Energy Use in the US & Global Agri-Food Systems: Implications for Sustainable Agriculture
Shirin Wertime, Culture Change
During the 20th century, access to cheap and abundant sources of energy helped transform the world in countless ways. Extraction of fossil fuels led to a massive expansion in economic growth and agricultural production, and was one of the bases of a six-fold increase in human population.
Petroleum, the most sought after fossil fuel, had the largest role in this transformation. Because of its versatility and liquid form, oil is today the world’s primary transportation fuel (Heinberg 1) and leading source of energy (Brown 27). Less than 200 years ago, however, all of the planet’s food energy was derived from the sun through photosynthesis (Pimentel, Pimentel & Karpenstein-Machan 3) and almost all work was done by human or animal muscle power (Heinberg 2). Practically all of our energy presently comes from non-renewable resources whose stocks are being depleted at an ever-faster rate.
The benefits we derive from oil are so numerous and of such great convenience that we have built our entire way of life around its use. Now we are entering a period of declining oil supplies and rising prices that threaten not only food security for increasing numbers of people globally, but also many aspects of political and economic stability as well — a new phenomenon for a world that became accustomed to growing supplies of oil and relatively stable prices. Unless we begin quickly to a move away from fossil fuel dependence to a different energy regime and a radical lifestyle and societal change, the transition to a post-petroleum world could be devastating for Americans and people throughout the world. Food, the basis of all life, will be at the forefront of this upheaval.
Agriculture is one of many features of modern life that have been drastically altered by the availability of cheap and abundant oil. The American and most other agri-food systems are almost entirely dependent on fossil fuel energy for everything from food production to transportation to food preparation and storage. The structure of industrialized agriculture under a capitalist system, aided and abetted by government policies, including that of the United States, has spurred the expansion of farm specialization and consolidation, monocultures, the delocalization of agricultural production, and the adoption of industrial farming practices (Altieri 78-9). The technological innovations of the Green Revolution drastically reduced a farmer’s labor input time and greatly increased agricultural yields. Thanks to modern mechanization, the time input necessary to raise a hectare of corn is 110 times less than that required by hand-produced crops (Pimentel 464). Since 1950, the world grain harvest has more than tripled. This growth in productivity resulted from a ten-fold increase in fertilizer use, a near tripling of land irrigation, and the development of high yielding crop varieties (Brown 36-7). Countering the benefits of modern industrialized agriculture is the massive amount of fossil energy needed to power the petroleum-fueled farm machinery and to produce indispensable fertilizers and pesticides. Increases in production notwithstanding, the shift to industrialized agriculture has brought about a host of ecological and social problems in its wake.
The increase in globalized food production, which has come at the expense of local production, is possible only for as long as cheap energy supplies can subsidize the transportation of goods across long distances. The price of food will inevitably climb as oil becomes more and more expensive and drives up the cost of production and transportation. This will disproportionately impact the world’s poor, especially those who depend on food assistance and cheap North American grain. Only by taking steps toward creating a sustainable food system of a radically new kind can we hope to attenuate the looming crisis in agri-food systems in this country and abroad. As Patricia Allen argues, any effort to create a truly sustainable food system must take into account the relationships humans have with each other as well as with their environment, which they have molded and influenced in many significant ways (1). Agricultural dependence on fossil fuels is a man-made problem. It will take not just scientific and ecological solutions but also deep-rooted structural and institutional changes as well as lifestyle changes on the part of individuals, their governments, and societies to transition to a more sustainable, non-petroleum based food system which oil depletion and rising costs will inexorably force on us. Before dealing with the implications of oil depletion and rising costs for the agri-food system and human survival, a closer look at the dominant role oil plays in the agri-food system is in order…
(5 June 2010)
Advisers walk out in fury over £500,000 GM food PR exercise
Sean Poulter, Daily Mail
An official public consultation into genetically modified food has been thrown into chaos following protests that it has been rigged.
The exercise by the Food Standards Agency could now be axed following the resignation of two leading advisers working on it.
The two academics said they were not prepared to support a proposal that would spend £500,000 of public money on a spin exercise to promote so-called ‘Frankenstein Food’.
…The FSA, which has a history of supporting GM technology, made great play of claims that the consultation would be independent. However, two advisers who sit on the steering group overseeing the proposal have stepped down claiming it is biased in favour of GM.
They include the vice chairman, Professor Brian Wynne, a sociologist at Lancaster University.
He is the country’s leading expert on public engagement with science and has also advised House of Lords and EU committees.
