Producing biofuels today is a crime against humanity.’ So said the United Nations special rapporteur for the right to food, Jean Ziegler, on a German radio show this week. His comments have been widely echoed in recent days. Growing crops to produce fuel does indeed look like a bad idea at present, especially when prices of basic food commodities have shot up in recent months. Yet narrowly focusing on one aspect of agriculture misses the point about the wider problems within global development. Biofuels have become a scapegoat for those who cannot face having a serious debate about development, agriculture and progress today.
The idea behind ‘biofuel’ is that by growing crops that absorb carbon and then burning them to produce energy, the net effect will be to cycle carbon in and out of the atmosphere rather than releasing carbon that is currently locked up in the ground as oil, coal or gas. However, the business of producing biofuel itself - growing and harvesting food, transporting it, processing it and delivering the final fuel product - also uses up energy. Thus, biofuels are not as carbon-neutral as they first appear.
Moreover, if the expansion of agricultural land to produce such fuels requires the flattening of forest land, the carbon-capturing effect of the trees will be lost and considerable greenhouse gases will be produced as the timber is used or as it rots. (There are other ways of producing biofuel, like purifying waste vegetable oil, but these are only available in much smaller quantities.)
Therefore, with the current level of technology, biofuels make little sense for their main stated purpose: reducing carbon emissions. This is even more true of the kinds of crops being subsidised for this purpose in the USA. Corn, the main crop used to generate ethanol for fuel purposes in America, is far less efficient for biofuel than the sugar cane produced in other countries, most notably Brazil. It is clear that the Bush administration, which has been at the forefront of promoting biofuels since 2005, has been more concerned with finding a justification for agricultural subsidies and addressing the problem of energy security than with a rational use of crops. That matters because the US is the world’s dominant exporter of corn, providing considerably more than the rest of the world put together.
However, governments in Europe are just as culpable as the Bush administration. They have promoted biofuels as an important plank of their climate change policies, in particular the target to produce 20 per cent of energy from ‘renewable sources’ by 2020. In the UK from today, the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation will require that petrol and diesel must contain 2.5 per cent biofuel. The aim is to increase this proportion over time to 10 per cent. However, this target is now being called into question by the latest food price rises.
Robert Bailey, a policy adviser for the development charity Oxfam, told Bloomberg News: ‘The sorts of problems that biofuels are causing are irreversible. If rainforest gets chopped down, it’s gone forever. If somebody loses access to food, they become malnourished, their physical and mental development is impaired and they may die.’ (2) This is not the fluffy, warm glow of ethical approval that governments were hoping for when they invested in biofuels.
However, if biofuels take the blame for the current crisis, the most important factors will go unaddressed. Perversely, food shortages are going hand-in-hand with record harvests. Food production continues to increase. How can we have a food crisis when there is so much food being produced?
Environmentalists would argue that there are too many people, eating too much meat. World population in 2007 was estimated to be 6.6billion and to be growing at a rate of 1.17 per cent per annum. However, world grain production - vital both directly as food and as feed for animals - has stuttered in recent years, although 2007 saw record output. Moreover, calorie consumption per capita has risen steadily (3).
This is where the meat issue comes into play. One kilogramme of meat requires seven kilos of animal feed (where the animals do not live off pasture). As meat consumption has risen in the developing world, so demand for grain has risen. This seems like a no-brainer. Because we’re all eating meat, we are effectively stealing grain from the mouths of the poorest people and using it to fatten animals for our consumption. We clearly need to curb the rise in population and stop eating so much meat, or millions of people will starve, right?
Wrong. The decline in grain production per person has coincided with a vast retirement of land from agricultural production. From 1981 to 2000, the area of land devoted to grain fell from 732million hectares to 656million hectares (4). This was mainly due to oversupply, alongside environmental policies. For example, farmers in Europe and America are increasingly paid not to grow food but to ‘steward’ the land instead - in other words, to provide a wildlife sanctuary and keep pastures green - in keeping with a romantic view of the countryside.
