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Another week, another dollar or billion
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The Byron Shire Echo Volume 35 #06 • July 22, 2020
Future food that doesn’t cost the Earth ‘Civilisation is in a race between education and catastrophe’, H. G. Wells once said. One ongoing catastrophe – and there are many – is the uncertainty of food supply for the planet’s seven billion odd humans. It might not be as important to a nation such as Australia, which produces more food than it consumes, yet it’s worth keeping an eye on technological advances in food production. Journalist and author George Monbiot normally writes about gloomy matters, such as climate change, for the Guardian, but in January this year, he was full of praise for the potential to replace crops and livestock with food made from microbes and water. He ate a pancake that was made from flour produced from a ‘primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. ‘When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted onto heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour’. ‘It tasted… just like a pancake’, he said. Monbiot enthused that lab-grown food by Solar Foods can be used for feedstock ‘for almost everything’. ‘In their raw state, they can replace the fillers now used in thousands of food products. When the bacteria are modified they will create the specific proteins needed for lab-grown meat, milk and eggs. ‘Other tweaks will produce lauric acid – goodbye palm oil – and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids – hello lab-grown fish. The carbohydrates that remain when proteins and fats have been extracted could replace everything from pasta flour to potato crisps. The first commercial factory built by Solar Foods should be running next year’. He said, ‘The hydrogen pathway used by Solar Foods is about 10 times as efficient as photosynthesis. But because only part of a plant can be eaten, while the bacterial flour is mangetout, you can multiply that efficiency several times. And because it will be brewed in giant vats, the land efficiency, the company estimates, is roughly 20,000 times greater’. While lab-grown food could provide a huge economic transformation, the obstacles will always be corporate concentration of the food market. In the financial and energy markets, for example, those big players undermine democracies with large political donations, employing former politicians and also employing political staffers. Surely Monbiot knows that, but why get in the way of a great pancake where a cow wasn’t involved? Hans Lovejoy, editor News tips are welcome: editor@echo.net.au
he consensus is in: the economy rules, okay? Finally, what remains of the national cabinet is essentially united. Restrictions are not to be reimposed any further, and those still in place will be removed as quickly as possible. The latest slogan is that we cannot turn the economy on and off like a tap. Well, we can of course, but we won’t. The price would be too high. There may be some tweaking, but it will be with the primary aim of enhancing commerce, not public health. Although, fortunately, many enterprises have recognised that keeping people alive and out of hospital makes pretty good business sense. And the situation is indeed dire. According to the latest estimates, by the middle of next year the deficit will have hit $230 billion, with net debt climbing to $610 billion – 31 per cent of GDP, both easily unenviable post-war records. Those figures are horrendous. But perhaps the most worrying factor is the collapse of confidence. The Westpac survey revealed a drop of six per cent in June alone, with worse to come. If hope is being abandoned, we are in for a long and painful road before recovery is even on the horizon. And for this reason alone, it is perplexing, to say the least, that many of the commentariat urging the need to break the shackles and get back to the new normal, are undermining the very foundations required to give it a fighting chance. The relentless slagging of Victoria’s Premier, Daniel Andrews, and his handling of the crisis is ensuring that confidence will only be further eroded. It looks almost like conscious sabotage – not just to the economy, but to the government that the mainstream media generally supports. And the marketer in Scott Morrison realises this, which is why he has not joined in the chorus of denigration. He knows that even if he can live without Andrews, he cannot live without Victoria, given that the garden state contains almost a quarter of the national economy. However, he either cannot or will not restrain his media cheer squad, particularly the zealots of the Murdoch press. For The Australian, the crusade against Andrews has become yet another of its holy wars – the man must be exterminated, and only when he is dead and
buried can normal politics be resumed. So in another effort to give respectability to naked self-interest, our national daily proffered a shill from the Liberal Party’s PR firm, Barton Deakin, to spruik a fringe economic theory he calls ‘the sunk-cost fallacy.’ Like much of the language of economics, it is no more than jargon for the bleeding obvious: don’t throw good money after bad.
Now the second wave is upon us and the clusters are emerging. But there is every reason to suppose that repeating the same harsh dose would be equally successful Mungo MacCallum The author of this weighty thesis, one David Alexander, relates the cliché to COVID-19 by suggesting that the strategy of suppression has failed and therefore a different tactic is needed – presumably the ‘let it rip’ approach, favoured by countries like Sweden with its huge infection and death count. So why spend any more hard-earned revenue? And there would be a bonus: most of the deaths would be the old and frail, unproductive recipients of welfare. Think of the extra dosh we could save. A bit tough on the victims and their nearest and dearest, perhaps, but toughen up, cupcakes. Think of the profits. However Alexander is himself embracing a fallacy, because the suppression strategy of the past did not fail. Mass testing, quarantine, lockdown, hygiene, social distancing and border closures succeeded in shutting down the first wave of the virus: the curve was well and truly flattened, to the point where most restrictions were lifted. Now the second wave is upon us and the clusters are emerging. But there is every reason to suppose that repeating the same harsh dose would be equally successful. And yes, there would be – will be – a price; no such thing as a free lunch. But on any rational cost-benefit analysis, it would be a price worth paying if it would take us back to where we were a few short weeks ago, when salvation
beckoned. Which brings us back to the vital need for confidence – for reassurance – that all the governments involved know what they are doing. And once again, last week provided a useful example. The COVIDSafe app, the telephone device sold to the public as a necessary tool to combat the virus, has widely been derided as a dud. As many of us suspected at the time, it has failed to trace any of those actually infected with the virus. At the time, Morrison declared it absolutely vital – 10 million Australians, 40 per cent of the population needed to download it before restrictions could be lifted. In fact he had to walk away from that ultimatum before reaching the goal. But the figure did reach 6.65 million (one in four of those owning mobile telephones), not a bad result, and one that proved that if the authorities acted swiftly and decisively the public would respond. And from that point of view it was a success – confidence was boosted, the essential ingredient in working our way out of the panic in the pandemic. This is the model Morrison and the premiers must follow – do not be distracted by voodoo magic solutions and the obsessions of media mercenaries, keep focused on what the public will believe and accept. Announcing JobTrainer is a useful start, and this week our Panglossian treasurer Josh Frydenberg will tell us how we are to get through the fraught days until the October budget. And you can bet he will put the best possible spin on it – no gloom and doom, just silver linings, rose-coloured glasses and rainbows all the way. Our leaders have obviously concluded that the punters will not wear another prolonged and arduous lockdown, which fits with their own desire to make economic recovery their main target. Now they must concentrate on explaining it, cajoling, and reassuring the masses that they have a plan, they know what they are doing, and that it will work. Of course, it may not; as someone has mentioned, these are unprecedented times. But at least we will not die wondering. Coronavirus remains the biggest danger, but uncertainty comes up a good second.
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