[A-List] Why More Food Is Not the Answer

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Kelpie Wilson, Environment Editor

truthout.com (April 22 2008)


With food riots across the globe in the news, the immediate cause of
food shortages is simply this: grain prices have doubled over the last
year and poor people can no longer afford to buy enough food. There is
no one single cause for the price rise; it is a combination of supply
and demand.

Steady population growth means there are about seventy million new
mouths to feed every year, and increasing affluence is also spurring
more people to buy more meat. Meat is grain-intensive - it takes about
seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. Biofuels are another
new demand on grain stocks, and a potentially insatiable one. The grain
used to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.

There is more than enough grain to feed every hungry human on the
planet, but the poor cannot compete with wealthier buyers of meat and
biofuels. Markets are not interested in feeding hungry people - they
want to make money, so from a capitalist point of view, the only
solution is to increase supply in the hope that it will drive prices down.

However, on the supply side, serious limiting factors are coming into
play: dwindling water supplies and increased drought exacerbated by
climate change; increasingly degraded land and soils; the rising cost of
energy used for everything from water pumping to transport, and the
growing cost of fertilizer and other inputs.

The world wants more food - a lot more food - but the planet will not be
able to provide it. For this reason alone, more food is not the answer -
it cannot be the answer.

Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of the
book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (third edition, 2008),
says that while there have been food price spikes in the past, "This
troubling situation is unlike any the world has faced before".

Brown doesn't use the term, but it is likely that we have reached "peak
food", the moment when world grain output has achieved its maximum and
we will have to work very hard to keep it from declining.

One of the top reasons to believe we have reached peak food is that we
have apparently reached peak oil. In his book, Eating Fossil Fuels
(2006), Dale Allen Pfeiffer shows how utterly dependent modern
agriculture is on fossil fuels, not just for the machinery that plants
and harvests, but for the energy to irrigate fields, and for
fertilizers. About thirty percent of farm energy goes to fertilizer,
much of which is made from natural gas. Like oil, natural gas is
becoming increasingly expensive as production nears peak. Without oil,
we might not drive cars, but without fertilizer, we might not eat.

Food and fuel are intimately connected. Not only is fuel essential to
produce food, but because food can substitute for fuel, the price of
food is now locked into the price of oil - a price that is going nowhere
but up.

A Timely Report Shows the Way Forward

Globalization has promised to lift every person out of poverty by
growing the economy so large that wealth will eventually trickle down to
all. But this is a false promise that ignores physical limits to
planetary resources.

A groundbreaking United Nations report that presents a serious challenge
to the promises of globalization and biotech was released last week at a
very timely moment. The IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural
Science and Technology for Development) is directed by Robert Watson, a
former director of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change),
and it shares some similar features to the UN Climate assessment reports.

Most importantly, the IAASTD report says that agricultural systems
cannot go on as they have. They are failing to feed the poor, wrecking
ecosystems, exacerbating global warming and are far too dependent on
fossil fuels. Just as everything about the way we produce and use energy
must change in order to avoid climate catastrophe, so everything about
the way we produce and use food must change in order to avoid a
humanitarian and ecological disaster.

Watson said, "If we do persist with business as usual, the world's
people cannot be fed over the next half-century. It will mean more
environmental degradation, and the gap between the haves and have-nots
will further widen. We have an opportunity now to marshal our
intellectual resources to avoid that sort of future. Otherwise, we face
a world no one would want to inhabit."

As with climate change, the solution to the food crisis will not be
found in some miracle new technology. On the contrary, the report
identifies a need to reconsider many traditional crops and methods for
maintaining soil fertility and coping with drought. These traditional
technologies need to be integrated with modern ones to achieve the best
of both worlds. Currently there is little support for this approach to
crop science.

British economist Nicholas Stern called climate change the biggest
market failure in history. The IAASTD report also indicts markets with
failing to eradicate hunger and poverty. Watson said, "The incentives
for science to address the issues that matter to the poor are weak ...
the poorest developing countries are net losers under most trade
liberalization scenarios".

Agribusiness Reacts

The IAASTD study involved more than 400 authors and took four years to
produce. However, not everyone stuck with the process till the end.
Representatives from the biotechnology industry walked out in protest,
complaining that GM (genetically modified) crops were being unfairly
overlooked in favor of organic agriculture. The New Scientist (5 April
2008) presented a point counterpoint between participants Deborah Keith,
a manager for Syngenta, one of the world's largest biotech companies,
and Janice Jiggins, a social scientist. Keith complained that the draft
document was unscientific and that "too often it treated fears and
prejudices against technology and business as fact ..." Organic
agriculture was not subjected to the same scrutiny, she said.

Jiggins' account of the process noted that traditional farmers at the
table "took deep offense at hearing technologies ... building on
centuries-old traditions dismissed as 'anecdotal' and of no value".

At heart, the debate is over what is considered "scientific"
agriculture. The discussion of biotechnology in the final report summary
peels the "anecdotal" label off traditional agriculture and slaps it
back on genetic engineering, saying that "assessment of modern
biotechnology is lagging behind development; information can be
anecdotal and contradictory ..."

Jiggens notes that, among other problems, "the capacity to monitor and
regulate GM has failed to keep up".

In reaction to the IAASTD report, some commentators have leaped on the
idea that people who are "afraid of science" are irrationally keeping
biotech and companies like Monsanto from saving the world.

Oxford professor Paul Collier, writing in The London Times, said that
Europe and Japan are "befuddled by romanticism" for subsidizing
inefficient small farms. "The remedy to high food prices is to increase
supply", he said, and the only solution to the food crisis is more food
produced by "unromantic industrialized agriculture".

