25 July 2022. Land | Politics
Beyond the market for food, and land // Politics and the purity spiral
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1: Beyond the market for food, and land
I’ve been doing some work recently with Chatham House on the impacts of the Russia-Ukraine war on a range of global issues, including food, energy, resources, and security. I can’t write about that just yet, but one of the themes that emerged was the need to change the way we approach the way we think about land—that market-based systems for managing it, aren’t going to work any more.
(Image via Rawpixel. Public domain)
There’s been a couple of recent pieces that have different perspectives on this. Researchers at Human Rights Watch argued in a short piece in May that we need to start thinking about a rights-based approach to food. The reason was this:
India is the latest country turning to export restrictions to cope with rising food prices fueled by the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and climate change. In May 2021, Argentina banned beef exports to tamp inflation that reached 50.9 percent. Indonesia halted palm oil exports and Kazakhstan restricted wheat and wheat flour exports as local prices for these commodities soared. As of early May 2022, more than 20 countries had imposed food export bans.
One of the problems here is that only part of the volatility in food prices is down to supply. Some of it is down to market power, of both countries and companies, financial speculation, and lack of regulation. They suggest that access to food is “a basic human right”:
Systemic change to ensure people can access food will be crucial as climate change is expected to increasingly affect food insecurity and prices, and households in poverty are at particular risk. Building rights-respecting food systems means making them more sustainable and climate resilient, better regulating markets, and ensuring affordability so that everyone can afford safe and nutritious food by investing in adequate social safety nets to protect people from hunger and poverty in times of rising food prices.
The idea of access to affordable, accessible and nutritious food came up in a UK context in some work I did last year—it was one of four ‘platforms for change’ we identified in a report on the future of food environments.
So maybe it’s not a surprise to see the World Economic Forum putting out a piece on how business need to think about land differently. I say this since it tends to rush around with fig leaves when business interests are being compromised by too much corporate greed.
A piece that was published for Davos, also in May, argues that land needs to at the top of business’ agendas:
Land is at the centre and connects all three Rio conventions – the UN Convention to Combat Desertification COP15 in May, UN Convention on Biological Diversity COP15 in August, and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change COP27 in November. Land isn’t just dirt beneath our feet. It’s where life thrives, underpinning resilient planet, society and economy.
It cites a recent WEF report on the need for sustainable land use that lists three reasons why business need to take the issue seriously. I’m not going to spend long on this, but here are the reasons:
Reason #1: To achieve net-zero targets, firms must halt deforestation and conversion
The forest, land and agriculture (FLAG) sector has the potential to deliver up to 30% of needed mitigation actions from now through 2050. In addition to the much-needed energy transition, the prevention of deforestation and conversion, and increased investment in sustainable and restorative land use should be central to companies’ climate commitments...
Reason #2: Sustainable land use mitigates risks for businesses
(L)and-related risks to businesses are not always immediately visible, as their dependence on land is often embedded in the supply chains. Land use-related reputational, market, legal and financial risks are also rising. Governments are taking more ambitious action to conserve and restore land, evidenced by the EU’s landmark legal proposals to ban imports of beef, palm oil, soy, cocoa and other products linked to deforestation.
Reason #3: Sustainable land use creates business opportunities and resilient jobs
A sustainable transition in food, land and ocean-use systems can create almost $3.6 trillion in annual value and 191 million jobs by 2030. High potential business opportunities in this space include ecotourism, new precision-agriculture technologies, sustainable forest management, supply chain innovations, and a circular economy in textiles and sustainable inputs. Preserving and restoring land resources is also for the future generations. Food systems are the world’s largest employer of young people.
We’ll see how all that turns out. The big food traders that are at the heart of this system have made billions in the past few years, mostly through worrying about the short-term rather than the long-term.
National politicians, especially in the Global South, also know from long experience that food prices can see them thrown out of office quickly and sometimes violently, which means that their responses to food crises tend also to be short-termist.
We know there’s enough food—even given the shortages caused by the war. (China, for example, could have fixed that problem and barely dented its grain reserve). In other words, we have a collective action problem here. The global food system works better for everyone when it’s managed co-operatively. Political, commercial and financial interests all do better out of the short term. But a new politics of land and food is bubbling up despite this.
2: Politics and the purity spiral
I’m not going to dignify with anything resembling analysis the battle for the leadership of the British Conservative Party that will decide the identity of Britain’s next Prime Minister.
But there has been a feature of the internal election process that has salience beyond Britain, which was noted in his newsletter by Charles Arthur.
The striking thing about the campaign between the candidates as they appeared a couple of times on national television debates was how little they had to say about the political and economic issues roiling Britain at the moment.
What’s the most important challenge facing the UK right now? Is it the woefully low productivity growth since 2008, leading to real wages staying static or falling? Is it the NHS being essentially unable to provide a functional service, with achingly long waits for ambulances and treatment? Is it the prospect of frighteningly high heating bills in the coming winter, to add to escalating vehicle fuel bills as the pound clatters downwards against the dollar? Rising inequality? The impossibility for most younger people of buying a home?
Watching the TV debates, the answer seemed to be ‘none of the above’. The candidates instead were competing to talk about sending refugees to Rwanda, cutting taxes, the dangers of ‘wokeness’ to British culture, and the shackles imposed on British lawmakers by the European Court of Human Rights.
(Via quickmeme)
This may be because the electorate that gets to whittle down the candidates to the final two are other Conservative MPs. After that the Conservative party membership makes the final choice: older by some way than the population as a whole, and well to their right.
Arthur, who has written a book on the effects of social media called Social Warming, suggests that this is the result of a social media effect he calls the “purity spiral”:
Purity spirals are a form of social warming, because everyone gets more annoyed with everyone else: those deemed sufficiently pure to remain in the conversation, because they come under increasing scrutiny from those left behind and have to fear being left out, and so become ever more critical of those also remaining; and those thrown out as insufficiently pure, because they think everyone else is being hypocritical. Eventually, group dynamics means that only a tiny number are sufficiently pure to be allowed to remain.
Versions of this effect existed before the internet was a significant shaper of group discourse. Cass Sunstein noted the ‘law of group polarisation’ in a 1999 paper:
“In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own pre-deliberation judgments.”
Social media makes these effects—effectively a version of ‘groupthink’ quicker and more extreme. In the context of Conservative Party politics, this means they float off into a private world:
The trouble with these tight little groupings, though, is that they easily become more and more detached from the reality of the wider population. MPs’ WhatsApp groups are wonderful breeding grounds for this sort of effect; the European Research Group (ERG) of anti-European Tories... would regularly push itself to more and more extreme positions on topics because if you didn’t, then what sort of wussy insufficiently Brexit-y person were you, exactly?
American readers might notice similarities with some of their own political parties. In the case of the British conservatives, the two stage process—first MPs, then the 80-90,000 party members—effectively takes us through two cycles of purity spiral. It has created, says Arthur, “a machine for impossible promises”.
What this may mean is that winning the election is something of a Pyrrhic victory. Although the purity spiral plays out in social media, often privately or semi-privately, the election leadership election also plays out in our mass media. The gap between the discourse needed to win the leadership election, and the issues that the wider electorate are worrying about, simply gets too big. Even people who are Conservative voters find the chasm too big, as some BBC focus group research discovered:
In other words, the wider electorate has watched the claims and promises made by the candidates. By the time the winner gets to be Prime Minister, either it’s hard to trust them, or they seem to be irrelevant.
But this doesn’t play out well for democracy. We need our politicians to be connected to the things that voters are concerned about if our political systems are going to be credible and relevant. If they fail, you get apathy, populism, and beyond that, political violence.
j2t#350
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