“We have to go to an organic sustainable system or we’ll starve.”
That’s not your typical granola munchin’, Prius-drivin’ food coop managin’ eco-citizen talking, but Jeremy Grantham, a highly successful investment banker, who just so happens to match keen financial instinct with an equally keen understanding of reality.
In an article by Mark Bittman in the New York Times, this visionary capitalist explains that though most people remain unaware of it, we are “about five years into a chronic global food crisis that is unlikely to fade for many decades.”
Depletion of soils, over-dependence on synthetic fertilizers and petroleum-based herbicides and pesticides, and increasing energy costs have set the stage for potentially catstrophic failures of conventional agricultural systems, says Mr. Grantham, co-founder and chief strategist of Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co. LLC.
In his view, intensive investment in organic farming not only makes sense from an ecological and health perspective, it’s also a good financial investment, though the payoff may take a while to show. It is certainly smarter than investing in systems based on the illusory notion that “exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world.”
Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co. LLC, and he is a company co-founder
