Clashing Objectives

Listening to Professor Nexon’s lecture today, I was reminded of an article from the New York Times.com “U.N. Panel Urges Changes to Feed Poor While Saving Environment” which delves into the issues of rising food prices, climate change, and international solutions to these problems.

According to Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, “Since 2005 the prices of (food) staples have jumped 80 percent.” The UN also announced that food now represents “60 percent to 80 percent of consumer spending in developing countries.” Faced with these problems, one of the causes of rising food prices has come under dispute: “the Western push to use “biofuels” made from grain, especially corn, to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.”

According to the NYT article, the US has recently come under fire for this push to use biofuels such as corn-based ethanol to lower oil consumption and keep corn prices high for farmers, because “the same prices that please farmers are causing shortages in basic grains used for food in the developing world.” Fuilhem Calvo, consultant to the Unesco Division of Ecological and Earth sciences, pointed out that dealing with environmental concerns and providing enough food for the poor are “contradictory objectives.” This article’s author elucidates: “The quandary is an example of how environmental aims may have to give way to the needs of the poor – or, as the Unesco report urges, that agricultural methods will have to change.” At the end of the article, the Unesco report’s director Robert Watson said that the biofuel push “repeated an old message about the cost of concentrating “on production alone” was resulting in “an increasingly divided planet.”

As Professor Nexon pointed out in class, global warming is a particularly difficult issue to deal with due to the distribution of costs and benefits in programs aiming to counter such warming, and due to the changes in behavior that countering warming requires. However, I think that the Unesco report is taking its objectives of aiding the poor too far. If governments are going to take the problem of climate change head on, that means encouraging innovation in technology. Biofuels may not be the ideal solution to climate change but at least they are a step in the right direction: away from fossil fuels. Increased innovation will necessarily be supported by government incentives to businesses, but even with such incentives new green technology is likely to (at least initially) cost more than existing technology. Preventing climate change does not come cheap.

I do support governments and international organizations providing monetary relief to poor nations suffering from increased food prices, and according to the NYT article the World Bank and President Bush have vowed to do so. However, preventing changes in existing methods to limit climate change on the basis of food crises in poor nations, (which have several other causes), would have disastrous results for the globe. Climate change hurts the global community, not just certain nations, and is difficult enough to counteract without further restrictions on programs to solve it. And interesting as Garrett Harding’s proposal in this week’s class reading to “relinquish the freedom to breed” was, it seems a rather too severe solution to climate change. Although the changes that feasible solutions to climate change effect may unfortunately contribute to rising problems in food scarcity in the short term, in the long term limiting global warming will undoubtedly lead to benefits that greatly outweigh this cost.

Source: “U.N. Panel Urges Changes to Feed Poor While Saving Environment”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/world/europe/16food.html?ref=world