance… It’s an accelerating cycle that inexorably destabilizes the system…

The result is a corporate sector even more concentrated and connected than the financial sector was before the 2008 crash. Now we have:

Four companies controlling the majority of agricultural output. For example, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus control an estimated 90 percent of the global grain trade.ChemChina, Corteva, Bayer and BASF control 66 percent of the world’s market for agricultural chemicals.

The food sector has seen a faster and more extensive acceleration than many other industries.

One reason is that sectors with a high rate of technological change can use their intellectual property — such as patents on genetically engineered seeds — to lock competitors out of the market.

Another aspect of consolidation has been the food sector

becoming more tightly coupled to the financial sector with the same institutional investors cropping up throughout the global food system…speculation has become an end in itself and is likely now to be a destabilizing force.

When a complex system is approaching a tipping point, it begins to flicker — become more volatile. Monbiot sees this flickering happening in the global food system. Looking at 2008 and 2011 we can see

the biggest spikes this century in the price of food and, as a result, in hunger. The global wheat price rose by 3.3 percent in 2008 and 3.8 percent in 2011. But these two major shocks had two extraordinary features. Ostensibly they were triggered by heatwaves and droughts in some food growing regions in 2007 and 2010, but these disruptions were by no means the most extreme in recent years… What appears to have happened is that the impact of small shocks in some growing regions was magnified across the global food system by commodity traders.

The chapter just gets more alarming as Monbiot discusses the effect of global heating on crop production and the extensive damage that has already been done to the soil. He highlights the unintended consequences of agricultural subsidies and ongoing problems such as soil erosion. The chapter was painful to read. The only hope I held was that since it was chapter two, he was still laying out the problem. I was glad to reach the last page. Then upset to read the last sentence.

Unfortunately, the world’s governments and enterprises seem to be attempting exactly the wrong solution to the problem of declining redundancy: expansion.

Please read the book if you want to learn more about this in-depth. It is very well researched, with the last third filled with notes and attributions for his facts and statistics.

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This post was previously published on Andrea O’Ferrall’s blog.

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