Food Shortages; Blind System Loyalty; The Disaster Of Our Ways

April 23 2008 by The Systemic Analyst.

Forget oil prices; shortages of food, and in some places water, are rapidly becoming serious concerns. The bubble that is our Western world often prevents us from seeing the dangers posed by our system; distracted by fears of job loss, unmanageable personal debt and an unending supply of mind-numbing entertainment pumped into our homes through the intravenous that is mass media, we can’t see what difficulties our way come. Step away from immediate and local concerns for a second, scan the international headlines on an internet search and suddenly some alarming trends become apparent: food prices are soaring, the hungry are rioting and some food producing countries are moving towards self-protectionism.

So long as there is processed food across the street in some store’s freezer or selling products in our market is still more lucrative than in the country of origin, why have grounds for concern, right? How long, however, can economics be expected to trump survival; our post-Cold War mentality leaves us still believing in a capitalist system as if it were religion, some divine law of existence that will neither change nor disappear. It’s unthinkable for most people to even conceive that our current system could be any other than what it is. Indeed, just broach the topic with someone and prepare for a touchy backlash of, what else could it be: a dictatorship? communism? what else is there? 

This inability to accept that systems come and systems go leaves us incredibly vulnerable to change. Lacking creativity to even imagine that there should be change renders us incapable of ever preparing for it.  

As an industrialized society we moved en masse to urban centres. We bought into a system - buying food from a network of stores, taking water from a network of pipes, wearing clothes mass produced in distant lands - and in the process became entirely dependent. If suddenly there was a break in the system and we no longer had access to the things that we need, what would happen?

Despite the comparative luxuries some of us have heretofore enjoyed in the West, the time has for us to reconsider the viability of our system. Hopefully, this will occur before the current food shortages, which are only just beginning, truly come to affect us - which inevitably will happen given how connected the system, upon which we as individuals have become so dependent, has become to the wider global network.

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