Changing Course to Feed the World in 2050

Editor’s Note: Timothy A. Wise and Marie Brill of ActionAid USA have co-authored a new ActionAid report “Rising to the Challenge: Changing Course to Feed the World in 2050,” based on a GDAE Working paper. The following op-ed published by Triple Crisis and the Huffington Post summarizes the findings of the their report.

Timothy A. Wise and Marie Brill, Guest Blogger

Was Thomas Malthus right after all? In 1798, Malthus postulated that exponential population growth would outstrip our ability to feed ourselves, dooming civilization. This early attempt at global economic modeling has since been widely discredited. But if you’ve been listening to policy-makers and pundits since food prices spiked in 2008, you’ve likely heard the eerie echoes of Malthusian thinking.

“With almost 80 million more people to feed each year, agriculture can’t keep up with the escalating food demand,” warned Frank Rijsberman, head of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). “FAO estimates that we have to double food production by 2050 to feed the expected 9 billion people, knowing that one billion people are already going to bed hungry every day.”

Well, not so fast. Yes, resource constraints, exacerbated by uncertainties over climate change and the unsustainable consumption of non-renewable resources have introduced new threats to our ability to feed a growing population. The issues are indeed serious, but the specter of looming food shortages is a bit overblown.
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The Emerging Left in the “Emerging” World: Two Areas of Continuity

Editors’ note:  This is the fourth and final part of “The Emerging Left in the ‘Emerging’ World,” by Triple Crisis founding contributor Jayati Ghosh, originally delivered in 2012 as part of the Ralph Miliband Lecture Series at the London School of Economics. Find the first three parts of the lecture here, here, and here. In this week’s post, Ghosh discusses two areas of “strong continuity” between the traditional left and the emerging left: “the attitude toward the significance of the nation state and the attitude toward imperialism.”

None of these emerging left positions [the “seven common threads”] is completely new. There are many strands of earlier leftist thought that contain some of these features. The concern with women’s rights and the recognition of other forms of oppression, for example, can be found in the writings of Marx and Engels, as well as other socialist thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Still, the features outlined above do represent significant departures from the traditional left paradigm.

Meanwhile, there are two crucial features of strong continuity between the traditional and the emerging left: the attitude towards the significance of the nation state and the attitude towards imperialism.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Emerging Left in the "Emerging" World: Two Areas of Continuity

Editors’ note:  This is the fourth and final part of “The Emerging Left in the ‘Emerging’ World,” by Triple Crisis founding contributor Jayati Ghosh, originally delivered in 2012 as part of the Ralph Miliband Lecture Series at the London School of Economics. Find the first three parts of the lecture here, here, and here. In this week’s post, Ghosh discusses two areas of “strong continuity” between the traditional left and the emerging left: “the attitude toward the significance of the nation state and the attitude toward imperialism.”

None of these emerging left positions [the “seven common threads”] is completely new. There are many strands of earlier leftist thought that contain some of these features. The concern with women’s rights and the recognition of other forms of oppression, for example, can be found in the writings of Marx and Engels, as well as other socialist thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Still, the features outlined above do represent significant departures from the traditional left paradigm.

Meanwhile, there are two crucial features of strong continuity between the traditional and the emerging left: the attitude towards the significance of the nation state and the attitude towards imperialism.

Read the rest of this entry »

No Respite, Five Years after Lehman

Martin Khor

From the editors: This piece by Triple Crisis blogger Martin Khor appeared last week at Third World Network.

This week marks five-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers that was the immediate trigger for the United States and global financial crisis.

Lehman was the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface were many contributory elements.

They include financial deregulation, the conversion of finance from serving the real economy to a beast that thrived on speculation, creaming layers off the productive sectors and unsuspecting consumers through new manipulative instruments.

The U.S. subprime housing mortgage crisis was the boil that burst—where massive loans were given to homeowners who could not pay, the loans were securitised and sold to unsuspecting investors, the derivatives magnified the proportions of the crisis, while the bankers made billions selling very risky “financial products” as very credit-worthy investments.

Many collapsed or collapsing banks in the U.S. and Europe had to be rescued in bailouts totaling trillions of dollars.

The crisis also exposed the deep deficiencies of the global financial system. Globalisation of finance meant a crisis in one part could be quickly transmitted to other parts of the system.

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The Emerging Left in the “Emerging” World: More Threads

Editors’ note:  This is the third part (of four) of “The Emerging Left in the ‘Emerging’ World,” by Triple Crisis founding contributor Jayati Ghosh, originally delivered in 2012 as part of the Ralph Miliband Lecture Series at the London School of Economics. We posted the introduction two weeks ago (here), and the second part last week (here). In this week’s post, Ghosh discusses five more “common threads” of the emerging left: private property, “rights,” class and identity, gender, and the environment. We will post the conclusion to the lecture next week.

On Private Property

Earlier models of socialism, such as Soviet style “state socialism”, did away with private property in the means of production, only recognizing private rights over personal belongings. The new leftist thinking is more ambivalent about private property—disliking it when it is seen as monopolizing or highly concentrated (for example in the form of multinational corporations) but otherwise not just accepting of it, but even (as in the case of small producers) actively encouraging it. Increasingly, left movements and governments have recognized the value of other kinds of property rights as well, particularly communal property associated with traditional indigenous communities. Again, this runs strongly counter to earlier centralizing and “modernizing” models of socialism, which derided these communities and their communal property forms as premodern relics that had to be done away with.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Emerging Left in the "Emerging" World: More Threads

Editors’ note:  This is the third part (of four) of “The Emerging Left in the ‘Emerging’ World,” by Triple Crisis founding contributor Jayati Ghosh, originally delivered in 2012 as part of the Ralph Miliband Lecture Series at the London School of Economics. We posted the introduction two weeks ago (here), and the second part last week (here). In this week’s post, Ghosh discusses five more “common threads” of the emerging left: private property, “rights,” class and identity, gender, and the environment. We will post the conclusion to the lecture next week.

