Renaud Duterme is a Belgian author and geographer. After his book The hidden debt of the economyin 2014, he just published Shortages, when everything is lacking, published by Éditions Payot & Rivages. Interview.
How did you come up with the idea of taking up the theme of shortages in a world that is so wasteful?
I have long been interested in the question of the links between our societies and their environment and in particular the ecological impacts on the climate and on biodiversity. It started with the Club of Rome (1972) and its report on growth. We see the contradiction between the increasing number of warnings about the situation and the inability of our economic system to cope with it. All this because the very nature of our economic system is based on growth. Which requires increasing material flows, energy flows, etc.
What is the objective of this new book?
The objective of this book is to provide an overview of the physical, economic and social constraints that weigh on our various supplies (energy, raw materials, agricultural products, industrial goods). What surprised me the most was the vulnerability of our system to these shortages. The most telling example is that of Covid-19. We believed that the term shortage belonged to the past for our so-called developed economies. But the Covid-19 pandemic, the blockage of the Suez Canal for only a few days and the war in Ukraine have brought it back to the forefront of the news. Energy, raw materials, food, medicines, construction materials, auto parts, microchips, labor, etc. no sector seems spared from this worrying trend.
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Has the unbalanced functioning of globalization been revealed thanks to the crisis?
And for good reason. Almost all of the goods we buy and use come to us through long and complex supply chains. They are made up of multiple links, ranging from the extraction of raw materials (ore, agricultural products, energy) and their transformation, to delivery to supermarket shelves, through manufacturing, storage and, of course, transportation. Capitalist globalization obliges, these different stages have been increasingly distant from each other, increasing the risks of disruption by domino effect. Conflicts, natural disasters, climatic hazards, strikes, attacks, epidemics, so many events can “seize” one link in the chain, or even several, and thereby cause bottlenecks calling into question the very functioning of the chain. ‘economy. All our vulnerabilities interpenetrate and influence each other.
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After Covid-19, economic life has returned to its natural functioning and the race towards growth has resumed. Is man not capable of learning lessons from disasters?
If the images of hypermarkets robbed of packets of toilet paper or pasta have been over-publicized, during Covid-19, consumers returned to their usual behaviors, but with a lot of fear. Preparing for a disaster also avoids the phenomenon of panic. And that is also the subject of this book. I come back to the question 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 the ground over thousands of kilometers in Uganda, just a stone’s throw from herds of giraffes and elephants. In the protected park of Murchison Falls, in the west of the country, one of the highest places of biodiversity in the world. Despite all the criticism from environmental defense associations, 136 TotalEnergies wells will be able, from 2025, to produce black gold for the rest of the world. An investment of 9 billion euros concluded between Uganda, Tanzania and the Chinese oil company CNOOC. Global demand for this polluting energy continues to be strong.
To read. Shortages, when everything is missingby Renaud Duterme, published by Éditions Payot & Rivages.