He also said, "The most realistic way is to replicate the Brazilian
model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies that supply
the world market. There are still many areas of the world - including
large swaths of Africa - that have good land that could be used far more
productively if it were properly managed by large companies. To contain
the rise in food prices, we need more globalization, not less."

Brazil - Big Ag Set Up to Fail?

Taking a closer look at the Brazilian model shows why the IAASTD authors
overwhelmingly rejected the big business model as a way to sustainably
feed the world.

Brazil's Mato Grosso region is the world's most active agricultural
frontier. Satellite photos show the relentless push of soybean
monocultures and cattle grazing into the Amazon rainforest. Forest
ecologist Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center, says that
soy agriculture in the Mato Grosso has "greased the skids" for
deforestation of the Amazon.

The success of soy farming in Mato Grosso is based on two advantages:
the region's abundant rainfall and the discovery that heavy applications
of fertilizer, especially lime and phosphorus, could impart impressive
fertility to the tropical soils. Both of these assets are likely to be
short-lived.

First and foremost is the rain. Nepstad's research focus is drought in
the Amazon. He has found that after only two years of drought, trees
begin to die and the forest fires start. Once a regular fire regime
takes hold, a tipping point is reached that rapidly converts rainforest
to dry scrub. The consequence is not just losing the rainforest, but
losing the rain. Through a process called transpiration, trees in the
Amazon seed the clouds that water the fields and pastures of South
America and the Caribbean. Researchers are finding that clouds and air
currents that originate in the Amazon can drive weather patterns as far
away as the North Atlantic. As the forest evaporates, so does the rainfall.

The second factor, a reliance on heavy applications of fertilizer, is
also bound to be a temporary phenomenon. Little noted in the popular
press, fertilizer prices have skyrocketed in recent months. Reuters
reported on April 16 that Chinese fertilizer importers have "agreed to
pay more than triple what they did a year ago to reserve tight supplies
of potash, sending the shares of global fertilizer makers to record levels".

Phosphorus, like potash, is mostly produced by mining mineral deposits
and there is a limit to global reserves - a limit that we are rapidly
approaching. Patrick Dery and Bart Anderson looked at phosphorus
production data in a report for Energy Bulletin titled "Peak
Phosphorus". They concluded that the world has passed the peak of
phosphorus production and is already in decline.

"In some ways", say Dery and Anderson, "the problem of peak phosphorus
is more difficult than peak oil. Energy sources other than oil are
available ..." But, they point out, "Unlike fossil fuels, phosphorus can
be recycled. However if we waste phosphorus, we cannot replace it [with]
any other source."

The main way to recycle phosphorus is to reclaim it from sewage and
animal waste. The need to do this will bring us full circle from modern
high-tech agriculture back to traditional practices that used animal
manure and human "night soil". Researchers in Sweden and Australia are
already working on a new toilet design that would siphon off human urine
to use as a source of phosphate. It would be stored in tanks for supply
to farmers.

What will happen to the farms of Mato Grosso when the price of
phosphorus doubles, quadruples, and then doubles again? For that matter,
what will happen to the fields of Iowa?

Brazil and the New Agriculture

It is the specter of resource limits that has led the authors of the
IAASTD study to recommend that traditional practices be studied and
adopted where they make sense. One of the most promising traditional
practices that is now being studied at Cornell and other major
agricultural research institutions has its origins in Brazil.

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been on the defensive
for his government's role in deforesting the Amazon. Most recently,
critics have attacked Brazilian agriculture for diverting capacity from
food to biofuels. Lula has countered the criticism by insisting that
Brazil will expand its agriculture without further encroachments on the
Amazon. One of the best ways to do that, and conserve scarce fertilizers
like phosphorus at the same time, might be to adopt a practice used by
an ancient civilization that occupied the Amazon before Columbus.

The practice is called terra preta, Portuguese for "dark earth". These
dark earths are highly fertile soils that were created by burying
charcoal along with manure and other organic wastes. Charcoal is a
porous material that is very good at holding nutrients like nitrogen and
phosphorus and making them available to plant roots. It also aerates
soil and helps it to retain water.

Some terra preta fields are thousands of years old, and yet they are
still so fertile that they are dug up and sold as potting soil in
Brazilian markets.

Because making charcoal from biomass releases energy, researchers today
are looking at integrated biomass energy and food production systems
using "biochar" - the modern term for terra preta. For more details on
these efforts, see my report for Truthout on the first biochar
conference in 2007. There is also a good account of the terra preta in
Charles C Mann's book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus ï(Knopf, 2005).

Biochar may be the answer that Lula is looking for. Biochar could be a
great gift from Brazil to the rest of the world. Charles C Mann notes
that "it might improve the expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture
in Africa - a final gift from the peoples who brought us tomatoes,
maize, manioc, and a thousand different ways of being human".

Biochar is just one of the traditional agricultural practices that a
world running out of fossil fuels and cheap fertilizer may be very
grateful to rediscover in the coming years. The IAASTD report, if acted
upon quickly, could jumpstart this research.

Roadmap Needed

The IAASTD report does not go so far as to provide a road map or an
action plan, but the various private-public partnerships that are
working to implement its goals are already finding it useful.

Inter Press Service reports that a delegate from Costa Rica said "These
documents are like a bible with which to negotiate with various
institutions in my country and transform agriculture".

Benny Haerlin, the representative from Greenpeace, sees the document as
a blazing signpost, lighting the way. He said: "This marks the beginning
of a new, of a real Green Revolution. The modern way of farming is
biodiverse and labor intensive and works with nature, not against it."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042208A.shtml

http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
http://www.ashisuto.co.jp