Does mining contribute to food shortages, riots, and death? Ask Mugabe

Can the mining industry do anything about the food shortage?  Here is the problem:

 

Mr Holmes, who is also the most senior UN official coordinating relief efforts, thinks we are just at the beginning of the crisis.  “What we are seeing so far is relatively limited, I’m glad to say, but there have been very severe protests in Haiti, for example. [There have been] riots and deaths in Egypt in bread queues and we’ve seen unrest in different counties in Africa. Most of the stapes of people’s diet - wheat and rice - have risen more than 50 per cent in the last 12 months and they’ve risen even more steeply than that very recently. There are some fundamental factors behind this. This is not just, I think, a sort of quick blip in prices which will return to normal shortly, it’s because there are these fundamental factors of the population rising, crops being used for bio-fuels, more sophisticated diets in places like India and China. [A] lack of strategic grain reserves and maybe also the effects of climate change and, for example, the drought in Australia affecting wheat production in recent years. That’s not helped either.”

I have not been able to find a correlation between the presence (or absence) of mines and the severity of food shortages.  Nor have I been able to find a correlation between the income of countries and their food-riot potential.  Although it is pretty obvious that in ill-governed countries like Haiti and too many places in Africa (Zimbabwe included) people are starving and will only get hungrier. 

It would be sad, if it were not so obvious an outcome of poor governance, failure to develop natural resources, and changes in lifestyle in countries like China and India.  I suspect it will get a lot worse, and we will see many more die of starvation.  

I hate to think that we are at a point where Malthus and/or the Club of Rome and its 1972 Limits to Growth are proven correct.  It almost seems that way when you read of Dafur and the Congo and now food riots. 

I hesitate to recommend an end to turning Iowa corn into gas for SUVs, and increasing the Canadian oil sands as a substitute.  I hesitate to call for an end to turning sugar cane into sugar and biofuel and instead planting real edible stuff.  How about all those organic fair-trade coffee plantations–surely they could provide edible food for hungry people instead of a moral high at the local Sunday farmers’  market.  Then there is all that farm land churned up to make way for McMansions that are deserted most of the day while their over-strapped owners slave to pay mortgages.  Maybe we should return the land to edible food production and put up a few more highrises within walking distance of employment centers.   I hate to suggest taking the farms away from Mugabi’s cronies and returning them to the folk who used to enable Zimbabwe to export food.   As for suggesting that China halt its expansion and eat less like they used to–I could get excoriated for that suggestion.

But you will have noticed that I have not yet implicated mining in this new crisis.  You see I believe the solution to the food shortage and price run-ups lies with grabbing politicians and the nefarious who rule countries for their own benefit to the detriment of the common herd.  I believe that if only these ill-governed countries could get their act together, there would be more mines and more food to go around.  

To substantiate this belief, let me note that in Saskatoon I read in the local newspaper that the potash mines of the province are working flat out to supply Brazil with fertilizer.    The money to buy the stuff comes one suspects from the mines of that country.   Thus I conclude that mining, in a rule-of-law society, is a generator of wealth that is a necessary precursor to amelioration of food shortages.  In a kleptomaniac, theocratic, or non-democratic society, neither mining nor food-handouts will achieve anything.  Seems such places will just have to be left to the ravages of the limits of growth. 

PS.  In spite of the photo that accompanies this posting, I confess I love McDonalds, and sneak of there to eat whenever my more sophisticated friends are not watching.