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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Geopolitics of Food Scarcity
  • Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 07:42:26 -0700


02/11/2009 02:53 PM
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,606937,00.html

WORLDWIDE CRISIS
The Geopolitics of Food Scarcity
By Lester Brown

In some countries social order has already begun to break down in the
face of soaring food prices and spreading hunger. Could the worldwide
food crisis portend the collapse of global civilization?

One of the toughest things for us to do is to anticipate
discontinuity. Whether on a personal level or on a global economic
level, we typically project the future by extrapolating from the past.
Most of the time this works well, but occasionally we experience a
discontinuity that we failed to anticipate. The collapse of
civilization is such a case. It is no surprise that many past
civilizations failed to grasp the forces and recognize signs that
heralded their undoing. More than once it was shrinking food supplies
that brought about their downfall.

Water tables are falling in countries that contain half the world's
people, including the three biggest grain producers -- China, India,
and the United States.

Does our civilization face a similar fate? Until recently it did not
seem possible, but our failure to deal with the environmental trends
that are undermining the world food economy -- most importantly
falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures -- forces
the conclusion that such a collapse is possible.

These trends are taking a significant toll on food production: In six
of the last eight years world grain production has fallen short of
consumption, forcing a steady drawdown in stocks. World carryover
stocks of grain (the amount remaining from the previous harvest when
the new harvest begins) have dropped to only 60 days of consumption, a
near record low. Meanwhile, in 2008 world grain prices have climbed to
the highest level ever.

The current record food price inflation puts another severe stress on
governments around the world, adding to the other factors that can
lead to state failure. Even before the 2008 climb in grain prices, the
list of failing states was growing. Now even more governments in many
more low and middle-income countries that import grain are in danger
of failing as food prices soar. With rising food costs straining
already beleaguered states, is it not difficult to imagine how the
food crisis could portend the failure of global civilization itself.

Today we are witnessing the emergence of a dangerous politics of food
scarcity, one in which individual countries act in their narrowly
defined self-interest and subsequently accelerate the deterioration of
global equilibrium. This began in 2007 when leading wheat-exporting
countries such as Russia and Argentina limited or banned exports in an
attempt to counter domestic food price rises. Vietnam, the world's
second-largest rice exporter after Thailand, banned exports for
several months for the same reason. While these moves may reassure
those living in exporting countries, they create panic in the scores
of countries that import grain.

In response to restrictions by these and other grain exporters, grain-
importing countries are trying to nail down long-term bilateral trade
agreements in order to secure future food supplies. The Philippines,
no longer able to count on rice from the world market when it needs
it, negotiated a three-year deal with Vietnam for a guaranteed 1.5
million tons of rice each year. Other importers are seeking similar
arrangements.

Food import anxiety is also spawning an entirely new genre of trade
agreements as food-importing countries seek to buy or lease large
blocks of land to farm in other countries. Libya, which imports close
to 90 percent of its grain and is understandably anxious about access
to supplies, has leased 250,000 acres of land in Ukraine to grow wheat
for its own people in exchange for access to one of its oil fields.
Egypt is seeking similar land acquisition in Ukraine in exchange for
access to its natural gas. China has the most ambitious "farming
abroad" goals of all: In 2007 the country signed a memorandum of
understanding to farm 2.5 million acres in the Philippines, an area
equal to roughly 10 percent of that country's farmland. But this
agreement, quietly entered into by government officials, was later
abandoned by Manila as rice supplies tightened and as local farmers
voiced concern. China is now looking for long-term leases of land in
other countries, including Australia, Russia, and Brazil.

No Temporary Shortage

The current surge in world grain prices is trend-driven; some of these
trends expand demand and others restrict growth in supply. On the
demand side, these trends include world population growth of 70
million people a year, a growing number of people consuming more grain-
intensive products, and the massive diversion of US grain to ethanol-
fuel distilleries. During the last few years, the United States's use
of grain for ethanol has nearly doubled the annual growth in world
grain consumption from 19 million metric tons to more than 36 million
metric tons.

