Editor’s note: This is a difficult concept to understand. The reason is because we have been taught the opposite all our lives. Taxes don’t fund spending. The spending must be done first so that taxes can be paid. So it is not tax and spend, it is spend and tax. Our taxes don’t fund anything. That is why nobody asks how are we going to fund the military. Money is a government issued tax credit. Its value is derived from the violence that may be necessary to collect the tax. The government creates money by giving it to people for goods and/or services(guns or butter). Which then gives those people the ability to pay the tax. People accept the money out of fear of that violence. The tax collector has to be paid or promised to be paid before they perpetuate that violence(police). The money must be created first so that people can pay their taxes with it. It is spent into existence. Taxes create the necessity for money. A “deficit” just keeps score of how much extra money the government paid to people but was not collected as taxes. Much like beyond a certain point, how much money you have is just keeping score. The government cannot run out of its own money. Just like a baseball game has no limit on the score. What a government spends(creates) its money for are political decisions which are only constrained by the physical “resources” of the living planet.
The government must raise funds through taxation or borrowing in order to spend. In other words, government spending is limited by its ability to tax or borrow.
With government deficits, we are leaving our debt burden to our children.
Government budget deficits take away savings.
Social Security is broken.
The trade deficit is an unsustainable imbalance that takes away jobs and output.
We need savings to provide the funds for investment.
It’s a bad thing that higher deficits today mean higher taxes tomorrow.
How does civilization collapse? First slowly, then suddenly. Complexity solves problems. – (Joseph Tainter) Maybe that is a solution in search of a problem. Never asking, just because we can does not mean that we should, e.g., technology, splitting the atom, agriculture.
The pioneering research by one of the founders of economic anthropology is essential for understanding the social and institutional processes that gave rise to money as we know it.
The late 19th century saw economists, mainly German and Austrian, create a mythology of money’s origins that is still repeated in today’s textbooks. Money is said to have originated as just another commodity being bartered, with metal preferred because it is nonperishable (and hence amenable to being saved), supposedly standardized (despite fraud if not minted in temples), and thought to be easily divisible—as if silver could have been used for small marketplace exchanges, which was unrealistic given the rough character of ancient scales for weights of a few grams.[1]
This mythology does not recognize government as having played any role as a monetary innovator, sponsor, or regulator, or as giving money its value by accepting it as a vehicle to pay taxes, buy public services, or make religious contributions. Also downplayed is money’s function as a standard of value for denominating and paying debts.[2]
Although there is no empirical evidence for the commodity-barter origin myth, it has survived on purely hypothetical grounds because of its political bias that serves the anti-socialist Austrian school and subsequent “free market” creditor interests opposing government money creation.
Schurtz’s Treatment of Money as Part of the Overall Social System
As one of the founders of economic anthropology, Heinrich Schurtz approached the origins of money as being much more complex than the “economic” view that it emerged simply as a result of families going to the marketplace to barter. Surveying a wide range of Indigenous communities, his 1898 book, An Outline of the Origins of Money, described their trade and money in the context of the institutional system within which members sought status and wealth. Schurtz described these monetary systems as involving a wide array of social functions and dimensions, which today’s “economic” theorizing excludes as external to its analytic scope.
Placing money in the context of the community’s overall system of social organization, Schurtz warned that anyone who detaches “sociological and economic problems from the environment in which they emerged… their native land… only carries away a part of the whole organism and fails to understand the vital forces that have created and sustained it.”
Looking at Indigenous communities as having preserved presumably archaic traditions, Schurtz viewed trade with outsiders as leading wealth to take an increasingly monetary form that eroded the balance of internal social relations. Schurtz deemed the linkage between money, debt, and land tenure to lie beyond the area on which he focused, nor did he mention contributions to group feasts (which historian Bernard Laum suggested as the germ from which Greek obols and drachmas may have evolved).[3]
The paradigmatic forms of Indigenous wealth were jewelry and other items of personal adornment, decorations, and trophies, especially foreign exotic products in the form of shells and gemstones or items with a long and prestigious history that gave their wearers or owners status.
Thorstein Veblen would call the ownership and display of such items conspicuous consumption in his 1899 book, TheTheory of the Leisure Class. They had an exchange value, as they do today, but that did not make them monetary means of exchange. Schurtz saw many gray areas in their monetization: “Beads made of clay and stone are also crafted by Indigenous people and widely used as ornaments but rarely as money.”
At issue was how a money economy differs from barter and from the circulation and exchange of useful and valued items in a social economy. Was Indigenous exchange and wealth pre-monetary, an archaic seed that led to money’s “more ideal forms?”
Schurtz’s Distinction Between Inside-Money and Outside-Money
Exchange with outsiders was typically conducted by political leaders as the face of their communities to the outside world. Trade (and also payment of tribute) involved fiscal and social relations whose monetary functions differed from those of the domestic economy but ended up dovetailing with them to give money a hybrid character. Schurtz distinguished what he called outside-money from inside-money, with outside-money ultimately dominating the inside monetary system.
“The concept of money,” he wrote, originated “from two distinct sources: What functions as the foundation of wealth and measure of value for property and serves social ends within a tribe is, in its origins, something entirely different from the means of exchange that travels from tribe to tribe and eventually transforms itself, as a universally welcomed commodity, into a kind of currency.”
Inside-money was used within communities for their own exchange and wealth. Outside-money was derived from transactions with outsiders. And what was “outside” was a set of practices governing trade outside the jurisdiction of local governance.[4]
Schurtz’s distinction emphasized a characteristic of trade that has continued down through today’s world: the contrast between domestic payments subject to checks and balances to protect basic needs and navigating status hierarchies but (ideally) limiting sharp wealth disparities, and exchange with outsiders, often conducted on islands, quay areas, or other venues socially outside the community’s boundaries, subject to more impersonal standardized rules.
Throughout the ancient world, we find offshore island entrepots wherever they are conveniently located for conducting trade with outsiders.
These islands kept foreign contact at arm’s length to prevent mercantile relations from disturbing the local economic balance. Egypt restricted foreign contacts to the Delta region where the Nile flowed into the Mediterranean. For the Etruscans, the island of Ischia/Pithekoussai became the base for Phoenician and Greek merchants to deal with the Italian mainland in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. North Germans seem to have conducted the Baltic amber trade through the sacred island of Helgoland.
“The emergence of specific internal monetary systems is always supported by the inclination to transform outside-money into inside-money, and to employ money not to facilitate external trade, as one might assume according to common theories, but rather to obstruct it,” Schurtz concluded. In his chapter, “Metal as Ornament and Money,” he pointed out that it was foreign trade that led metal to become the primary form of money. “While most varieties of ornament-money gradually lose their significance, one of them, metal-money, asserts its ground all the more and finally pushes its competitors out of the field.” He added that: “Metal-money made from noble metals is not a pure sign-money, it is at the same time a valuable commodity, the value of which depends on supply and demand. In its mature form, it therefore in itself embodies the fusion of inside-money with outside-money, of the sign of value and valuable property with the means of exchange.”[5]
This merging of inside- and outside-money is documented already in the third millennium BCE in the Near East. Silver-money was used for long-distance trade and came to be used for domestic enterprise as well, while grain remained the monetary vehicle for denominating agrarian production, taxes, and debt service on the land, and for distribution to dependent labor in Mesopotamia’s temples and palaces.
