On the outskirts of London’s Heathrow airport there is a multi-story warehouse that plays a remarkable role in the eating habits of millions of people. The British Airways perishables handling center is the arrival point for 90,000 tonnes of air freighted fresh produce a year: Everything from chopped melon and pineapple fruit salads to baby sweetcorn and asparagus. Every day these once exotic items arrive in the belly of passenger jets from Africa and Asia, destined for the chilled aisles of supermarkets.
Only not at the moment. With almost all European air travel grounded since April 16 due to volcanic ash, the freight operator that runs the perishables center declared things “at a standstill.” By definition, these perishable imports do not store well, and Waitrose is already warning of potential shortages. Rather than weigh down the aircraft with unnecessary skin and pips, much of the fruit is pre-sliced in African facilities, making retailers even less able to create contingency buffers. Our desire for year-round oral gratification has left us perilously dependent on just-in-time supply chains in the stratosphere.
But fruit and veg is only one aspect of our dependence on air travel revealed by this volcanic disruption. Courier companies such as FedEx and DHL have had to shut down their services, disrupting delicate logistic chains across the industry. As anyone who has ordered an iPod from Apple knows, you can track in real time the flow of high-value electronics flown across the world by these companies. Or at least, it is normally.
Iceland’s revenge on the world economy has given us a glimpse of a world without air travel. We are used to images of stranded passengers — marooned by terrorism, industrial action or perhaps just our overcrowded and under-invested aviation industry. But it is very rare for the skies to be scoured so comprehensively as this. As many people have observed over the past few days, the sight of clear blue skies without a contrail to be seen is strangely uplifting.
But it also had a post-apocalyptic feel about it, more reminiscent of a Hollywood disaster movie than environmental utopia.
The short-term economic cost is likely to be minimal. Airlines will lose a few tens of millions of dollars each from the disruption — hardly ideal at a time of big losses and falling passenger numbers, but probably not catastrophic in the long term. The larger numbers bandied about by so-called experts about the cost to nations’ economies at large should be taken with a pinch of salt. Not only is it impossible to quantify disruption on such a diverse scale, but much economic activity is merely postponed by such events rather than eliminated entirely.
More important is the psychological impact of such events. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, forced many companies to re-examine the resilience of their supply chains — but that was nearly a decade ago now, and the continued march of globalization will have left many of them vulnerable. Climate change should force business to think more about the alternatives, but it rarely does. Greens should also celebrate this timely reminder of what the world might look like when the oil runs out.
Sadly, as flights in Europe begin once again to take to the skies, we will probably have forgotten all this by the weekend when we start booking our summer holidays or planning the fruit salad for that spring picnic.
But just imagine what Europe might look like in six months time, or six years time, if the volcano were to continue belching out ash on a scale that made air travel permanently unviable.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS