“The continued globalisation of modern food networks is introducing an unprecedented level of complexity to the global food system, bringing both significant benefits and systemic risks. Disruptions at any one point in the system would be likely to reverberate throughout the food supply chain. Volatile food prices and increasing political instability are likely to magnify the impacts of food production shocks, causing a cascade of economic, social and political impacts across the globe. [Lloyd’s Emerging Risk Report – 2015 Innovation Series June 2015 30pp.]

To fix that is going to require major change; ‘thinking about system dynamics’ just won’t cut it. Govt intervention will just deal with the effects and not the causes. Mechanization cannot be achieved by smallholders – we see this very clearly in the coffee system, where mechanization in Brazil, plus rents from deforestation drive them out of business. What will happen to them?

I don’t agree with Dani’s basic worry that we are back to “neoclassical” growth. The type of growth that Arthur Lewis was describing comes about when a complex adaptive system goes through a transition to self-organising complexity (though of course Lewis didn’t describe it this way) and I see no reason to think that other countries cannot do this too.

I agree that predistribution is in principle preferable to ex post redistribution – but I reckon it is likely to work better if governments try to increase skills to enable people to participate in a high productivity labour market rather than trying to predistribute by reducing the skills needed to benefit from growth by pushing productivity down.

Yes, resilience could be increasingly built into the food system, but in a free market, where short term profit is the goal, it won’t happen, any more than it has for the financial system (which is still not fixed by the way).

When I mentioned ‘defies analysis’, of course it can be analysed to death, but it’s a complex system whose behaviour cannot be predicted, especially to black and grey swan events. Has anyone even tried to do this?

‘Nothing we can’t fix’ doesn’t really reassure me. The problem these days is that things don’t seem to get fixed – whether it’s the climate, the financial crisis, the Middle East (the whole of it), Greece, Calais and so on.

Going back to Rodrik’s point: we can either try to resist these changes, by pushing economies towards more labour intensive (ie lower productivity) configurations, or we can embrace the change, and concentrate on how to deal with the power and politics required to share those (overall very welcome) benefits more fairly, locally and globally. I think the first option is neither possible nor desirable.

But complex systems can be resilient and self healing – more so than simple systems. (Think of the internet, for example, which by design routes around problems.)

Complex systems are not the same as chaotic systems (if you are using “complex” and “chaotic” in their technical meaning).

I watch my partner’s father bringing in the harvest on a combine harvester, doing work which would have taken a dozen men before. Am I OK with that? Sure I am. Lots can go wrong: but nothing we can’t fix.

The exponentially increasing number of components (computers, sensors, robots, satellites, etc.) each have their own chain. The total complexity will defy analysis. Increased efficiency always means reduced resilience, i.e. more susceptible to disruption.

In an increasingly chaotic world, are you okay that most of your food will be produced by robots? Nothing can go wrong?