Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] The food bubble facing imminent collapse

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The food bubble facing imminent collapse
  • Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 11:43:05 -0700


The food bubble facing imminent collapse
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/TFBE.php
ISIS Press Release 10/01/05
The Institute of Science in Society

----------------
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reviews Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under
Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, by Lester Brown, Earth
Policy Institute, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2003,
ISBN 0-393-05859-X
----------------

Global warming is happening; and at a much faster, more
abrupt rate than projected by the International Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) (see "Abrupt climate change
happening", SiS 20).

The news media have been filled with reports of heat waves,
floods, droughts, hurricanes, accelerated melting of the
polar ice caps and sea levels rising. And yet, they may be
missing the most serious consequence of climate change
that’s staring us in the face: a collapse of food production
on a global scale; or as Lester Brown of Earth Policy
Institute puts it, "the bursting of the food bubble".

The economy must be restructured at "wartime speed", Lester
Brown says, because we have built an "environmental bubble
economy", where economic output is artificially inflated by
over-consumption of the earth’s natural resources. He adds:
"the destruction wrought by terrorists is likely to be small
compared with the worldwide suffering if the environmental
bubble economy collapses."

This same warning was first put forward no less forcefully
by Edward Goldsmith and colleagues in A Blueprint for
Survival published in 1972, and echoed by many since;
notably Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce (1993) and
David Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World (1995).

What’s new in Lester Brown’s message is that the most
vulnerable economic sector may be food. Food production is
facing imminent collapse unless the urgent problems of water
shortage, overpopulation and rising temperatures are tackled
right away. (And no, he does not think GM crops are the
answer to feeding the world.)

Water is fast running out

The world is fast running out of water after decades of
unsustainable over-pumping of aquifers to expand food
production to feed a growing world population. Water tables
have fallen sharply and rapidly in scores of countries
including China, India and the United States, which together
produce nearly half of the world’s grain. Other more
populous countries with depleted aquifers include Pakistan,
Iran and Mexico. As water tables fall, rivers fail to reach
the sea, lakes disappear and wells dry up.

Conventional industrial agriculture is extremely water-
intensive. It takes 1000 tonnes of water to produce a tonne
of grain. Worldwide, 70 % of all the water diverted from
rivers or pumped from underground is used for irrigation;
20% is used by industry and 10% for residential purposes.

Growing needs of industry is diverting irrigation water from
agriculture, and countries are turning to grain imports to
make up for the shortfall. A person drinks 4 litres of water
a day and an additional 2 000 litres is needed to produce
the food eaten. In rich countries where grain is consumed to
feed livestock, the water needed to produce food per person
can easily reach 4 000 litres a day.

Water shortages are generating conflicts between upstream
and downstream claimants.

Crops cease to produce at high temperatures

Another challenge facing farmers to keep up productivity is
global warming. The 16 warmest years since record -keeping
began in 1880 all occurred from1980 onwards, the three
warmest years were 1998, 2001 and 2003. Crops are facing
heat stresses that are without precedent.

As the temperature rises above 34 C, photosynthesis slows
down, dropping to zero for many crops at 37 C. At that
temperature, corn plants in the US Corn Belt suffer from
heat shock and dehydration, shrinking the harvest.
Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute in
the Philippines and the US Department of Agriculture
developed a rule of thumb that each deg C rise in
temperature above the optimum during the growing season
reduces grain yields by 10%. Thus, according to projections
of the IPCC – which some say is already an underestimate -
grain harvests in tropical regions could be reduced by an
average of 5-11 percent by 2020 and 11-46 percent by 2050.

Research at Ohio State University indicates that as
temperature rises, photosynthesis increases until 20C, and
then plateaus until 35C when it begins to decline, ceasing
entirely at 40C. At that temperature, the plant is in
thermal shock, simply trying to survive.

The most vulnerable part of the life cycle is at
fertilization. Corn silk dries out rapidly in the heat, and
prevents pollen tubes from reaching the kernels. Similarly,
the fertility of rice falls from 100% at 34C to nearly zero
at 40C. In north India, a 1C rise in temperature did not
reduce wheat yields, but a 2C rise lowered yields at almost
all of 10 sites. There was a decline in irrigated wheat
yields ranging from 37 to 58% from heat alone; and when
increased CO2 was factored in – which tends to increase
photosynthesis - the decline ranged from 8 to 38%.