If production in the developed world has been too efficient in comparison to food prices, the developing world still suffers from low productivity. As a professor of agriculture noted in a letter to The Economist this week: ‘In Africa, South Asia and Central America most small farmers consume more food than they produce. A majority are net food-buyers who make ends meet by working off-farm, and they suffer along with the urban poor and landless rural folk when food prices rise… The root challenge is to improve the low productivity of 1.5 billion small farmers in the developing world.’ (5)
Or to put the debate about food prices another way: how did the rest of the world get so dependent on American exports that a policy change in Washington, like that over biofuel, could have such a big effect? As a report for the Worldwatch Institute notes, ‘output per person varies dramatically by region. For instance, it stands at roughly 1,230 kilograms per year in the United States, most of which is fed to livestock, compared with 325 kilograms in China and just 90 kilograms in Zimbabwe.’ How can we raise productivity globally to match that in the US?
The solution is to apply the best techniques from the developed world to the developing world: mechanisation, farm specialisation, chemical inputs like fertilisers and pesticides, selecting better varieties of crop - including genetically modified (GM) crops - and so on.
Unfortunately, these are just the kind of things which development organisations and environmental campaigners have been arguing against. Instead, we are assured that the developing world should get by on ‘appropriate technology’ like treadle pumps and simple ploughs. Poor farmers really do ‘live the dream’ of organic farming by default - they can’t afford to do anything else. The result is low output, endless poverty, and financial insecurity.
Thus, rising food prices tell us a lot more about the perversity of environmental and agricultural policy than about our alleged incapacity to produce enough food. Yet instead of addressing these real barriers to the global development of food for all, officials and commentators obsess over the terrible ‘crime’ of biofuels, and, even worse, use the opportunity of the food price crisis to bang their personal prejudicial drum - whether by calling for a return to more labour intensive, local, organic farming in the developing world or for a reduction in population growth so that there aren’t so many ‘mouths to feed’. Well, that is one quickfire way to solve the ‘food crisis’: rein in demand by reducing the number of hungry black babies being born. In place of a serious debate about the food price crisis, we have apocalyptic porn about overpopulation, future war and mass starvation.
There have always been food shortages around the world. Crop failures have occurred because of wars, bad weather and blight. Yet only occasionally do these make much of an impact on the public imagination in the West. The development of a world market for food has at least allowed for greater security so that reasonably cheap food has been available even when local food production has been down. In fact, it is the relatively small size of this market which means that comparatively minor changes - like the diversion of food to fuel - can have a disproportionate impact on prices. So what we need, in the short term at least, is to develop the world market further - and that will require greater development and wider access to richer markets more generally for countries that are currently poor.
Yet such an outlook, which emphasises the capacity to adapt and develop and calls for the world to work together to resolve its problems, is absent in much of the discussion of the food price crisis. Instead, we are inundated with dire warnings about human greed (that is, people aspiring to a Western standard of living) destroying the planet, and about food and water insecurity leading to disruption and conflict. Or we are offered apocalyptic visions of a world in which there are too many gobs to fill with food, with the threat of a terrible natural ‘correction’ to come if we don’t clamp down on reproduction now. If we pursue environmentalist ideas - that is, if we put a frantic concern about producing carbon over and above the aim of producing calories - we may be in danger of fulfilling these prophecies.
In essence, both biofuels and the current food price crisis are a product of the inhumane politics of environmentalism. Biofuels spring not only from the Bush administration’s cynical attempt to justify agriculture subsidies, or from European ministers’ desperate desire to switch in part from fossil fuel useage to renewable fuel sources; more fundamentally, biofuels are built on the mainstream, widely-consensual idea that curbing carbon emissions should be the driving force of human endeavour today. Likewise, one of the contributing factors to the food price crisis is the retirement of farming land for environmentalist purposes, as well as, of course, the biofuels debacle. This is what happens when we put cutting carbon over meeting people’s needs and desires, when we literally put the ‘earth first’ instead of the people who inhabit it. Human welfare should be at the centre of all political and international decision-making - and the greatest barrier to giving human welfare its proper place today is the rise and rise of apocalyptic green thinking.
one of the biggest problem with organic farming is that it is more labor intensive, produces less per acre, and the yield is usually less visibly attractive and the indivudual units are usually smaller. Those are the reasons it cost more.
