The Economist’s treatment of the food crisis, “the silent tsunami”, is as riddled with self-serving contradictions and convenient omissions as one would expect; and sadly, it is by far the most reasonable and balanced analysis to appear in the mainstream media. They cover the symptoms, but in uncharacteristic style stop digging before they reach the true root cause, our failed energy and “free trade” policies, predicated on massive petroleum imports and ongoing sacrifice at the altar of the multinational corporation. The food crisis is but a symptom of the larger disease: corporate profits now dictate social policy. We need to realign our energy policy away from merely serving the interests of large energy corporations and shift to government subsidized nuclear power, to provide cheap and clean energy for all.

In one breath, the ever-anonymous Economist author advocates emergency funding of $700 million to the United Nations’ World Food Program (and rightly so) to ease the food crisis. He also proposes that the WFP expand aggressively into nontraditional activities: beyond simply distributing food to famine victims, the WFP ought to be “supporting (and sometimes inventing) social-protection programmes and food-for-work schemes for the poor” that will cost “tens of billions of dollars”. ¹ Two paragraphs down, he then writes “In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene in them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn…” It appears that two different articles were unwittingly pasted together. One wonders how the editors’ and proofreaders’ heads did not explode from the cognitive dissonance.

Setting aside, for the moment, The Economist’s lack of a coherent proposal for a way out of the current crisis (we should spend “tens of billions of dollars” on new programs to stabilize world food markets, and at the same time “not intervene in them further”?), their analysis of the causes spends only about one sentence mentioning, in passing, the most direct causative culprit of the crisis: ethanol, and first world government subsidies thereto, in the midst of a characteristic neoliberal tirade on how big bad governments fiddling with the beauteous magic of market mechanisms is the source of all evil in the world.

The misguided idea that the developed world ought to free itself from dependence on foreign oil by manufacturing fuel domestically from plants, converting vast swathes of farmland into gasoline rather than food, was the Bush administration’s token renewable energy project, at the same time a grudging admission that hey, climate change might be real after all, a nod to nationalists who are grumbling about our ever growing dependence on foreign oil, and a windfall subsidy for large agribusiness interests who grow the crops and the oil companies who refine them. Worldwide food prices spiking to their highest levels in recorded history was an unforeseen side effect. It is hardly surprising that they do not go into much detail here, as The Economist’s interests and views are generally aligned with the Republicans who proposed the plan and the large corporations who benefit. Another story in the current edition mentions ethanol in passing, once. The cover story of this week’s edition deals with the food crisis, and we have about two sentences in the whole issue mentioning “ethanol”.

The magazine has offered ² noncommittal ³ lukewarm ⁴ indifferent support ⁵ to ethanol ⁶ in the past. They affect a progressive social and environmental posture when possible but still generally seem to function as the mouthpiece for conservative politicians and large multinational oil companies in terms of geopolitics and energy policy — they must tread a thin line on the topic of alternative fuels. Indeed, in most issues it seems like half the display ads are paid for by Exxon and Chevron and Shell, used to tout their questionable green credentials to The Economist’s international A-list audience. The ethanol proposal seemed to have something for everyone, but it was too early to say for sure. To their credit they did belatedly agree that perhaps turning all our food into fuel isn’t such a great idea ⁷ a year ago, long after the writing was on the wall. They are undoubtedly now glad that they didn’t put their weight fully behind the ethanol plan earlier.

Open Markets: From Demon to Saint

Globalization and “free trade”, the broader underlier of the present crisis, is also transformed in a masterful stroke of Karl Rove-Joseph Goebbels style propaganda from the biggest weakness of their position into a purported strength. Shortsighted and self-serving trade policies contributed in no small part to the present situation. They are anything but “free”; the only freedom is for large corporations in the US and Europe to grossly damage their own national economies bys shutting down local production when possible to exploit faraway third world workers in places without pesky first world laws regarding acceptable standards for treatment of labor and the environment. For decades, successive Presidential administrations in the US have publicly touted the benefits of unfettered “free trade” while at the same time strengthening massive protectionist subsidies for domestic agriculture run by politically powerful agribusiness.

That extends to ethanol, as well: cheap and efficient sugar ethanol from Brazil ⁸ and other tropical countries is excluded by tariffs from the American market to subsidize local inefficient corn-based production. Our voracious demand for energy at any price has been been fused to hypocritical agribusiness protectionism and our very food supply on a large scale, with unforeseen and disastrous results.

This places The Economist, perennial champion of both the environment and unfettered trade (except when either would be financially undesirable to powerful business interests), in a sticky situation, and explains the utter lack of castigation for such policies in the current issue on the food crisis. Calling for serious change from the status quo now during a crisis might actually produce results that harm The Economist’s high end advertisers and political patrons. They thus focus on Band-Aid symptomatic solutions to the food crisis, while turning the fundamental causes around to incredulously propose that the present crisis erupted simply because large multinational corporations have not been allowed to do whatever they please in the world’s agriculture markets.

