John Robb

Food and the RC, resilient community

The global shift to the resilient community model (RC) won't be merely a function of systems disruption (as it is in developing economies and in COIN efforts). In the main, it will be driven by basic economic necessity as the costs for core inputs (food and energy/fuel) soar beyond affordablity. For example. According the the Wall Street Journal, price inflation for basic items is already very high:

The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They're all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.

The trend data appears solid, in that this inflation will not abate in intensity for some time to come (a natural outgrowth of a global market system that has expanded beyond the capacity for oversight). Food riots in Asia were just an early warning signal. Given that median incomes are static in the West (eight years of data), likely due to fierce global competition from below , these increases in core inputs are going to quickly reach an unsustainable percentage of the average household's disposable income. In tandem with the upward march of energy/fuel costs and a housing crisis (home foreclosures in California are running at 500 a day now), a widespread shift to the RC is increasingly inevitable. Don't expect any help from the nation-state on getting this done (unless the DoD helps out via the backdoor of RCs for COIN and stability operations).

Posted by John Robb on Thursday, 24 April 2008 at 07:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)