What would ‘Malthusian years’ bring?
Tom Abate covers the technology sector for GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. Any views expressed are his own.
It seems like a science fiction novel: Near-starvation of much of the world’s population results in the development of patented seeds and widespread livestock cloning.
But that scenario is not pure speculation. Rather it is a possible future envisioned by analysts for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, in a new report titled “The Bioeconomy of 2030.”
The report, which extrapolates current trends into the year 2030, deals with every aspect of biotechnology from medicines to plant-based chemicals, and projects their impacts on the world economy. It raises the fictional starvation scenario to prod the public and policymakers into considering biotech agriculture in a new light.
“Two consecutive years of extreme drought and high temperatures in the major grain growing regions of the world between 2016 and 2017 … caused an explosion in food prices,” says the report published last month. “The ‘Malthusian years’, as they were quickly called by journalists, fueled further investment in agricultural biotechnology.”
Thomas Malthus, a British economist and demographer, famously predicted that population growth would outpace food production, resulting in famine. But over the past two centuries, a series of technological advances — the Industrial Revolution, for example — have greatly expanded the world’s ability to produce food and his theory has been largely discredited.
G20 ends Anglo-Saxon era
– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
Thursday’s G20 summit may not mark the end or even the beginning of the end of the global recession. It did mark the end of the ascendancy of the unfettered, Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism.
What comes next is far from sure, but it will be different from the headlong dash for individual enrichment, short-term profit and financial acrobatics that began with the dominance of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The widespread acceptance of increased regulation would have been anathema for U.S. President Barack Obama‘s predecessors.
“The old Washington consensus is over,” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared after chairing the London summit. It was a clear acknowledgement that the deregulation that allowed casino capitalism to flourish on Wall Street and in the City of London, the world’s two biggest financial centers, had failed and will be fundamentally overhauled.
Brown’s role in brokering a bigger-than-expected G20 deal on refinancing and reforming the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, extending the scope of regulation and providing new finance for trade and the poorest countries was a personal success. But it may not help him much at home, where many recall his 1997-2007 decade as a “light-touch” finance minister who claimed to have ended the cycle of “boom and bust.”
The $1.1 trillion in funds for the IMF, the World Bank, trade finance and development which he announced, even if it is not all new money, may begin to restore market confidence that countries will not default, and to revive trade flows.
Sherry, there is nothing wrong with charity. But most of the countries where there is poverty, there is a corrupt government to deprive the people. Think India. Think Rwanda. These places don’t have a subsisting impoverished class because their nation is outright poor — it’s because every time the idiots at the UN elect to send food, the food is taken by the government to go where the government wants it… which is the government alone. Everyone else is left in the dust, and the government couldn’t care less. Therefore, it isn’t an issue of what the governments in our first-world nations can supply through generosity, but what our goverments can slowly encroach onto us as they raise the taxes like the temperature of a frying pan on which the frog sits. We’ll be okay with tiny increases year after year, until we give more than half of what we make to the government so they can play around with a few billion more dollars of money that isn’t theirs to begin with. This sort of thinking, letting the government do as it pleases, brought us into this mess.
U.S. fights fire, Germans fear flood
– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
The United States is fighting a fire in the world economy, but Germany and some other European countries fear a flood of inflation as a result.
That clash of cultures is at the heart of transatlantic debate over whether Europe should spend more and ease monetary policy to revive growth, with a deep economic contraction certain this year and an end to the recession not yet in sight.
The perception gap could cause lingering resentment among Americans and Germans on the way out of the crisis.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick sees concern on both sides of the Atlantic, not just in Europe, at the risk of inflation down the road from the massive additional liquidity created by the U.S. Federal Reserve and soaring public debt.
The current gush of liquidity made the glut after the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2001 look like a desert, he told the weekend Brussels Forum, a conference of North American and European policymakers, business and opinion leaders.
The dollar’s sharp fall and the jump in the price of gold after the Fed’s announcement of a giant purchase of long Treasury bonds reflected fears that the United States will try to inflate its way out of the crisis.
Germany has done a lot. Germany has absorbed hundreds of thousand immigrants and political refugees from the recent turmoils of the world. When the two Germanys reunited the chancellor said ‘we will not have Germans with full rights and some with tentative rights’, even though some economic advisers said that there should be some kind of interim economic status for the former East Germans. The next day all of those East Germans took the worthless East Marks out of their mattresses and exchanged them one for one for D-Marks. How much do you think that cost?
Germany is the big economic engine that pulls the rest of Europe with it.
