A shorter version of this post first appeared on Blogcritics.

I might never have “practiced” as an agricultural scientist, but an Australian degree in the subject has left me acutely aware of the global shortage of fresh water and quality soils – and how fast these are being degraded.

Australia might be an esspecially bad case – its ancient soils particularly ill-suited to imported European farming methods and its mostly desert interior having a desperate dryness most Europeans struggle to imagine – but erosion and degradation of soils is a huge global problem, as is shortage of water, and we have no alternative ways of producing food….

When I was studying some 20 years ago, climate change was hardly mentioned, but since then its threat to all of our futures has become glaringly obvious.

So which is going to get us first: water, soil or climate change? That sounds flippant, but it is an important question – we need to tackle all of these problems, urgently, and with every input we can muster, but there are some choices that have to be made, and some priorities selected.

Reading Lester Brown’s World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, it’s clear that his calculations have produced one answer: water, not that there is any cause for comfort on the other two issues.

On soils, the tale of woe is long. In Lesotho, in the past 10 years its grain harvest has dropped by half in large part due to the soil fertility problems; Haiti, self-sufficient in grain 40 years ago, is now importing more than half; in Mongolia over the past 20 years nearly 3/4 of the wheat land has been abandoned and yields have fallen, cutting the harvest by 4/5.

But it is not just the developing world problem. Roughly one third of global crop land is losing soil at an excessive rate, and each inch means a lost 6% in grain production. We all know about America’s Dust Bowl, but since then it was the Soviet’s turn in the late 1950s. At its heart was Kazakhstan, which at its peak had more than 25 million hectares of land under grain; that has fallen to 7 million, but the average wheat yield is scarcely one tonne a hectare, compared to seven in France.

The new problems? China, which has roughly the same number of cattle as the US, but about 281 million sheep and goats, compared to America’s 9 million, and a huge problem with dust storms; India, with 24% of its land area turning into desert; and the expanding Sahara in Africa. It is estimated that land degradation across Africa costs it 8,000,000 tonnes of grain a year, about 8% of its annual harvest. This loss is expected to double by 2020.
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A much shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

It’s an odd recommendation, but a strong one: the copy of Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis is quite the most battered book I’ve ever picked up from the London Library, and the fact that this is down to wide use rather than accident is attested to by the large number of date stamps on the inside cover since its publication in 2001.
And having completed the text, I’d entirely concur with that recommendation, as well as that of Raj Patel in the Guardian, who put me on to it.

In my political science studies I’d encountered the theory that underdevelopment was a process, not a “natural” state of being of certain countries but a degradation inflicted on them by force and geopolitical circumstances, but what Davis does in this book is brings that reality vividly, painfully, awfully to life. But what’s more, he debunks many of the traditional claims of the imperialist apologists – that the crises in India and China were Malthusian in original – the product of uncontrolled human reproduction. And as we hear a lot these days about El Nino and La Nina, he gives them a history back at least to the 17th century (and in a very detailed chapter containing a lot of physics an explanation of them).

Furthermore, much of this history has sharp, frightening relevance today. One of his key points – obvious when you think about it, yet I’ve never previously seen it discussed, is that globalisation of food supplies means globalisation of prices – which means a shortfall in supplies doesn’t just affect one specific area, but the whole of the globe. If prices rise sharply, famine – an inability to buy necessary food supplies – hits the poor everywhere.

So here’s Davis’ picture of India in 1876, a picture that looks in miniature awfully like the world we have today: “The worsening depression in world trade had been spreading misery and igniting discontent throughout cotton-exporting districts of the Deccan, where in any case forest enclosures and the displacement of gram by cotton had greatly reduced local food security. The traditional system of household and village grain reserves regulated by complex networks of patrimonial obligation had been largely supplanted since the Mutiny by merchant inventories and the cash nexus. Although rice and wheat production of the rest of India … had been above average for the past three years, much of the surplus had been exported to England… The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise, the telegraph ensued that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends. Moreover, British antipathy to price control invited anyone who had money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation. … food prices soared out of the reach of outcaste labourers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers and poor peasants. ‘The dearth,’ as The Nineteenth Century pointed out a few months later ‘was of money and of labour rather than of food’.” (p. 26)
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Article first published on Blogcritics
There’s an assumption underlying The Plundered Planet that left me astonished at Paul Collier’s hubris, and amazed that the author felt no need, whatsoever, not a jot, to justify it. He spells it out simply: “in all probability the distant future will be very much richer than we are”. I’d love to be able to question him, to ask how he can be so certainty that huge material “progress” – seen at most over only a couple of centuries, in a few small parts of the world – will continue?

