As food prices rise, we need to question the system that created it. Systems thinking and the Buddhist teaching of Dependent Arising can help
As food prices rise, many people here in Wales, as elsewhere, are skipping meals or turning to food banks; so it was good to hear the Welsh government announce a £3 million food crisis fund this week. Intriguingly, much of the money is being channelled through a food partnership network that aims to change the food system as a whole, encouraging better nutrition and local production, so people feel connected to where their food comes from.
The reasons food prices are rising are hard to pin down because most of our food comes through a tightly structured and very complex global food system. Individual countries specialise in particular crops and a few giant suppliers dominate distribution. Experts have long warned that the system is vulnerable to shocks like the Ukraine war and long term threats like climate change.
When people go hungry we need to respond immediately; but if we want to effect change we must look at the system that created the problems and ask fundamental questions about its structure. An increasingly influential approach is known as Systems Thinking, which looks at the biosphere, the economy and food supply as vast systems made up of smaller sub-systems. These systems operate in distinctive ways, and terms like feedback loops and tipping points, come from the world of systems thinking.
The connection to Buddhism, surprising as it might seem, is that a central concern of Buddhist teachings is ‘causality’, or how things happen, and the Buddhist account is close to Systems thinking. For example, Buddhism says, if you want to be happy, you can’t force happiness to happen, but you can patiently cultivate the conditions from which it emerges. A systems thinker would say that this makes happiness ‘an emergent property’, a Buddhist would say that happiness ‘arises in dependence upon conditions.’
The same principle of ‘dependent arising’ applies to any outcome we desire. The mistake is to regard something like the food system as a machine we can control. Perhaps it’s more like a living organism. From a Buddhist perspective, approaching it with wisdom and care means recognising its complexity, and patiently fostering the conditions that will make it strong and resilient.
