Saturday, March 26, 2011

China and why American Food Prices will increase

The story on this blog seems like an opportunity for a high school student to build a system dynamics model to test different policy decisions before food prices actually start rising dramatically.

“Can the United States Feed China?”

Combining an increasing population with environmental damage might create an overshoot and collapse scenario in China.  Over the next ten years, China will add the equivalent of the population of America.  At the same time, as stated in the Sustainablog (blog.sustainablog.org) the available land and water in China is shrinking.

This affects America because China will want to import more and more grain and that will cause prices for food in America to increase.  Besides bread and cereals, grain is also used to produce meat, milk and eggs so those prices will increase. China holds $900 billion in American debt that they could use as leverage to make America supply more grain.

One policy decision might be to reverse desertification like they are doing in Africa.  The feedback loops are going to have different time delays and so there are short term and long term policy decisions that might be considered.  A model builder would have to learn how to calculate the time constant for each feedback loop.

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