Dr Helen Wallace, who is the director of Genewatch UK and a long time critic of GM, has also stepped down.
Dr Wallace said: ‘This is a worst case example of dirty politics where vested interests are paid to dupe the public using public money.
‘Taxpayers will be shocked to learn that a former minister still has his fingers in their pockets long after the New Labour government is dead.
‘This money should be spent on schools or hospitals, not reputation management for Monsanto and other GM companies.’
(3 June 2010)
UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet
Felicity Carus, the guardian
A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today.
As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.
It says: “Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”
Professor Edgar Hertwich, the lead author of the report, said: “Animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels.”
The recommendation follows advice last year that a vegetarian diet was better for the planet from Lord Nicholas Stern, former adviser to the Labour government on the economics of climate change. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has also urged people to observe one meat-free day a week to curb carbon emissions.
The panel of experts ranked products, resources, economic activities and transport according to their environmental impacts. Agriculture was on a par with fossil fuel consumption because both rise rapidly with increased economic growth, they said…
(2 June 2010)
Incredible Edible: Supporting Food Independence in Todmorden, England
Carissa Bluestone, Worldchanging
The residents of Todmorden in England are working together to fast-track the creation of a local food system—the town wants to declare food independence by 2018. Considering that only two years into the project, a third more of the residents were tending their own vegetable gardens and 15 times as many townspeople were keeping backyard chickens (part of the Every Egg Matters campaign), the town will probably meet its goals.
The brainchild of Pam Warhurst, Incredible Edible started very small, with a few herb gardens and tree plantings. Warhurst and her volunteers allowed the program to expand organically, and as Warhurst told The Independent in 2009, focusing on making the initiative as inclusive as possible is how her vision differs from that of the Transition Town movement: “We are working with people who would find transition towns hard to identify with. Our project is all about finding the lowest common denominator, which is food, and then speaking in a language that everyone can understand. Plus we don’t have strategies; we don’t have visiting speakers; we don’t have charters and documents. We just get on with things: this is all about action.”
To win over council members and local institutions Incredible Edible used two main tactics, making and meeting small but noteworthy goals and engaging in a little guerrilla gardening to lead by example. The group seems to have found a winning formula because now most of the town’s major institutions are involved: The local council okayed the planting of 500 fruit trees near local recreation fields. The major housing authority started giving its tenants seed packets and gardening courses. Local schools have switched over to only using local produce in cafeterias, and each school has some sort of garden—at this writing, Incredible Edible was attempting to secure funding to build an aquaponics center at Todmorden High School…
(3 June 2010)
Fossil-Fuel Use and Feeding World Cause Greatest Environmental Impacts: UNEP Panel
ScienceDaily
How the world is fed and fueled will in large part define development in the 21st century as one that is increasingly sustainable or a dead end for billions of people.
A new and hard-hitting report concludes that dramatically reforming, re-thinking and redesigning two sectors — energy and agriculture — could generate significant environmental, social and economic returns.
Current patterns of production and consumption of both fossil fuels and food are draining freshwater supplies; triggering losses of economically-important ecosystems such as forests; intensifying disease and death rates and raising levels of pollution to unsustainable levels.
The report, prepared by the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, says decoupling the environmental impacts of these two broad sectors from economic growth, can start at the level of the household.
Sustainability goals can begin through dramatic improvements in household patterns of energy and food use including heating and cooling systems, gadgets and appliances and the way people travel.
Perhaps controversially, it also calls for a significant shift in diets away from animal based proteins towards more vegetable-based foods in order to dramatically reduce pressures on the environment.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which hosts the Panel, said: “Decoupling growth from environmental degradation is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation — thus setting priorities would seem prudent and sensible in order to fast track a low carbon, resource efficient Green Economy.”…
Launched today with the European Commission in Brussels on the eve of UN World Environment Day (June 5), the 149-page report provides science-based priorities for world environmental efforts — ranking products, materials and economic and lifestyle activities according to their environmental and resource impacts.
The Panel, which has drawn on numerous studies including the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, cites the following pressures on the environment as priorities for action: climate change, habitat change, wasteful use of nitrogen and phosphorus, overexploitation of fisheries, forests and other resources, invasive species, unsafe drinking water and sanitation, solid cooking fuels, lead exposure, urban air pollution and occupational (including kitchen) exposure to particulate matter.
