Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

As I stressed, it's not that the sky is falling but we are facing a unique
convergence of bad news from several directions. The intelligent discussion
on this list needs to be taking place everywhere. Thank you all for so much
original thinking and challenge and committment to sensible change.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
list owner
----------------

"The food crisis is being compounded by growing populations, extreme
weather
and ecological stress, according to a number of recent reports. This week
the UN Environment Programme said the planet's water, land, air, plants,
animals and fish stocks were all in "inexorable decline"."


Global food crisis looms as climate change and fuel shortages bite
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/03/food.climatechange
Soaring crop prices and demand for biofuels raise fears of political
instability
by John Vidal, environment editor
The Guardian (November 03 2007)

Empty shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of
hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring
prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with
governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of
bread, maize, rice and dairy products.

Record world prices for most staple foods have led to eighteen percent food
price inflation in China, thirteen percent in Indonesia and Pakistan, and
ten percent or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN
Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Wheat has doubled in price, maize
is nearly fifty percent higher than a year ago and rice is twenty percent
more expensive, says the UN. Next week the FAO is expected to say that
global food reserves are at their lowest in 25 years and that prices will
remain high for years.

Last week the Kremlin forced Russian companies to freeze the price of milk,
bread and other foods until January 31, for fear of a public backlash with
a
parliamentary election looming. "The price of goods has risen sharply and
that has hit the poor particularly hard", said Oleg Savelyev, of the Levada
Centre polling institute.

India, Yemen, Mexico, Burkina Faso and several other countries have had, or
been close to, food riots in the last year, something not seen in decades
of
low global food commodity prices. Meanwhile, there are shortages of beef,
chicken and milk in Venezuela and other countries as governments try to
keep
a lid on food price inflation.

Boycotts have become commonplace. Argentinians shunned tomatoes during the
recent presidential election campaign when they became more expensive than
meat. Italians organised a one-day boycott of pasta in protest at rising
prices. German leftwing politicians have called for an increase in welfare
benefits so that people can cope with price rises.

"If you combine the increase of the oil prices and the increase of food
prices then you have the elements of a very serious [social] crisis in the
future", said Jacques Diouf, head of the FAO, in London last week.

The price rises are a result of record oil prices, US farmers switching out
of cereals to grow biofuel crops, extreme weather and growing demand from
countries India and China, the UN said yesterday.

"There is no one cause but a lot of things are coming together to lead to
this. It's hard to separate out the factors", said Ali Gurkan, head of the
FAO's Food Outlook programme, yesterday.

He said cereal stocks had been declining for more than a decade but now
stood at around 57 days, which made global food supplies vulnerable to an
international crisis or big natural disaster such as a drought or flood.

"Any unforeseen flood or crisis can make prices rise very quickly. I do not
think we should panic but we should be very careful about what may happen",
he warned.

Lester Brown, founder of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute
thinktank, said: "The competition for grain between the world's 800 million
motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its two billion poorest
people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue".

Last year, he said, US farmers distorted the world market for cereals by
growing fourteen million tonnes, or twenty percent of the whole maize crop,
for ethanol for vehicles. This took millions of hectares of land out of
food
production and nearly doubled the price of maize. Mr Bush this year called
for steep rises in ethanol production as part of plans to reduce petrol
demand by twenty percent by 2017.

Maize is a staple food in many countries which import from the US,
including
Japan, Egypt, and Mexico. US exports are seventy percent of the world
total,
and are used widely for animal feed. The shortages have disrupted livestock
and poultry industries worldwide.

"The use of food as a source of fuel may have serious implications for the
demand for food if the expansion of biofuels continues", said a spokesman
for the International Monetary Fund last week.

The outlook is widely expected to worsen as agro-industries prepare to
switch to highly profitable biofuels. according to Grain, a Barcelona-based
food resources group. Its research suggests that the Indian government is
committed to planting fourteen million hectares (35 million acres) of land
with jatropha, an exotic bush from which biodiesel can be manufactured.
Brazil intends to grow 120 million hectares for biofuels, and Africa as
much
as 400 million hectares in the next few years. Much of the growth, the
countries say, would be on unproductive land, but many millions of people
are expected to be forced off the land.

This week Oxfam warned the EU that its policy of substituting ten percent
of
all car fuel with biofuels threatened to displace poor farmers.

The food crisis is being compounded by growing populations, extreme weather
and ecological stress, according to a number of recent reports. This week
the UN Environment Programme said the planet's water, land, air, plants,
animals and fish stocks were all in "inexorable decline". According to the
UN's World Food Programme (WFP) 57 countries, including 29 in Africa,
nineteen in Asia and nine in Latin America, have been hit by catastrophic
floods. Harvests have been affected by drought and heatwaves in south Asia,
Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay.

This week the Australian government said drought had slashed predictions of
winter harvests by nearly forty percent, or 4 million tonnes. "It is likely
to be even smaller than the disastrous drought-ravaged 2006-07 harvest and
the worst in more than a decade", said the Bureau of Agricultural and
Resource Economics.

According to Josette Sheeran, director of the WFP, "There are 854 million
hungry people in the world and four million more join their ranks every
year. We are facing the tightest food supplies in recent history. For the
world's most vulnerable, food is simply being priced out of their reach."

Food for thought Possible scenarios

Experts describe various scenarios for the precarious food supply balance
in
coming years. An optimistic version would see markets automatically
readjust
to shortages, as higher prices make it more profitable once again to grow
crops for people rather than cars.

There are hopes that new crop varieties and technologies will help crops
adapt to capricious climactic conditions. And if people move on to a path
of
eating less meat, more land can be freed up for human food rather than
animal feed.

A slowdown in population growth would naturally ease pressures on the food
market, while the cultivation of hitherto unproductive land could also help
supply.

But fears for even tighter conditions revolve around deepening climate
change, which generates worsening floods and droughts, diminishing food
supplies. If the price of oil rises further it will make fertilisers and
transport more expensive, and at the same time make it more profitable to
grow biofuel crops.

Supply will be further restricted if fish stocks continue to decline due to
overfishing, and if soils become exhausted and erosion decreases the arable
area.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007