CPF Discussion on Food Supply Security in Africa

As part of the Crisis Policy Forum, the HotSpring collaborative innovation initiative is now planning an effort to tackle the problem of food supply management and chronic food and water scarcity in Africa. The lessons from this experiment in collaborative research will be applicable in many cases to other situations around the world, and we are open to spurring dialogue in those areas as outgrowths of this ongoing discussion.

Discussion will focus on practical solutions to:

1. Problems related to infusing food supply with enough to feed all those in need;
2. Environmental degradation: i.e. resilience services, ecological measures, ecosystem management;
3. Land use deficiencies: how to improve;
4. Animal and timber poaching;
5. Economic corrosion and instability;
6. Corruption and funding shortfalls;
7. Cooperative measures for extending food supply to conflict-afflicted areas;
8. Overcoming limits of transportation infrastructure;
9. Contagious disease: treatment, education, socio-economic impact;
10. Communications gaps: get relevant anecdotal and researched data to those who can use it.

The goal will be to actually craft calibrated solutions to the seemingly intractable problems related to food security across the diverse regions of the African continent. We hope to use collaborative research, and evolving online commentary to develop innovative practices, including funding options, which local stakeholders can implement in a variety of combinations.

More at Crisis Policy Forum: “FOOD SUPPLY RESTORATION & SECURITY: AFRICA”

Web 3.0 Must Make Information More Free, the Individual More Autonomous

We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society. The New Scientist magazine reports in its March 15-21, 2008 edition that “web 3.0 will be about making information less free”.

We must, as end-users, content creators, innovators and even pioneers in media and technology, consider that for very serious and transcendent reasons, this cannot be permitted to become true. Web 3.0 must be liberating, and it must expand, not shrink the freedom of information that stems from the First Amendment to the US Constitution, free and open society in general, a free press specifically, and the Internet’s empowerment of the individual.

If we are to be a global society, or a “globalized” society, if we are to have a planetary consciousness, or benefit from the “village” dynamic inherent in global trade and telecommunications, then we must ensure that individual freedoms are not limited by global media powers or by governments who think there is something expedient about limiting media freedoms. When freedom of information is restricted, human beings suffer, in real terms, and economic vitality is slowed and economic resilience damaged.

Technology is the great economic immune system for industrial and post-industrial societies. It breeds competition, innovation, the expansion of learning and individual potential, opportunity and social mobility, and it spurs the exploration of new directions in thought and production. Information technology is helping to create a global fabric of human ideas, individuals and broader societies, interwoven in a complex web of shared and competing interests and shared and competing freedoms.

The mass convergence of new media, established media, commercial activity, personal communications, event planning and vital services (such as medical, financial, travel and utility), poses an obvious threat to the freedom of individuals to remain unmonitored or unexposed to new risks and new controls. But information serves us best when it is free, when it is untainted by powerful interests, when it moves where it needs to move, finding its level like water.

People move toward information and information moves toward people, in ways that cannot be calculated from a media conglomerate’s boardroom, and which, for better or for worse, do not parallel anyone’s particular bottom-line. Yet major telecoms are planning to stratify web-speeds for paying media giants, and advertisers are looking to recruit bloggers to create specialized information which actually functions like a covert advertisement.

Segmenting the web further by charging for the permission to let end-users access your servers via the highest bandwidth is a direct assault on media freedoms and access to information. It is also an attempt to ensure that most web traffic ensures at least 3 separate payments to the telecom for a single event. This attack on Net Neutrality —tied to the basic freedom of the press— runs contrary to the real promise of Web 3.0 and media hyper-convergence.

Deceptive or manipulative advertising formats are not inherently an attack on web freedoms, but they do pose a threat to the equality of access individuals may have to quality information as such. This means consumers may actually opt to create or to frequent services that shy away from those practices, which may in many cases be closed services or “gated communities” that provide their audience with a self-image of privilege, though their main function would be to limit the flow of information.

Green Economy: Resilience Services Will Meet Opportunity & Urgency

The ongoing transition to an environmentally sustainable economy, focusing on energy and agricultural resources, is already opening the door to a range of new industrial and engineering services related to resource and ecosystem resilience (now understood to be vital to the stability of the natural environment whose own services underpin every element of our civilization).

