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The Global Food Crisis: The End of Plenty
Joel K. Bourne Jr, National Georgraphic
It is the simplest, most natural of acts, akin to breathing and walking upright. We sit down at the dinner table, pick up a fork, and take a juicy bite, oblivious to the double helping of global ramifications on our plate. Our beef comes from Iowa, fed by Nebraska corn. Our grapes come from Chile, our bananas from Honduras, our olive oil from Sicily, our apple juice—not from Washington State but all the way from China. Modern society has relieved us of the burden of growing, harvesting, even preparing our daily bread, in exchange for the burden of simply paying for it. Only when prices rise do we take notice. And the consequences of our inattention are profound.
Last year the skyrocketing cost of food was a wake-up call for the planet. Between 2005 and the summer of 2008, the price of wheat and corn tripled, and the price of rice climbed fivefold, spurring food riots in nearly two dozen countries and pushing 75 million more people into poverty. But unlike previous shocks driven by short-term food shortages, this price spike came in a year when the world’s farmers reaped a record grain crop. This time, the high prices were a symptom of a larger problem tugging at the strands of our worldwide food web, one that’s not going away anytime soon. Simply put: For most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food than it has been producing. After years of drawing down stockpiles, in 2007 the world saw global carryover stocks fall to 61 days of global consumption, the second lowest on record.
“Agricultural productivity growth is only one to two percent a year,” warned Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., at the height of the crisis. “This is too low to meet population growth and increased demand.”
High prices are the ultimate signal that demand is outstripping supply, that there is simply not enough food to go around. Such agflation hits the poorest billion people on the planet the hardest, since they typically spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food.
(June 2009)
Food activists point out that it is not true to put all the blame on food supplies; unequal distribution is perhaps the larger problem.
Recommended by Big Gav. -BA
A new agrarian culture
N. Martin, Simple Green (blog)
Some people think that agriculture is as old as humanity, but agriculture is actually a pretty recent thing. If we assume that Homo Sapiens Sapiens is about 80000 years old, agriculture is just a Neolithic invention, around 10000 years ago, and so only a “recent” experiment performed by humans.
Even when one might agree with Jared Diamond saying that agriculture was “the worst mistake in the history of human race” (here), imaging a world without it is pretty hard. With almost 6.5 billion people living today, and after so many centuries of agrarian culture (agri-culture) we cannot scape from that “mistake”.
Nevertheless, winds of change are blowing. Organic agriculture promises a more sustainable practice, avoiding the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. It is also true that the original good intentions of organic farming are a little bit lost nowadays, when very powerful toxins are being allowed just because they “exist in Nature”, and one can find the shelves of his/her favorite nursery packed with “organic pests killers” that promise to get rid of ants, slugs or anything that moves while being “environmentally friendly”. Nevertheless, even when the spirit of organic farming might have been lost by some, it offers a new alternative of farming.
But organic farming is not the new agrarian culture I am talking about. It is just an excuse to show the reader that there are several ways of farming. Consequently, we do not have a gap between hunting and gathering and “the worst mistake of the history of human race”, we have more of a continuum. In one side (lest call it 0) we have hunting and gathering. On the other (let it be 1) we have industrialized farming with monocultives, pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified seeds. This scale is not perfect and does not try to be very accurate, but is useful for explaining the idea of this essay. Somewhere to the left of 1 we have the different ways of farming organically, let’s say around 0.7 or 0.8, and I would give a 0.5 to the traditional way of farming, without machines and with animals, no pesticides, herbicides, just manure and manual weeding.
This scale is useful because it grades two dimensions at the same time. One is the yield per area vs. energy gotten per energy invested. Close to the 1 we have techniques that provide big yields per area, but need a very high investment in energy. Close to the 0 we have very low yields per area, but really good returns in term of energy invested per energy returned. While a modern farmer needs to invest the energy of the irrigation system, tractor, fuel, pesticides, herbicides and so on to get some food, a hunter gather invests no more than a walk. On the other side, a farmer might get all the energy (in terms of food) he needs from 1 acre, while a hunter gather needs a very extensive area.
The other dimension of the grading system is an attitude towards Nature. While 0 means an integration with Nature, a feeling of being one with it, 1 means seeing Nature as a resource, something to control, something to be put to use For 0 a weed is as legitimate as a melon, for 1 is a pest, something to eradicate, a “loss”. Together with the intensification of agriculture comes an attitude to divide the world in “useful” and “useless” , “domestic” and “wild” and a desire to increase the first at expense on the last.
I will not comment on the harmful consequences for the environment produced by the “1” attitude. Instead, I want to elaborate about agricultural methods that might be graded between 0 and 0.5.
(22 May 2009)
Michael Pollan rallies Boulderites, businesses
Jabril Faraj, Boulder Daily Camera
Pollan, who wrote “In Defense of Food,” “The Botany of Desire” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” is in the middle of a nationwide speaking tour. Pollan, who gave a brief talk and signed books at the Naturally Boulder Spring Fling and then spoke before a sold-out crowd at Boulder’s Unity Church, said he decided to make a stop in Boulder because of the part the city plays in this “movement” to promote healthy, organic foods.
“Boulder is one of the centers of this kind of work … this is a hotbed,” he said.
…”I know that these are a lot of the pioneers in this movement,” he said. “A lot of these businesses were (there in) the very early days of organic and I also know that you need resources of the really successful organic business to drive these changes in Washington.” Joan Boykin, a Naturally Boulder board member, said that her group was glad that he agreed to come when they asked.
…Boykin reiterated the importance of Pollan’s call for action. “We need to keep support for that kind of action for whole, organic, good food in the United States,” she said.
…”Food is the key to all these other issues we’re dealing with,” he said. “You’re not gonna deal with the health care crisis until you deal with the catastrophe that is the American diet. And you’re not gonna deal with climate change until you deal with the food system — it’s a third of the greenhouse gasses — or energy independence. So, it’s the issue that’s at the core of all the important issues.”
(23 May 2009)
Suggested by kalpa and also on her blog, Saturday’s edition of which is dedicated to Agricultural Economic issues (many articles of interest). Kalpa is a Boulder native and blogger and has commented on this article there. KS
