Food Shortages: Just a harbinger of things to come

A UN expert is getting hyperventilated over the global food shortage:

The U.N. Human Rights Council should meet urgently to spotlight the global food crisis as a human rights emergency affecting at least 100 million people whose right to adequate food is being massively violated, a U.N. expert said Friday.

Olivier De Schutter, the council’s new independent expert on the right to food, said a special session of the human rights body would bring into the debate over rising food prices and global shortages “the human right to adequate food which for the moment has been totally absent.”

I’ll ignore the “human right” part, which I certainly don’t agree with. And for now, I’ll ignore the tragedy part, which is certainly compelling and important.

I’m ignoring those points because what I really want to talk about is why this shortage exists, and why shortages of various resources will continue to occur over the next few decades. And the reason, of course, is that increasing global demand is causing price increases and shortages. That demand is the result of dramatically increased consumption by formerly 3rd world countries, such as China and India

Here are a few shortages/radical price increases we’ve already seen over the past few years:

• Concrete
• Metals
  • Iron/Steel
  • Copper
  • Aluminum
  • Scrap Metal
• Gas & Oil
• Food
  • Rice
  • Wheat
  • Corn
  • Soybeans
• Fertilizer

As you can see, these aren’t isolated occurrences, and once the shortages appear, they tend to persist. Our future is one of continuing price increases, and impaired access to basic commodities we have taken for granted for decades. And as usual, we don’t appear to have any sort of coherent strategy for dealing with this situation.

I’d hate to think that we are living at the all-time peak in our lifestyle, and that going forward we’ll see a steady decline in our standard of living, but it’s certainly appearing that that’s the case.