Grain production has been dropping

The problems of water shortage and increased temperatures
are already hitting grain yields. Grain production has been
declining in some smaller countries; but it is now falling
in China, the most populous country in the world. Over the
past five years, China’s grain harvest has dropped from 390
million to 340 million tonnes – a drop equal to the grain
harvest of Canada.

Sooner or later, says Lester Brown, China will enter the
world grain market for imports, and that will cause food
prices to rise, especially as world grain reserves are at an
all time low.

In 2002, the world grain harvest of 1 807 million tonnes
fell short of the world grain consumption by 100 million
tonnes, or 5 percent. This shortfall, the largest on record,
marked the third consecutive year of grain deficits,
bringing stocks to the lowest level in a generation.

In such a situation, the first to suffer will the world’s
poorest and hungriest. The United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organisation (FAO) latest estimates, based on
data from the years 1998-2000, put the number of
undernourished people in the world at 840 million. But since
1998-2000, world grain production has fallen 5 percent,
suggesting that the ranks of the hungry may be swelling.

"Food is fast becoming a national security issue as growth
in the world harvest slows and as falling water tables and
rising temperatures hint at future shortages," says Lester
Brown.

More than 100 countries now import wheat. Some 40 countries
import rice. Iran and Egypt rely on imports for 40 percent
of their grain supply. Algeria, Japan, South Korea and
Taiwan import 70% or more. Israel and Yemen import more than
90%. And just 6 countries - the US, Canada, France
Australia, Argentina and Thailand - supply 90% of grain
exports. The US alone controls almost half of world grain
exports.

China importing grain to make up for its deficits could
destabilize world grain market overnight. When the former
Soviet Union bought grain from the world market in 1972 for
roughly a tenth of its grain supply following a bad harvest,
the world wheat prices climbed from $1.90 to $4.89 a bushel.

"Ecological meltdown"

The problem of declining food production is dwarfed by the
ecological impacts of the over-exploitation of resources to
keep production high. China is singled out for "ecological
meltdown".

Since 1980, China’s economy has expanded more than fourfold.
Income has also expanded by nearly fourfold lifting more
people out of poverty faster than at any time in history.
But this has resulted in over-ploughing, over-grazing, over-
cutting of forests and over-pumping of aquifers.

With a population of 1.3 billion and 400 million cattle,
sheep and goats, "weighing heavily on the land" and grazing
flocks stripping the land of protective vegetation, a dust
bowl has been created on a scale not seen before. China is
at war with expanding deserts. Old deserts are advancing and
new deserts forming. With little vegetation remaining in
parts of northern and western China, the strong winds of
late winter and early spring can remove millions of tonnes
of topsoil in a single day, soil that would take centuries
to replace. The Gobi Desert expanded by 52 400 square
kilometres between 1994 and 1999, and is now within 150
miles of Beijing.

Millions of rural Chinese may be uprooted and forced to
migrate eastward as the deserts claim their land.
Desertification has already driven villagers from their
homes in Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia provinces.
Unfortunately, they do not have an obvious place to escape
to within China. Such ‘environmental refugees’ will be
increasingly common.

China’s dust storms are spreading beyond its borders. On
April 12, 2002, South Korea was engulfed by a huge dust
storm from China that shut down schools and cancelled
flights, and clinics were overrun with people having
difficulty breathing. Koreans have come to dread the arrival
of what they now call "the fifth season" of dust storms from
China.

Plan B for survival

Plan A – business as usual – must be replaced by plan B as a
matter of urgency if we are to avoid the food bubble
bursting, and with it, famine on a global scale, disease
epidemics, social and political unrest, and wars.

Plan B means shifting from a carbon-based energy economy to
a hydrogen-based one to stabilize climate change. Iceland is
the first country to adopt that as its national plan.
Denmark and Germany are leading in wind-generated energy;
Japan in solar cells. The evolution of fuel cells and
availability of hydrogen generators will contribute to
building a climate-benign hydrogen economy. The Netherlands
has shown what can be achieved by phasing out motorcars in
favour of bicycles. The Canadian province of Ontario is
phasing out coal. It is replacing its five coal-fired power
plants with gas-fired plants, wind-farms and making
efficiency gains; the net result is to reduce carbon
emissions equivalent to taking 4 million cars off the road.

