Renaud Duterme is a Belgian author and geographer. After his book The hidden debts of the economyin 2014 he just published Shortages, when everything is missing, published by Éditions Payot & Rivages. Maintenance.
How did you come up with the idea of tackling the topic of shortages in a world that is so wasteful?
I have long been interested in the issue of the links between our societies and their environments, and in particular the ecological consequences for the climate and for biodiversity. It started with the Club of Rome (1972) and its report on growth. We see the contradiction between the increasing warnings about the situation and the inability of our economic system to deal with it. All this because the nature of our economic system is based on growth. This requires increasing material flows, energy flows, etc.
What is the purpose of this new book?
The purpose of this book is to take stock of the physical, economic and social constraints that weigh on our various resources (energy, raw materials, agricultural products, industrial goods). What surprised me most was the vulnerability of our system to these shortages. The most striking example is that of Covid-19. We believed that the term deficit was a thing of the past for our so-called developed economies. But the Covid-19 pandemic, the blockage of the Suez Canal for just a few days and the war in Ukraine have brought it back to the forefront of the news. Energy, raw materials, food, medicine, building materials, auto parts, microchips, labor, etc. no sector seems to be spared from this worrying trend.
“Excitement” before the drop in fuel discounts: many gas stations are sold out again
Has the uneven functioning of globalization been exposed thanks to the crisis?
And with good reason. Nearly all the goods we buy and use come to us through long and complex supply chains. They consist of several links, ranging from the extraction of raw materials (ore, agricultural products, energy) and their transformation, to their delivery to supermarket shelves, through production, storage and of course transport. As capitalist globalization obliges, these different stages have become increasingly separated, increasing the risk of disruption through the domino effect. Conflicts, natural disasters, climatic hazards, strikes, attacks, epidemics, so many events can ‘occupy’ one link in the chain, or even several, and therefore cause bottlenecks that call into question the functioning of the chain economy. All our vulnerabilities interpenetrate and influence each other.
The growing global demand for oil
After Covid-19, economic life has returned to its natural functioning and the race for growth has resumed. Is man unable to learn lessons from disasters?
If the images of hypermarkets robbed of packs of toilet paper or pasta became too publicized, consumers returned to their usual behavior during Covid-19, but with much fear. By preparing for a disaster, you also avoid the phenomenon of panic. And that is also the subject of this book. I return to the issue of energy and the environment. The energy issue has always been central to the functioning of societies. Let’s take the current example. Backhoe loaders are busy digging thousands of kilometers of land in Uganda, just a stone’s throw from herds of giraffes and elephants. In the Murchison Falls protected park, in the west of the country, one of the highest places of biodiversity in the world. Despite all the criticism from environmental organizations, 136 TotalEnergies wells will be able to produce black gold for the rest of the world from 2025. An investment of 9 billion euros was concluded between Uganda, Tanzania and the Chinese oil company CNOOC. The global demand for this polluting energy remains high.
Read. Shortages, while everything is missingby Renaud Duterme, published by Éditions Payot & Rivages.
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