The additional demand for grain associated with rising affluence
varies widely among countries. People in low-income countries where
grain supplies 60 percent of calories, such as India, directly consume
nearly 200 kilograms of grain per year. In affluent countries like the
United States and Canada, annual grain con-sumption per person is
close to 800 kilograms, but about 90 percent of that is consumed
indirectly as meat, milk, and eggs. The potential for additional grain
consumption as incomes rise among low-income consumers is huge. To
illustrate, the current world grain harvest of around two billion
metric tons could feed 10 billion Indians at current consumption
levels but only 2.5 billion Americans.

This potential growth in demand for grain is huge but it pales next to
that for automotive fuel production. The automotive demand for crop-
based fuels is insatiable. If the food value of grain is less than its
fuel value, the market will move the grain into the energy economy.
Thus as the price of oil rises, the price of grain follows it upward.
The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its dependence on
foreign oil by substituting grain-based fuels, is generating global
food insecurity on a scale not seen before.

Water Shortages Mean Food Shortages

Of all the environmental trends that are shrinking the world's food
supplies, the most immediate is water shortages. In a world where 70
percent of all water use is for irrigation, this is no small matter.
The drilling of millions of irrigation wells has pushed water
withdrawal in many countries beyond recharge rates from rainfall,
leading to groundwater mining. As a result, water tables are now
falling in countries that contain half the world's people, including
the big three grain producers -- China, India, and the United States.

Aquifer depletion poses a particularly serious threat to China and
India where between roughly 80 and 60 percent, respectively, of the
grain harvest comes from irrigated land. This compares with only 20
percent in the United States. Most aquifers can be replenished. When
they are depleted, the pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate of
recharge. Fossil aquifers, however, are not replenishable: For these,
depletion brings pumping to an end. Farmers who lose their irrigation
water can return to lower-yield dryland farming if rainfall permits,
but in more arid regions, such as the southwestern United States or
the Middle East, it can mean the end of agriculture altogether.

Nowhere is the shrinkage of irrigated agriculture more dramatic than
in Saudi Arabia, a country as water-poor as it is oil-rich. After the
Arab oil export embargo in the 1970s, the Saudis realized they were
vulnerable to a counter embargo on grain. To become self-sufficient in
wheat, they developed a heavily subsidized irrigated agriculture based
on pumping water from a fossil aquifer over a half-mile below the
surface. In early 2008, with the aquifer largely deplet-ed, the Saudis
announced that they will phase out wheat production by 2016 -- after
being self-sufficient in this staple food for over 20 years. Saudi
Arabia will then be importing roughly 14 million metric tons of wheat,
rice, corn, and barley for its Canada-sized population of 30 million
people. It is the first country to publicly reveal how aquifer
depletion will shrink its grain harvest.

Falling water tables are also adversely affecting harvests in many
other countries. In China, a groundwater survey revealed that the
water table under the North China Plain, an area that produces over
half of the country's wheat and a third of its corn, is falling fast.
Overpumping has largely depleted the shallow aquifer, forcing well
drillers to turn to the region's deep aquifer, which is not
replenishable. The aquifer is dropping at a rate of nearly three
meters per year. A 2001 World Bank report predicted "catastrophic
consequences for future generations" unless water use and supply can
quickly be brought back into balance.

As water tables fall and irrigation wells go dry, China's wheat crop,
the world's largest, is shrinking. After peaking at 111 million metric
tons in 1997, the harvest fell to 103 million metric tons this year, a
drop of seven percent within a decade. During the same period,
production of rice, a water-guzzling crop, dropped six percent from
127 million to 119 million tons. Already dependent on imports for
nearly 70 percent of its soybeans, China may soon be importing massive
quantities of grain as well.

In India the margin between food consumption and survival is even more
precarious. The country's farmers have drilled 21 million irrigation
wells, with the result that water tables are falling in almost every
state. In a survey of India's water situation, British author and
journalist Fred Pearce reported in August 2004 in New Scientist
magazine that "half of India's traditional hand-dug wells and millions
of shallower tube wells have already dried up, bringing a spate of
suicides among those who rely on them. Electricity blackouts are
reaching epidemic proportions in states where half of the electricity
is used to pump water from depths of up to a kilometer."

The progressive worldwide depletion of aquifers is making further
expansion of food production more difficult. After nearly tripling
from 94 million hectares in 1950 to 276 million hectares in 2000, the
world's irrigated area abruptly stopped growing. For the world's
farmers, peak water apparently has arrived.

