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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The New Geopolitics of Food
  • Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 12:39:22 -0600


The New Geopolitics of Food
>From the Middle East to Madagascar, high prices are spawning land grabs and
>ousting dictators. Welcome to the 21st-century food wars
BY LESTER R. BROWN | MAY/JUNE 2011
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/the_new_geopolitics_of_food

In the United States, when world wheat prices rise by 75 percent, as they
have over the last year, it means the difference between a $2 loaf of bread
and a loaf costing maybe $2.10. If, however, you live in New Delhi, those
skyrocketing costs really matter: A doubling in the world price of wheat
actually means that the wheat you carry home from the market to hand-grind
into flour for chapatis costs twice as much. And the same is true with rice.
If the world price of rice doubles, so does the price of rice in your
neighborhood market in Jakarta. And so does the cost of the bowl of boiled
rice on an Indonesian family's dinner table.

Welcome to the new food economics of 2011: Prices are climbing, but the
impact is not at all being felt equally. For Americans, who spend less than
one-tenth of their income in the supermarket, the soaring food prices we've
seen so far this year are an annoyance, not a calamity. But for the planet's
poorest 2 billion people, who spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food,
these soaring prices may mean going from two meals a day to one. Those who
are barely hanging on to the lower rungs of the global economic ladder risk
losing their grip entirely. This can contribute -- and it has -- to
revolutions and upheaval.

Already in 2011, the U.N. Food Price Index has eclipsed its previous all-time
global high; as of March it had climbed for eight consecutive months. With
this year's harvest predicted to fall short, with governments in the Middle
East and Africa teetering as a result of the price spikes, and with anxious
markets sustaining one shock after another, food has quickly become the
hidden driver of world politics. And crises like these are going to become
increasingly common. The new geopolitics of food looks a whole lot more
volatile -- and a whole lot more contentious -- than it used to. Scarcity is
the new norm.

Until recently, sudden price surges just didn't matter as much, as they were
quickly followed by a return to the relatively low food prices that helped
shape the political stability of the late 20th century across much of the
globe. But now both the causes and consequences are ominously different.

In many ways, this is a resumption of the 2007-2008 food crisis, which
subsided not because the world somehow came together to solve its grain
crunch once and for all, but because the Great Recession tempered growth in
demand even as favorable weather helped farmers produce the largest grain
harvest on record. Historically, price spikes tended to be almost exclusively
driven by unusual weather -- a monsoon failure in India, a drought in the
former Soviet Union, a heat wave in the U.S. Midwest. Such events were always
disruptive, but thankfully infrequent. Unfortunately, today's price hikes are
driven by trends that are both elevating demand and making it more difficult
to increase production: among them, a rapidly expanding population,
crop-withering temperature increases, and irrigation wells running dry. Each
night, there are 219,000 additional people to feed at the global dinner table.

More alarming still, the world is losing its ability to soften the effect of
shortages. In response to previous price surges, the United States, the
world's largest grain producer, was effectively able to steer the world away
from potential catastrophe. From the mid-20th century until 1995, the United
States had either grain surpluses or idle cropland that could be planted to
rescue countries in trouble. When the Indian monsoon failed in 1965, for
example, President Lyndon Johnson's administration shipped one-fifth of the
U.S. wheat crop to India, successfully staving off famine. We can't do that
anymore; the safety cushion is gone.

That's why the food crisis of 2011 is for real, and why it may bring with it
yet more bread riots cum political revolutions. What if the upheavals that
greeted dictators Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt,
and Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya (a country that imports 90 percent of its
grain) are not the end of the story, but the beginning of it? Get ready,
farmers and foreign ministers alike, for a new era in which world food
scarcity increasingly shapes global politics.

THE DOUBLING OF WORLD grain prices since early 2007 has been driven primarily
by two factors: accelerating growth in demand and the increasing difficulty
of rapidly expanding production. The result is a world that looks strikingly
different from the bountiful global grain economy of the last century. What
will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity?
Even at this early stage, we can see at least the broad outlines of the
emerging food economy.

