Sustainability and Future

The Arithmetic of Decarburization: A Hard Look at the Energy Revolution ← Series Home The Role of Science in the Energy Debate If we were guided by science, there would be a lot less hot air and more informed debate around energy. Nothing in society is possible without the availability of sufficient energy. Nothing. Energy is a fundamental prerequisite of life and represents a particularly important factor of everyday life. ...

Hunger is Man-Made: The Political Economy of Food Scarcity 1 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 1: How Inequality Fabricates Scarcity 2 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 2: Engineered Vulnerability: When Famine Becomes an Act of History 3 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 3: The Green Trap: How Modernization Concentrated Land and Poverty 4 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 4: The Global Supermarket: Corporate Control, Debt, and the Toxic Gift of Aid ← Series Home Key Takeaways Export concentration creates vulnerability: Developing nations dependent on one or two export crops face devastating impacts from price fluctuations controlled by traders and commodity speculators. Agribusiness diverts fertile land from food to luxury exports: Multinational corporations redirect land to flowers, beef, asparagus, and exotic fruits for Western markets while populations face malnutrition. Contract farming gives corporations control without ownership: Companies like Nestlé and United Brands control production while shifting financial risk to farmers. International debt forces export-focused policies: Nations must prioritize export earnings over domestic food security to service mounting external debt. Food aid and World Bank loans reinforce inequality: Aid maintains dependency, destroys local markets, and funds political elites rather than reaching the hungry. Post 4: Hunger is Man-Made - Part 4: The Global Supermarket: Corporate Control, Debt, and the Toxic Gift of Aid The core argument of this work is that the problem of global hunger is rooted in dependency and underdevelopment, deliberately manufactured through control over essential resources. Having examined the historical shift to cash cropping and the failure of technologically focused modernization, we now address the current global economy—specifically, the interlocking crises of trade, agribusiness control, debt, and the political weaponization of “aid.” ...

Hunger is Man-Made: The Political Economy of Food Scarcity 1 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 1: How Inequality Fabricates Scarcity 2 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 2: Engineered Vulnerability: When Famine Becomes an Act of History 3 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 3: The Green Trap: How Modernization Concentrated Land and Poverty 4 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 4: The Global Supermarket: Corporate Control, Debt, and the Toxic Gift of Aid ← Series Home Key Takeaways "High Yielding Varieties" are actually "High Response Varieties": These seeds require expensive inputs (irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides) available only to wealthy farmers. Technology under inequality worsens conditions for the poor: Profitable innovations in unequal societies inevitably concentrate wealth and displace the vulnerable. Green Revolution excluded 85% of the world's cultivable land: HRVs covered only 15% of land by 1972-73, leaving traditional agriculture to poor farmers with limited resources. Mechanization displaced millions of agricultural workers: Landowners invested in machinery to increase profits and eliminate labor costs, creating permanent joblessness. Land concentration accelerated dramatically: Wealthy farmers monopolized government credit and services, forcing smallholders to sell land cheaply to survive. Post 3: Hunger is Man-Made - Part 3: The Green Trap: How Modernization Concentrated Land and Poverty For decades, the core question driving global food policy has been: “How can we produce more food?”. This focus on aggregate production, rather than equitable access, created an era of “agricultural modernization” which replaced the goal of true rural development. This process ignores the social reality of hunger—that the hungry are precisely those who control little to none of the food production resources. ...

Hunger is Man-Made: The Political Economy of Food Scarcity 1 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 1: How Inequality Fabricates Scarcity 2 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 2: Engineered Vulnerability: When Famine Becomes an Act of History 3 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 3: The Green Trap: How Modernization Concentrated Land and Poverty 4 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 4: The Global Supermarket: Corporate Control, Debt, and the Toxic Gift of Aid ← Series Home Key Takeaways Famines result from human systems, not weather: Historical records show famines often occur during periods of food abundance when production is diverted for profit. Colonial systems deliberately engineered vulnerability: Forced cash crop production destroyed traditional mixed-farming systems designed for food security. When systems prioritize food, famine can be prevented: China avoided famine during severe drought through agricultural priorities and equitable distribution. Inequality determines who starves during food shortages: In India during drought, the entire impact falls on the poorest; in more equal systems, shortfalls are shared. Land seizure created permanent dependency: Colonial displacement of farmers onto marginal lands created cycles of soil exhaustion and forced reliance on imports. Post 2: Hunger is Man-Made - Part 2: Engineered Vulnerability: When Famine Becomes an Act of History The pervasive myth suggests that famines are inevitable natural phenomena—catastrophic acts of weather beyond human control. However, history reveals that famines do not occur simply because a “divine force willed it”. Rather, they result from the actions of human beings. ...