Plan B means stabilizing world population at around 7.5
billion, as some 34 countries in the world have already
stabilized their populations. It means increasing the
productivity of water in agriculture, for example, by drip-
irrigation pioneered in Israel. It means halting soil
erosion by replanting trees, adopting minimum-till, no-till
and other soil-conservation practices.

Finally, it means restructuring the entire economy by
creating an "honest market", one that "tells the ecological
truth", by including the indirect costs of goods and
services into the prices, that values nature’s services
properly and respect the sustainable-yield thresholds of
natural systems such as fisheries, forests, rangelands and
aquifers.

For petrol, calculating the true costs to society means
including the medical costs of treating people made ill from
polluted air, the costs of acid rain in damages to lakes,
forests, crops and buildings, and most of all from global
warming. Various studies have produced estimates of petrol
prices raised to $3.30, or even $8.64 a gallon if drivers
were to pay some of the indirect costs, including the
military costs of protecting petroleum supply lines and
ensuring access to Middle Eastern oil.

An example of valuing nature’s services is the decision of
the Chinese government to ban all tree cutting in the
Yangtze River basin after the flooding in 1998, which
inflicted $30 billion worth of damages. The ban was
justified by according to standing trees a worth three times
that of cut trees.

A further measure is to shift taxation – lowering income
taxes while raising taxes on environmentally destructive
activities.

Sustainable agriculture left out

While most of the measures in plan B are laudable, they do
not add up to the radical "restructuring" of the bubble
economy called for.

Edward Goldsmith, Paul Hawken, David Korten and others have
argued convincingly that the fatal error of our bubble
economy is that it is predicated on unlimited growth. A
major part of the solution may well involve abandoning
unlimited growth as a matter of policy and as an index of
progress and well-being, for an alternative economic model
that emphasizes stability, autonomy and self-renewal at
every level. But that’s not going to happen so long as the
dominant model of economic globalisation of the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) holds sway.

Another weakness of plan B is that after having painted a
dire picture of the unsustainable food bubble created by
decades of industrial monoculture, Lester Brown nevertheless
fails to call for a comprehensive shift to sustainable
agriculture that would tackle the problems he has mentioned
head on, as well as ones he hasn’t mentioned, the most
obvious being that industrial monoculture is extremely
energy inefficient and dependent on fossil fuel, which too,
is fast running out.

Organic and agroecological farming, by contrast, are proving
productive, energy and resource efficient and
environmentally friendly; they are able to provide food
security for the poorest farmers, to protect biodiversity,
to regenerate degraded land, and to turn soil from a carbon
source back into a carbon sink. They are the key to
delivering health to the nation, whether rich or poor (as
described in articles in successive issues of Science in
Society http://www.i-sis.org.uk/isisnews.php; also The Case
for a GM Free Sustainable World
http://indsp.org/ISPreportSummary.php.).

It is nothing short of scandalous that out of the £500
million allocated to implementing the UK government’s
Strategy for Sustainable Farming and Food (Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, London
www.defra.gov/farm/sustain/newstrategy/strategy.pdf), only
£5 million was earmarked for supporting organic agriculture.

The reason is that adopting truly sustainable agriculture
would entail major conceptual and structural changes to the
food production and delivery system that many governments,
including the UK, are not prepared to face up to. These
include rejecting global "competitiveness" and "efficiency"
as artificially defined by the WTO to perpetuate the
iniquitous exploitation of the world poor by the rich that
has added untold misery to the lives of Third World farmers
and food miles to agricultural produce shipped across the
globe. They include, instead, supporting local production
and consumption and shortening the food-supply chain to
ensure that farmers get a fair price for their produce and
consumers get the benefit of fresh, nutritious and health-
promoting food while reducing global carbon dioxide
emission.


Buy now from

Amazon.com
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393325237/instituofsc0c-20

Amazon.co.uk
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393325237/instituofscie-21






  • [Livingontheland] The food bubble facing imminent collapse, Tradingpost, 01/10/2005

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page