Can we feed the world? Will we?

One shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, that ethical questions are entirely absent from your post. I mean the consumption of animals and animal products, of course. Presently, nearly 60 billion land animals are used for food purposes annually, most of those are chickens. Obviously, fish, shellfish, and the like, are left out of that number given that their yield tends to be measured in tonnes. Even if one does not adopt a perspective wherein the legitimacy of using animals in such a way is rejected, you are still left with the fact that the current means of production are deemed to be, at best, evil.

If feeding people is a real concern, doing so should not be done through animal based agriculture: the conversion rates of plant matter and water to meat protein and calories is exceptionally inefficient. There’s more than enough plant matter to go around right now to adequately feed the world–and into the future.

“most of the production growth was due to productivity, not extra inputs”

What do you mean by that? It could have been done without fertilizer and irrigation?

— Currently, by FAO statistics the world produces enough calories to feed 8 billion people. If a billion people go hungry even though there is no food supply shortage, then it is mysterious to me why increasing supply is always the first response cited in discussions about world hunger, and especially that 50% figure (which I keep seeing) appears unjustifiable and highly misleading. The challenge is not so much to produce more than to better distribute it. As you note, waste reduction is also a big issue.

It is said that agricultural productivity has grown 2% per year for the past 50 years. But actually when you look at the FAO data, production growth in cereals, maize and soybeans has been *linear*. Cereal yields per ha have increased 150%, and total production 168%, between 1961 and 2007 but the trend line is clearly linear, not exponential. That means that even if the growth trend continues, it will be slower in fractional terms. Of course, there never was any reason to expect agricultural yields to grow exponentially. It’s a common convention to express growth in fractional terms but it can be highly misleading when growth is not actually exponential.

Also, yields per ha is not what is currently being optimized by most of “The West” agriculture, but yields per man hour – wouldn’t more labor intensive agriculture be vastly more productive ? In the same way, land reform would probably help – best productivity (per ha) is mostly achieved in family sized farms, not in the larger latifundia…

This is not just a nitpick : Vietnam instantly went from food importer to mass exporter whenit decollectivised in the eighties, despite some of the highest rural densities in the world (denser than your average US suburb…)

Craig
” One shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, that ethical questions are entirely absent from your post.”

John Quiggin, in the original post (bolding added by me):

“We can feed the world if we make the right choices. There is no greater moral obligation facing the world as a whole and particularly those of us who are well-fed and live in wealthy countries.”

A few more links to share:

Royal Society theme issue Theme issue ‘Food security: feeding the world in 2050’
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554.toc

Science theme issue ‘Feeding the future’
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/327/5967/797

Rice yiedls falling under global warming
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10918591
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/07/26/1001222107.abstract

The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0007940

Perhaps one problem that isn’t being addressed (I’m not an expert so I might be wrong), is the effect of annual variability. Climate Chaos last year has caused shortfalls this year which are likely to cause a damaging price spike this year are an example. It may well be that world agriculture can respond to longterm price signals and increase production accordingly, but if the reaction time of the system is too long to cover a couple of bad harvests, we could end up with a severe humanitarian crisis.

Longer term phosphorus is an issue. Current agriculutural and sanitation practices mean we are mining finite deposits of phosphorus, and letting it flow as waste into the oceans as dissolved matter. I think we have roughly a hundred years supply. We need to think about how we can get to a longterm sustainable phosphorus economy.

#9 piglet Although these are 2003 figures, China’s wheat production 30% higher per hectare than US, tending to reinforce the point:
http://www.nue.okstate.edu/Crop_Information/World_Wheat_Production.htm

Challenges to future food production also include this:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=phosphorus-a-looming-crisis

“It may well be that world agriculture can respond to longterm price signals and increase production accordingly, but if the reaction time of the system is too long to cover a couple of bad harvests, we could end up with a severe humanitarian crisis.”

Price volatility is a huge issue and it is going to become more of an issue due to the climate going crazy. When prices drop below production cost one year and weather-induced price spikes cause famines the next, only speculators win. Food producers, especially small producers in poor countries, need a reliable and sufficient income or they will go out of business. That is a big part of food security. Apparently the market cannot provide that kind of security. Non-market mechanisms are needed.

