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  • How the Difference Is Shaking the World
  • Awake!—1975
  • Subheadings
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  • Resources
  • Economics
  • Food
  • World Leaders React
  • Record Crops, but Food Shortages—Why?
    Awake!—1974
  • Where the Present Road Is Leading
    Awake!—1973
  • What’s Wrong with the Economy?
    Awake!—1981
  • Where Is Your Money Heading?
    Awake!—1974
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Awake!—1975
g75 2/8 pp. 5-8

How the Difference Is Shaking the World

“THE ground on which we stand is shaking. The familiar landmarks have gone,” complained West German government official Walter Scheel at the U.N. special session. Formerly, individual nations seemed able to manage their own problems. “But that is no longer the case,” declared U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger in a recent address to the U.N. General Assembly.

A world that now operates at the very limit of its capacity has resulted in new and fragile balances among the nations. Economic and political thrusts that used to affect the world about as much as a flea does an elephant now seem to strike with the force of a lion on a mouse.

“If we do not get a recognition of our interdependence,” warns Kissinger, “the Western Civilization that we know is almost certain to disintegrate” as a result of selfish nationalistic rivalries. “We are delicately poised” between “joint progress and common disaster,” he cautions.

Why? A few specifics will illustrate how fundamental differences in the way our world now functions serve to intensify problems into seemingly insoluble crises. Let us start with . . .

Resources

Suddenly quadrupled oil prices, more than any other single thing, shook the world into recognition of its newly precarious condition. The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies pronounced the price increases to be “the greatest shock, the most potent sense of a new era, of any event in recent years.” The chain reaction in the industrial world’s economic structure from this act alone threatens to shatter it, as world leaders have clearly said.

But oil is only one symptom of the underlying difference in the world market for natural resources. What was once a “buyers’ market,” before the turning point, has suddenly become a “sellers’ market” in which suppliers of raw materials can charge almost anything they wish.

Since much of these nations’ prosperity has been built on having plenty of cheap raw materials from certain underdeveloped nations, this change alone threatens their entire way of life. “The Europe we have to build now is a Europe of penury [extreme poverty],” sorrows French President Giscard d’Estaing.

Economics

Closely related to the resource crisis is the economic one. The worst worldwide inflation in history suddenly affects us all. You feel the effects every time you go shopping. Inflation among industrial nations as a whole recently jumped to a pace about four times that of the 1960’s! At the same time those nations have just “gone through the most exceptional deceleration of [economic] growth ever experienced,” observes a recent report from the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The struggle just to keep pace with rapidly accelerating prices and demands has suddenly thrust many nations deeply into debt. “We banks are up to our limits for financing Italy, France, Britain and others,” warns former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Pierre-Paul Schweitzer.

The U.S. economy is not immune. Total U.S. public and private debt is now over six times as much as it was at the end of World War II, “and the sharpest gains have come since 1960,” notes Business Week.

The world economy functions so differently now that most economists readily admit that their much-vaunted formulas for “fine-tuning” national economies are suddenly obsolete. Thus Business Week predicts that even if the world escapes economic “disaster, . . . there is no way it can escape change.” What kind of “change”?

For the first time, many respected authorities are predicting that collapsing “free world” economies will invite dictatorial or Communist solutions, and the loss of personal freedoms.

Food

Also interrelated with exploding resource and economic problems is the food crisis. “History records more acute [food] shortages in individual countries,” says a report prepared for the U.N.’s World Food Conference, “but it is doubtful whether such a critical food situation has ever been so worldwide.” And U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) economist Don Paarlberg asserts that “it is obvious that we are at some kind of hinge point” for agriculture. Why now?

Different agricultural methods. Modern farming depends on energy​—for fertilizer, tractors, water pumps, pesticides, transportation, and so forth. A ton of fertilizer can mean as much as ten tons of grain in many areas. Sudden energy shortages and skyrocketing prices have struck hardest where these methods are needed most and farmers can least afford them. Recent massive crop losses in northern India, for example, could have been reduced had there been a steady supply of power for irrigation pumps.

Different grain reserve level. Sudden disappearance. of formerly huge reserves has already driven farm prices to several times their former levels. Now the USDA’s world grain forecast is for reductions in world output that will “likely result in a further lowering of world wheat stock levels” in 1975. Many experts believe that there is just not enough margin for error. “For the first time in 50 years, there is no one country in the world with sufficient food to save the starving hordes,” should drought strike, worries a U.S. cabinet official. And there are at least two billion more mouths to feed now, twice as many as there were fifty years ago!

Different weather prospects. Climatic reverses have been a key cause of recently declining food reserves. What hope is there for a return to more agriculturally favorable weather? “It must be remembered that crop-production weather during the 15 years or so preceding 1972 was the best it’s been in the past century and a half,” reminds weather expert Reid A. Bryson. “The chances of its recurring are about one in 10,000.”

After considering the foregoing, the question arises: How can a world that has had thousands of years to feed and care for its population and failed​—except for a privileged few—​ever hope to do so when, according to its own estimates, it has only thirty-five years to provide for double its present number?

Even now authorities are considering a chilling answer for the first time​—national triage—​the policy of giving aid first to nations with the best chance for survival. Thus if a world famine should strike, whole nations would be ‘cast adrift’ by food suppliers in favor of those deemed better able to survive. Many experts warn that producing nations may face this harsh moral decision within a year.

World Leaders React

These crises, together with unprecedented poverty, pollution and others, are shaking most national leaders into recognition of the fact that they are facing something different from what they did just a few short years ago. Their reaction itself is the most striking evidence of the change. For the first time, national heads are making unparalleled moves toward international cooperation in a desperate attempt to save themselves.

Emphasizing this point, U.S. President Ford recently told the U.N. General Assembly that the “nations are forced to choose between conflict and cooperation” and that now, “more than at any time in the history of man, nations . . . must turn to international cooperation” to manage their resources.

But are these moves motivated by any new love the nations have for one another? No. It is only “the very seriousness of the situation,” answers U.N. Secretary-General Waldheim, that “may bring about those developments in international relations which all appeals to reason and goodwill have so far been unable to achieve.”

Admittedly, then, any unified action among the nations is erected on a shaky foundation of self-interest and self-preservation, not genuine interest in one’s fellowman and righteous principles. Will efforts founded on such a basis succeed?

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