On the demand side, farmers now face clear sources of increasing pressure.
The first is population growth. Each year the world's farmers must feed 80
million additional people, nearly all of them in developing countries. The
world's population has nearly doubled since 1970 and is headed toward 9
billion by midcentury. Some 3 billion people, meanwhile, are also trying to
move up the food chain, consuming more meat, milk, and eggs. As more families
in China and elsewhere enter the middle class, they expect to eat better. But
as global consumption of grain-intensive livestock products climbs, so does
the demand for the extra corn and soybeans needed to feed all that livestock.
(Grain consumption per person in the United States, for example, is four
times that in India, where little grain is converted into animal protein. For
now.)

At the same time, the United States, which once was able to act as a global
buffer of sorts against poor harvests elsewhere, is now converting massive
quantities of grain into fuel for cars, even as world grain consumption,
which is already up to roughly 2.2 billion metric tons per year, is growing
at an accelerating rate. A decade ago, the growth in consumption was 20
million tons per year. More recently it has risen by 40 million tons every
year. But the rate at which the United States is converting grain into
ethanol has grown even faster. In 2010, the United States harvested nearly
400 million tons of grain, of which 126 million tons went to ethanol fuel
distilleries (up from 16 million tons in 2000). This massive capacity to
convert grain into fuel means that the price of grain is now tied to the
price of oil. So if oil goes to $150 per barrel or more, the price of grain
will follow it upward as it becomes ever more profitable to convert grain
into oil substitutes. And it's not just a U.S. phenomenon: Brazil, which
distills ethanol from sugar cane, ranks second in production after the United
States, while the European Union's goal of getting 10 percent of its
transport energy from renewables, mostly biofuels, by 2020 is also diverting
land from food crops.

This is not merely a story about the booming demand for food. Everything from
falling water tables to eroding soils and the consequences of global warming
means that the world's food supply is unlikely to keep up with our
collectively growing appetites. Take climate change: The rule of thumb among
crop ecologists is that for every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above
the growing season optimum, farmers can expect a 10 percent decline in grain
yields. This relationship was borne out all too dramatically during the 2010
heat wave in Russia, which reduced the country's grain harvest by nearly 40
percent.

While temperatures are rising, water tables are falling as farmers overpump
for irrigation. This artificially inflates food production in the short run,
creating a food bubble that bursts when aquifers are depleted and pumping is
necessarily reduced to the rate of recharge. In arid Saudi Arabia, irrigation
had surprisingly enabled the country to be self-sufficient in wheat for more
than 20 years; now, wheat production is collapsing because the
non-replenishable aquifer the country uses for irrigation is largely
depleted. The Saudis soon will be importing all their grain.

Saudi Arabia is only one of some 18 countries with water-based food bubbles.
All together, more than half the world's people live in countries where water
tables are falling. The politically troubled Arab Middle East is the first
geographic region where grain production has peaked and begun to decline
because of water shortages, even as populations continue to grow. Grain
production is already going down in Syria and Iraq and may soon decline in
Yemen. But the largest food bubbles are in India and China. In India, where
farmers have drilled some 20 million irrigation wells, water tables are
falling and the wells are starting to go dry. The World Bank reports that 175
million Indians are being fed with grain produced by overpumping. In China,
overpumping is concentrated in the North China Plain, which produces half of
China's wheat and a third of its corn. An estimated 130 million Chinese are
currently fed by overpumping. How will these countries make up for the
inevitable shortfalls when the aquifers are depleted?