So its just a basic function of efficiency.
And something totally different, once in grade school our teacher had us make a all natural bug repellant for pea plants we grew in class. and like three days later they died, it was hillarious.
I went to the food store yesterday and there were shelves filled with food. manufactured food scarcity
That is true for us right now, I am not worried by these reports but I do feel sorry for the people of Haiti.
When our stores are empty they will report they are fuller than they have ever been.
Propaganda blows one way and that is backwards.
I walked by a TV today only to hear a BBC report talking about how vitamins kill people
The implementation of Codex Alimentarius is really fuching moving faster than I thought it would.
Wed Apr 16, 2008 3:43 pm
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madthumbs
Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8249 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
If Ethanol was a viable alternative, it would not require subsidizing. There are government grants for building your own distiller. Farmers already have most of the raw materials needed for alcohol production and could run their farm equipment off it. They could also sell the excess. The by-product of making alcohol is fertilizer. The by-product of growing corn (stalks) can be used to make alcohol (growing food specifically for alcohol is NOT necessary).
When it comes to people starving, well that reminds me of a fuel company that owned a convenience store. They'd over charge themselves for fuel and use the losses to make the very low pay for the workers seem fair. The people that would be starving are already oppressed to begin with. Also, prices should be based on cost of production, not competition.
The amount of alcohol consumed by Scottish people on the weekend could power every car in the world for 50 Million years
Well that may not be 100 accurate it does make a point, if people put the social mind control drug into there cars they would start to make sense of everything around them.
BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 21, 2008
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing. Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.
At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.
"Where's the rice?" an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. "You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous."
The bustling store in the heart of Silicon Valley usually sells four or five varieties of rice to a clientele largely of Asian immigrants, but only about half a pallet of Indian-grown Basmati rice was left in stock. A 20-pound bag was selling for $15.99.
"You can't eat this every day. It's too heavy," a health care executive from Palo Alto, Sharad Patel, grumbled as his son loaded two sacks of the Basmati into a shopping cart. "We only need one bag but I'm getting two in case a neighbor or a friend needs it," the elder man said.
The Patels seemed headed for disappointment, as most Costco members were being allowed to buy only one bag. Moments earlier, a clerk dropped two sacks back on the stack after taking them from another customer who tried to exceed the one-bag cap.
"Due to the limited availability of rice, we are limiting rice purchases based on your prior purchasing history," a sign above the dwindling supply said.
Shoppers said the limits had been in place for a few days, and that rice supplies had been spotty for a few weeks. A store manager referred questions to officials at Costco headquarters near Seattle, who did not return calls or e-mail messages yesterday.
An employee at the Costco store in Queens said there were no restrictions on rice buying, but limits were being imposed on purchases of oil and flour. Internet postings attributed some of the shortage at the retail level to bakery owners who flocked to warehouse stores when the price of flour from commercial suppliers doubled.
The curbs and shortages are being tracked with concern by survivalists who view the phenomenon as a harbinger of more serious trouble to come.
"It's sporadic. It's not every store, but it's becoming more commonplace," the editor of SurvivalBlog.com, James Rawles, said. "The number of reports I've been getting from readers who have seen signs posted with limits has increased almost exponentially, I'd say in the last three to five weeks."
Spiking food prices have led to riots in recent weeks in Haiti, Indonesia, and several African nations. India recently banned export of all but the highest quality rice, and Vietnam blocked the signing of a new contract for foreign rice sales.
"I'm surprised the Bush administration hasn't slapped export controls on wheat," Mr. Rawles said. "The Asian countries are here buying every kind of wheat." Mr. Rawles said it is hard to know how much of the shortages are due to lagging supply and how much is caused by consumers hedging against future price hikes or a total lack of product.