Germany does a lot in the world. Germany trains the Afghan police. Germany provides immediate emergency technical help when disasters occur around the world, and especially in Europe and Turkey. Germany has health care for all it’s people (and no, it’s not ‘socialized medicine’-if you don’t like the doctor you have you go find another one), Germany sends injured, overweight, and stressed out people to ‘cures’, a holistic health care method of dealing with illness that involves fresh air, social interaction, healthy food, and a health maintenance approach-not just drugs and more drugs.
You see I am an admirer of Germany.
What Germans are afraid of is a currency reform. We have never had a currency reform in the United States. The Germans Grandparents lived through two of these. One day you have the money you worked for all your life, the next day you have nothing, not because of a stock market crash, but because the ‘old’ money is now worthless. The Germans are afraid that this is where the financial crisis and current situation is heading.
Ask the World Bank President
Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, and a man who believes that 2009 will be a “dangerous year”, will be speaking on March 31st and has agreed to take questions from Reuters readers.
Zoellick has been outspoken during the current economic crisis predicting the first shrinking of the economy since the ’30s, warning that increased government spending will simply create a ‘sugar high‘ until banks’ toxic assets are dealt with properly, and urging a tougher stand against protectionism.
But the World Bank’s primary focus is on helping developing nations and alleviating poverty. Earlier this month it published research showing that the spreading crisis will push 46 million more people into poverty in 2009 on top of 130-155 million pushed into poverty in 2008.
With the London summit of the Group of 20 nations on April 2nd fast approaching what do you want to know about the World Bank’s role in shoring up the world economy and helping poorer nations? Use the comments section below, or use the #askwb tag on Twitter, and I’ll get as many of your questions to Robert Zoeliick as possible.
UPDATE: This event has now taken place and you can view the questions we put to Robert Zoellick in the player below. We have no means to pass on any further questions to the World Bank but you are welcome to add your comments on the discussion thread below.
How closer have we come to eliminating world poverty and creating financial equality among humans on our planet according to the goals of your institution?
What steps are you taking to correct the errors and to improve this necessary vision?
Quantitative and qualitative speaking according to factual statistics what have you really done to increase the per person income and not the average or GDP of countries since the insertion of your organization?
How come there is more and more poverty and more and more people making less and less and a few ones getting richer?
What is not working with your old proposed model and what are you going to do about it now?
China needs to be bold to ride out the storm
– Wei Gu is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own. –
Beijing risks inflicting even more damage to the world economy by reflexively slowing market reforms in response to the financial crisis. But China’s leaders should quicken, not slow, the pace of reform to help it ride through the storm.
This December marks the 30th anniversary of China’s decision to embrace market liberalization but with growth becoming the No.1 concern in China, reforms have taken a back seat.
To stimulate the economy, Beijing has resorted to non-market measures that have worked in the past, such as building big infrastructure projects to boost public spending.
Further, the yuan’s recent slide has prompted some market-watchers to speculate that policymakers are deliberately encouraging the depreciation of the currency to support exports.
But those policies will not pull China out of this turmoil. The multiplier effect of government infrastructure investment is much weaker than during the Asian financial crisis because China’s roads and bridges are much improved. And with demand slumping almost everywhere abroad, a small yuan devaluation will not save exports, especially when the currencies of other Asian nations are seeing much bigger falls.
China has to switch from its export-oriented growth model to a new one driven by domestic demand.
Post-1949 China has plenty of sins to answer for, but it has worked for years to curb population growth. Indeed, aspects of China’s strict one-child policy have been condemned by many of its fiercest critics.The government in Beijing is no different than any other in seeking to eradicate grinding poverty; don’t forget that huge swathes of China remain impoverished. To portray this “preying” on other countries by exporting is, to say the least, eccentric. Note that the fledgling American economy grew by exporting low-cost goods to Europe. The problems associated with free trade have at least as much to do with short-sighted domestic economic policies and business practices in the US as with so-called predatory practices by developing countries.China needs to reform it’s economy to steadily increase domestic demand, although it must avoid the sort of unsustainable, debt-based bubble that has wrecked the US economy. That cannot be done in a flash.
I think the whole idea of eating is for nutrition. It is possible to create genetically modified foods that will grow in all sorts of terrible soil conditions, but then I would not benefit from the nutrition. I’m sure we can create a type of cocoa that can grow on iron-depleted soil, but then we would not gain much digestible iron from the cocoa. Fruits, vegetables and livestock convert the substances from the soil into a form that we can more easily digest. Genetic modification might just cause us to eat more to compensate for the lack of nutrition.