When I was born, in 1987, global GDP was US$17 billion. This year, we’ll likely top US$104 trillion ($172 trillion). Like the majority of people reading this article, I’ve lived my whole life under this umbrella of steady economic growth.
What’s caused it? Depending on who you talk to, this boundless economic growth is a thanks to great leaps forward in technology (like the container ship and internet), exploitation of the Global South, globalisation and free trade, dodgy accounting, mass education, cheap money, nitrogen fertiliser, untethering currency from the gold reserve, contraception or the presence of the United States Navy in the world’s shipping lanes.
Let me throw one more into the mix – a mindset that lurks behind each of those factors: the drive for efficiency.
“Doing more from less” is pretty much a religion these days. It’s taken as given that the best strategy is the one that uses the least amount of resources (usually money) to achieve the goal. Generally, we like things cheap and fast and clearly it’s worked.
It’s only now, still reeling from covid supply chain issues, climate-charged cyclones and destabilising wars abroad, that our confidence in the efficiency mantra is starting to falter.
Instead, we hear a lot more talk about designing for the flipside of efficiency – resilience. On the tin, it says that resilience is about building adaptability into a system. Ensuring that when the conditions change, the farm, business or family can make it through by drawing on saved resources, pivoting to new ways of doing things and banding together with people they trust.
The problem with resilient systems is that they appear extravagant in the good times. Piles of spare parts, unprofitable side hustles and neighbourhood meetings look like waste. And efficiency hates waste.
Once you start looking for it, this choice between efficiency and resilience is everywhere – with resilience usually losing. It’s playing out across our screens and papers right now via the government’s redesign of the Ka Ora, Ka Ako school lunch programme.
In finding $107 million in savings and expanding to another 10,000 kids, the redevelopment is classic “do more with less”. The savings will be found by bulk procuring basic food through corporate caterers for intermediate and secondary schools, rather than having more diverse food prepared on site, often by locals.
What sparks of resilience are we losing for that $107m? Heaps. Like opportunities to connect local farms, food and farmers directly to the school cafeteria. Or thriving on-site kitchens where kids can learn about nutrition and different food cultures, and practise community service. Reduced waste from less plastic and transport needs. The ability for schools to transform into centres for wider community care in the wake of disasters. And don’t forget the upfront nutritional gains for kids from eating diverse, fresh and unprocessed food.
In choosing to chase a paltry 0.06% of efficiency savings in government expenses, we’ve lost sight of the uncosted benefits that designing for resilience in a place as foundational as the classroom can deliver. We’ve chosen a simple, brittle system, for peanuts.
The efficiency vs resiliency battle isn’t confined to the classroom. It’s in a government’s reluctance to fund New Zealand’s coastal shipping network because it can’t compete with the bulk liners – until a cyclone washes away our highways and it’s all we’ve got to keep communities supplied.
Or how a decision by the Chinese to accept only dried velvet now threatens an industry that ended domestic drying decades ago.
Or hospitals that outsourced catering to a dodgy multinational, only to reintegrate the service years later following patient complaints about food quality, allegations of workplace misconduct and a rethinking of the role of good food in healing.
The efficiency vs resiliency battle also underpins the debate about regenerative agriculture, which flared up again in last week’s Farmers Weekly story “Gas and dollars at odds in regen ag’.
The report rightly raises some tough questions about how farmers struggle to stay profitable while implementing landscape resilience practices. Considering these tight economic times, that’s a hard ask. I would have preferred the report to take a more holistic view of the competing needs of efficiency and resilience in farming systems – also evaluating the unseen, uncosted factors that really matter in a crisis, like farmer health and wellbeing, soil moisture retention, animal health and energy use.
Thankfully, though, there is sometimes a no-man’s land where efficiency and resilience do meet on the farm. Like the Beef + Lamb NZ and Quorum Sense Catching the Rain soil moisture retention programme, for example.
On our farm, we have “insurance blocks” – niggly bits or steep slopes that will be taken out of production and planted in forage trees like tagasaste and poplars.
One hot day in a hot March, we’ll drop the fence on these blocks, give the stock a much-needed feed and buy ourselves a few more days through the dry.
