Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Soaring Food Prices, Wild Weather and a Planetful of Trouble, Christian 
Parenti http://tinyurl.com/3kp84yw

What can a humble loaf of bread tell us about the world?

Consider this: between June 2010 and June 2011, world grain prices almost 
doubled. In many places on this planet, that proved an unmitigated 
catastrophe. In those same months, several governments fell, rioting broke 
out in cities from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to Nairobi, Kenya, and most 
disturbingly, three new wars began in Libya, Yemen and Syria. Even on Egypt’s 
Sinai Peninsula, Bedouin tribes are now in revolt against the country’s 
interim government and manning their own armed roadblocks.

And in each of these situations, the initial trouble was traceable, at least 
in part, to the price of that loaf of bread. If these upheavals were not 
“resource conflicts” in the formal sense of the term, think of them at least 
as bread-triggered upheavals.

Growing Climate Change in a Wheat Field

Bread has classically been known as the staff of life. In much of the world, 
you can’t get more basic, since that daily loaf often stands between the mass 
of humanity and starvation. Still, to read present world politics from a loaf 
of bread, you first have to ask: of what exactly is that loaf made? Water, 
salt and yeast, of course, but mainly wheat, which means when wheat prices 
increase globally, so does the price of that loaf—and so does trouble.

To imagine that there’s nothing else in bread, however, is to misunderstand 
modern global agriculture. Another key ingredient in our loaf—call it a 
“factor of production”—is petroleum. Yes, crude oil, which appears in our 
bread as fertilizer and tractor fuel. Without it, wheat wouldn’t be produced, 
processed, or moved across continents and oceans.

And don’t forget labor. It’s an ingredient in our loaf, too, but not perhaps 
in the way you might imagine. After all, mechanization has largely displaced 
workers from the field to the factory. Instead of untold thousands of 
peasants planting and harvesting wheat by hand, industrial workers now make 
tractors and threshers, produce fuel, chemical pesticides, and nitrogen 
fertilizer, all rendered from petroleum and all crucial to modern wheat 
growing. If the labor power of those workers is transferred to the wheat 
field, it happens in the form of technology. Today, a single person driving a 
huge $400,000 combine, burning 200 gallons of fuel daily, guided by computers 
and GPS satellite navigation, can cover twenty acres an hour, and harvest 
8,000 to 10,000 bushels of wheat in a single day.

Next, without financial capital—money—our loaf of bread wouldn’t exist. It’s 
necessary to purchase the oil, the fertilizer, that combine, and so on. But 
financial capital may indirectly affect the price of our loaf even more 
powerfully. When there is too much liquid capital moving through the global 
financial system, speculators start to bid-up the price of various assets, 
including all the ingredients in bread. This sort of speculation naturally 
contributes to rising fuel and grain prices.

The final ingredients come from nature: sunlight, oxygen, water and 
nutritious soil, all in just the correct amounts and at just the right time. 
And there’s one more input that can’t be ignored, a different kind of 
contribution from nature: climate change, just now really kicking in, and 
increasingly the key destabilizing element in bringing that loaf of bread 
disastrously to market.

Marketing Disaster

When these ingredients mix in a way that sends the price of bread soaring, 
politics enters the picture. Consider this, for instance: the upheavals in 
Egypt lay at the heart of the Arab Spring. Egypt is also the world’s single 
largest wheat importer, followed closely by Algeria and Morocco. Keep in mind 
as well that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia when rising food prices, high 
unemployment, and a widening gap between rich and poor triggered deadly riots 
and finally the flight of the country’s autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali. His 
last act was a vow to reduce the price of sugar, milk and bread—and it was 
too little too late.

With that, protests began in Egypt and the Algerian government ordered 
increased wheat imports to stave off growing unrest over food prices. As 
global wheat prices surged by 70 percent between June and December 2010, 
bread consumption in Egypt started to decline under what economists termed 
“price rationing.” And that price kept rising all through the spring of 2011. 
By June, wheat cost 83 percent more than it had a year before. During the 
same time frame, corn prices surged by a staggering 91 percent. Egypt is the 
world’s fourth largest corn importer. When not used to make bread, corn is 
often employed as a food additive and to feed poultry and livestock. Algeria, 
Syria, Morocco and Saudi Arabia are among the top 15 corn importers. As those 
wheat and corn prices surged, it was not just the standard of living of the 
Egyptian poor that was threatened but their very lives as climate-change 
driven food prices triggered political violence.

