China: A View of Our Future Food Supply

What makes us think that the future global food supply will be any more secure or reliable than China's is today?

I have written previously that national security is not just a matter of armies and borders.  Everything that sustains our nation is, ultimately, a matter of national security.  A clean, reliable, healthy food supply is one of the very most basic matters, and one which will soon be increasingly difficult and expensive to ensure.

Those who minimize the dangers of unchecked human population growth, or worse - misguidedly celebrate it, would do well to read Barbara Demick's recent Los Angeles Times article on China's secret, parallel food supply system for the elite and powerful, because this is what a food supply looks like when there are too many people to ensure a uniformly adequate quality.  While the select few dine on clean, safe, nutritious, and horrendously expensive organic foods,  the masses must make do with "foods that are increasingly tainted or less than healthful — meats laced with steroids, fish from ponds spiked with hormones to increase growth, milk containing dangerous additives such as melamine, which allows watered-down milk to pass protein-content tests," writes Demick.   

This is not just a matter of the masses being too poor to afford the best foods.  The very existence of these food supplies is kept secret, a measure against increasing public anger at privileges reserved for the elite, as well as a series of horrible and deadly scandals involving intentionally tainted foods.  And don't think you are immune:  recall the tainted pet food scandal of 2007, in which US pets died after eating foods containing imported Chinese wheat gluten and rice protein laced with melamine.  You can read the ingredients on pet-food labels, but they will not tell you where those ingredients originated.    And guess what?  Chinese ingredients are in a lot of your people-food, too.  And you can read the labels, but you can't tell where the ingredients come from.  Soylent Green, here we come.

Here is a telling excerpt from Demick's article:  "In modern-day China, it is the degradation of the environment and a limited supply of healthful food that is fueling the parallel food system for the elite."  This environmental degradation comes from  more people, more consumption, more industrialization.   The human population itself is destroying - has destroyed - much-needed food supplies, and restoring those food supplies, even imperfectly, takes more than a human lifetime of sustained determination and tremendous expense (which is why governments generally don't act until the problem is truly catastrophic).    For an example, look to the famously noxious River Thames:  it took more than a century of cleanup to see the first fish return.  And even after a successful cleanup, some species may be extinct, like the Chinese river dolphin, thanks to overfishing and pollution of the Yangtze River.  Other species may take a long time to reach numbers that can be sustainably harvested as food.  Meanwhile, the human population continues to grow and that's one less food supply to draw from.

Pay close attention to this excerpt from Demick:  "On their organic diet, the cows produce about half the volume of conventional dairy cows, meaning that the supply is never enough, especially since the 2008 scandal in which tainted milk left six Chinese babies dead and sickened 300,000 people....  'We're not Switzerland. Our population is way too big for everybody to eat organic food,' said Hou Xuejun, general manager of the Green Yard dairy."   Here, China's situation reveals the flaw in the argument that human population can expand indefinitely and agricultural science will magically fill the void:  while "conventional" dairy cows produce double the volume of milk, even that has been too often tainted and harmful to consumers.  Perhaps it is more a matter of unsavory administrators padding their profits, but there is no going back to natural practices; as Hou says, the population is "way too big" for that.  

China has long held the position of World's Most Populous Nation.  Even with their draconian one-child policy, their growth has continued, albeit more slowly than the global population.  In 1970, China's population stood at 790 million.  Today, they stand at 1.34 billion - about an 85% increase - and are having great difficulty ensuring a safe food supply.  Compare this to the global population:  in 1970, we stood at 3.5 billion.  Today that has doubled to 7 billion.  What makes us think that the future global food supply will be any more secure or reliable than China's?

China is a cautionary tale, a harbinger of the future for all homo sapiens, unless global population growth is checked.   Unfortunately, human beings don't have a real great track record when it comes to heeding cautionary tales, and we are quickly running up against this planet's Malthusian limitations. We already see this in such sobering statistics as this:  one out of six people on this planet right now has no access at all to potable water and must make do with unsafe water supplies.   China's current situation may look like the Land of Milk and Honey compared to what the global population will experience as our numbers continue to climb.

So how can the US help ensure an adequate food supply? 