It’s a pity, for the author of The Bottom Billion has a lot of interesting things to say in his latest book, which is chiefly concerned with the ways, both philosophical and practical, developing states should exploit their resources – particularly mineral resources. (He’s also concerned about climate change and making decisions for the future about that.) There’s a lot of sense in it, a lot of human concern, and very reasonable concern about the future.

The basic premise that he sets out is that no resources should be exploited unless the decisionmaker can be confident that the resources generated as a result will be more valuable to the future than leaving the original material in the ground. The chief concern here, as in his previous book, is developing states, and particularly with exploring what’s gone wrong in states suffering the “resource curse”, and in the few rare examples, such as Botswana, where it hasn’t applied.

He begins by explaining just how little is actually known about the resources of developing states, particularly in Africa. Collier gives the example of Zambia – the most recent geological surveys date back to the 1950s, and there’s never been a mineral discovery further than 10 miles from a major road. The answer, he suggests, is — setting out the reasons why auctioning or selling something when you can have no real idea of its value — aid projects financing surveys, a pretty radical idea for the aid community to swallow. And then you’ve got the problem of how to sell what you’ve got, when you know it is there…

Collier notes that China is the only source now offering free surveys. In fact he’s very counter-current on China, not viewing the increasingly influential state through rose-coloured glasses, but particularly interested in the way China is purchasing the rights to resource extraction in return for the construction of infrastructure. He says these deals are traditionally hated, since they are wholly opaque, with no idea of real value being recorded. But, having suggested that the vast bulk of revenue from natural resources should be invested for the future, this might be a way to do it.

“Any prudent Minister of Finance …might justifiably be afraid of being but one voice in favor of spending much of the money on infrastructure. Across the table, the Minister of Defense might argue now was the time to raise army salaries. He might mention that there had been disaffection in the ranks and look meaningfully at the President. The Minister of Education would interject that the teachers unions were fully aware that extra money had flowed into the budget and planning a strike. In short, the Minister of Finance might reasonably fear that the bulk of the money would dribble away on extra recurrent spending. Compared with that outcome, the Chinese deal might look rather attractive. There would be no extra money to carve up at the cabinet table: the offer was for infrastructure. The investment rate out of the implicity revenues would therefore be 100 percent.”

The problem is now – as with internal investment – transparency of the value of what’s offered. The argument runs – and certainly seems to me to have veracity – that capital investments come broadly in two parts – equipment (eg trucks) and structures (eg roads). The former generally have to be imported in developing states so the price paid can, with even very limited scrutiny, judged against world prices, so if wildly inflated by corruption it is obvious. But the structures have to be built in-situ, and in greatly varying conditions, so it is difficult to tell if costs have been hugely inflated by corruption (or indeed simply been underbid by the Chinese). The alternative would be to open the same process to competition – offer the best infrastructure to win the right to the resources. “Instead of accusing the Chinese of plundering Africa, it might have been more effective of the international community to imitate them.”

But how to decide which infrastructure to plump for? That’s also wide open to corruption. (And not only in notable “corrupt” places – as a young journalist in rural Australia locals were always telling me about how the roads outside councillors’ houses were always remarkably smooth.) Collier says that cost-benefit analysis, the traditional route, makes too many demands on the human resources of most developing world bureaucracies; is simply unrealistic. Instead he makes a simple, practical proposal, choosing some successful middle-income country, Malaysia or Botswana for example, as a model, and broadly following its investment model.

He does, however, make one prescription, and in a place where his narrow economist lens starts again to look very limited: that investment should be concentrated in cities, and preferably big cities. “Each time a city doubles in population, the productivity of its workers increases by around 6 percent.” Fine, and probably true, so far as it goes, but if you concentrate investment there, how is the agricultural hinterland going to keep the city fed? (Although again Nigeria provides an example of how things can go badly wrong – in a political carve-up Lagos, its largest city, was left without any oil revenue at all.)
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