Schurtz also questioned whether the dominance of metallic money emerged spontaneously in many places or whether there was a diffusion from a singular origin, that is, “whether a cultural institution has grown in situ or whether it has been transferred from other regions through migration and contact between societies.” The diffusion of Mesopotamian weights is associated with silver points to its diffusion from that region, as does the spread of the region’s practice of setting interest rates simply for ease of calculation in terms of the local fractional arithmetic system (60ths in Mesopotamia for a shekel per mina a month, 10ths or percentages in decimalized Greece, and 12ths in Rome for a troy ounce per pound each year).
Checks and Balances to Prevent the Selfish Concentration of Wealth
What does seem to have developed spontaneously were social attitudes and policies to prevent the concentration of wealth from injuring economic balance. Wealth concentration, especially when achieved by depriving cultivators of their means of livelihood, would have violated the ethic of mutual aid that low-surplus economies need as a condition for their resilience.
Viewing money as part of the overall social context, Schurtz described “the social transformation brought about by wealth” as a result of monetizing trade and its commercial pursuit of profit, or “acquisitiveness”:
“[E]veryone is now compelled to join in the competition for property or he will be pulled into the vortex created by one of the newly emerging centers of power and property, where he will need to work hard to be able to live at all. For the property owner, no temporal limit constrains his view on the perpetual increase of his wealth.”
Schurtz characterized the economic mentality as a drive for “the unlimited accumulation of movable property,” to be passed on to one’s children, leading to the creation of a wealthy hereditary class. If archaic societies had this ethic, could ancient civilizations have taken off? How did they prevent the growth of wealth from fostering an oligarchy seeking to increase its wealth at the expense of the community at large and its resilience?
Schurtz reviewed how Indigenous communities typically avoided that fate by shaping a social value system that would steer wealth away from being used to achieve predatory power over others. He cited numerous examples in which “immense treasures often accumulate without reentering the transactions of daily life.” One widespread way to do this was simply to bury wealth. “The primitive man,” he wrote, “believes that he will have access to all the goods given to him in the grave, even in the afterlife. Thus, he too knows no bounds to acquisition.”
Taking his greed and wealth with him to use in the hereafter prevents hoarded wealth from being inherited “and growing into a dangerous instrument of power” by becoming dynastic; ultimately operating “on the belief that the deceased does not give up his rights of ownership but jealously guards over his property to ensure that no heir makes use of it.” A less destructive removal of wealth from its owners was to create an ethic of peer pressure in which individuals gained status and popular acclaim by accumulating wealth to give away. Schurtz wrote:
“[R]emnants of the ancient communism remain alive enough for a long time to effectively block attempts to amass as many assets as possible in a single hand. And in places without an actual system of debt and interest, the powerful individual, into whose house the tributes of the people flow, has indeed little choice but to ‘represent’ by way of his wealth: in other words, to allow the people to participate in his indulgences.”
Such an individual achieves philanthropic renown by generously distributing his possessions to “his friends and followers, winning their hearts and thereby establishing real power based on loyal devotion.” One widespread practice was to celebrate marriages, funerals, and other rites of passage by providing great feasts. This “extraordinary… destruction and squandering of valuable property, particularly livestock and food, during those grand festivals of the dead that evolved out of sacrifices and are, among some peoples, not only an effective obstacle to the accumulation of wealth but have turned into economic calamities” when families feel obliged to take on debt to host such extravagant displays.
Religious officials and temples often played a role in such rituals. Noting that “money, trade, and religion had a good relationship with one another in antiquity,” Schurtz cited the practice of donating wealth to temples or their priesthoods. But he recognized that this might enable them to “gain dominance through the ownership of money” under their control.
“The communist countermeasures against wealth generally do not endure,” Schurtz wrote. “Certain kinds of property seem to favor greed directly, especially cattle farming, which can literally turn into a hoarding addiction.” He described communalistic values of mutual aid as tending to break down as economies polarized with the increase in commercial wealth.
Schurtz also noted that the social checks on personal wealth-seeking did not apply to economies that developed a “system of debt and interest.” Wealth in the form of monetary claims on debtors was not buried and could hardly be redistributed to the population at large, whose members typically were debtors to the rising creditor interest.
The only way to prevent such debts from polarizing society was to cancel them. That is what Near Eastern rulers did, but Schurtz’s generation had no way of knowing about their Clean Slate proclamations.
Starting with the very outset of debt records c. 2500 BCE in Sumer, and continuing down through Babylonia, Assyria, to their neighbors, and on through the early first millennium BCE, rulers annulled financial claims on agrarian debtors. That prevented creditors from concentrating money and land in their own hands. One might say that these debt cancellations and land redistributions were the Near Eastern alternative to destroying material wealth to preserve balance. These royal acts did not destroy physical wealth but simply wiped out the debt overhead to maintain widespread land tenure and liberty for the population at large.
Canceling agrarian debt was politically feasible because most personal debts were owed to the palace sector and its temples or their officials. Royal Clean Slates seemed so unthinkable when they began to be translated around the turn of the last century that early readers hardly could believe that they actually were enforced in practice. François Thureau-Dangin’s French translation of the Sumerian ruler Enmetena’s (c. 2400 BCE) proclamation in 1905 was believed by many observers to be too utopian and socially disruptive to have been followed in practice, as was the Biblical Jubilee Year of Leviticus 25.[6]
But so many such proclamations have been found, extending so continuously over thousands of years—along with lawsuits in which judges upheld their increasing detail—that there is no doubt that these acts did indeed reconcile the accumulation of monetary wealth with social resilience by blocking the creation of predatory oligarchies such as those that would emerge in classical Greece and Rome and indeed survive into today’s world.
Monetary Innovations in the Bronze Age Near Eastern Palaces and Temples
Economic documentation in Schurtz’s day was able to trace monetary practice only as far back as classical Greece and Rome. There was a general belief that their practices must have evolved from Indigenous Indo-European speakers. Marcel Mauss would soon treat the gift exchange of the Kwakiutl tribe of the Canadian Pacific Northwest (with their competitive one-upmanship) as the prototype for the idea of charging interest. But monetary interest has a specific stipulated rate, with payments due on specific periodic dates set by written contracts. That practice stems from Sumer in the third millennium BCE, along with silver (and grain) money and related financial innovations in the economic big bang that has shaped subsequent Western economic evolution.
Money’s function as a standard of valuation did not play a big role in Schurtz’s survey. But subsequent archaeological research has revealed that money’s emergence as part of an overall institutional framework cannot be understood without reference to written account-keeping, denominating debt accruals, and fiscal relations. Money, credit/debt, and fiscal obligations have all gone together since the origins of written records in the ancient Near East.
Near Eastern fiscal and financial records describe a development of money, credit, and interest-bearing debt that neither the barter theory nor Schurtz’s ethnographic studies had imagined. Mesopotamia’s “more ideal” money evolved out of the fiscal organization of account-keeping and credit in the palaces and temples of Sumer, Babylonia, and their Bronze Age neighbors (3200–1200 BCE). These Near Eastern economies were larger in scale and much more complex and multilayered than most of the Indigenous communities surveyed by Schurtz.