There is a lot of important information in the report by Jean Ziegler as UN special rapporteur for food security (http://www.righttofood.org/). He showed for example how IMF-induced deregulation in poor countries did away with many sensible and successful policies that were supporting small producers. Unfortunately there is also a lot of misguided government intervention that doesn’t help. The typical focus of a lot of government policies is on making food cheap, which is counterproductive (especially in rich countries). Cheap food has led us to forget the importance of farmers. Economists are among the worst culprits, some even arguing that we don’t really need agriculture given its small contribution to GDP…

At 13: Phosphorus, the looming Crisis: http://www.comste.gov.ph/images/files/Phosphorus-Looming%20Crisis.pdf

Colin,

I’ve submitted a piece to ‘City’ journal and three local councils here in Melbourne on exactly this issue. Large cities produce one thing in abundance and unendingly – human shit. This is wonderful fertiliser and can be used to produce food on even really unsuitable soil.

Don’t want to get into the detail here but I’m using the insights of military/counter-insurgency theory (the fragile nature of our dependence on oil for agriculture) to produce agricultural produce on marginal land within the urban environment – in fact ONLY within the urban environment as this is where the concentrated volume of human waste gives the economy of scale that it needs. It’s been done at Gennevilliers on the outskirts of Paris since the 1860’s, BTW.

One other point: in terms of energy for agriculture the pre-industrial farm in rural England was 20 times more efficient in terms of energy inputs and outputs than a modern industrial farm (‘Cities’ by John Reader). The work of Joseph Tainter on energy inputs and social complexity is well worth reading (‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’).

Apparently the market cannot provide that kind of security. Non-market mechanisms are needed.
Thats what makes me so pessimistic (aside from contemplating Malthus). At least on this side of the pond “the market is the ONLY way”, has been so successfully implanted into the brains of the people, that any other suggestions are almost unthinkable. I don’t think this mental restriction is nearly as advanced elsewhere, but I fear that successful propaganda tactics can be copied elsewhere. And the two things a pure market solution won’t do are (1) solve distribution inequities. And (2) buildup a large buffer of grain in case of a couple of bad years. It’s also horrendously bad at long term planning.

Dennis 20: a starting point might be http://www.sciencemag.org/content/327/5967/809.full.

Re phosphorous recovery from human sewage.

Already being done:

http://www.ostara.com/

No, I’ve no connection with them but an observation from someone in the weird metals game. To a certain extent the metals industry is moving towards what Blueprint for Survival was insisting we should do all those decades ago. Move from a flow economy to a stock economy.

It’s easy enough for me to overstate this but there is definitely a movement towards not ripping up another mine to get at something and instead look at how something already above ground might be reprocessed. And when not that, of looking at what there is in small amounts in what we’re already digging up and working out how to extract that rather than going looking for it elsewhere.

I’ve already mentiond on another thread here people looking for germanium in fly ash from coal burning. The same stuff is also used as a substitute for cement (you can add 40% fly ash to cement thus saving 40% of your new cement production). One of the old Cornish tin mines has just announced that it will be reopening. But instead of just going for the tin, they’ll extract the silver, gold, indium and zinc as well. Processing technology has advanced sufficiently to make this worthwhile.

And the biggie is probably the iron/steel industry. The biggest change in recent decades has been the closing/bankruptcy of the big integrated blast furnace producers in the advanced world and their replacement by scrap processors. US Steel, Behtlehm, etc, have been crushed by companies like Nucor,. There’s very little production of iron from iron ore in the industrialised countries now (compared to the new/scrap ratio of 50 years ago): certainly, it’s a generally accepted wisdom that no new blast furnaces will ever be built in them.

When reading this article I thought that it missed part of the point. Although it touched on it in couple times but I don’t believe it was properly articulated.

As a younger person concerned about the food that I eat and food security it seems to me that a large part of the problem would be reforming land use in the developed world. And this has been brought up here, e.g. meat consumption per capita is enormously energy intensive, management intensive systems are more productive than energy intensive systems, using human waste as a direct input for urban agriculture (why not the vast amounts of table scraps too).

There seems to be problems with our agricultural practice at every turn, and yet I can’t help but feel like this article supports the over arching structure of it. Maybe my opinion is somewhat naive, seeing as how I didn’t grow up through the green revolution, but I can’t help but feel like trying to apply western practices else where in the world could produce anything but failure. We can’t even set up democracies there!