The Solution: Solving Energy Solves Food.

The solution to the food crisis rests on a fundamental and sweeping philosophical reanalysis of the goals of our society. Do we exist as a wealth engine for large corporations, indifferent to all but their balance sheets, or do we exist to create a better future for ourselves, our children, and the generations to come? Raw, unfettered capitalism is a remarkably efficient economic engine precisely because it is utterly amoral and cares only about the production of value and wealth. This has indeed served well for many years, creating unprecedented levels of technological and economic growth, but we have now passed the stage where this unfettered capitalism has diverged from our own best interests. Continuing to shortsightedly cling to unqualified free market liberalism at this stage will prove our undoing.

Our modern economy requires an unfathomably large input of energy in whatever form every single day to function on the level to which we have grown accustomed over the past hundred years. To even hold steady at the present level, much less continue this astronomical rate of growth, we need, above all, a long-term sustainable energy policy that provides vast quantities of energy stably, cleanly, and cheaply. It cannot depend on burning fossil fuels, to avoid baking ourselves with greenhouse gases. It cannot depend on the goodwill of any foreign government, to avoid becoming entangled in endless wars and morally corrupting geopolitical machinations. And it cannot divert our food supply into our cars, which has the obvious effect of making food very expensive and causing massive social unrest.

The large corporations that presently serve our energy needs are making more money every year than most small countries do. They are obviously loath to make any modifications to the present system which effectively prints money for them 24 hours a day. Yet we must force them to do so or we shall all suffer; the very survival of our society is at stake here. If they are willing to adapt themselves with us and help us, all the better; but they must accept that their years of fat are past.

Nuclear Power

The grand irony is that the energy question was solved in every respect but one 60 years ago. Nuclear energy “too cheap to meter” can produce more energy than we can possibly use. But that is precisely why it has not, so far, been adopted as our main energy source: there is no profit to be made in it. Oil, on the other hand, is a goldmine. Here we see where the profit motive and the overall benefit to society have grossly diverged.

Nuclear plants have a large upfront capital requirement and then run almost for free thereafter. There is just not much profit to be made in providing limitless free energy, so not many private corporations will invest money in their construction when they can get a far better return on their capital elsewhere. Governments have, by and large, not lined up to pour money into nuclear plant construction because the political will to convert our nation to nuclear power was sapped long ago by deep-pocketed oil interests looking to protect their cash cow — two oilmen are even today in the White House.

Environmental concerns are a curious objection to nuclear power. Since when do environmentalists substantially affect public policy, particularly before the present? Environmentalism has only very recently entered the public discourse in the United States as a serious concern, and even today it is still more lip service than anything else. Certainly 50 years ago, few policymakers cared about environmental impacts. It is only on the rare occasions when their arguments coincide with large corporate interests, as in the case of nuclear power, that anyone pays the environmentalists the slightest bit of notice.

This is not to say that there are no real environmental concerns with nuclear energy, of course, but these are eminently more addressable than the myriad environmental problems resulting from burning imported hydrocarbons all day and night and dumping the exhaust into the air. We can run nuclear fission reactors today, generally considered safe and nonpolluting, with an infintesimal risk of a nuclear meltdown — which could be offset by simply building them deep underground in remote areas. Spent radioactive fuel can be reprocessed into more fuel. If half of the $513,000,000,000 or so that has to date been spent on the oil war in Iraq had been spent instead on research into how to cleanly dispose of nuclear fission waste, the problem would have long since been solved.

Nuclear Fusion

Still more compelling is the case for nuclear fusion research. Nuclear fusion produces no toxic waste and has no chance of a catastrophic meltdown, but it is amazingly hard to get right. The German government estimates that €60-80 billion is required over 50 years to produce a viable fusion reactor. The Iraq war has cost well over six times that amount, at a conservative estimate. If, instead of spending €80 billion over 50 years on fusion research, we spent $100 billion every signle year, we could have the problem solved in perhaps 15 or 20 years.

Further, any commitment by the United States government to spend $100 billion a year on fusion research would undoubtedly be met by similar commitments from Europe, Russia, and China; how long would nuclear fusion take if all the major powers of the world were collectively pouring $400 billion a year into research?

Energy is the key. Energy is the solution to the food problem, to globalization, and to continued American preeminence in the world, and energy (more specifically, expensive ads bought regularly by oil companies) is the reason The Economist is shying away from tackling the roots of the food crisis, and the reason why The Economist tows the globalization and free trade line so diligently.

If we invest in clean nuclear energy generation, big oil companies will lose their cash cow, but we as a society will be far better positioned to continue expanding our own economy, to remain at the top of an expanding and peaceful world economy, to avert environmental disaster, to take the wind out of terrorism by stemming the tide of petrodollars flowing to the Middle East, and to obviate the need for painful, expensive and reputation-sullying wars of conquest to control oil resources. The solution is already there for anyone who wishes to take it. I hope we can do so before it’s too late.