In contrast to largely self-sufficient communities, southern Mesopotamia was obliged to engage in large-scale and long-distance trade because the region’s river-deposited soil lacked metal, stone, and even hardwood. The region’s need for raw materials was far different from the trade and “monetization” of luxuries by the relatively small-scale and self-sufficient communities studied by Schurtz and hypothesized by economists imagining individuals bartering at their local market. In these communities, he noted: “The amount of metal shaped into ornaments almost always far outweighs the amount transformed into practical tools.” Mesopotamia’s trade had to go far beyond personal decorative luxuries and prestige commodities or trophy items.
An entrepreneurial merchant class was needed to obtain these raw materials, along with a specialized labor force, which was employed by the temples and palaces that produced most export handicrafts, provisioned corvée labor to work on public infrastructure, served as mints and overseers of weights and measures, and mediated most monetary wealth and debt. This required forward planning and account-keeping to feed and supply labor (war widows, orphans, and slaves) in their weaving and other handicraft workshops and to consign their output to merchants for export. Calculating the cost of distributing food and raw materials within these large institutions and valuing their consignment of goods to merchants required designing standard weights and measures as the basis for this forward planning. Selecting monetary units was part of this standardization of measuring costs and value.
This made possible the calculation of expected rental income or shortfalls, along with profit-and-loss statements and balance sheets. The typical commodity to be distributed was grain, which served as a standard of value for agrarian transactions and credit balances that mounted up during the crop year for advances to sharecroppers, consumption such as beer from ale-women, and payments to priests for performing ceremonial functions. Their value in grain was to be paid at harvest time.
The calculation of food rations for distribution to the various grades of labor (male, female, and children) enabled the costs to be expressed in grain or in workday equivalents.
Schurtz would have called this grain “inside-money,” and regarded as “outside-money” the silver minted by temples for dealing with foreign trade and as the basic measure of value for business transactions with the palace economy and for settling commercial obligations. A mina (60 shekels) of silver was set as equal to a corresponding unit of grain as measured on the threshing floor. That enabled accounts to be kept simultaneously in silver and grain.
The result was a bi-monetary grain-silver standard reflecting the bifurcation of early Mesopotamian economies between the agrarian families on the land (using grain as “inside-money”) and the palatial economy with its workshops, foreign trade, and associated commercial enterprise (using silver as “outside-money”).
Prices for market transactions with outsiders might vary, but prices for debt payments, taxes, and other transactions with large institutions were fixed.
Schurtz’s conclusion that the rising dominance of commercial money tended to break down domestic checks and balances protecting the Indigenous communities that he studied is indeed what happened when commercial debt practices were brought from the Near East to the Aegean and Mediterranean lands around the eighth century BCE.
Having no tradition of royal debt cancellations as had existed in the Near East ever since the formative period of interest-bearing debt, the resulting decontextualization of credit practices fostered financial oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome. After early debt cancellations and land redistribution by populist “tyrants” in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the ensuing classical oligarchies resisted popular revolts demanding a revival of such policies.
The dynamics of interest-bearing debt and the pro-creditor debt laws of classical antiquity’s creditor oligarchies caused economic polarization that led to five centuries of civil warfare. These upheavals were not the result of the coinage that began to be minted around the eighth century BCE, as many 19th-century observers believed, mistakenly thinking that Aegean coinage was the first metallic money. Silver-money had been the norm for two millennia throughout the Near East, without causing disruption like that experienced by classical antiquity. What polarized classical antiquity’s economies were pro-creditor debt laws backed by political violence, not money.
Conclusion and Discussion
Schurtz’s starting point was how communities organized the laws of motion governing their distribution of wealth and property. He viewed money as emerging from this institutional function with a basically communalistic ethic. A key characteristic of Indigenous economic resilience was social pressure expecting the wealthy to contribute to social support. That was the condition set by unwritten customs for letting some individuals and their families become rich.
Schurtz and subsequent ethnologists found a universal solution for reconciling wealth-seeking with community-wide prosperity to be social pressure for wealthy families (that was the basic unit, not individuals) to distribute their wealth to the citizenry by reciprocal exchange, gift-giving, mutual aid, and other forms of redistribution, and providing large feasts, especially for rites of passage.
This was a much broader view than the individualistic economic assumption that personal gain-seeking and, indeed, selfishness were the driving forces of overall prosperity. The idea of monetizing economic life under communalistic mutual aid or palace direction was and remains anathema to mainstream economists, reflecting the worldview of modern creditors and financial elites. Schurtz recognized that mercantile wealth-seeking required checks and balances to prevent economies from impoverishing their members.
The problem for any successfully growing society to solve was how to prevent the undue concentration of wealth obtained by exploitative means that impaired overall welfare and the ability of community members to be self-supporting. Otherwise, economic polarization and dependency would lead members to flee from the community, or perhaps it simply would shrink and end up being defeated by outsiders who sustained themselves by more successful mutual aid.
As noted above, Schurtz treated the monetization of wealth in the form of creditor claims on debtors as too post-archaic to be a characteristic of his ethnographic subjects. But what shaped the context for monetization and led “outside-money” to take priority over inside-money were wealth accumulation by moneylending and the fiscal and military uses of money. Schurtz correctly rejected Bruno Hildebrand’s characterization of money as developing in stages, from small-scale barter to monetized economies becoming more sophisticated as they evolved into financialized credit economies.[7]
And, in fact, the actual historical sequence was the reverse. From Mesopotamia to medieval Europe, agrarian economies operated on credit during the crop year. Monetary payment occurred at harvest time to settle the obligations that had accumulated since the last harvest and to pay taxes. This need to pay debts was a major factor requiring money’s development in the first place. Barter became antiquity’s final monetary “stage” as Rome’s economy collapsed after its creditor oligarchy imposed debt bondage and took control of the land.
When emperors were unable to tax this oligarchy, they debased the coinage, and life throughout the empire devolved into local subsistence production and quasi-barter. Foreign trade was mainly for luxuries brought by Arabs and other Near Easterners. The optimistic sequence that Hildebrand imagined not only mistakenly adopted the barter myth of monetary origins but also failed to take debt polarization into account as economies became monetarized and financialized.
Schurtz described how the aim of preventing the maldistribution of wealth was at the heart of Indigenous social structuring. But it broke down for various reasons. Economies in which family wealth took the form of cattle, he found, tended to become increasingly oppressive to maintain the polarizing inequality that developed. The same might be said of credit economies under the rising burden of interest-bearing debt. Schurtz noted the practice of charging debtors double the loan value—and any rate of interest indeed involves an implicit doubling time.
That exponential dynamic is what polarizes financialized economies. In contrast to Schurtz, mainstream economists of his generation avoided dealing with the effect of monetary innovation and debt on the distribution of wealth. The tendency was to treat money as merely a “veil” of price changes for goods and services, without analyzing how credit polarizes the economy’s balance sheet of assets and debt liabilities. Yet, the distinguishing feature of credit economies was the use of moneylending as a lever to enrich creditors by impoverishing debtors. That was more than just a monetary problem. It was a political creditor/debtor problem and, ultimately, a public/private problem.
The issue was whether a ruler or civic public checks would steer the rise in monetary wealth in ways that avoided the creation of creditor oligarchies.