Hunger is Man-Made: The Political Economy of Food Scarcity 1 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 1: How Inequality Fabricates Scarcity 2 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 2: Engineered Vulnerability: When Famine Becomes an Act of History 3 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 3: The Green Trap: How Modernization Concentrated Land and Poverty 4 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 4: The Global Supermarket: Corporate Control, Debt, and the Toxic Gift of Aid ← Series Home Key Takeaways 500+ million people face hunger despite global abundance: This crisis unfolds not from food scarcity, but from concentrated control over production resources. Scarcity is an illusion created by inequality: Sharp disparities in controlling food resources obstruct development and distort utilization. Whoever controls bread controls the mind: Control of essential resources determines who eats and who starves, enabling the exploitation of populations. Hunger stems from human systems, not nature: Malthus was wrong—the problem is dependency and underdevelopment, not limits to growth. Demystifying hunger is the first step to change: Understanding the structures that manufacture scarcity is essential for implementing genuine solutions. Post 1: Hunger is Man-Made - Part 1: How Inequality Fabricates Scarcity The book, The Hunger Industry, challenges readers to rethink deeply held assumptions about food and subsistence. Readers will confront ideas previously accepted as settled facts. This work compels mental alertness, anxiety, and a departure from intellectual routine. It deals with the most crucial human issue: securing daily bread. The authors emphasize that “without bread, man does not live” and whoever controls the bread controls the mind. ...

Development Delusions ← Series Home Can Less Be More? A Radical Rethinking of Foreign Aid Throughout this series, we have dissected the development delusions—the $200+ billion industry built on contradictions, fueled by imperatives to spend, obsessed with control, staffed by transient expatriates, and locked in a symbiotic trap with recipient governments. We have seen how it generates processism, how it ignores the vast informal economies where most people live and work, and how it fundamentally struggles to catalyze the deep, politically contentious transformations that genuine development requires. The question that remains is: can this industry reform? Can less, indeed, be more? This final post confronts the implications of our anatomy. ...

Development Delusions ← Series Home Informality: The $200 Billion Elephant in the Room The development industry, for all its sprawling complexity and vast resources, has a profound and systematic blind spot. It operates almost exclusively within the formal sectors of recipient economies—the registered businesses, legal land markets, and state-defined urban spaces. Yet, an enormous proportion of economic activity and, crucially, the lives of the majority of people in the rest, takes place outside this formal realm, in what is broadly termed the informal sector. David Sims argues that this “elephant in the room” is simply ignored by the industry, despite its implications being “vast and sobering”. This post explores why the formal-sector bias exists and why it matters for understanding development’s limited reach. ...

Development Delusions ← Series Home The Development Dance Redux: How Mutually Reinforcing Dependencies Guarantee the Status Quo The development industry, characterized by its sheer scale, self-perpetuating spending compulsion, and obsession with control, operates in an environment of institutional tension with the governments it purports to serve. This tension, the “development dance”, is not merely a dysfunctional accident; it is a symbiotic trap where both donor and recipient governments develop mutually reinforcing dependencies that ultimately ensure the continuity of the aid system while perpetually postponing difficult, transformative change. David Sims asserts that the industry’s malaise is “more than the sum of its individual parts”, primarily because the systemic connections between the donor world and the recipient governments lock both into an increasingly self-referential cycle of ‘processism’. ...

Development Delusions ← Series Home The Recipient’s Arsenal: Negative Manipulation, Passive Aggression, and Exploiting Donor Vulnerabilities The relationship between Western donor agencies and governments in “the rest” is formally described using lofty terms like “partnership” and “country ownership”. However, the reality of this interaction is fraught with profound power imbalances, tension, and obstructionist undercurrents. David Sims frames this interaction as the “development dance”—a constant, seemingly never-ending process of negotiation and bargaining that neither party leaves particularly satisfied. The dance persists because both parties willingly join it, but it often breaks down, requiring renegotiation. ...

Development Delusions ← Series Home Uncomfortable Truths: Exposing the Colossal Remuneration Differentials and Their Corrosive Effects The rhetoric of “partnership” and “country ownership” (Post 5) fundamentally clashes with a pervasive and often unacknowledged reality within the foreign aid industry: the colossal disparities in pay, perks, and status between Western donor staff (and their consultants) and their local counterparts in recipient governments. David Sims identifies this economic chasm as an uncomfortable truth that permeates and poisons almost all development activities, generating suspicion, jealousy, and tension, while actively undermining critical objectives such as capacity building and genuine teamwork. ...