"There have been so many stories about worldwide shortages that it encourages people to stock up. What most people don't realize is that supply chains have changed, so inventories are very short," Mr. Rawles, a former Army intelligence officer, said. "Even if people increased their purchasing by 20%, all the store shelves would be wiped out."
At the moment, large chain retailers seem more prone to shortages and limits than do smaller chains and mom-and-pop stores, perhaps because store managers at the larger companies have less discretion to increase prices locally. Mr. Rawles said the spot shortages seemed to be most frequent in the Northeast and all the way along the West Coast. He said he had heard reports of buying limits at Sam's Club warehouses, which are owned by Wal-Mart Stores, but a spokesman for the company, Kory Lundberg, said he was not aware of any shortages or limits.
An anonymous high-tech professional writing on an investment Web site, Seeking Alpha, said he recently bought 10 50-pound bags of rice at Costco. "I am concerned that when the news of rice shortage spreads, there will be panic buying and the shelves will be empty in no time. I do not intend to cause a panic, and I am not speculating on rice to make profit. I am just hoarding some for my own consumption," he wrote.
For now, rice is available at Asian markets in California, though consumers have fewer choices when buying the largest bags. "At our neighborhood store, it's very expensive, more than $30" for a 25-pound bag, a housewife from Mountain View, Theresa Esquerra, said. "I'm not going to pay $30. Maybe we'll just eat bread."
The Hidden Battle to Control the World’s Food Supply
The Hidden Battle to Control the World’s Food Supply
Monday, April 21st, 2008
Quote:
By Amy Goodman |
Food riots are breaking out across the planet. We must re-examine corporate control of the food supply.
The rise in global food prices has sparked a number of protests in recent weeks, highlighting the worsening epidemic of global hunger. The World Bank estimates world food prices have risen 80 percent over the last three years and that at least thirty-three countries face social unrest as a result. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned the growing global food crisis has reached emergency proportions.
In recent weeks, food riots have also erupted in Haiti, Niger, Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. Protests have also flared in Morocco, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Mexico and Yemen. In most of West Africa, the price of food has risen by 50 percent — in Sierra Leone, 300 percent. The World Food Program has issued a rare $500 million emergency appeal to deal with the growing crisis.
Several causes factor into the global food price hike, many linked to human activity. These include human-driven climate change, the soaring cost of oil and a Western-led focus on biofuels that critics say turns food into fuel.
Raj Patel is a writer, activist and former policy analyst with Food First, which is based in the Bay Area. He has worked for the World Bank, World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and he’s also protested them on four continents. He has just come out with a new book called Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He recently joined me in San Francisco to talk about the book and the food-price crisis.
Raj Patel: There are two kinds of stories that we can tell about the food prices. One is an economic story, and that’s a story about a perfect storm of poor harvests and a demand for meat in developing countries, which is diverting grain, and the high price of oil, which is driving up food — farm inputs, and at the same time, the biofuels boom, the process of growing fuels in order — sorry, growing food in order to burn it rather than eat it. All of these are economic factors that are driving up the price of food.
But at the same time, there’s a political story here, and it’s a longer-term political story about how countries have been forced to abandon their support for farmers and to abandon things like grain supplies and grain stores. And this is a longer-term story, and it involves organizations like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization that have a fairly iron control over the economies of most of the poorest countries in the world. And what the World Bank and what the WTO and, to some extent, the International Monetary Fund have done is force these countries to tie their hands behind their back, effectively, and to bind them very firmly to an international economy in food. And the consequence of that is that when the price of food goes up, these economies have very little recourse and very little possibility of defending themselves economically.
Amy Goodman: Raj, you worked at these institutions that you’re now critiquing. You worked at the World Bank. You worked at the World Trade Organization. How much contact do you have with people at the other end — for example, the people who are now rising up all over the world, the most destitute?
Well, I mean, I certainly don’t have any contact with anyone at the World Bank or the World Trade Organization. I was there when I was doing my doctoral work. I did some research for the World Bank. It was a disaster. And I interned at the World Trade Organization just to find out what it was like.