Most 19th-century and even subsequent economic writers shied away from confronting this political context, leaving the most glaring gap in modern economic analysis. It was left to the discovery of cuneiform documentation to understand how money first became institutionalized as a vehicle to pay debts. This monetization was accompanied by remarkable success in sustaining rising wealth while preventing its concentration in the hands of a hereditary oligarchy. That Near Eastern success highlights what the smaller and more anarchic Western economies failed to achieve when interest-bearing debt practices were brought to the Mediterranean lands without being checked by the tradition of regular cancellation of personal nonbusiness debt.
Credit and monetary wealth were privatized in the hands of what became an increasingly self-destructive set of classical oligarchies culminating in that of Rome, which fought for centuries against popular revolts seeking protection from impoverishing economic polarization.
The devastating effects of transplanting Near Eastern debt practices into the Mediterranean world’s less communalistic groupings show the need to discuss the political, fiscal, and social-moral context for money and debt. Schurtz placed monetary analysis in the context of society’s political institutions and moral values and explained how money is a product of this context and, indeed, how monetization tends to transform it—in a way that tends to break down social protection. His book has remained relatively unknown over the last century, largely because his institutional anthropological perspective is too broad for an economics discipline that has been narrowed by pro-creditor ideologues who have applauded the “free market” destruction of social regulation aimed at protecting the interests of debtors.
That attitude avoids recognizing the challenges that led the Indigenous communities studied by Schurtz, and also the formative Bronze Age Near East, to protect their resilience against the concentration of wealth, a phenomenon that has plagued economies ever since classical antiquity’s decontextualization of Near Eastern debt practices.
Editor’s note: “President Donald Trump has been pushing the U.S. to barrel ahead on deep-sea mining. The country plans to permit mining in international waters under an obscure U.S. law from 1980 called the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act(DSHMRA), which predates the Law of the Sea treaty. Congress wrote the law to serve as an ‘interim legal regime’ — a temporary way to grant mining licenses until the United Nations-affiliated regime took shape.
A main point of contention is that, according to the U.N. treaty and the DSHMRA, the international seabed is designated the ‘common heritage of mankind.’ In other words, the nodules legally belong to all people living on Earth today as well as future generations. The treaty declares that any profits from exploiting that heritage be distributed across nations, not just reaped by one country, in a benefits-sharing agreement that treaty signatories are still hashing out
The French diplomat slammed the Trump administration’s executive order, issued on April 24, that directs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) to fast-track seabed exploration and commercial mining permits in both U.S. waters and ocean areas beyond America’s jurisdiction — commonly called the high seas..”
Invoking national security to justify private sector economic development is a tired cliché. And yet, in a troubling twist, a Canadian company is invoking U.S. national security to obtain an exclusive license from the U.S. government for a deep-sea mining venture for critical minerals in international waters—and it appears to be working.
Companies leading the push to launch deep-sea mining under a U.S. license are foreign-incorporated entities with no operational footprint—and no meaningful supply chain commitments to it. The timeline for commercial production remains uncertain and subject to indefinite delays due to technical, financial, and regulatory hurdles.
Far from offering strategic value, this initiative is best understood as a speculative venture propped up by shifting political winds. Deep-sea mining is not the answer to a mineral security crisis—it’s a solution to a problem that does not exist.
At the very least, ask for a 60 day extension to the public comment period because of the crucial nature of the proposal. But also express that you strongly oppose consolidating the exploration license and commercial recovery permit process.
Mining in international waters without global consent carries enormous reputational, legal, and financial risks. It could trigger investor pullout, international condemnation, and logistical nightmares. We can make sure it’s simply not worth the cost.
Despite everything, I left Jamaica feeling positive. Progress might be slow, yet things are moving in the right direction. But we can’t afford complacency. This meeting made clear just how fragile international governance really is. Loopholes and silence are letting corporate interests push the system to its limits.
At the same time, I saw how much influence we still have. Scientists, youth, Indigenous leaders, and civil society are shifting the conversation. The pressure we’re building is working — we have to keep going.
Join us in protecting what should never be plundered in the first place:
“We’re too late to know what today’s ocean without oil and gas drilling, whaling and overfishing would look like. We can stop this next great threat before it starts, and save one of the planet’s final frontiers — and the amazing life that lives there. Tell the Interior Department: Don’t mine the deep sea.” https://environmentamerica.org/center/articles/is-the-u-s-going-to-start-deep-sea-mining/
Donald Trump has brought the world together against the U.S. with this dangerous unilateral action.
The deep sea, the planet’s most expansive and least understood ecosystem, remains largely unexplored. Yet while the deep sea may seem a dark and distant space, events underwater directly impact our lives, from essential services like climate regulation to fisheries and the marine food web. While scientific understanding of this realm is nascent, a new industry is rapidly emerging driven by the demand for rare metals essential for batteries, microchips and AI: deep-sea mining.
In the past three years, more than 38 nations have voiced support for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, a rapid pace by the standards of multilateral lawmaking, and the equivalent of one new country signing on per month. This progress marks a major shift from just a few years ago, when states were either supportive of mining, reluctant to take a position, or were simply uninformed.
The triggering of a treaty provision known as the “two-year rule” by the nation of Nauru in 2021, intended to accelerate deep-sea mining in areas beyond national jurisdiction, brought increased attention and scrutiny to the activity. Nevertheless, some private actors are pushing for the granting of applications for commercial deep-sea mining of minerals like copper, nickel and cobalt, despite significant concerns from global leaders, the scientific community and the public at large.
This divergence between scientific understanding and prevailing narratives came into sharp focus at the recent annual meeting of the International Seabed Authority (ISA). There, nations gathered to discuss matters profoundly consequential for the future of the deep ocean. However, there also seemed to be a broad understanding that a strong regulatory framework based on science, equity and precaution must be in place before an informed decision can be taken, and that no mining activities should commence in the meantime.
Moving forward, it’s imperative that we actively counter misinformation, significantly invest in scientific research, and, in the interim, take concrete measures to ensure that deep-sea mining activities do not commence in the absence of clear science, robust regulations, sufficient safeguards, and equity.
Here are the three main myths about deep-sea mining:
‘Deep-sea mining will provide an economic boom and promote global peace and security’
The primary justification for exploiting the seabed rests on a dubious economic premise: that mining’s financial gains will somehow outweigh its environmental costs. Yet, the economic case for deep-sea mining is tenuous at best, and expert indications suggest the burdens will far outstrip any tangible benefits. Deep-sea mining is an inherently capital-intensive endeavor, demanding massive amounts of upfront investment to take part in a high-risk, burgeoning industry. Developing and deploying specialized machinery capable of operating thousands of meters below the surface, under immense pressure and in corrosive conditions, presents unprecedented engineering challenges. The costs associated with exploration, environmental impact assessments, research and development, and then the actual extraction, processing and transport of minerals from such remote and hostile environments are projected to be staggering.
Some argue that deep-sea mining could bolster supply chain security for critical sectors such as defense, transportation, construction and energy. Given the vital importance of these industries to national security, the seabed’s mineral resources become intrinsically linked to the economic futures of nations like the U.S., which view them as a means to diversify mineral access: the majority of such mineral extraction occurs in regions like Africa, South America, Indonesia and Australia, and the supply chains for many of these critical minerals are currently dominated by geopolitical rivals like China, further intensifying the scramble to mine the deep.