On Private Property

Earlier models of socialism, such as Soviet style “state socialism”, did away with private property in the means of production, only recognizing private rights over personal belongings. The new leftist thinking is more ambivalent about private property—disliking it when it is seen as monopolizing or highly concentrated (for example in the form of multinational corporations) but otherwise not just accepting of it, but even (as in the case of small producers) actively encouraging it. Increasingly, left movements and governments have recognized the value of other kinds of property rights as well, particularly communal property associated with traditional indigenous communities. Again, this runs strongly counter to earlier centralizing and “modernizing” models of socialism, which derided these communities and their communal property forms as premodern relics that had to be done away with.
Read the rest of this entry »

China’s Ultimate Debt Holders—Not the Borrowers

Sara Hsu, Guest Blogger

In China, things are not looking pretty. Debt is high among corporations and local, provincial, and state governments—up to more than 25 trillion RMB among governments in 2012 and 60 trillion RMB among corporations in 2012. Some say debt is also high among households, but let’s face it: households still have a hell of a time borrowing from banks. Their debt load comprised close to 10 trillion RMB in 2012, and most of their income is put into savings as a cushion against adverse conditions.

Much of the debt that has gone to governments and corporations has been extended through loans, “entrusted loans,” or “trust loans.” Entrusted loans are loans from one party to another that use a bank as an intermediary, while trust loans are loans from trusts to one or multiple parties. Both of these types of loans can be securitized and sold off to bank customers, which they have been, in spades, as wealth management products.

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How to Put a Stop to Sweatshop Abuse

John Miller, Guest Blogger

The April 24 collapse of the Rana Plaza building, just outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital city, killed over 1,100 garment workers toiling in the country’s growing export sector.

The horrors of the Rana Plaza disaster, the worst ever in the garment industry, sent shockwaves across the globe. In the United States, the largest single destination for clothes made in Bangladesh, newspaper editors called on retailers whose wares are made in the country’s export factories to sign the legally binding fire-and-safety accord already negotiated by mostly European major retailers. Even some of the business press chimed in. The editors of Bloomberg Businessweek admonished global brand-name retailers that safe factories are “not only right but also smart.”

The business press, however, also turned their pages over to sweatshop defenders, contrarians who refuse to let the catastrophic loss of life in Bangladesh’s export factories shake their faith in neoliberal globalization. Tim Worstall, a fellow at London’s free-market Adam Smith Institute, told Forbes readers that “Bangladesh simply cannot afford rich world safety and working standards.” Economist Benjamin Powell, meanwhile, took the argument that sweatshops “improve the lives of their workers and boost growth” out for a spin on the Forbes op-ed pages.

For sweatshop apologists like Worstall and Powell, yet more export-led growth is the key to improving working and safety conditions in Bangladesh. “Economic development, rather than legal mandates,” Powell argues, “drives safety improvements.” Along the same lines, Worstall claims that rapid economic growth and increasing wealth are what improved working conditions in the United States a century ago and that those same forces, if given a chance, will do the same in Bangladesh.
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The Emerging Left in the “Emerging” World: Seven Common Threads

Jayati Ghosh

Editors’ note:  This is the second part (of four) of “The Emerging Left in the ‘Emerging’ World,” by Triple Crisis founding contributor Jayati Ghosh, originally delivered in 2012 as part of the Ralph Miliband Lecture Series at the London School of Economics. We posted the introduction last week (here).  In this second part of the lecture, Ghosh presents the first two of “seven common threads” shared by the emerging left: democracy and scale.

What I call “the emerging Left” shares seven common threads that appear in otherwise very distinct political formations and in very different socioeconomic contexts. These are not always “new ideas”—in fact they are more often than not old ideas that appear new because of the changing context and the collective failure of memory, even within the left itself. Still, these seven threads—new attitudes toward democracy, scale and centralization, private property, the discourse of rights, class and other identities, women and gender, and the environment—all represent breaks from 20th century socialist orthodoxy.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Emerging Left in the "Emerging" World: Seven Common Threads

Jayati Ghosh

Editors’ note:  This is the second part (of four) of “The Emerging Left in the ‘Emerging’ World,” by Triple Crisis founding contributor Jayati Ghosh, originally delivered in 2012 as part of the Ralph Miliband Lecture Series at the London School of Economics. We posted the introduction last week (here).  In this second part of the lecture, Ghosh presents the first two of “seven common threads” shared by the emerging left: democracy and scale.

What I call “the emerging Left” shares seven common threads that appear in otherwise very distinct political formations and in very different socioeconomic contexts. These are not always “new ideas”—in fact they are more often than not old ideas that appear new because of the changing context and the collective failure of memory, even within the left itself. Still, these seven threads—new attitudes toward democracy, scale and centralization, private property, the discourse of rights, class and other identities, women and gender, and the environment—all represent breaks from 20th century socialist orthodoxy.

Read the rest of this entry »