The amount of pollution it produces is unmitigated. Have you seen pictures of algae blooms? Fish kills in the united states due to raw animal sewage being dumped rivers. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100305-baltic-sea-algae-dead-zones-water/

“Unsustainable fishing can be replaced, to a substantial extent by aquaculture, as discussed in this Scientific American article.”
Sea lice linked to aquaculture are decimating wild fish stocks. This is not sustainable. http://www.goodfoodworld.com/2010/12/farmed-salmon-and-sea-lice-whats-killing-wild-pink-salmon/

The colorado river already doesn’t reach the sea. http://www.counterpunch.org/colorado.html

Why would we ever want to reproduce this elsewhere? I guess the answer is to stop millions of people to starving to death. However I agree with some of the other readers we must use increased labour to increase yields. Maybe western governments should implement 2 years of mandatory woofing. Woofing = volunteering as agricultural labour on organic farms (cheap way to travel!). My personal response to this quandary is to dumpster dive.

A colleague referred me to this post. Thanks so much for your reflections and analysis.

I’m working on my doctoral dissertation at GW on (broadly) some political dimensions of global hunger and thought I might add in a couple other political concerns underlying the problem of global hunger.

1. How we define hunger and how we measure it is significant in this debate. For an excellent analysis of this see Anna Herforth’s chapter in Per Pinstrup-Andersen’s (2010) new edited volume on African food security. In short, the FAO determines the hunger rates that scholars and practitioners use by looking at available calories in the given country. This gives incentives to domestic policymakers to encourage ag production in starchy foods to inflate the statistic and “check off” the need to seriously address food security among their population. How we come up with what we think “counts” as hunger and how we measure it is inherently political and will affect whether or not we actually improve the food condition (in terms of nutrition) or just pretend to (looking at empty calories).

2. I keep thinking back to Amartya Sen’s comment on “food entitlements.” It’s always interesting to me to see the UN FAO, WFP, and policymakers from developed and developing countries alike push for more ag production as a solution to the problem. In reality, of course, we already have a ridiculous surplus of food stuffs that will never reach the world’s hungry. This is because (though I leave it to the economists for greater analysis) most of the world’s hungry can’t “demand” food. They can’t afford it. And prices will never drop low enough on their own, as policymakers will always have an incentive to keep prices above a certain level (and/or subsidize the farmers directly). I think it’s a myth that without serious income programs we can address food shortages with increased production. On this point it’d be worth comparing most of Europe’s response to domestic hunger (as met through income supplements) where virtually no food banks exist on the streets to the US response (lots of food banks, a national food stamp program, but weak on income assistance). Haven’t done this myself, but would be interesting.

3. Finally, it’s interesting to note that beyond the vague “we need to produce more food,” I don’t think there is a consensus on how to “solve” global hunger. Whether or not we ever will feed the world depends on the outcome of some very, very, political conversations and tugging and pulling between business interests and “principled” NGOs. There is a lot at stake here for businesses. Do we solve hunger by easing fishing restrictions (the fisheries would think so!)? IOs purchasing and distributing more fertilizer (fertilizer companies gave a lovely $1 million donation to the FAO in 1960 after the FAO produced a report saying that increased fertilizer use would be a good measure to solving world hunger)? Easing intellectual property restrictions on hybrid seeds or GMOs? Returning to small-scale env.-friendly farming (the environmental NGOs are often at odds with many other voices in this hunger debate)? These debates take time and resources away from acting on the problem and yet will be unavoidable.

Am running out the door but thought I’d just post these few thoughts. Thanks for letting me join in!

Omega – Abolutely true that there are health concerns, but the fact is that such a program has been running in Paris since the 1860’s/70’s – it was only wound down to a much lower level due to increases in land value due to the growth of Paris.