Even as we are running our wells dry, we are also mismanaging our soils,
creating new deserts. Soil erosion as a result of overplowing and land
mismanagement is undermining the productivity of one-third of the world's
cropland. How severe is it? Look at satellite images showing two huge new
dust bowls: one stretching across northern and western China and western
Mongolia; the other across central Africa. Wang Tao, a leading Chinese desert
scholar, reports that each year some 1,400 square miles of land in northern
China turn to desert. In Mongolia and Lesotho, grain harvests have shrunk by
half or more over the last few decades. North Korea and Haiti are also
suffering from heavy soil losses; both countries face famine if they lose
international food aid. Civilization can survive the loss of its oil
reserves, but it cannot survive the loss of its soil reserves.

Beyond the changes in the environment that make it ever harder to meet human
demand, there's an important intangible factor to consider: Over the last
half-century or so, we have come to take agricultural progress for granted.
Decade after decade, advancing technology underpinned steady gains in raising
land productivity. Indeed, world grain yield per acre has tripled since 1950.
But now that era is coming to an end in some of the more agriculturally
advanced countries, where farmers are already using all available
technologies to raise yields. In effect, the farmers have caught up with the
scientists. After climbing for a century, rice yield per acre in Japan has
not risen at all for 16 years. In China, yields may level off soon. Just
those two countries alone account for one-third of the world's rice harvest.
Meanwhile, wheat yields have plateaued in Britain, France, and Germany --
Western Europe's three largest wheat producers.

IN THIS ERA OF TIGHTENING world food supplies, the ability to grow food is
fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage, and countries are
scrambling to secure their own parochial interests at the expense of the
common good.

The first signs of trouble came in 2007, when farmers began having difficulty
keeping up with the growth in global demand for grain. Grain and soybean
prices started to climb, tripling by mid-2008. In response, many exporting
countries tried to control the rise of domestic food prices by restricting
exports. Among them were Russia and Argentina, two leading wheat exporters.
Vietnam, the No. 2 rice exporter, banned exports entirely for several months
in early 2008. So did several other smaller exporters of grain.

With exporting countries restricting exports in 2007 and 2008, importing
countries panicked. No longer able to rely on the market to supply the grain
they needed, several countries took the novel step of trying to negotiate
long-term grain-supply agreements with exporting countries. The Philippines,
for instance, negotiated a three-year agreement with Vietnam for 1.5 million
tons of rice per year. A delegation of Yemenis traveled to Australia with a
similar goal in mind, but had no luck. In a seller's market, exporters were
reluctant to make long-term commitments.

Fearing they might not be able to buy needed grain from the market, some of
the more affluent countries, led by Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and China,
took the unusual step in 2008 of buying or leasing land in other countries on
which to grow grain for themselves. Most of these land acquisitions are in
Africa, where some governments lease cropland for less than $1 per acre per
year. Among the principal destinations were Ethiopia and Sudan, countries
where millions of people are being sustained with food from the U.N. World
Food Program. That the governments of these two countries are willing to sell
land to foreign interests when their own people are hungry is a sad
commentary on their leadership.

By the end of 2009, hundreds of land acquisition deals had been negotiated,
some of them exceeding a million acres. A 2010 World Bank analysis of these
"land grabs" reported that a total of nearly 140 million acres were involved
-- an area that exceeds the cropland devoted to corn and wheat combined in
the United States. Such acquisitions also typically involve water rights,
meaning that land grabs potentially affect all downstream countries as well.
Any water extracted from the upper Nile River basin to irrigate crops in
Ethiopia or Sudan, for instance, will now not reach Egypt, upending the
delicate water politics of the Nile by adding new countries with which Egypt
must negotiate.

The potential for conflict -- and not just over water -- is high. Many of the
land deals have been made in secret, and in most cases, the land involved was
already in use by villagers when it was sold or leased. Often those already
farming the land were neither consulted about nor even informed of the new
arrangements. And because there typically are no formal land titles in many
developing-country villages, the farmers who lost their land have had little
backing to bring their cases to court. Reporter John Vidal, writing in
Britain's Observer, quotes Nyikaw Ochalla from Ethiopia's Gambella region:
"The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people of
land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the
indigenous population. The deals are done secretly. The only thing the local
people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their lands."