However, it is naïve to think that deep-sea mining would address or alleviate global geopolitical tensions. If anything, the pursuit of unilateral deep-sea mining seems more likely to exacerbate fraught international relations, with the consequences spilling over to the global legal order more broadly. Countries should instead consider investing in a more circular economy, responsible sourcing and refining, encouraging innovation to be less metal-dependent, and developing multilateral frameworks to promote responsible and equitable international cooperation for critical metals and minerals.
A glass octopus, a nearly transparent deep sea species whose only visible features are its optic nerve, eyeballs and digestive tract. Image by Schmidt Ocean Institute (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
‘Deep-sea mining will reduce or alleviate the environmental impact of terrestrial mining’
Another justification is that we will be able to move away from many of the environmental and social ills of terrestrial mining. While it is true that terrestrial mining has caused massive deforestation and led to severe human rights abuses in areas like the Democratic Republic of Congo, the idea that shifting mining activity to the sea will ease the pressure on land-based operations is misguided.
As deep-sea competitors arise to challenge the establishment of terrestrial mining, the increased competition will only serve to expand the global footprint of resource extraction and encourage operators to cut corners to stay competitive. When mining activity accelerates, the environmental and social harms produced are likely to follow, leading to an increasingly untenable situation where biodiversity is wiped out and the planet’s capacity to provide ecosystem services depleted. In this scenario, it is local communities and Indigenous groups in the Global South who will suffer most as they become dispossessed of the resources needed for survival, like forests for fuel and fish for food.
While the recovery and restoration of former terrestrial mining sites is possible, with governments increasingly mandating multiyear rejuvenation and rehabilitation projects, the situation in the deep sea is vastly different. Deep-sea recovery is limited and extremely slow on human timescales. Moreover, current scientific knowledge indicates that any restoration effort there would be difficult and cost-prohibitive, if not impossible.
Moreover, the environmental footprint of deep-sea mining activities, particularly for polymetallic nodule extraction — where a single mining project will involve extraction over a very large spatial area spanning thousands of square kilometers — will far exceed the footprint of terrestrial mining, which usually involves a very small and targeted area. If deep-sea mining were to alleviate or replace terrestrial mining, there would need to be multiple of such extraction projects — which would be disastrous for the marine environment and the planet.
The ISA is currently debating how to factor environmental externalities into contractor payments, as harm to these common heritage resources shouldn’t burden society. The requirement to compensate developing countries with large terrestrial mining industries for lost earnings, funded by ISA revenues, suggests the entire exercise could result in a net negative benefit.
A deposit of polymetallic nodules in the Pacific Ocean. Image by Philweb / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
‘Deep-sea mining is necessary for the energy transition’
The need for metals to power the energy transition is largely overstated by deep-sea mining advocates. Their arguments often cite expanding demand for electric vehicles and renewable energy, both cornerstones of the energy transition that currently require large supplies of rare-earth metals and minerals to craft the infrastructure needed to generate and store renewable power. For these advocates, deep-sea mining is presented as the sole means to access adequate supplies of crucial transition minerals.
However, these arguments are built on the false premise that demand for transition metals will continuously rise alongside our demand for energy. Advances in battery chemistry are already helping to reduce demand for cobalt, and circular solutions like recycling can further reduce our reliance on virgin metals obtained through mining, thereby challenging narratives that we are facing an unavoidable mineral deficit unless we turn to the deep seabed.
So, given the high costs and severe environmental risks, why then pursue deep-sea mining? This activity threatens unique deep-sea ecosystems and could irrevocably alter ocean health, impacting life on land. Scientists warn of irreversible damage from sediment plumes, habitat destruction and noise pollution to ecosystems formed over millions of years. Without sufficient baseline data, predicting or mitigating these risks is impossible, mandating caution under the precautionary principle.
Finally, the numbers also do not add up, which means financing deep-sea mining is akin to investing in a financial scam. If we are serious about tackling the unprecedented and existential threats that we are now facing, destructive activities like deep-sea mining surely cannot form part of the equation. It is therefore heartening to see many global leaders and governments voicing their concerns and calling for a pause or moratorium on deep-sea mining.
Pradeep Singh is an ocean governance expert at the Oceano Azul Foundation and holds degrees from the University of Malaya, the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard Law School.
Banner Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, 2019 Southeastern U.S. Deep-sea Exploration. Public Domain
Editor’s note: “Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead.
Several Chelemeras look out on the nursery before submerging themselves in the lagoon. After inclement weather, they return to the mangrove shelters to repair them. Image by Caitlin Cooper for Mongabay.
Keila Vazquez walks through a higher-elevation area in Progreso, Yucatán. Las Chelemeras are currently working to level the topography of the area so that freshwater can reach the mangroves naturally. Image by Caitlin Cooper for Mongabay.
The women of Chelem, a fishing community on the northern coast of the Mexican state of Yucatán, hadn’t planned to work in mangrove restoration. At first, it was simply an opportunity to make money to support their families, so they signed up for the project.
It was 2010, and the initiative, led by the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTA) at the National Polytechnic Institute, aimed to restore a mangrove forest that had been devastated by the construction of a port in the late 1960s.
The group has since come to be known as Las Chelemeras (“the women of Chelem”), who have learned to restore and defend mangroves and who, 15 years later, continue to do so.
Keila Vázquez, coordinator of Las Chelemeras, remembers this place, known as the Yucalpetén bend, as barren.
“It was caused by dredging for a nearby port,” Vázquez says. “All the gravel from the port was dumped there: the topography changed, the salinity increased and the water stopped flowing.”
That’s where Las Chelemeras came in. The 14 women in the group, ranging in age from 30 to 85, learned about the different mangrove tree species of the area and what they needed to survive and grow, Vázquez says.
“Despite being from the coast, we didn’t know why the mangroves were important,” Vázquez says. “For example, they protect against cyclones and act as nurseries for commercial marine species such as prawns. Now we understand how much they benefit us.”
She adds, “We know that each of our actions is benefiting the environment and contributing to the economy and protection of the coast itself.”
The second Las Chelemeras project began in 2015, in the nearby municipality of Progreso, to restore an area of 110 hectares (272 acres) inside the State Protected Natural Area of the Marshes and Mangroves of the Northern Coast of Yucatán, a wetland reserve impacted by highway construction.
“The highway is wide — six lanes — and stretches from Mérida to Progreso, interfering with the hydrological flow of the mangroves,” says Calina Zepeda, an expert in climate risk, resilience and restoration with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), an international NGO that has supported and financed the project. “This led to the loss of many mangroves and also caused a large part of the wetland to dry up, while another area flooded.”
To date, Las Chelemeras have restored more than 60% of the forest and 90% of the water flow in this affected area inside the reserve in collaboration with CINVESTAV and TNC, according to Vázquez. She adds that their work has focused on hydrological restoration, with the opening of channels and the creation of tarquinas, topographical modifications that act as small islands where new mangrove trees can grow.
“When the hydrology is restored and the water begins to flow again, it brings with it black mangrove seeds and they propagate there on their own,” Vázquez says. “This is natural regeneration. We don’t plant them. But in the last two years, we have been helping with the reforestation of red mangroves.”