First, do away with religious-based objections to contraception.  If there is one thing worth "exporting" to change world cultures, it is education, education, education, and especially empowerment of women worldwide.  Time and again it has been proven that women - and men - who are educated and given the option of contraception will choose to limit their family sizes to have healthier children.

Next, do away with big-agriculture monopolies on seed types.  I'm not saying we should all go organic; as China's experience shows, that's probably not even possible any more.  But there is a dangerous trend toward single-breed crops and herds, which are susceptible to being wiped out by a single disease.  Cloned plants and animals are even worse, as they have no diversity at all.  Crop diversity enhances overall survivability.  It's just good science.

In tandem with promoting crop diversity, we need to promote US farming and cut our dependence on Chinese imported ingredients in particular.  Check out the food in your supermarket:  I'm seeing canned peaches from Thailand, frozen shrimp from Bangladesh, fresh grapes from Chile.  It's great that our global system allows us to get out-of-season foods, but this will become prohibitively expensive in the future because of increased competition for both fuel to transport the food, and the food itself.  Locally grown food is cheaper and supply lines are shorter:  in a word, it's more secure, and we should do what we can now to promote better local supplies in the future, because more of us will depend on those for survival.

Shoshana Hebshi and our Fourth Amendment Rights: Fear Itself

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror..."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous words apply perfectly to our present situation, and we would do well to reflect and act on them.   People, we are in real danger in this country right now, and it is because we are namelessly, unreasonably, unjustifiably afraid.  We are trading away our freedoms and protections for the mere perception of a little temporary security. 

Shoshana Hebshi-Holt is an American, a native English-speaker, a young mom from Ohio, flying home after a visit to her sister in California.  She remained in her seat on her flight.  She tinkered with her phone to entertain herself.  And then, after her flight had already landed in Detroit, armed security forces swarmed the plane and handcuffed her, refused to answer her questions, detained her without allowing her to contact anyone, questioned her, fingerprinted her, took all of her personal information including e-mail address, Facebook, and Twitter as well as the usual address and phone number, and strip-searched her.   The suspicious activity that precipitated this extreme, invasive, and unconstitutional response?  Um... nothing.  Nothing. 

Ms. Hebshi-Holt had the misfortune, which you may easily have one day, of being randomly seated next to two dark-skinned men whom she had never met.  The men engaged in the highly suspicious behavior of going to the bathroom at some point during the flight.  Ms. Hebshi-Holt has the additional misfortune of being dark-skinned and dark-haired herself.  You may also have this misfortune, but don't congratulate yourself too quickly if you look like a white-bread Anglo-American.  You know how it goes:  "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out..."

I urge you to please read Ms. Hebshi-Holt's original post detailing her experience on 11 September 2011.  It is chilling, and it can happen to you.  During this frightening, humiliating, scarring experience, the officials she dealt with either told her nothing, or insisted that the whole procedure was for her own protection.  Far more chilling than her story - which was bad enough - is that some of the commentators on her original post see nothing wrong with what happened to her.  There seems to be a significant number of frightened people in this country, actively throwing away their rights in the name of "safety." 

Another chilling thought:  the whole way in which these events were set in motion amounts to some unidentified, scared, thoughtless idiot - we may never know who - who essentially screamed the modern-day equivalent of "witch!"  and caused an overblown, hysterical reaction, and now we are left with a lot of finger pointing on who said what, and when.  Frontier Airlines defended its crew, saying they were responding to passenger concerns, but the airline abdicates all responsibility for what happened next.  The TSA and the Wayne County Airport Authority both say that it was the airline crew who notified law enforcement and pointed out the "suspicious" trio. 

So here is America: someone yells "Witch!" and the next thing you know, a US citizen who said and did nothing suspicious has her Fourth Amendment rights grossly violated.  We can argue over whether the TSA searches are a Fourth Amendment violation (I think they are), but there is no question that Ms. Hebshi-Holt's rights were horribly violated, with no probable cause whatsoever.  We cannot allow this!  We are one step away from the internment camps of the 1940s, in which American citizens were confined for no other reason than their last names and their appearance, while their sons fought and died for the US.

There are those politicians who rally around the cry to "take back America."  Well, I want to take back America, too.  The one where we had rights, the one where the citizens were America and not a bunch of suspects, the one where we had common sense and went our ways unafraid and with our heads held high.