Cropland Losses

In addition to losses from erosion, cropland is also being converted
to non-farm uses. Although there are no reliable worldwide data on
cropland conversion, it is clear that whether it is housing
developments marching up California's Central Valley, the thousands of
factories being built each year in the Yangtze River Basin, or similar
losses elsewhere, some of the world's most productive cropland is
being lost to construction. Meanwhile, the world automobile fleet is
growing by 23 million cars per year, and is claiming ever more
cropland for roads, highways, and parking lots. To illustrate this,
imagine if China were one day to achieve the Japanese automobile
ownership rate of one car for every two people. The country would then
have a fleet of 650 million motor vehicles, compared with only 35
million today. Since at least 0.4 hectares of land has to be paved for
every 20 vehicles added to the fleet, this would require paving nearly
13.3 million hectares of land -- an area equal to half the riceland in
China. Worldwide, the average grainland per person shrank from 2.4
hectares in 1950 to well below 1.2 hectares in 2007. This area,
smaller than a building lot in an affluent US suburb, will soon shrink
to 0.8 hectares if current population growth trends continue.

Rising Temperatures, Falling Yields

Global warming is another pervasive environmental threat to food
security. Agriculture as it exists today was shaped by a climate
system that despite occa-sio-nal blips has remained remarkably stable
over farming's 11,000-year history. Since crops were developed to
maximize yields in this long-standing climate regime, climate change
means agriculture will be increasingly out of sync with its natural
environment. In a July 2004 study published by the US National Academy
of Sciences, a team of scientists from several countries confirmed the
rule of thumb emerging among crop ecologists -- that a one-degree
Celsius temperature rise above the norm lowers wheat, rice, and corn
yields by 10 percent. The scientists concluded that "temperature
increases due to global war-ming will make it increasingly difficult
to feed earth's growing population."

Aside from the direct effect of higher temperatures, ice melting
indirectly affects agriculture over the longer term. The Greenland ice
sheet, which is melting at an accelerating rate, will raise sea level
seven meters if it melts entirely. If we continue with business-as-
usual, sea level could easily rise by two meters during this century.
This would quickly inundate rice-growing river deltas such as those of
the Ganges in Bangladesh and the Mekong in Vietnam. A World Bank map
shows that a one-meter rise in sea level would flood close to half of
the riceland in Bangladesh, proportionately shrinking the rice supply
of the country's 161 million people.

Crop Yields Plateauing

Even as these multiple environmental and resource trends threaten
future food security, the shrinking backlog of unused agricultural
technology is slowing the rise in land productivity. Between 1950 and
1990, the world's farmers raised grain yield per hectare by more than
two percent a year, exceeding the growth of population. But since then
yield growth has slowed to just over one percent a year, scarcely half
the earlier rate. Some commentators point to genetically modified crop
strains as a way out of our predicament, but GM crops have not
dramatically raised yields, nor are they likely to do so in the near
future.

The bottom line is that new harvest-expanding technologies are ever
more difficult to come by as crop yields move closer to the inherent
limits of photosynthetic efficiency. This limit in turn establishes
the upper bounds of the earth's biological productivity, which
ultimately will determine the earth's human carrying capacity. The
question -- at least for now -- is not will the world grain harvest
continue to expand, but will it expand fast enough to keep pace with
rapidly growing demand. If we continue down the current path it is not
likely to do so, which means that food supplies will tighten further.
There is a real risk that we could soon face civilization-threatening
food shortages.

Signs of food stress are everywhere. After declining for several
decades, the number of chronically hungry and malnourished people in
developing countries bottomed out in 1996 at 800 million and has been
climbing since. In 2006 it exceeded 850 million and in 2007 it climbed
to over 980 million. The US Department of Agriculture projects the
number will reach 1.2 billion by 2017. For the first time in several
decades this basic social indicator is moving in the wrong direction,
and it is doing so at a record rate and with disturbing social
consequences. No country is immune to the effects of tightening food
supplies, not even the United States. If China turns to the world
market for massive quantities of grain, as it recently has done for
soybeans, it will undoubtedly look to the United States, which
dominates world grain exports. For US consumers, the prospect of
competing for the US grain harvest with 1.3 billion Chinese consumers
with fast-rising incomes is a nightmare scenario. It would be tempting
for the United States to restrict exports, but this is not an option
with China which now holds well over one trillion US dollars. Like it
or not, US consumers will share their grain with Chinese consumers
regardless of how high food prices rise.

