George Monbiot

Also, farmers in a very parlous state in poorer countries can easily be driven over the brink by higher prices for fertiliser and for diesel and other supplies they need to farm.

Even so, it's having an effect on farmers here as well, and it will have an effect on food prices.

But much more dangerous, even than that, is what it could do to the global food system as a whole.

This system is on a knife edge.

It is, as you said in your introduction, much like the financial system in the run-up to 2008, and for all the same reasons.

Too few players have got too big to fail.

They're all pursuing the same corporate strategies.

They've cut their operations to the bone.

It's just-in-time delivery.

It's...

all heavily financialized.

All of this is a recipe for catastrophic failure, for collapse.

And when you look at the papers which have studied why the financial system went down or very nearly went down, it needed bailout amounting to trillions to stop it going down.

All of those factors now apply to the global food system.

It's really dangerous.

And there is a fundamental difference between the financial system and the food system is that when the financial system nearly went down, governments were able to bail it out by issuing future money in the form of quantitative easing.

Well, you can't bail out the food system by issuing future food.

Well, so what could happen?

And, you know, we don't when a system has lost its resilience, we don't know what the event which could tip it over the edge might be.

You know, it could be something going on in the Gulf.