(From an E-Mail Conversation)
“You’re right – I re-read my part and found it to be pretty hazy. It was written in a hurry, so sorry.
As a background, the file you are sending me is taken from a Time article about an year old (though the conclusion is not Time’s). A lot has happened since then. Let me retry to get my point through, but I might again fail:
1. Rising Asian population and economic growth IS a major factor behind food price increases, contrary to what the author of the e-mail posits, more so because:
a. Staple food price increases, rather than basket food price increases is the real issue, and (most of)
2. However, the most rapid spikes happened with the Biofuel debacle, where large amounts of crop-producing capacity was diverted to… well, crop production – but for fuel producing purposes. If the author of the e-mail wants to blame the West, he could have, much more credibly, bring that point forth, as the rise of Biofuels has much to do with rising fossil-fuel prices and an increasing ‘green-consciousness’ which are nearly exclusively a Western phenomenon (as the poor East heavily lacks biofuel usage capacity anyway).
To quote from an interesting conversation between Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman here (highly recommended, BTW):
Zakaria: Explain what you mean by "hot, flat and crowded."
Friedman: There is a convergence of basically three large forces: one is global warming, which has been going on at a very slow pace since the industrial revolution; the second--what I call the flattening of the world--is a metaphor for the rise of middle-class citizens, from China to India to Brazil to Russia to Eastern Europe, who are beginning to consume like Americans. That's a blessing in so many ways--it's a blessing for global stability and for global growth. But it has enormous resource complications, if all these people--whom you've written about in your book, The Post American World--begin to consume like Americans. And lastly, global population growth simply refers to the steady growth of population in general, but at the same time the growth of more and more people able to live this middle-class lifestyle. Between now and 2020, the world's going to add another billion people. And their resource demands--at every level--are going to be enormous. I tell the story in the book how, if we give each one of the next billion people on the planet just one sixty-watt incandescent light bulb, what it will mean: the answer is that it will require about 20 new 500-megawatt coal-burning power plants. That's so they can each turn on just one light bulb!
I hope I am clearer now. ;)"