One-Sided Battles are the Best Kind

The New York Times reports on the "one-sided" battle in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad, Pakistan.  "One-sided" is such a charged phrase, as if the battle  were somehow a little... dishonorable, or unfair.  Hardly!  It's the best kind of battle to have. 

The fact that there turned out to be very little and ineffective resistance was due to the US maintaining the element of perfect surprise, and moving fast once on the ground.  You do not sit around waiting for your enemy to get ready for you.  The one-sided battle is a testament to the quality of our intelligence, to the preparation of our Navy Seals, and to the decisions they made on the ground.  It is also a testament to some of the best examples of wartime decision-making to come from civilian leadership.  For instance:  not informing Pakistan of what we were about to do, and not micromanaging the operation. 

The result was beautiful.  No US casualties, a major terrorist leader eliminated, and a trove of intelligence data to sift through.  Who can argue with that? 

About the only thing that should have been done differently, in retrospect, is that we should have withheld all details until the White House had a clearer picture of just what had happened.  In the interim, the statement could have confirmed bin Laden's death in a raid conducted by US Navy Seals, that we had offered the body to the custody of Saudi Arabia, who refused, and that the body was subsequently buried within 24 hours in accordance with Islamic custom and at sea to avoid establishing any kind of shrine to bin Laden.  At that point, no further details should have been offered since we would be in the process of debriefing the team, securing anything of value from the site, and handing off control of the site to the government of Pakistan.  But that's 20/20 hindsight.  For the critics of the garbled information initially released by Jay Carney, understand that there is enormous pressure to provide details in the immediate wake of such tremendous news. 

As for the arguments over releasing the gory death photos of bin Laden, I think President Obama has made the correct call to keep those private.  The White House correctly notes that there is a long history of such images being used to make people in to heroes and martyrs, to incite violence, to inspire further attacks.  And the photos will not convince anyone who already doubts the fact of bin Laden's death.   In gauging world reaction to the news, there is no reasonable doubt of the basic fact:  bin Laden is dead.

The Wrong Preparations for a WMD Attack

It's time for politicians to stop promising 100% protection, and time for the public to stop expecting it.

The FBI’s Assistant Director in charge of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate recently said that the chance of a WMD attack against the US  is 100%.   That should crystallize the fact that any security apparatus, in the end, is only an illusion of safety.  While common-sense measures can help deter some attacks, no measures, no matter how extreme,  can ever prevent 100% of all attacks.

This calls into question the draconian, even Orwellian, security measures and apparatus that the US has put into place over the past decade.  In the wake of 9/11, we have seen our privacy whittled away with the Patriot Act and the Total Information Awareness Database.  We have seen the rise of the TSA, with ever more invasive screenings which seem to treat all passengers as criminals, subjecting them to radiation, virtual strip searches, and groping of their most private parts (and even then, these measures are not enough to detect all contraband).  We have seen the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, an enormous and unwieldy conglomeration of new and previously existing agencies, at an equally enormous cost to the taxpayer.  

All of this inconvenience, expense, and even the sacrifice of some of our freedoms and civil protections, in exchange for... a 100% chance of a WMD attack.

The government has behaved as if the American public demands 100% no-fail protections at any cost, even the cost of our freedoms.  There are probably many such individuals, but I will wager that there are many, many more who value their freedom and dignity far more than a zero-risk environment.  We cannot even achieve a zero-risk environment in our daily lives.  Such an expectation is naive and unreasonable, and the government does the people no favors by coddling them, giving them false reassurances, and generally treating them like children.  

What the government owes its people is the truth as far as it is known, and for that, I applaud the FBI.  Now it is long overdue for the government to educate the public on what to expect, appropriate responses, and self-protection in the event of a WMD attack, which is 100% certain to occur.  Lack of information and lack of preparation - even if it is only the psychological preparation of understanding what is happening - leads to mass panic, and that greatly amplifies the effect of any attack.  Attempts to evacuate cities are inevitably chaotic and expose many more people to harm, than learning how to shelter in place.  