More efficient management of water, better testing, diversification, distribution and self-sustainability of crop varieties, energy resources that do little to disrupt the natural environment but seriously impact the more harmful tendencies of our economic activity, sustainable transport (increasingly shifting toward the low-emissions and emissions-free standards), each play a vital role in the emerging resilience economy.

What we are building into the global economy, in the same present tense, are both severely damaging extensions of now primitive industrial methods and also the antidotes or successors to those practices. As one after another city, province, region or state, begins to view its own natural habitat as an economic asset, resilience services and the goal of self-regulating elasticity become key market-altering forces, on both the conceptual and practical levels.

New technologies may go a long way to helping us serve the resilience interests of local and international markets, in ways that remain difficult to envision. The first wave of such technologies will likely be those that supplement energy production and reduce demand for high-polluting carbon-based fuels, while advances in overall efficiency and resource-light information distribution will continue to reshape economic output in favor of resilience and sustainability.

Transport habits may change, or standards for fuel-use (partly driven by escalating costs of burning fossil fuels), while energy-efficient modes of production may allow a vast expansion of industrial productionin clean-fuel transport and the necessary support infrastructure.

HotSpring is planning research communities that will take the technical riddle of how to make the zero-combustion, zero-emission drive mechanism that fits this vital new economic outlook. Our focus on the green economy will be tied to the quest for daring, responsible, practicable advances that help us reduce the negative impact of industrial-scale human activity on the natural environment.

Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

BOOK REVIEW & INTRODUCTION TO ONGOING HOT SPRING DISCUSSION

Ecologist and researcher Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, has issued the 3rd installment of his ‘Plan B’ books —Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (2008)—, which lay out the most vital research underlying and the most optimal means of meeting the need to transition to a sustainable economy that not only works in harmony with natural system, but also helps to reverse the excesses of the existing industrial model.

The alterations to the Earth’s climate that are resulting from centuries of burning fossil fuels, rich in carbon and which release unnatural amounts of carbon-dioxide into the environment, are presenting current and future costs that have not been integrated into pricing models:

When Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, released his ground-breaking study in late 2006 on the future costs of climate change, he talked about a massive market failure. He was referring to the failure of the market to incorporate the climate change costs of burning fossil fuels. The costs, he said, would be measured in the trillions of dollars. The difference between the market prices for fossil fuels and the prices that also incorporate their environmental costs to society are huge.

The roots of our current dilemma lie in the enormous growth of the human enterprise over the last century. Since 1900, the world economy has expanded 20-fold and world population has increased fourfold. Although there were places in 1900 where local demand exceeded the capacity of natural systems, this was not a global issue. There was some deforestation, but overpumping of water was virtually unheard of, overfishing was rare, and carbon emissions were so low that there was noserious effect on climate. The indirect costs of these early excesses were negligible.

Now with the economy as large as it is, the indirect costs of burning coal—the costs of air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, and climate change—can exceed the direct costs, those of mining the coal and transporting it to the power plant. As a result of neglecting to account for these indirect costs, themarket is undervaluing many goods and services, creating economic distortions.

As economic decisionmakers—whether consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, or investment bankers—we all depend on the market for information to guide us. In order for markets to work and economic actors to make sound decisions, the markets must give us good information, including the full cost of the products we buy. But the market is giving us bad information, and as a result we are making bad decisions—so bad that they are threatening civilization.

The market is in many ways an incredible institution. It allocates resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match and it easily balances supply and demand. The market has some fundamental weaknesses, however. It does not incorporate into prices the indirect costs of producing goods. It does not value nature’s services properly. And it does not respect the sustainable yield thresholds of natural systems. It also favors the near term over the long term, showing little concern forfuture generations. 

A major factor in the challenge now facing human civilization is how exactly to continue to exploit the benefits of a market model, while we make sweeping industrial transitions away from fossil fuels, and ‘program’ the market to learn to account for these vital, and incomparably valuable, considerations. Lester Brown’s latest book is, as is custom with his work, a relentless and committed examination of the problem in its most vital detail, coupled with real solutions and a strategy for overcoming the global challenge of moving to a climate-safe economy.

• Earth Policy Institute: Eco-Economy Updates (plus data & translation links)
• Earth Policy Institute: Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures
• Earth Policy Institute: The Earth Policy Reader
• Sentido.tv: Informes de Eco-economía, en español
• Sentido.tv: Lester Brown presents Plan B 2.0 at Google (video)