GMO Quarterly Letter

The recent GMO quarterly letter, "Welcome to Dystopia! Entering a long-term and politically dangerous food crisis" [pdf] was interesting even if alarmist and Malthusian.

He notes that "The general public, the media, the financial markets, and governments badly underestimate these risks. Only the military of some countries, including the U.S. and the U.K., seem to appreciate them appropriately."

Of course, I agree with his broader thesis that you cannot have exponential growth on a finite planet.

He also makes an interesting point about how "mining and oil companies benefit a lot from rising prices, but they suffer from the need, as capitalist enterprises, to keep replacing their stock in trade every year and this slowly becomes impossible to do completely. Farms, however, also benefit from rising commodity prices but for them their 'stuff in the ground' is soil, which, if well managed, has fully renewed growing capacity each year, usually even with a modestly rising trend."