Was North Korea the canary in the mine shaft?

John Feffer of Foreign Policy in Focus argues that it was. The North Korean canary was warning us about the interconnectedness of rising energy prices, diminishing food supplies and the problems of climate change.

The world’s contempt for North Korea’s government caused us to overlook the fact that North Korea had a highly mechanized agriculture system. However, the system was dependent on cheap energy. When China and Russia stopped subsidizing North Korea’s energy supply, things started to go badly as the country could not afford to buy much of the world’s oil when the prices started to go up.

Then, there is the question of arable land. As with most of the world, about 14% of the country’s land can grow food. The North Koreans used fertilizer and pesticides to boost production, as do we. Eventually, this took a toll on the soil, so they started cutting down trees. The rains came and disaster struck, disaster that the government could not cope with.

All this happened in the 20^th century. Now at the start of the 21^st century, oil is at $140 a barrel, food prices have jumped and we’re using 20% of our arable land to produce fuel which causes as much pollution as oil and will soon probably cost as much as oil and the weather is not getting better – drought in Australia, floods in China, tornados in the MidWest, earthquakes scattered over the globe. And the rising affluence of China and India means that more meat is eaten there, which translates into a need for more grain to feed the cattle.

Feffer argues that our trade policy exacerbates the problem for developing and third world countries. By conditioning aid on buying American local economies don’t get all the benefits they could. Nor are we being very smart by cutting our budget for agricultural research by 75%. In addition, he feels we need to do more for small farmers.

He reminds us that in many cases we tend to assume that resources are unlimited. Clearly, this is not the case. For example, the world loses productive land at an astonishing rate – one hectare per 7.67 seconds (though the exactitude of this number raises many questions in my mind about how it was calculated).

We are in a very tough situation. How many of our leaders recognize this?