But my allegiances are and always have been with the people on the streets. And I’m working right now with shack dwellers in Durban in South Africa. But also I’m connected to groups of peasants and of landless people around the world by occasionally doing some research for Via Campesina, the international peasant movement, that by some estimates has over 100 million members. So I’m definitely more connected and more supportive of their efforts to develop a more positive and more genuine food democracy.
In your work there, even as a researcher, what was — how much understanding did people who work there have of what was going on and what their institutions were doing?
I mean, to some extent, there’s a lot of creative denial about the suffering that these organizations cause. I mean, certainly within the World Bank, when I worked there, there was a banner, sort of five stories high, as you enter into the World Bank building, with a beautiful African child on it and beneath it the slogan, “Our dream is a world free of poverty.” And certainly, there’s a sort of myth-making enterprise within the World Bank that everything they were doing was for the benefit of the poor, whether the poor liked it or not. So I certainly think that there’s a sense that when things are tough, it’s tough love that comes from the World Bank.
But I don’t think that they’re terribly connected to the movements of poor people around the world, who are very articulately saying that what the World Bank is doing is actively destructive. And that’s, in fact, one of the reasons that Via Campesina, the international peasant movement, started, was because the World Bank was introducing agricultural policy throughout the developing world, but they were doing it without any reference to the farmers’ movements that existed or the movement of landless people that existed. And those movements got together to fight back against the World Bank. And they continue to fight back against the World Bank, and the World Bank has very little, if any, contact with them at all.
Raj, talk about coffee.
The price of coffee is absolutely a function of the way the food system works today. If you look at the path that coffee takes from the field to our cups, you will see that the farmers get paid a pittance. The processors get paid a little bit more, sort of twenty, thirty cents a kilo. The grain exporters get paid a little bit more, sort of fifty, sixty cents a kilo. But by the time it gets processed and turned into instant coffee, it’s nearer $30 a kilo. And the people who make the most money out of that process are the coffee processors, the big international coffee traders, companies like Nestle, for example. And that’s indicative of the way the food system works in general.
I mean, if you imagine a sort of hourglass, at the top there are the millions of farmers who grow the food that we eat, and at the bottom there are billions of us consumers, and in the middle there are just a handful of corporations that mediate between the people who grow our food and us. And those corporations, in many cases — it’s usually four corporations controlling more than 50 percent of the market. I mean, in tea, for example, one company, Unilever, controls 90 percent of the market.
Now, when you’re in that position of market power, you’re able to do a great deal. First, you’re able to drive prices down for farmers. And of course the irony there is that farmers and farm workers are the poorest people on the planet. So you’re paying the poorest people on the planet the least. And then you’re processing the food so that what we end up with is food that is rich in salts and fats and sugars, food that tends to make us want to buy more, food that makes us obese. And that’s why you’re having a situation where there are six billion people in the world, a billion of whom are now overweight.
Explain that further, that connection that you actually start your book with. A billion people overweight, 800 million people who are starving, who are hungry, who are not fed enough — explain the connection.
Well, I mean, in the past, it used to be that the people who were overweight were rich — excuse me — and the people who were hungry were poor. Today, hunger and obesity are both signs that people are unable to control their diets. They’re unable to control, not in a sort of willpower way, but unable to control in terms of being able to access fresh fruits and vegetables, access food that is healthy. I mean, in the United States, for example, it’s much harder for communities of poor people and people of color, in particular, to access fresh fruits and vegetables. In West Oakland, for example, near where I live, you have a situation where there’s just one supermarket in West Oakland and dozens and dozens of liquor stores where there are no fresh fruits and vegetables, but there are these highly processed industrial foods. Now, that’s a sign that in fact — I mean, it would be wonderful for all of us to be able to access these fresh fruits and vegetables, but at the moment, particularly for people on low incomes, that’s pretty tough to do. And so, the environments in which poor people find themselves and which are being built around poor people are more conducive to being overweight and to be unhealthy in the cities, and for poor people in the fields, those kinds of prices that come from the industrial food system are driving them out of business.
Soy. Can you talk about soy?