In Egypt, food is a volatile political issue. After all, one in five 
Egyptians live on less than $1 a day and the government provides subsidized 
bread to 14.2 million people in a population of 83 million. Last year, 
overall food-price inflation in Egypt was running at more than 20 percent. 
This had an instant and devastating impact on Egyptian families, who spend on 
average 40 percent of their often exceedingly meager monthly incomes simply 
feeding themselves.

Against this backdrop, World Bank President Robert Zoellick fretted that the 
global food system was “one shock away from a full-fledged crisis.” And if 
you want to trace that near full-fledged crisis back to its environmental 
roots, the place to look is climate change, the increasingly extreme and 
devastating weather being experienced across this planet.

When it comes to bread, it went like this: In the summer of 2010, Russia, one 
of the world’s leading wheat exporters, suffered its worst drought in 100 
years. Known as the Black Sea Drought, this extreme weather triggered fires 
that burnt down vast swathes of Russian forests, bleached farmlands, and 
damaged the country’s breadbasket wheat crop so badly that its leaders (urged 
on by Western grain speculators) imposed a year-long ban on wheat exports. As 
Russia is among the top four wheat exporters in any year, this caused prices 
to surge upward.

At the same time, massive flooding occurred in Australia, another significant 
wheat exporter, while excessive rains in the American Midwest and Canada 
damaged corn production. Freakishly massive flooding in Pakistan, which put 
some 20 percent of that country under water, also spooked markets and spurred 
on the speculators.

And that’s when those climate-driven prices began to soar in Egypt. The 
ensuing crisis, triggered in part by that rise in the price of our loaf of 
bread, led to upheaval and finally the fall of the country’s reigning 
autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia and Egypt helped trigger a crisis that led to 
an incipient civil war and then Western intervention in neighboring Libya, 
which meant most of that country’s production of 1.4 million barrels of oil a 
day went off-line. That, in turn, caused the price of crude oil to surge, at 
its height hitting $125 a barrel, which set off yet more speculation in food 
markets, further driving up grain prices.

And recent months haven’t brought much relief. Once again, significant, in 
some cases record, flooding has damaged crops in Canada, the United States 
and Australia. Meanwhile, an unexpected spring drought in northern Europe has 
hurt grain crops as well. The global food system is visibly straining, if not 
snapping, under the intense pressure of rising demand, rising energy prices, 
growing water shortages and, most of all, the onset of climate chaos.

And this, the experts tell us, is only the beginning. The price of our loaf 
of bread is forecast to increase by up to 90 percent over the next twenty 
years. That will mean yet more upheavals, more protest, greater desperation, 
heightened conflicts over water, increased migration, roiling ethnic and 
religious violence, banditry, civil war and (if past history is any judge) 
possibly a raft of new interventions by imperial and possibly regional powers.

And how are we responding to this gathering crisis? Has there been a broad 
new international initiative focused on ensuring food security for the global 
poor—that is to say, a stable, affordable price for our loaf of bread? You 
already know the sad answer to that question.

Instead, massive corporations like Glencore, the world’s largest commodity 
trading company, and the privately held and secretive Cargill, the world’s 
biggest trader of agricultural commodities, are moving to further consolidate 
their control of world grain markets and vertically integrate their global 
supply chains in a new form of food imperialism designed to profit off global 
misery. While bread triggered war and revolution in the Middle East, Glencore 
made windfall profits on the surge in grain prices. And the more expensive 
our loaf of bread becomes the more money firms like Glencore and Cargill 
stand to make. Consider that just about the worst possible form of 
“adaptation” to the climate crisis.

So what text should flash through our brains when reading our loaf of bread? 
A warning, obviously. But so far, it seems, a warning ignored.
Christian Parenti