Here’s the section from “Cities’ – it gives a good general overview of the system:

“A system of pipes and pumps had been set up to irrigate 6 ha of plots with liquified manure, and forty volunteer farmers were invited to raise crops on it for free. The results astonished farmers, engineers and visitors alike. In July 1870, another 165 farmers petitioned Paris for an extension of the scheme. Word spread, scepticism vanished. Napoleon III made an ‘incognito’ inspection, and left with an abundance of fine vegetables for his table.
And while consumers marvelled at the fine vegetables that could be grown on poor land irrigated with liquefied sewage, sanitary engineers had discovered that the fine sandy soil was capable of filtering and purifying the sewage water too. Each day for a month they had poured 10 litres of liquified sewage into a 2 metre deep cistern filled with sand and soil from Gennevilliers, and drawn a stream of clear water from the bottom. Not only clear, but found in comparative tests to be even purer than water which had been chemically treated.
With the discovery that filtration was the simplest and best method of purification, plans went ahead for the extension of sewage farming at Gennevillers – though from the sanitary engineers point of view agriculture was a secondary consideration; they saw the irrigated land as a series of filtration beds and devised a system which would feed the liquefied sewage into the soil at plant root level and draw off the filtered water some metres below ground.
From the Clichy collector the sewage was pumped to Gennevilliers via pipes fixed underneath bridges over the Seine. It arrived at an elevation of 3.5 m, at a rate of 800 litres per second. Gravity distributed the sewage through an extensive network of pipes and ducts, soaking the soil but never coming into contact with stems and leaves. Drainpipes, laid 4 m underground, collected this filtered water and directed it back to the Seine.
By the late 1890’s Paris was irrigating some 5,000 ha at Gennevilliers. Each hectare received about 40,000 m3 of sewage per day and was capable of producing up to 40,000 cabbages, 60,000 artichokes or 100 t. of sugar beet. Spinach, beans, peas, celery, onions, asparagus, lettuce, strawberries – virtually everything flourished. The best hotels in Paris clamoured for vegetables from Gennevilliers…
But the system was ultimately overwhelmed by the growth of the cities it served. As land values soared and pumping sewage to more distant sites proved technically demanding, sewage irrigation as a means of filtration and disposal became increasingly uneconomic… Nonetheless, 2,000 hectares of sewage farms were still producing vegetables for Paris in the 1980’s – though they used only about 5% of the sewage from just one of the several plants handling the sewage from Paris and its suburbs.”

The trick is to shrink the scale to a local (suburb) level to remove the need for a petrol-based distribution system, which is one setback with the whole centralised industrial model mentioned by Tim above. The model of Havana is insturctive – they produce a large apercentage of the food they conasume within their urban boundaries, removing the need for a districution system.

“Modern sewage infrastructure was introduced as a public health measure. Using raw sewage has epidemiological consequences. So we need to develop a new paradigm, that adresses both public health, and recycling of nutrients.”

That specific phosphorous recycling system I mentioned actually started out as an attempt to stop the sewage works gumming up. “Struvite” (no, me neither) builds up as a scale on the inside of the pipes and this was originally designed as a method of reducing that build up. But it turns out that it concentrates the phosphorous and thus can be used to make fertilisers.

#30: I think Chris was making the point that there are places like Snowdonia where no sort of arable farming at all is possible (and where water is not exactly in short supply), but where sheep can graze, so why not eat them?

“Well sort of. Except that some animals (sheep, goats) will live where you can’t grow plants efficiently.”

Of course, and sheep and goats can be quite destructive to the environment. The argument about the inefficiency of raising meat is correct in general and the destructive consequences of livestock industry are amply documented (cf. the FAO report Livestock’s long shadow, http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM). Of course it depends on how it’s done. Current practices, especially CAFO-type mass production, are clearly unsustainable and a sustainable level of meat production would probably be lower than it is today but there are also important synergies between cropping and livestock husbandry. Michael Pollan has given some good examples (e. g. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95896389) how Mixed Crop-Livestock agriculture can be both efficient and environmentally sound. I think he makes the argument that livestock is actually indispensable for a sustainable (closed loop) food system.

Some other refs:
Livestock: Thornton, P. K. 2010 Livestock production: recent trends, future prospects. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 365, 2853–2867. (doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0134)

Herrero et al. 2010: Smart Investments in Sustainable Food Production: Revisiting Mixed Crop-Livestock Systems, Science 327: 822-825 (Special section Food Security, February 12, 2010, http://www.sciencemag.org/special/foodsecurity/)

We used recycle phosphorus from the sea to the land via fishing, and burial of fish remains.

ISTR research showing that a truly unbelievable amount of P circulation in British Columbia depends on salmon growing in the sea, swimming upstream and being eaten by bears. Seriously, I think it was about 80% or something.