Local hostility toward such land grabs is the rule, not the exception. In
2007, as food prices were starting to rise, China signed an agreement with
the Philippines to lease 2.5 million acres of land slated for food crops that
would be shipped home. Once word leaked, the public outcry -- much of it from
Filipino farmers -- forced Manila to suspend the agreement. A similar uproar
rocked Madagascar, where a South Korean firm, Daewoo Logistics, had pursued
rights to more than 3 million acres of land. Word of the deal helped stoke a
political furor that toppled the government and forced cancellation of the
agreement. Indeed, few things are more likely to fuel insurgencies than
taking land from people. Agricultural equipment is easily sabotaged. If ripe
fields of grain are torched, they burn quickly.

Not only are these deals risky, but foreign investors producing food in a
country full of hungry people face another political question of how to get
the grain out. Will villagers permit trucks laden with grain headed for port
cities to proceed when they themselves may be on the verge of starvation? The
potential for political instability in countries where villagers have lost
their land and their livelihoods is high. Conflicts could easily develop
between investor and host countries.

These acquisitions represent a potential investment in agriculture in
developing countries of an estimated $50 billion. But it could take many
years to realize any substantial production gains. The public infrastructure
for modern market-oriented agriculture does not yet exist in most of Africa.
In some countries it will take years just to build the roads and ports needed
to bring in agricultural inputs such as fertilizer and to export farm
products. Beyond that, modern agriculture requires its own infrastructure:
machine sheds, grain-drying equipment, silos, fertilizer storage sheds, fuel
storage facilities, equipment repair and maintenance services, well-drilling
equipment, irrigation pumps, and energy to power the pumps. Overall,
development of the land acquired to date appears to be moving very slowly.

So how much will all this expand world food output? We don't know, but the
World Bank analysis indicates that only 37 percent of the projects will be
devoted to food crops. Most of the land bought up so far will be used to
produce biofuels and other industrial crops.

Even if some of these projects do eventually boost land productivity, who
will benefit? If virtually all the inputs -- the farm equipment, the
fertilizer, the pesticides, the seeds -- are brought in from abroad and if
all the output is shipped out of the country, it will contribute little to
the host country's economy. At best, locals may find work as farm laborers,
but in highly mechanized operations, the jobs will be few. At worst,
impoverished countries like Mozambique and Sudan will be left with less land
and water with which to feed their already hungry populations. Thus far the
land grabs have contributed more to stirring unrest than to expanding food
production.

And this rich country-poor country divide could grow even more pronounced --
and soon. This January, a new stage in the scramble among importing countries
to secure food began to unfold when South Korea, which imports 70 percent of
its grain, announced that it was creating a new public-private entity that
will be responsible for acquiring part of this grain. With an initial office
in Chicago, the plan is to bypass the large international trading firms by
buying grain directly from U.S. farmers. As the Koreans acquire their own
grain elevators, they may well sign multiyear delivery contracts with
farmers, agreeing to buy specified quantities of wheat, corn, or soybeans at
a fixed price.

Other importers will not stand idly by as South Korea tries to tie up a
portion of the U.S. grain harvest even before it gets to market. The
enterprising Koreans may soon be joined by China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and
other leading importers. Although South Korea's initial focus is the United
States, far and away the world's largest grain exporter, it may later
consider brokering deals with Canada, Australia, Argentina, and other major
exporters. This is happening just as China may be on the verge of entering
the U.S. market as a potentially massive importer of grain. With China's 1.4
billion increasingly affluent consumers starting to compete with U.S.
consumers for the U.S. grain harvest, cheap food, seen by many as an American
birthright, may be coming to an end.

No one knows where this intensifying competition for food supplies will go,
but the world seems to be moving away from the international cooperation that
evolved over several decades following World War II to an
every-country-for-itself philosophy. Food nationalism may help secure food
supplies for individual affluent countries, but it does little to enhance
world food security. Indeed, the low-income countries that host land grabs or
import grain will likely see their food situation deteriorate.

