Why More Food Is Not the Answer
t r u t h o u t | Environment Editor
With food riots across the globe in the news, the immediate cause of food shortages is simply this: grain prices have
doubled over the last year and poor people can no longer afford to buy enough food. There is no one single cause for the
price rise; it is a combination of supply and demand.
Steady population growth means there are about 70 million new mouths to feed every year, and increasing affluence is
also spurring more people to buy more meat. Meat is grain-intensive - it takes about seven pounds of grain to produce
one pound of beef. Biofuels are another new demand on grain stocks, and a potentially insatiable one. The grain used to
fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.
There is more than enough grain to feed every hungry human on the planet, but the poor cannot compete with wealthier
buyers of meat and biofuels. Markets are not interested in feeding hungry people - they want to make money, so from a
capitalist point of view, the only solution is to increase supply in the hope that it will drive prices down.
However, on the supply side, serious limiting factors are coming into play: dwindling water supplies and increased
drought exacerbated by climate change; increasingly degraded land and soils; the rising cost of energy used for
everything from water pumping to transport, and the growing cost of fertilizer and other inputs.
The world wants more food - a lot more food - but the planet will not be able to provide it. For this reason alone,
more food is not the answer - it cannot be the answer.
Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of the book "Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save
Civilization," says that while there have been food price spikes in the past, "This troubling situation is unlike any
the world has faced before."
Brown doesn't use the term, but it is likely that we have reached "peak food," the moment when world grain output has
achieved its maximum and we will have to work very hard to keep it from declining.
One of the top reasons to believe we have reached peak food is that we have apparently reached peak oil. In his book,
"Eating Fossil Fuels," Dale Allen Pfeiffer shows how utterly dependent modern agriculture is on fossil fuels, not just
for the machinery that plants and harvests, but for the energy to irrigate fields, and for fertilizers. About 30 percent
of farm energy goes to fertilizer, much of which is made from natural gas. Like oil, natural gas is becoming
increasingly expensive as production nears peak. Without oil, we might not drive cars, but without fertilizer, we might
not eat.
Food and fuel are intimately connected. Not only is fuel essential to produce food, but because food can substitute for
fuel, the price of food is now locked into the price of oil - a price that is going nowhere but up.
A Timely Report Shows the Way Forward
Globalization has promised to lift every person out of poverty by growing the economy so large that wealth will
eventually trickle down to all. But this is a false promise that ignores physical limits to planetary resources.
A groundbreaking United Nations report that presents a serious challenge to the promises of globalization and biotech
was released last week at a very timely moment. The IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Science and
Technology for Development) is directed by Robert Watson, a former director of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change), and it shares some similar features to the UN Climate assessment reports.
Most importantly, the IAASTD report says that agricultural systems cannot go on as they have. They are failing to feed
the poor, wrecking ecosystems, exacerbating global warming and are far too dependent on fossil fuels. Just as everything
about the way we produce and use energy must change in order to avoid climate catastrophe, so everything about the way
we produce and use food must change in order to avoid a humanitarian and ecological disaster.
Watson said, "If we do persist with business as usual, the world's people cannot be fed over the next half-century. It
will mean more environmental degradation, and the gap between the haves and have-nots will further widen. We have an
opportunity now to marshal our intellectual resources to avoid that sort of future. Otherwise, we face a world no one
would want to inhabit."
As with climate change, the solution to the food crisis will not be found in some miracle new technology. On the
contrary, the report identifies a need to reconsider many traditional crops and methods for maintaining soil fertility
and coping with drought. These traditional technologies need to be integrated with modern ones to achieve the best of
both worlds. Currently there is little support for this approach to crop science.
British economist Nicholas Stern called climate change the biggest market failure in history. The IAASTD report also
indicts markets with failing to eradicate hunger and poverty. Watson said, "The incentives for science to address the
issues that matter to the poor are weak ... the poorest developing countries are net losers under most trade
liberalization scenarios."
Agribusiness Reacts
The IAASTD study involved more than 400 authors and took four years to produce. However, not everyone stuck with the
process till the end. Representatives from the biotechnology industry walked out in protest, complaining that GM
(genetically modified) crops were being unfairly overlooked in favor of organic agriculture. The New Scientist (5 April
2008) presented a point counterpoint between participants Deborah Keith, a manager for Syngenta, one of the world's
largest biotech companies, and Janice Jiggins, a social scientist. Keith complained that the draft document was
unscientific and that "too often it treated fears and prejudices against technology and business as fact ..." Organic
agriculture was not subjected to the same scrutiny, she said.
Jiggins' account of the process noted that traditional farmers at the table "took deep offense at hearing technologies
... building on centuries-old traditions dismissed as 'anecdotal' and of no value."
At heart, the debate is over what is considered "scientific" agriculture. The discussion of biotechnology in the final
report summary peels the "anecdotal" label off traditional agriculture and slaps it back on genetic engineering, saying
that "assessment of modern biotechnology is lagging behind development; information can be anecdotal and contradictory
..."
Jiggens notes that, among other problems, "the capacity to monitor and regulate GM has failed to keep up."
In reaction to the IAASTD report, some commentators have leaped on the idea that people who are "afraid of science" are
irrationally keeping biotech and companies like Monsanto from saving the world.
Oxford professor Paul Collier, writing in The London Times, said that Europe and Japan are "befuddled by romanticism"
for subsidizing inefficient small farms. "The remedy to high food prices is to increase supply," he said, and the only
solution to the food crisis is more food produced by "unromantic industrialized agriculture."
He also said, "The most realistic way is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated
agro-companies that supply the world market. There are still many areas of the world - including large swaths of Africa
- that have good land that could be used far more productively if it were properly managed by large companies. To
contain the rise in food prices, we need more globalization, not less."
