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Food crisis leading to an unsustainable land grab
Sue Branford, Guardian
Private companies across the world are buying huge quantities of foreign land for the mass production of food. Sue Branford wonders if this quick-fix solution risks creating an even bigger environmental crisis
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The world map is being redrawn. Over the past six months, China, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other nations have been buying and leasing huge quantities of foreign land for the production of food or biofuels for domestic consumption. It’s a modern day version of the 19th-century scramble for Africa.
This year’s bubble in food prices – driven by financial speculators, biofuels and compounded when some countries halted food exports to ensure their own supplies – led to pain for nations dependent on imports.
Alarm bells rang, with many governments alerted to what might lie ahead as climate change and soil destruction reduce the supply of food on the world market. The result, a huge international land grab, raises many troublesome issues.
Although governments are encouraging the trend, the acquisitions are generally made by the private sector. Along with agribusiness, corporations and food traders, investment banks and private equity funds have been jumping on board, seeing land as a safe haven from the financial storm.
Indeed, with the supply of the world’s food under long-term threat, investment in land may prove a more solid bet than earlier speculation in dotcoms and derivatives.
(22 November 2008)
Related from the Guardian: Laos: The resentment rises as villagers are stripped of holdings and livelihood.
Soil erosion threatens land of 100m Chinese, survey finds
Tania Branigan, Guardian
Almost 100 million people in south-west China will lose the land they live on within 35 years if soil erosion continues at its current rate, a nationwide survey has found.
Crops and water supplies are suffering serious damage as earth is washed and blown away across a third of the country, according to the largest-scale study for 60 years.
Harvests in the north-east, known as China’s breadbasket, will fall 40% within half a century on current trends, even as the 1.3 billion population continues to grow.
While experts cited farming and forestry as the main causes, contributing to over a third of the area affected, the research team said erosion was damaging industrial areas and cities as well as remote rural land.
(21 November 2008)
Fields of Grain and Losses
David Streitfeld, New York Times
Now, with the suddenness of a hailstorm flattening a field, hard times are back on the American farmstead. The price paid for crops is dropping much faster than the cost of growing them.
The government reported this week that the cost of goods and services nationwide fell by a record amount in October as frantic businesses tried to lure customers. While lower prices are good for consumers in the short run, a prolonged stretch of deflation would wreak havoc as companies struggled to stay afloat.
In this lonesome stretch near the Texas border, farmers are getting an early taste of a deflationary world. They have finished planting next year’s winter wheat, turning the fields a brilliant emerald green. But it cost about $6 a bushel in fuel, seed and fertilizer to put the crop in. That is $1 more than they could sell it for today, and never mind other expenses like renting land.
This looming loss sharpens their regret that they did not unload more of this year’s crop back when they harvested it in May. They knew the boom would end, but not so soon.
(20 November 2008)
We’re All Farmers Now
Tessa Boase, Telegraph (UK)
As fears grow about the economic battleground of food supplies, local heroes are pitching in to save the day.
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Here is some disturbing news. According to Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, next year is tipped to be “peak oil” year. This means that from 2009, fossil fuel extraction will start tailing off globally – most rapidly in western Europe. Pessimists say the situation will be acute by 2020.
It takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food in Western culture. “Anyone can see that this is not sustainable,” says Holden, who predicts that the big issue for coming years will be “food security”.
We have a food system that keeps nothing in stock and everything constantly on the move in trucks, responding to computerised signals when supplies are running low. It is known as the “just in time” system. A lorry drivers’ strike, a volatile situation in the Middle East, an oil blockade – all or any of these could sabotage the process that puts food on our shelves.
“We all hope there won’t be a food emergency,” says Holden, “but many are now thinking not ‘if’, but ‘when’. If we’re prepared, we will survive.”
Now for some heart-warming news. Over the past few years a revolution of almost silly simplicity has been taking place in the fallow pockets and small farms of Britain. It is a bottom-up movement, led by individual citizens acting from a potent combination of enlightenment and self-interest, and it could make us resilient to a future without oil.
It started quietly, as underground movements do.
(19 November 2008)
Finding a solution to soil’s carbon problem
Bibi van der Zee, The Guardian
If you’d told me a week ago that I would spend two days listening to people talk about soil carbon sequestration (and be gripped by it!) I would have laughed in your face.
But at the Soil Association conference (SA) this week it was the hot topic, partly because the SA is launching a report in a month or so which will conclude that organic farming practices mean that while the UK’s soils are losing carbon at a rate of up to 1% a year, organic farmers sequester enough carbon to offset their emissions by 5-30%.
The background to this, as you may or may not know, is that our soils are one of the biggest carbon sinks on Earth: carbon is stored in them as vegetation falls and decomposes and becomes part of the soil. Carbon is then slowly released into the atmosphere from the soil partially as a result of microbial activity: unfortunately a study in 2005 found that England’s soils were losing carbon at about 0.6% a year, which could equal an annual loss of 13m tonnes. Given that our annual emissions are about 650m tonnes, that’s a worrying contribution…
(21 November 2008)
