I wouldn't argue against the research but to me, the "global food system" is much more robust than I imagined.
We stayed in our homes for months en mass without prep time and prior warning and the food availability barely changed. We are creatures that need to eat multiple times a day and yet we can stay in our homes for months and get fed just as well. Therefore I'm not very worried about the management of the food production and distribution, we are extremely good at it.
Thanks to the global nature of it, things move quickly and even though a problem in one location can be felt everywhere we don't end up with millions of deaths in that location. I'm really not onboard with "localize everything" motto because everything being local means catastrophic consequences at local issues.
What scares me is something biological or ecological happening at global scale. Something that takes at least 6 months to fix for example.
We are extremely good at it is your take when 900 million people don't get to eat even in times of abundance?
If our food system can't take a little bit of war and drought imagine how will it fare when production starts falling. Climate change is happening at global scale, and we must be able to coordinate and innovate on a similar scale to be able to handle it.
Instead we have a spontaneously formed a shitty system. Most people are ignorant of this. Some pretends that isolation is the solution, let's Brexit it, some are blaming ethanol apparently. There is no shortage of bad takes on this, but the fact remains that we suck at this.
The system is unfortunately exclusionary of some parts of the world due to extreme conditions at those places - which are much worse than a single war. It's more like decades of never ending wars and extreme droughts. Africa's problem isn't that they don't know how to code and as a result make less money and can't afford food, the troubles there are much much bigger and as a result they are outside of the supply chain we have.
And yes, by global event that scares me is exactly the climate change.
We stayed in our homes for months en mass without prep time and prior warning and the food availability barely changed. We are creatures that need to eat multiple times a day and yet we can stay in our homes for months and get fed just as well. Therefore I'm not very worried about the management of the food production and distribution, we are extremely good at it.
Thanks to the global nature of it, things move quickly and even though a problem in one location can be felt everywhere we don't end up with millions of deaths in that location. I'm really not onboard with "localize everything" motto because everything being local means catastrophic consequences at local issues.
What scares me is something biological or ecological happening at global scale. Something that takes at least 6 months to fix for example.