How secure is our food supply?

James Surowiecki, writing in the New Yorker, says that globalization of the food market has increased efficiencies, giving more people more food cheaply. But when things go wrong... :

The old emphasis on food security was undoubtedly costly, and often wasteful. But the redundancies it created also had tremendous value when things went wrong. And one sure thing about a system as complex as agriculture is that things will go wrong, often with devastating consequences. If the just-in-time system for producing cars runs into a hitch and the supply of cars shrinks for a while, people can easily adapt. When the same happens with food, people go hungry or even starve. That doesn't mean that we need to embrace price controls or collective farms, and there are sensible market reforms, like doing away with import tariffs, that would make developing-country consumers better off. But a few weeks ago Bill Clinton, no enemy of market reform, got it right when he said that we should help countries achieve "maximum agricultural self-sufficiency." Instead of a more efficient system, we should be trying to build a more reliable one.

Meanwhile, you'll remember the London Banker post from the other day about how the collapse of an obscure economic indicator called the Baltic Dry Index, which has to do with shipping, portends a credit-caused shutdown of the global commodities distribution network. Result: hunger, civil unrest, even revolution. Well, here's a post by an investment advisor explaining why the Baltic Dry Index is the best indicator of the condition of the economy -- and will let us know when the crisis has passed.