The Panel set out to identify those activities or resources that contribute disproportionately to environmental pressures and impacts, including (i) production and manufacturing processes; (ii) products and consumption categories; and (iii) materials. It concludes that the priorities for achieving transformational change are:-
Agricultural goods, particularly products from animals, which are fed more than half of all world crops. Agricultural production accounts for 70% of the global freshwater consumption and 38% of the total land use. Food production accounts for 19% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and 60% of the phosphorus and nitrogen pollution and 30% of toxic pollution in Europe;
Users of fossil fuels, especially electrical utilities and other energy-intensive industries, residential heating, and transportation. Fossil-fuel production and consumption dominate as the world’s leading cause of environmental degradation. Extraction from alternative fossil fuel sources, such as tar sands, poses potentially even heavier environmental consequences.”
Materials, especially plastics, iron, steel, and aluminium, use of which is growing, not least in the unsaturated emerging economies; and the energy requirements for which are rising because of declining grades of ore as they get used up…
(2 June 2010)
You can find the report here Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production
San Quintín and Brackish-Water Farming
Kristian Beadle, Miller-McCune
While traveling in Baja California, Kristian Beadle finds that water issues inland present a challenge and a threat to agriculture and the economy.
Location: Just inland of Cabo San Quintín, around the corner from a huge bay/wetland, lays an agricultural complex that serves the U.S. market.
Conditions: A generator whines and whirrs in the evening air — there is no grid electricity in this beach community. High-altitude clouds cover the night sky.
Discussion: The trans-peninsular highway cuts through innumerable small towns south of Ensenada; dusty farmlands blur in the glare of afternoon sunlight. I tried to put my sinus-induced headache aside and focus on the goal: to reach the mother load of Baja’s agricultural valleys, San Quintín, a place built for the noble purpose of selling America cheap food. How else could such a vast operation exist where water is brackish and the native soil resembles parchment?…
(28 May 2010)
GM lobby helped draw up crucial report on Britain’s food supplies
Jamie Doward, The Guardian
A powerful lobbying organisation representing agribusiness interests helped draft a key government report that has been attacked by environmentalists for heavily favouring the arguments of the genetically modified food industry.
The revelation comes after the resignation of two government advisers who have criticised the close relationship between the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the body that oversees the UK’s food industry, and the GM lobby.
Emails between the FSA and the Agricultural Biotechnology Council (ABC) show the council inserted key sentences strengthening the case for GM food that ended up in the final report.
The report, “Food Standards Agency work on changes in the market and the GM regulatory system”, examines how GM products are entering the UK, where the growing of GM products is banned, through the animal feed system. It acknowledges food prices could go up if GM products continue to be excluded.
Emails from the council – which represents leading GM food companies such as Monsanto and Bayer – to Dr Clair Baynton, the then head of novel foods at the FSA, show a close dialogue between both sides between 2008 and August 2009, when the report was published.
On 19 November 2008, Baynton sent the council a draft of the report, saying: “I am happy to discuss… if that would be helpful.”
In response, the council suggested a series of changes that emphasised how GM food was playing an increasingly important role in global agriculture and helping bring down food prices. Some of the amendments were rejected by the FSA, but others were accepted.
One accepted alteration acknowledged the GM lobby’s argument that GM food is inevitable in the European Union because of its ubiquity elsewhere. It stated that “retailers were concerned they may not be able to maintain their current non-GM sources of supply as producers increasingly adopt GM technology around the world”.
And the FSA also accepted the suggested amendment that soya protein (which can be grown as a GM crop) remains “the most cost-effective method of supplementing animal feed at present”. Baynton replied a few days later: “Many thanks for your comments on the draft report”, and asked the council for help in finding evidence of the prevalence of GM foods, “either authorised or being considered for authorisation in Argentina, Brazil and the US”.
Months later, the council sent Baynton, a former employee of GM food producer Syngenta, a list of whom it wanted on a steering group overseeing a “public engagement exercise” on GM food. The email stated: “We believe GM must be presented as an option within the wider context of food security as part of a solution to feeding a growing population.”
The FSA was due to start the public engagement exercise, which is expected to cost the taxpayer £500,000, this month. But the move is being seen in some quarters as a “rigged” exercise.
Two members who sit on the FSA’s steering group have resigned in protest. Dr Helen Wallace, director of Genewatch UK, a scientific pressure group opposed to GM, stepped down last month. Last week, the group’s vice-chairman, Professor Brian Wynne, an expert on public engagement with science, resigned, complaining that the FSA had adopted a “dogmatically entrenched”, pro-GM attitude…
(6 June 2010)