Brazil - Big Ag Set Up to Fail?
Taking a closer look at the Brazilian model shows why the IAASTD authors overwhelmingly rejected the big business model
as a way to sustainably feed the world.
Brazil's Mato Grosso region is the world's most active agricultural frontier. Satellite photos show the relentless push
of soybean monocultures and cattle grazing into the Amazon rainforest. Forest ecologist Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole
Research Center, says that soy agriculture in the Mato Grosso has "greased the skids" for deforestation of the Amazon.
The success of soy farming in Mato Grosso is based on two advantages: the region's abundant rainfall and the discovery
that heavy applications of fertilizer, especially lime and phosphorus, could impart impressive fertility to the tropical
soils. Both of these assets are likely to be short-lived.
First and foremost is the rain. Nepstad's research focus is drought in the Amazon. He has found that after only two
years of drought, trees begin to die and the forest fires start. Once a regular fire regime takes hold, a tipping point
is reached that rapidly converts rainforest to dry scrub. The consequence is not just losing the rainforest, but losing
the rain. Through a process called transpiration, trees in the Amazon seed the clouds that water the fields and pastures
of South America and the Caribbean. Researchers are finding that clouds and air currents that originate in the Amazon
can drive weather patterns as far away as the North Atlantic. As the forest evaporates, so does the rainfall.
The second factor, a reliance on heavy applications of fertilizer, is also bound to be a temporary phenomenon. Little
noted in the popular press, fertilizer prices have skyrocketed in recent months. Reuters reported on April 16 that
Chinese fertilizer importers have "agreed to pay more than triple what they did a year ago to reserve tight supplies of
potash, sending the shares of global fertilizer makers to record levels."
Phosphorus, like potash, is mostly produced by mining mineral deposits and there is a limit to global reserves - a
limit that we are rapidly approaching. Patrick Dery and Bart Anderson looked at phosphorus production data in a report
for Energy Bulletin titled "Peak Phosphorus." They concluded that the world has passed the peak of phosphorus production and is already in decline.
"In some ways," say Dery and Anderson, "the problem of peak phosphorus is more difficult than peak oil. Energy sources
other than oil are available..." But, they point out, "Unlike fossil fuels, phosphorus can be recycled. However if we
waste phosphorus, we cannot replace it [with] any other source."
The main way to recycle phosphorus is to reclaim it from sewage and animal waste. The need to do this will bring us
full circle from modern high-tech agriculture back to traditional practices that used animal manure and human "night
soil." Researchers in Sweden and Australia are already working on a new toilet design that would siphon off human urine
to use as a source of phosphate. It would be stored in tanks for supply to farmers.
What will happen to the farms of Mato Grosso when the price of phosphorus doubles, quadruples, and then doubles again?
For that matter, what will happen to the fields of Iowa?
Brazil and the New Agriculture
It is the specter of resource limits that has led the authors of the IAASTD study to recommend that traditional
practices be studied and adopted where they make sense. One of the most promising traditional practices that is now
being studied at Cornell and other major agricultural research institutions has its origins in Brazil.
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been on the defensive for his government's role in deforesting the
Amazon. Most recently, critics have attacked Brazilian agriculture for diverting capacity from food to biofuels. Lula
has countered the criticism by insisting that Brazil will expand its agriculture without further encroachments on the
Amazon. One of the best ways to do that, and conserve scarce fertilizers like phosphorus at the same time, might be to
adopt a practice used by an ancient civilization that occupied the Amazon before Columbus.
The practice is called terra preta, Portuguese for "dark earth." These dark earths are highly fertile soils that were
created by burying charcoal along with manure and other organic wastes. Charcoal is a porous material that is very good
at holding nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus and making them available to plant roots. It also aerates soil and
helps it to retain water.
Some terra preta fields are thousands of years old, and yet they are still so fertile that they are dug up and sold as
potting soil in Brazilian markets.
Because making charcoal from biomass releases energy, researchers today are looking at integrated biomass energy and
food production systems using "biochar" - the modern term for terra preta. For more details on these efforts, see my
report for Truthout on the first biochar conference in 2007. There is also a good account of the terra preta in Charles C. Mann's book, "1491: New Revelations of the
Americas Before Columbus."
Biochar may be the answer that Lula is looking for. Biochar could be a great gift from Brazil to the rest of the world.
Charles C. Mann notes that "it might improve the expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa - a final gift
from the peoples who brought us tomatoes, maize, manioc, and a thousand different ways of being human."
Biochar is just one of the traditional agricultural practices that a world running out of fossil fuels and cheap
fertilizer may be very grateful to rediscover in the coming years. The IAASTD report, if acted upon quickly, could
jumpstart this research.
Roadmap Needed
The IAASTD report does not go so far as to provide a road map or an action plan, but the various private-public
partnerships that are working to implement its goals are already finding it useful.
Inter Press Service reports that a delegate from Costa Rica said "These documents are like a bible with which to negotiate with various
institutions in my country and transform agriculture."
Benny Haerlin, the representative from Greenpeace, sees the document as a blazing signpost, lighting the way. He said:
"This marks the beginning of a new, of a real Green Revolution. The modern way of farming is biodiverse and labor
intensive and works with nature, not against it."
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Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor. Trained as a mechanical engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection
activist, then returned to engineering as a technical writer for the solar power industry. She is the author of "Primal Tears," an eco-thriller about a hybrid human-bonobo girl. Greg Bear, author of "Darwin's Radio," says: "'Primal Tears' is
primal storytelling, thoughtful and passionate. Kelpie Wilson wonderfully expands our definitions of human and family.
Read Leslie Thatcher's review of Kelpie Wilson's novel "Primal Tears."