Las Chelemeras clear sediment from a canal in their current work site in Progreso. Image by Caitlin Cooper for Mongabay.
Keila Vazquez walks through a higher-elevation area in Progreso, Yucatán. Las Chelemeras are currently working to level the topography of the area so that freshwater can reach the mangroves naturally. Image by Caitlin Cooper for Mongabay.
Saving the mangroves
The State Protected Natural Area of the Marshes and Mangroves of the Northern Coast of Yucatán is an important biological corridor that encompasses several ecosystems. According to the Ramsar Sites Information Service (RSIS), it includes mangroves, sea meadows, petén — islands of trees surrounded by marshes — lowland forest and savanna. It’s home to three mangrove tree species: red (Rhizophora mangle), black (Avicennia germinans) and white (Laguncularia racemosa).
The reserve provides habitat for a wide variety of plants and animals, some of them globally threatened, such as the Yucatán killifish (Fundulus persimilis) and the blind swamp eel (Ophisternon infernale) — both listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List — and the golden silverside (Menidia colei), a species of small fish found only along the northern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula and offshore islands. The site also hosts a large number of waterbirds, including the American flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) and the reddish egret (Egretta rufescens).
It’s in this biologically diverse area that Las Chelemeras work. They not only build channels and dig up sediment to reestablish the water flow — manually, with tools they made themselves — but they also recreate the topography of the area by building small islands out of wooden posts, shade cloth and soil. These are the tarquinas, or nurseries, where they cultivate new mangrove trees.
“We make the channels and take the sediment [and use it to build] the tarquinas,” Vázquez says.
The tarquinas are piles of earth built in the most flooded areas of the mangroves and fenced with mesh or greenhouse cloth to keep the sediment from washing away. Claudia Teutli is a researcher at the National School of Higher Education of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (ENES-UNAM) who, together with Jorge Herrera of CINVESTAV, has accompanied Las Chelemeras since the beginning and provided technical and scientific assistance to develop the group’s skills and formalize their knowledge.
Teutli says the goal of the tarquinas “is to help establish the seedlings, because these areas can flood up to 2 meters [6.6 feet].” By doing this, they contribute to the recovery of the mangrove’s ecosystem services, she says.
The women make their own tools to do their work. For example, the jamo, a stick with a net attached to one end, is used to clear channels.
“After working with a shovel and pick, they extract the sediment with the jamos, so that the water drains through the nets,” Teutli says, adding that they made them because shovels, in addition to being expensive, rusted too quickly and lasted less than a week, after which they would have to get rid of them. “These other tools can last months and have been a great success.”
Teutli says Las Chelemeras also weave baskets out of coconut fiber and palm leaves to transplant the mangrove seedlings and prevent contamination with the plastic bags normally used in nurseries.
Las Chelemeras say their workday begins very early in the morning. After they finish, in the afternoon, several members pick up their children from school, take them home and make them meals. Many say they also have jobs outside the mangroves, and some say they’ve invested their earnings from their work in the mangroves by opening shops and small catering businesses.
Vázquez says that for their mangrove work, they make sure responsibilities are divvied up equitably.
“There are two members whose job it is to watch the birds, another two who monitor, others who supervise … and that’s how we divide up the tasks between everyone,” Vázquez says. “We try to make sure that tasks are evenly distributed, so that no one gets upset. There’s a reason we’re all still here after [15] years. We know how to work together, and we understand one another.
Part of the restoration site in Progreso, where Las Chelemeras have built shelters where mangrove seedlings can take root. Image by Caitlin Cooper for Mongabay.A patch of restored mangrove in Yucalpetén, Las Chelemeras’ first work site. Image by Caitlin Cooper for Mongabay.
A source of pride
Vázquez says the hard work of Las Chelemeras has turned what were once barren and desolate landscapes of mud back into vibrant forests.
“All this vegetation is thanks to our work and our effort, all the exhaustion we experienced: it tells us it has been worth it,” she says.
In addition to the mangrove trees themselves, Vázquez says she’s seen many other species return to the area.
“There are crabs, fish, and what here in the Yucatán we call caracol chivita [Melongena corona, a species of sea snail]. But what has surprised us recently are prawns, and seeing that there are birds,” she says.
This, in her opinion, is one of the best parts of their work. “We have such diversity: we see reddish egrets … and white egrets, flamingos and groove-billed anis,” Vázquez says. “Being in this place really brings me peace. It comforts me, listening to the birds, seeing them in the trees, together with all the other animals. It makes you forget the world, the noise, everything.”
Vázquez says the mangrove trees have become like family to Las Chelemeras.
“I think it’s women’s intuition,” she says. “We say that the seedlings we managed to grow there are like our daughters. When we see their propagules, we say they are our granddaughters. We’ve made this place our home.”
What they want most, Vázquez says, is for new generations — especially their own children — to take part in conservation work. She says to this end they’ve introduced volunteering days, in which around 500 university students have participated in restoration activities.
“We aren’t going to live forever,” Vázquez says. “We know we need new generations to continue our work. My 2-year-old grandson likes birds; he’s made his own little mangrove nursery. They are the ones we need to bring into this world.”
Astrid Arellano is a Mexican journalist focused on investigative and narrative journalism. She writes about Indigenous peoples, the environment and human rights. Her reporting also focuses on victims of violence and kidnappings in Sonora, in northwestern Mexico, where she was born and currently lives. She won the 2019 National Journalism Award in Reporting and, in 2021, joined the Mongabay Latam team to cover Indigenous peoples and the environment. Follow her on Twitter: @astridarellanoo
Sainsbury’s is one of the ‘big six’ supermarkets in the UK. In 2019, it released its Future of Food report. It is not merely a misguided attempt at forecasting future trends and habits; it reads more like a manifesto for corporate control and technocratic tyranny disguised as ‘progress’. This document epitomises everything wrong with the industrial food system’s vision for our future. It represents a dystopian roadmap to a world where our most fundamental connection to nature and culture — our food — is hijacked by corporate interests and mediated through a maze of unnecessary and potentially harmful technologies.
The wild predictions and technological ‘solutions’ presented in the report reveal a profound disconnection from the lived experiences of ordinary people and the real challenges facing our food systems. Its claim (in 2019) that a quarter of Britons will be vegetarian by 2025 seems way off the mark. But it fits a narrative that seeks to reshape our diets and food culture. Once you convince the reader that things are going to be a certain way in the future, it is easier to pave the way for normalising what appears elsewhere in the report: lab-grown meat, 3D-printed foods and space farming.
Of course, the underlying assumption is that giant corporations — and supermarkets like Sainsbury’s — will be controlling everything and rolling out marvellous ‘innovations’ under the guise of ‘feeding the world’ or ‘saving the planet’. There is no concern expressed in the report about the consolidation of corporate-technocratic control over the food system.
By promoting high-tech solutions, the report seemingly advocates for a future where our food supply is entirely dependent on complex technologies controlled by a handful of corporations.
The report talks of ‘artisan factories’ run by robots. Is this meant to get ordinary people to buy into Sainsbury’s vision of the future? Possibly, if the intention is to further alienate people from their food sources, making them ever more dependent on corporate-controlled, ultra-processed products.