I think some comenters are misunderstanding the point about using grazers on land that is unsuitable for crops. The goal is not to make these lands inhabitable, by creating a local foodsource. The idea of having grazing on nonarrable land is to incrementally increase the global food supply. As long as we don’t feed cattle (or chickens or whatever) with foodstuffs diverted from the direct human foodchain, such grazers represent a net increase in the human food supply. (I know that this is not the current rich world paradigm), but it does represent a reasonable (and ethical) enterprise.

As an example. If we refuse to eat seaweed, then sustainable fishing represents an increase in food supply as compared to no fishing.

a truly unbelievable amount of P circulation in British Columbia depends on salmon growing in the sea, swimming upstream and being eaten by bears

What a setup for a straight line: “And what do the bears do then?”

Constant assertion from big-Ag hustle: “We’re feeding the world!” With GM frankenfoods monocrops artificial soil chemistries etc etc ad nauseum cetera.
But hey, it’s food. Sort of.
Constant, metastasizing image of big-Ag in practice:
Sterile landscapes of endless rows of robot-like crops, land completely void of humans and human things, except the high-tech equipment and minimum-wage labor necessary to produce the bottom line.
Once again the empire does precisely the opposite of what it says it’s doing, while doing exactly what it says. Feeding the world and simultaneously removing human beings from the landscape.
Feeding whoever’s left, maybe.
Back to the milpa, kids.

Of course it depends on how it’s done.

Indeed. Humans have been raising livestock for some 10.000 years, the techniques and consumption habits that threaten sustainability are less than 100 years old. We simply need consume less meat and abandon or modify those techniques.

We have spent the last 100 years or so replacing the “drudgery” of human labor on the land with machines and chemicals (thereby removing the value of human beings and assigning it to an unsustainable commodity: petroleum).
As petroleum becomes inaccessible (either scarcity or price), these devalued humans can do one of two things: find their own value to their own futures, or be discarded. When they wait for answers from “on high”, they sign their own death warrant.
Tunisia and Egypt show us the discord between the values of people and the values of The System of systems. Every time we make life a little bit “easier” for a human being, the human being loses a little more of their usefulness. Domestication does the same things to people that it does to other animals. Humans claim to be so intelligent, yet work so hard not to show it. They have used petroleum to overproduce humans, and now wonder why they feel like so much surplus confetti. Any farmer knows that you can’t keep more calves than you can feed. If you do, the ones you keep slowly starve to death. Humans don’t even utilize their manure properly! How dumb is THAT?
Maybe if we managed the real human/animal resources at least as well as we manage cattle resources, we could understand a little more about how to ‘fit’ our environment.

By the way regarding animals – Monbiot puts the arguments very clearly here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/06/meat-production-veganism-deforestation

Thanks for the link reason.

“won’t close substitutes always converge in price.”

The current activity is that these close subsitutes are diverging in price. Gas has traditionally been priced against oil. That’s just how the long term contracts have worked: oil price goes up, contractual price for gas goes up.

Shale is changing this (and isn’t Gazprom pissed about it). We’re now increasingly seeing gas being priced on the supply and demand for gas, delinking from the oil price.

And Tim you must KNOW that! I may not always agree with you, but I regard you as intelligent.

I haven’t had time to read all of the (no doubt excellent) linked articles, so this is perhaps a bit ex recto for such an erudite discussion, but it seems to me that there are two separate but related issues at play here. Namely, current food insecurity and predicted worsening food insecurity in the future. It doesn’t necessarily hold that solving the former will automatically solve the latter.

However, it seems clear to me, based on reading diverse sources over the years, that one of the ideas touched on above is pretty key to resolving both problems. Namely, growing more of the global food supply nearer to the locations at which it is consumed. This solution has the advantage of being applicable even without large-scale capital investment, and it can partake of both past practices that have fallen into disuse as well as future innovations. Barring some astounding technological miracle, it’s just not possible to transport and distribute much of the current food surplus/wastage from the locations where it is being wasted to the places where it is needed. If I let an apple rot in my pantry, that’s perhaps sinful, but it is hardly going to hurt the inhabitant of the Ruzizi Valley who went to bed hungry last night. There are local food security solutions possible though, like encouraging more and different tree crops in the DRC, which could certainly begin to close the food gap.