If the food crisis worsens, national restrictions on grain exports
coupled with various bilateral arrangements could tie down much of the
exportable supply of grain, making it increasingly difficult if not
impossible for weaker, less affluent countries to find grain to
import. Many countries heavily dependent on imports could be left out,
and the result would be hundreds of millions of desperate people.
Desperate people do desperate things: They riot, they fight over food,
they overthrow governments, and they mass migrate to more food-secure
countries.

In many countries the social order has already begun to break down in
the face of soaring food prices and spreading hunger. Deadly food
riots broke out in a number of countries in 2008. In Egypt several
people died in fights in government-subsidized bread lines. Food riots
in Yemen turned deadly, taking at least a dozen lives. In Cameroon the
food riot death toll was twice as high.

Falling Yields, Failing States

The deteriorating world food situation is not occurring in a vacuum:
it comes at a time when there is a growing backlog of unresolved
problems, many of them associated with a failure by developing
countries to slow population growth. Continuing population growth on a
planet already overburdened with human demands is politically
weakening scores of countries. Under stress, inter-nal social
conflicts develop between differing religious, ethnic, tribal, and
racial groups, sometimes leading to genocide as in Rwanda and Sudan.

Nearly all of the projected 2.4 billion people to be added to world
population by mid-century will be born in countries where
agriculture's natural support systems are already deteriorating in the
face of excessive demands. As water tables fall, soils erode, and
temperatures rise in countries like India, Pakistan, Ethiopia,
Nigeria, and Mexico, the risk of social collapse grows. We have
entered a new era in international affairs: In the last century it was
heavily armed superpowers that threatened security, but today it is
failing states. It is not the concentration of power but its absence
that now threatens us.

Plan B: Our Only Option

Business as usual is no longer a viable option. The current world food
crisis can be alleviated only by altering the trends that are causing
it. We need to go to Plan B. This involves extraordinary measures such
as stabilizing climate, stabilizing population, eradicating poverty,
and restoring agriculture's natural support systems, including soils
and aquifers.

Plan B has four components: cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020,
stabi-lize the world population at eight billion by 2040, eradicate
poverty, and restore forests, soils, and aquifers. The 80 percent cut
in net carbon dioxide emissions can be achieved by systematically
raising energy efficiency throughout the world economy, investing
massively in the development of renewable sources of energy, banning
deforestation worldwide, and planting billions of trees to sequester
carbon. The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is driven
by tax restructuring, namely raising the tax on carbon while
offsetting it with a reduction in income taxes.

Stabilizing population and eradicating poverty go hand in hand. The
key to accelerating the shift to smaller families is eradicating
poverty. This means ensuring education for all children, girls as well
as boys. It means providing rudimentary, village-level health care so
that people can be confident their children will survive to adulthood.
And it means giving women everywhere access to reproductive health
care and family planning services.

The fourth component, restoring the earth's natural systems and
resources, encompasses a worldwide initiative to arrest the fall in
water tables by raising water productivity, similar to the highly
successful worldwide initiative to raise land productivity that was
launched a half century ago and that has nearly tripled grain yield
per hectare. Raising water productivity means shifting to more
efficient irrigation systems and to more water-efficient crops. In
some countries this means, for example, more wheat and less rice. And
for industries and cities, it means continuously recycling water. As
industries and cities recycle water, more will be available for
irrigation. This component also includes a worldwide soil conservation
effort, with such measures as terracing, planting tree shelter belts,
and adopting minimum tillage practices.

Within the environmental community, we have talked for decades about
saving the planet. But now we have a new challenge: to save
civilization itself. To adopt Plan B is to embrace hope. We can
continue with business as usual, leaving the next generation a world
where failing states multiply until civilization descends into chaos.
Or we can start working now to leave our children a better world, a
world that is more secure, not less so.

Lester R. Brown is president of the Washington, D.C.-based Earth
Policy Institute and author of "Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save
Civilization."






  • [Livingontheland] The Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, Tradingpost, 02/12/2009

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