AFTER THE CARNAGE of two world wars and the economic missteps that led to the
Great Depression, countries joined together in 1945 to create the United
Nations, finally realizing that in the modern world we cannot live in
isolation, tempting though that might be. The International Monetary Fund was
created to help manage the monetary system and promote economic stability and
progress. Within the U.N. system, specialized agencies from the World Health
Organization to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) play major roles
in the world today. All this has fostered international cooperation.

But while the FAO collects and analyzes global agricultural data and provides
technical assistance, there is no organized effort to ensure the adequacy of
world food supplies. Indeed, most international negotiations on agricultural
trade until recently focused on access to markets, with the United States,
Canada, Australia, and Argentina persistently pressing Europe and Japan to
open their highly protected agricultural markets. But in the first decade of
this century, access to supplies has emerged as the overriding issue as the
world transitions from an era of food surpluses to a new politics of food
scarcity. At the same time, the U.S. food aid program that once worked to
fend off famine wherever it threatened has largely been replaced by the U.N.
World Food Program (WFP), where the United States is the leading donor. The
WFP now has food-assistance operations in some 70 countries and an annual
budget of $4 billion. There is little international coordination otherwise.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- the reigning president of the G-20 -- is
proposing to deal with rising food prices by curbing speculation in commodity
markets. Useful though this may be, it treats the symptoms of growing food
insecurity, not the causes, such as population growth and climate change. The
world now needs to focus not only on agricultural policy, but on a structure
that integrates it with energy, population, and water policies, each of which
directly affects food security.

But that is not happening. Instead, as land and water become scarcer, as the
Earth's temperature rises, and as world food security deteriorates, a
dangerous geopolitics of food scarcity is emerging. Land grabbing, water
grabbing, and buying grain directly from farmers in exporting countries are
now integral parts of a global power struggle for food security.

With grain stocks low and climate volatility increasing, the risks are also
increasing. We are now so close to the edge that a breakdown in the food
system could come at any time. Consider, for example, what would have
happened if the 2010 heat wave that was centered in Moscow had instead been
centered in Chicago. In round numbers, the 40 percent drop in Russia's
hoped-for harvest of roughly 100 million tons cost the world 40 million tons
of grain, but a 40 percent drop in the far larger U.S. grain harvest of 400
million tons would have cost 160 million tons. The world's carryover stocks
of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) would have
dropped to just 52 days of consumption. This level would have been not only
the lowest on record, but also well below the 62-day carryover that set the
stage for the 2007-2008 tripling of world grain prices.

Then what? There would have been chaos in world grain markets. Grain prices
would have climbed off the charts. Some grain-exporting countries, trying to
hold down domestic food prices, would have restricted or even banned exports,
as they did in 2007 and 2008. The TV news would have been dominated not by
the hundreds of fires in the Russian countryside, but by footage of food
riots in low-income grain-importing countries and reports of governments
falling as hunger spread out of control. Oil-exporting countries that import
grain would have been trying to barter oil for grain, and low-income grain
importers would have lost out. With governments toppling and confidence in
the world grain market shattered, the global economy could have started to
unravel.

We may not always be so lucky. At issue now is whether the world can go
beyond focusing on the symptoms of the deteriorating food situation and
instead attack the underlying causes. If we cannot produce higher crop yields
with less water and conserve fertile soils, many agricultural areas will
cease to be viable. And this goes far beyond farmers. If we cannot move at
wartime speed to stabilize the climate, we may not be able to avoid runaway
food prices. If we cannot accelerate the shift to smaller families and
stabilize the world population sooner rather than later, the ranks of the
hungry will almost certainly continue to expand. The time to act is now --
before the food crisis of 2011 becomes the new normal.










  • [Livingontheland] The New Geopolitics of Food, Tradingpost, 05/20/2011

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