I worked on development in the field. After 5 years I left a Central Asian nation having generated the startup of 3 copycat high-tech companies. Mostly what I did was teach people how to work within the Western system of economics. The biggest three changes were made by:
A. Teaching people to come to work on time (and negotiating with them about what hours would be.) Also showing them that they would really get paid if they did.
B. Teaching them to set an agenda, and come to conclusions in a set time rather than arguing without outcome.
C. Teaching quality control concepts, methods and procedures. I taught basic ideas, I taught Deming, I taught Poka-Yoke, and I taught methods of quality assurance. (QA is different from QC.)

My staff were raided as a result and now are at the core of those three companies, all three of which are still operating, entirely owned and staffed by natives of the country.

That said, I observed a great deal. I became versed enough in corruption and the operations of warlords that I was requested to write on it for West Point. A foundation matter that most economists neglect is the impact of social capital. Without a culture that supports a strong economy, the economies fail. Corruption, mainly of the gatekeeper variety rules. And warlordism coalesces around religious and secular ideologies, sometimes fomented by outside powers. These are key matters. There is a certain amount of Darwinian evolution, but cultural mores that create actual trust that can be relied upon are required for economies to grow. Without them, contractual relationships cannot exist and things degenerate.

Most locations that have long histories of failure have problems rooted in culture incompatible with development and those problems manifest in political breakdown and degrees of warfare. There are degrees of this. There is no hard boundary, it is shades of gray. The transparency index is an attempt in some ways, but also misses the mark.

That said, I have come to the position that almost all of the developed world’s attempts at help are counterproductive in the long run. My reasons for saying so are:

1. The long practice of providing loans to nations that are run as fiefdoms ruled by allocating opportunities for theft and graft results in large deposits into Liechtenstein and other banking centers. The thieves are never punished and the oppressed people of the country are left holding the bag. Loan forgiveness perpetuates it, allowing such nations to buy more weapons even when the loans or aid are not given for that purpose. There is no way to enforce it use of loans for their given purpose and little incentive to care due to the institutional nature of the IMF and World Bank.

2. Much the same goes for most aid. The nation gets sucked into a rather deadly form of aid economics which systematically penalizes those who are honest and favors those who are not, and that damages the social capital in a downward spiral. “Collision an Collusion” is a book that examines some of this in the context of Western aid to Eastern Europe. There, the long term economic health over 10 years was inversely proportional to the amount of aid received. Imagine if, in Australia, China started giving away amounts of money that were several multiples of the national budget each year on the basis of being able to repeat Chinese buzzwords and whether the individuals had an history of dissent against government policies? And then imagine what would happen if politicians in Australia could sign for trillion dollar loans that the politicians would in turn administer but would have to be paid back from the public purse? How long would Australian politicians stay responsive to the needs of the people? It would be hard enough to control those effects in a well run nation. But well run nations are not the target of such efforts.

3. Also related to aid is the problem of it being easier and more lucrative to operate dependently from aid sources than to do things on a real economy basis. I must include in that the academic grant system that allocates largess for certain projects. Even the Soros Foundation’s grants to students I have seen fall into this category. Such student fellowships were allocated by locals who required a 30% kickback to themselves for the grant, and the remaining monthly stipend was over 10 times what professors were paid who taught them. Not surprisingly, such students always did well in their classes, though not necessarily due to what they learned. Of such things are good statistics made.

As a result of my experience, I think we are barking up the wrong tree when it comes to feeding the world. Rather than focusing on the undeveloped world, we should instead focus on strengthening the developed world. This may sound callous, but if the developed world creates an economic suction by its strength, that will pull up the underdeveloped world more effectively. This is really just another version of a central thesis of Adam Smith, that by harnessing greed we can make it accomplish good ends.

So, robotics for farming, more energy production, big projects with strong positive ROI that benefit developed nation economies the way that Apollo, the international highway system, etc. did are going to help the underdeveloped nations more. Let them get pulled in by economic suction. They can learn how we do things, that I know with clarity. Once they do, then they can compete quite well.

Omega Centauri
You are correct about cars, but electricity and house heating are more than enough to push towards medium term convergence.

See my comment above about paradox, it cannot possibly last in the intermediate term, unless people think that the divergence will not last. Short term the markets are distinct, but as people invest in new equipment, so long as they think the price divergence is persistant, they must converge.

P.S. Maybe – noticing the arguments that Paul Krugman uses, speculators will not drive the prices to converge, because it is gas that is the cheaper of the two at present, and gas is hard to store.