Terrorism is not special, and it is high time we start thinking of it as any other threat:  ordinary crime, hurricanes, blizzards, floods, tornadoes.  We are raised from childhood on how to avoid or mitigate these threats.  They are terrifying when they occur, and some people die; but most of us know how best to seek protection in those moments, and even inadequate protection greatly enhances survival rates.  A WMD attack should be no different in the public mind, or in government policy.

Copyright R.N. Phillips

Feb 2011

Obama's Proposal On Spending Cuts: Two Words

President Obama is expected to use his State of the Union speech to call for a five-year freeze on "non-security discretionary spending" in order to tackle our burgeoning national budget deficit.

The first problem with this is the word "discretionary." In my personal budget, "discretionary" spending is what I get to do for my own increased comfort and satisfaction, if there is anything left over after I have paid my essential bills. Recession-addled consumers know what our government seems not to: in an era of trillion-dollar deficits and God knows how much national debt, there should be no discretionary government spending in any category. Not even "security" as the government seems to define it.

That brings us to the second problem: the word "security." It seems that our government has forgotten that national security is about much, much more than just borders, airplanes, and terrorists. That mindset, coupled with the intent to cut all spending other than this narrow definition of "security," is what leads to a police state. Since 9/11, we have flirted dangerously with just that: with things like the Patriot Act, the Total Information Awareness Database, the Department of Homeland Security (please - does it get any more Orwellian than that?), and now, groping airline passengers and performing "virtual strip searches" in violation - I think - of our Fourth Amendment rights. This creeping Big Brother act has been not only ineffective and invasive, but extremely expensive.

A secure nation is not just one with strong border defenses and a capable military. It is one that also creates an environment where its citizens can have a reasonable expectation not only of physical safety, but also of economic safety, health, and the solid education required to chart a satisfying - or at a minimum, an adequate - course for their own lives.

This means we can't afford to neglect our schools, infrastructure, Medicare, Social Security, or WIC. What we can do is cut some of the insane post-9/11 bureaucratic creations, such as DHS or TSA.

DHS is really only a redundant and suffocating super-structure overlying or duplicating pre-existing agencies which - despite all of the post-9/11 criticisms - were doing their jobs just fine. Their pre-existing flaws, such as failure to share information, have not improved with the creation of DHS. Their great "failure" to attach imminent, screaming importance to reports that might have uncovered the 9/11 scheme was only a failure to pick the one actually significant report out of a tremendous river of other reports, all seemingly of similar importance; it is like trying to choose one grain of sand on the beach, as the grain to pay attention to. How much worse it is now, with newly created, redundant agencies all generating their own reports, and only spotty cooperation among them.

As for TSA: ordinary citizens are subjected to ever greater abuses, the most recent bordering on state-sanctioned sexual assault, and/or introducing passengers to radiation risks that have not been properly evaluated, regulated, or disclosed. I am especially uncomfortable with the thought of children being either groped or irradiated. And then there are the lines: passengers clumped together in long, slow-moving "security" lines are themselves a prime target for attack. And for all of this, what has TSA achieved? Not a lot, other than racking up huge expenses for machines of questionable safety and effectiveness (body cavities remain a serious blind spot, yet the government has no plans to go there), and royally ticking off the American public. Some will point out that other countries, like Israel, for example, have even stricter security measures. Two points on that: first, the Israelis are laughing at our rather juvenile TSA efforts; and secondly, I don't want to live in Israel. I want to live in America. A pre-9/11 America. And yes, I think we can go back again.

Remember, it was ordinary citizens who foiled the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, and the Times Square bomber. Whenever the government crows that there have been no attacks since 9/11, keep in mind that Uncle Sam cannot claim full responsibility for his success rate: for at least some would-be attacks, John Q. Public was the one who saved the day. Not Uncle Sam.

So save yourself some money, Uncle Sam: let's go back to pre-9/11 America. Reduce the DHS and TSA bureaucracies, consolidate some of your intelligence agencies, reduce redundancy and stovepiping. If what we had before was broken, fix it; it was the wrong response to create more, more, and more government at greater public expense and reduction of public freedom. We are a government of, by, and for the people. If we keep our minds focused on that, we should be able to make the right decisions.

Copyright R.N. Phillips, 25 January 2011