Soy is the ingredient — I mean, it’s weird. It’s the perfect crop in so many ways. It’s rich in proteins. It’s great for the soil. It’s really robust. But because the way that we grow soy is through industrial agriculture and monoculture, that process of growing it takes these biological virtues and turns them into social ills. Soy is now in three-quarters of everything — of processed foods on the supermarket shelves and in almost everything that the fast-food industry brings us. Now, soy is — and it’s in these foods because it’s very flexible. It can be used as a vegetable oil. It can be used as an emulsifier. It can be used as an additive in meat, for example.
But the trouble is, of course, that a lot of the soy that’s grown in the world comes from Brazil. Brazil is, by some measures, the world’s largest soy exporter. And those soy plantations have been encroaching on the Brazilian cerrado and also on the rainforest. Soy farmers are going into the rainforest, chopping it down and growing soy. And worse yet, Brazil is home to, according to the International Labour Organization, home to 50,000 slaves, slaves who work on soy plantations, and also the majority work in biofuels plantations and sugarcane plantations. And it’s through the exploitation of these people that we’re able to have cheap meat, that we’re able to have these sort of food additives that shave a couple of cents off the price of our food. So, yeah, I mean, that — soy becomes emblematic of everything that’s wrong about the way we produce food and offers hope about the way we might reconnect to food in a different way.
Raj, can you talk about the corporations that have so much control over the food supply? Give us a history from, oh, United Fruit to, well, Duane Andreas’s company, Archer Daniels Midland, that sponsors so much of the media that we watch today.
Yes. I mean, of course, the history of industrial capitalism and food is very long indeed. I mean, the East India Company, for example, the British East India Company was responsible for driving the colonization of India and of the subsequent imposition of markets in food.
But in the twentieth century, the poster child for corporate malfeasance is the United Fruit company. The United Fruit Company controlled vast swathes of Central America, and it’s for their control of that part of the world for growing bananas that we have the term “banana republic.” And “banana republic” is a sort of abject case of blaming the victim. These banana republics existed because the tin-pot dictators who ran them were in the thrall and responsible to the United Fruit Company, rather than actually to the people over whom they ruled. Now, the United Fruit Company found itself in Guatemala, where a democratically elected president wanted to institute just a basic fair system of taxation. And so, he wanted — this was Jacobo Guzman, I believe, who wanted to tax the land at a fair market value. Now, rather than allow that, the United Fruit Company called its friends in the CIA, who instigated a coup. And as a result of that coup, there was a bloody civil war for forty years; 200,000 people died; and also, we could have cheap bananas. Now, that kind of utter manipulation of international economies is something that isn’t just happening in the global south; it’s happening right here in the United States.
Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, based here in the Bay Area.
Its possible that because Americans are being told to eat less food for health purposes the profit have dropped from these massive corporations? Maybe this situation is revenge and a way to maintain profits.
I can see the days of Soylent Green coming to a Super Market near you
Mon Apr 21, 2008 2:21 pm
postcardsfrompalestine VIP
Joined: 05 Sep 2006 Posts: 1737 Location: It means good luck - a chinese symbol
?
ShadowWorks wrote:
Its possible that because Americans are being told to eat less food for health purposes the profit have dropped from these massive corporations? Maybe this situation is revenge and a way to maintain profits.
I can see the days of Soylent Green coming to a Super Market near you
Do Americans eat food? Last time I checked, they were eating plastic food.
Mon Apr 21, 2008 5:36 pm
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madthumbs
Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8249 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
Re: ?
postcardsfrompalestine wrote:
Do Americans eat food? Last time I checked, they were eating plastic food.
We're blaming our health care system instead of what we eat, though it's a combination of both.
Mon Apr 21, 2008 8:50 pm
postcardsfrompalestine VIP
Joined: 05 Sep 2006 Posts: 1737 Location: It means good luck - a chinese symbol
Re: ?
madthumbs wrote:
postcardsfrompalestine wrote:
Do Americans eat food? Last time I checked, they were eating plastic food.
We're blaming our health care system instead of what we eat, though it's a combination of both.