It’s a future where the art of cooking, the joy of growing food and the cultural significance of traditional dishes are replaced by sterile, automated processes devoid of human touch and cultural meaning. This erosion of food culture and skills is not an unintended consequence — it’s a core feature of the corporate food system’s strategy to create a captive market of consumers unable to feed themselves without corporate intervention.
The report’s enthusiasm for personalised nutrition driven by AI and biometric data is akin to an Orwellian scenario that would give corporations unprecedented control over our dietary choices, turning the most fundamental human need into a data-mined, algorithm-driven commodity.
The privacy implications are staggering, as is the potential for new forms of discrimination and social control based on eating habits. Imagine a world where your insurance premiums are tied to your adherence to a corporate-prescribed diet or where your employment prospects are influenced by your ‘Food ID’. The possible dystopian reality lurking behind Sainsbury’s glossy predictions.
The report’s fixation on exotic ingredients like jellyfish and lichen draws attention away from the real issues affecting our food systems — corporate concentration, environmental degradation and the systematic destruction of local food cultures and economies. It would be better to address the root causes of food insecurity and malnutrition, which are fundamentally issues of poverty and inequality, not a lack of novel food sources.
Nothing is mentioned about the vital role of agroecology, traditional farming knowledge and food sovereignty in creating truly sustainable and just food systems. Instead, what we see is a future where every aspect of our diet is mediated by technology and corporate interests, from gene-edited crops to synthetic biology-derived foods. A direct assault on the principles of food sovereignty, which assert the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods.
The report’s emphasis on lab-grown meat and other high-tech protein sources is particularly troubling. These technologies, far from being the environmental saviours they are promoted as, risk increasing energy use and further centralising food production in the hands of a few tech giants.
The massive energy requirements for large-scale cultured meat production are conveniently glossed over, as are the potential health risks of consuming these novel foods without long-term safety studies. This push for synthetic foods is not about sustainability or animal welfare — it’s about creating new, patentable food sources that can be controlled and monetised by corporations.
Moreover, the push for synthetic foods and ‘precision fermentation’ threatens to destroy the livelihoods of millions of small farmers and pastoralists worldwide, replacing them with a handful of high-tech facilities controlled by multinational corporations.
Is this meant to be ‘progress’?
It’s more like a boardroom recipe for increased food insecurity, rural poverty and corporate monopolisation. The destruction of traditional farming communities and practices would not only be an economic disaster but a cultural catastrophe, erasing millennia of accumulated knowledge and wisdom about sustainable food production.
The report’s casual mention of ‘sin taxes’ on meat signals a future where our dietary choices are increasingly policed and penalised by the state, likely at the behest of corporate interests.
The Issue of Meat
However, on the issue of the need to reduce meat consumption and replace meat with laboratory-manufactured items in order to reduce carbon emissions, it must be stated that the dramatic increase in the amount of meat consumed post-1945 was not necessarily the result of consumer preference; it had more to do with political policy, the mechanisation of agriculture and Green Revolution practices.
“Have you ever wondered how ‘meat’ became such a central part of the Western diet? Or how the industrialisation of ‘animal agriculture’ came about? It might seem like the natural outcome of the ‘free market’ meeting demand for more ‘meat’. But from what I have learned from Nibert (2002) and Winders and Nibert (2004), the story of how ‘meat’ consumption increased so much in the post-World War II period is anything but natural. They argue it is largely due to a decision in the 1940s by the US government to deal with the problem of surplus grain by increasing the production of ‘meat’.”
Kassam notes:
“In the second half of the 20th century, global ‘meat’ production increased by nearly 5 times. The amount of ‘meat’ eaten per person doubled. By 2050 ‘meat’ consumption is estimated to increase by 160 percent (The World Counts, 2017). While global per capita ‘meat’ consumption is currently 43 kg/year, it is nearly double in the UK (82 kg/year) and almost triple in the US (118 kg/year).”
Kassam notes that habits and desires are manipulated by elite groups for their own interests. Propaganda, advertising and ‘public relations’ are used to manufacture demand for products. Agribusiness corporations and the state have used these techniques to encourage ‘meat’ consumption, leading to the slaughter and untold misery of billions of creatures, as Kassam makes clear.
People were manipulated to buy into ‘meat culture’. Now they are being manipulated to buy out, again by elite groups. But ‘sin taxes’ and Orwellian-type controls on individual behaviour are not the way to go about reducing meat consumption.
So, what is the answer?
Kassam says that one way to do this is to support grassroots organisations and movements which are working to resist the power of global agribusiness and reclaim our food systems. Movements for food justice and food sovereignty which promote sustainable, agroecological production systems.
At least then people will be free from corporate manipulation and better placed to make their own food choices.
As Kassam says:
“From what I have learned so far, our oppression of other animals is not just a result of individual choices. It is underpinned by a state supported economic system driven by profit.”
Misplaced Priorities
Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s vision of food production in space and on other planets is perhaps the most egregious example of misplaced priorities. While around a billion struggle with hunger and malnutrition and many more with micronutrient deficiencies, corporate futurists are fantasising about growing food on Mars.
Is this supposed to be visionary thinking?
It’s a perfect encapsulation of the technocratic mindset that believes every problem can be solved with more technology, no matter how impractical or divorced from reality.
Moreover, by promoting a future dependent on complex, centralised technologies, we become increasingly vulnerable to system failures and corporate monopolies. A truly resilient food system should be decentralised, diverse and rooted in local knowledge and resources.
The report’s emphasis on nutrient delivery through implants, patches and intravenous methods is particularly disturbing. This represents the ultimate commodification of nutrition, reducing food to mere fuel and stripping away all cultural, social and sensory aspects of eating. It’s a vision that treats the human body as a machine to be optimised, rather than a living being with complex needs and experiences.
The idea of ‘grow-your-own’ ingredients for cultured meat and other synthetic foods at home is another example of how this technocratic vision co-opts and perverts concepts of self-sufficiency and local food production. Instead of encouraging people to grow real, whole foods, it proposes a dystopian parody of home food production that still keeps consumers dependent on corporate-supplied technologies and inputs. A clever marketing ploy to make synthetic foods seem more natural and acceptable.
The report’s predictions about AI-driven personal nutrition advisors and highly customised diets based on individual ‘Food IDs’ raise serious privacy concerns and threaten to further medicalise our relationship with food. While personalised nutrition could offer some benefits, the level of data collection and analysis required for such systems could lead to unprecedented corporate control over our dietary choices.
Furthermore, the emphasis on ‘artisan’ factories run by robots completely misunderstands the nature of artisanal food production. True artisanal foods are the product of human skill, creativity and cultural knowledge passed down through generations. It’s a perfect example of how the technocratic mindset reduces everything to mere processes that can be automated, ignoring the human and cultural elements that give food its true value.
The report’s vision of meat ‘assembled’ on 3D printing belts is another disturbing example of the ultra-processed future being proposed. This approach to food production treats nutrition as a mere assembly of nutrients, ignoring the complex interactions between whole foods and the human body. It’s a continuation of the reductionist thinking that has led to the current epidemic of diet-related diseases.
Sainsbury’s is essentially advocating for a future where our diets are even further removed from natural, whole foods.
