Philobiblon

I’m currently reading Nature and Power, by Joachim Radkau, which is powerful and very interesting – nothing less than an attempt to set the framework for a mature study of environmental history.

But one fact in it really brought me up short. Before 1945, the vast bulk of the world depended on locally grown foodstuffs – very little was moved much distance at all – when you think about it every town in grain-growing areas of any size had a mill and presumably sold most of its flour more or less locally, and international trade was negligible.

Yet now, we’ve got vast amounts of bulk transports, and huge international transfers. In half a century, and I suspect lots of that change has happened in only the last 30 years or so, there’s been a huge unplanned, unconsidered, unmonitored change in how our most basic need is met.

Now I’ve been reading about the terrible rice crop in Vietnam, dreadful conditions in China, about the drought striking the Russian and central Asian breadbasket, and it has been extremely dry in much of Britain and France … and so I wondered how we are doing.

Looking around led me to this excellent overview from the London Review of Books, and to the US Department of Agriculture June report (which seems pretty sanguine – although some of the weather has happened since then – and it does predict a 7.5m tonne fall in wheat crop), and a very useful FAO summary site.

And today the Guardian reports that speculators are getting heavily into the whole business – just what we all don’t need.

So the short-term answer seems to be “worry”, and the longer-term answer is “be very, very worried”.