The concept of ‘farms’ cultivating plants to make growth serum for cells is yet another step towards the complete artificialisation of the food supply. This approach further distances food production from natural processes. It’s a vision of farming that has more in common with pharmaceutical production than traditional agriculture, and it threatens to complete the transformation of food from a natural resource into an industrial product.
Sainsbury’s apparent enthusiasm for gene-edited and synthetic biology-derived foods is also concerning. These technologies’ rapid adoption without thorough long-term safety studies and public debate could lead to unforeseen health and environmental impacts. The history of agricultural biotechnology is rife with examples of unintended consequences, from the development of herbicide-resistant superweeds to the contamination of non-GM crops.
Is Sainsbury’s uncritically promoting these technologies, disregarding the precautionary principle?
Issues like food insecurity, malnutrition and environmental degradation are not primarily technical problems — they are the result of inequitable distribution of resources, exploitative economic systems and misguided policies. By framing these issues as purely technological challenges, Sainsbury’s is diverting attention from the need for systemic change and social justice in the food system.
The high-tech solutions proposed are likely to be accessible only to the wealthy, at least initially, creating a two-tiered food system where the rich have access to ‘optimized’ nutrition while the poor are left with increasingly degraded and processed options.
But the report’s apparent disregard for the cultural and social aspects of food is perhaps its most fundamental flaw. Food is not merely fuel for our bodies; it’s a central part of our cultural identities, social relationships and connection to the natural world. By reducing food to a series of nutrients to be optimised and delivered in the most efficient manner possible, Sainsbury’s is proposing a future that is not only less healthy but less human.
While Sainsbury’s Future of Food report can be regarded as a roadmap to a better future, it is really a corporate wish list, representing a dangerous consolidation of power in the hands of agribusiness giants and tech companies at the expense of farmers, consumers and the environment.
The report is symptomatic of a wider ideology that seeks to legitimise total corporate control over our food supply. And the result? A homogenised, tech-driven dystopia.
A technocratic nightmare that gives no regard for implementing food systems that are truly democratic, ecologically sound and rooted in the needs and knowledge of local communities.
The real future of food lies not in corporate labs and AI algorithms, but in the fields of agroecological farmers, the kitchens of home cooks and the markets of local food producers.
The path forward is not through more technology and corporate control but through a return to the principles of agroecology, food sovereignty and cultural diversity.
This is an extract from the author’s new book Power Play: The Future of Food (Global Research, 2024). It is the third book in a series of open-access ebooks on the global food system by the author. It can be read here.
Colin Todhunter is an independent researcher and writer.
Editor’s note: The folly of controlling the rivers. “What will those who come after us think of us? Will they envy us that we saw butterflies and mockingbirds, penguins and little brown bats?” – Derrick Jensen Or will they despise us because we built dams which kill butterflies and mockingbirds, penguins and little brown bats?
China’s already vast infrastructure programme has entered a new phase as building work starts on the Motuo hydropower project.
The dam will consist of five cascade hydropower stations arranged from upstream to downstream and, once completed, will be the world’s largest source of hydroelectric power. It will be four times larger than China’s previous signature hydropower project, the Three Gorges Dam, which spans the Yangtse river in central China.
The Chinese premier, Li Qiang, has described the proposed mega dam as the “project of the century”. In several ways, Li’s description is apt. The vast scale of the project is a reflection of China’s geopolitical status and ambitions.
Possibly the most controversial aspect of the dam is its location. The site is on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo river on the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau. This is connected to the Brahmaputra river which flows into the Indian border state of Arunachal Pradesh as well as Bangladesh. It is an important source of water for Bangladesh and India.
Both nations have voiced concerns over the dam, particularly since it can potentially affect their water supplies. The tension with India over the dam is compounded by the fact that Arunachal Pradesh has been a focal point of Sino-Indian tensions. China claims the region, which it refers to as Zangnan, saying it is part of what it calls South Tibet.
At the same time, the dam presents Beijing with a potentially formidable geopolitical tool in its dealings with the Indian government. The location of the dam means that it is possible for Beijing to restrict India’s water supply.
This potential to control downstream water supply to another country has been demonstrated by the effects that earlier dam projects in the region have had on the nations of the Mekong river delta in 2019. As a result, this gives Beijing a significant degree of leverage over its neighbours.
One country restricting water supply to put pressure on another is by no means unprecedented. In fact in April 2025, following a terror attack by Pakistan-based The Resistance Front in Kashmir, which killed 26 people (mainly tourists), India suspended the Indus waters treaty, restricting water supplies to Pakistani farmers in the region. So the potential for China’s dam to disrupt water flows will further compound the already tense geopolitics of southern Asia.
Background layer attributed to DEMIS Mapserver, map created by Shannon1, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Concrete titans
The Motuo mega dam is an advertisement of China’s prowess when it comes to large-scale infrastructure projects. China’s expertise with massive infrastructure projects is a big part of modern Chinese diplomacy through its massive belt and road initiative.
This involves joint ventures with many developing nations to build large-scale infrastructure, such as ports, rail systems and the like. It has caused much consternation in Washington and Brussels, which view these initiatives as a wider effort to build Chinese influence at their expense.
The completion of the dam will will bring Beijing significant symbolic capital as a demonstration of China’s power and prosperity – an integral feature of the image of China that Beijing is very keen to promote. It can also be seen as a manifestation of both China’s aspiration and its longstanding fears.
Harnessing the rivers
The Motuo hydropower project also represents the latest chapter of China’s long battle for control of its rivers, a key story in the development of Chinese civilisation.
France 24 report on the construction of the mega dam project.
Such struggles have been embodied in Chinese mythology in the form of the Gun-Yu myth. This tells the story of the way floods displaced the population of ancient China, probably based on an actual flooding at Jishi Gorge on the Yellow River in what is now Qinghai province in 1920BC.
This has led to the common motif of rivers needing human control to abate natural disaster, a theme present in much classical Chinese culture and poetry.
The pursuit of controlling China’s rivers has also been one of the primary influences on the formation of the Chinese state, as characterised by the concept of zhishui 治水 (controlling the rivers). Efforts to control the Yangtze have shaped the centralised system of governance that has characterised China throughout its history. In this sense, the Motuo hydropower project represents the latest chapter in China’s quest to harness the power of its rivers.
Such a quest remains imperative for China and its importance has been further underlined by the challenges of climate change, which has seen natural resources such as water becoming increasingly limited. The Ganges river has already been identified as one of the world’s water scarcity hotspots.
As well as sustaining China’s population, the hydropower provided by the dam is another part of China’s wider push towards self-sufficiency. It’s estimated that the dam could generate 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year – about the same about produced by the whole UK. While this will meet the needs of the local population, it also further entrenches China’s ability to produce cheap electricity – something that has enabled China to become and remain a manufacturing superpower.
Construction has only just begun, but Motuo hydropower project has already become a microcosm of China’s wider push towards development. It’s also a gamechanger in the geopolitics of Asia, giving China the potential to exert greater control in shaping the region’s water supplies. This in turn will give it greater power to shape the geopolitics of the region.
At the same time, it is also the latest chapter of China’s longstanding quest to harness its waterways, which now has regional implications beyond anything China’s previous dynasties could imagine.
