One-Third of World's Food Goes to Waste - UN

Reposted in full from The Guardian, 12 May 2011

'One-third of the world's food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year, according to a study (pdf) released on Wednesday by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Roughly 1.3bn tonnes of food is either lost or wasted globally due to inefficiencies throughout the food supply chain, says the report, based on research by the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology (Sik). Amid rising global food prices, the study says that reducing food losses in developing countries could have an "immediate and significant" impact on livelihoods and food security in some of the world's poorest countries.

According to the report, industrialised and developing countries waste or lose roughly the same amount of food each year – 670m and 630m tonnes respectively. But while rich countries waste food primarily at the level of the consumer, the main issue for developing countries is food lost due to weak infrastructure – including poor storage, processing and packaging facilities that lack the capacity to keep produce fresh. Food losses mean lost income for small farmers and higher prices for poor consumers in developing countries, says the study.

The average European or North American consumer wastes 95kg-115kg of food a year, above all fruits and vegetables. In contrast, the average consumer in sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia or south-east Asia wastes only 6kg-11kg. The study notes that in developing countries poverty and limited incomes make it unacceptable to waste food, and that poor consumers in low-income countries generally buy smaller amounts of food at a time.

Food wasted by consumers in rich countries (222m tonnes) is roughly equal to the entire food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230m tonnes).

Looking for solutions, the report argues that reducing reliance on retailers such as big supermarkets could help cut food waste in the north, and suggests promoting the direct sale of farm produce to consumers. It also encourages retailers and charities to work together, to distribute unsold but perfectly edible food that would otherwise go to waste.

For developing countries, the study says the key lies in strengthening food supply chains, urging investment in infrastructure and transportation, along with increased attention to food storage, processing and packaging.

While world food prices fell slightly in March this year – after eight months of successive increases – the overall cost of food in April was 36% higher than it was last year. Prices of wheat, maize and soya reached levels last seen in 2008, when a global food crisis sparked food riots across the developing world. Last month, the World Bank said that rising food prices had pushed 44 million more people into extreme poverty, and the World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, added that an additional 10 million people could soon fall below the $1.25 a day extreme poverty line unless immediate action was taken to increase the supply of food.

But the FAO-backed report says: "Food production must clearly increase significantly to meet the future demands of an increasing and more affluent world population … In a world with limited natural resources (land, water, energy, fertiliser), and where cost-effective solutions are to be found to produce enough safe and nutritious food for all, reducing food losses should not be a forgotten priority."'

How ‘Homo-Economicus’ Destabilises Our Food Web

Reposted in full from Smart Planet, 25 April 2011

'Jennifer Dunne, professor at the Santa Fe Institute, is working on the first-ever effort to quantify where humans fit into the food webs in our ecosystem. Dunne, co-director for Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology (PEaCE) Lab, says our over-fishing of blue fin tuna is a good example of how humans are changing the natural cycles of our food web. It’s obviously bad for the tuna, but what most of us don’t realize is how it might destabilize the entire ecosystem.

How does a food web differ from a food chain?

Food webs reflect the complexity of all the relationships among organisms. The simple way to think about it is a bunch of food chains that are stuck together. You can take a typical food chain and interconnect it with another food chain, and another, and you end up getting a more complex network.

Why is it important to look at it this way?

Everyone learns about food chains in elementary school, and it usually doesn’t go any further than that. We all understand the idea of networks, and this is just an example of an ecological network. Looking at this helps us understand what happens when a species goes extinct or if there’s climate change or a change in the habitat. The food web gives us a more complex view.

Can you walk me through an example?

Let’s talk about wolves in Yellowstone. Before humans decided to hunt wolves to extinction, they preyed on a bunch of different species. But then they went extinct, and the things they preyed on – like deer and elk – their populations exploded. And that impacted all the vegetation they fed on. So you end up affecting the plant community in a variety of ways in terms of the plants that elk or deer would feed on. Those plant populations would go down, and the population of the competing plants would go up. So now, wolves are in the system and are feeding on elk and other things, and that affects the plants and animals like coyotes and bears who also feed on elk and deer.

So basically, one simple chain of links doesn’t really get you the full complexity when you reintroduce wolves in Yellowstone. Grizzlies now compete with wolves for at least some of what they eat — elk. And in some cases, the grizzlies are out-competed by wolves in foraging for elk. Again, you continue to get these ripple effects up and down the food web.

If you’re reintroducing a wolf, or reintroducing a species for pest control , you can quickly end up in a situation you didn’t expect because you had too simple a picture in your mind. We see that a lot — you think you’re going to introduce a predator of a bug we don’t like, but at the same time it’ll take out beneficial insects like pollinators.

So it’s important that conservation managers take a look at the bigger picture.

A lot of them have focused on tiny pieces of the system. In fishery systems, we have competition for the fish we like to eat, like seals or sea lions. So some fishery scientists in earlier years have called for killing or removing seals or sea lions, thinking that if we get rid of them there will be more of the fish we want to harvest. Network models show that about half the time the abundances would go up, but the other half, the abundances would go down. That’s because all these fish are not just linked to humans or sea lions. There are all these many different indirect paths and interactions throughout the network.

This is why a network approach in ecology provides a quantitative framework where we can begin to analyze and try to understand more systematically all the effects of us monkeying with the system, and we can avoid the bad unintended consequences.

From the time we were hunter-gatherers, what are some general trends in how humans are affecting the food web?

I’m involved in this study with the Sanak Aleut people in Alaska. It’s the first time that scientists have taken this ecological network approach and plugged humans into the complex ecosystem as predators. We’re talking about humans in the Aleutian Islands over the last 6,000 years , who lived closely tied to the ecosystem. One of the things we wanted to see is are humans just like other predators, or do they play special roles. It turns out humans do play special roles – they are more general eaters; they are eating more types of food than any other predator in the system. So humans are super-generalists and also super-omnivores.

They’re feeding on everything from algae all the way up to higher predators like sea otters, and everything in between — clams, fish, marine mammals. So when you do a quantitative analysis, they’re more strongly omnivorous than any other species is. They play special roles in how they fit into this network. Yet we know they were living on these islands continuously without crashing it. They don’t seem to have driven other species out of existence. So the humans lived as part of this ecosystem for thousands of years.

We use this model in order to understand the conditions by which a species could stabilize the system — either be part of the system without causing other species to go extinct, or destabilize the system. If a species that feeds on many different things enters the system, as long as it’s foraging for just a few of the species it eats, that’s very stabilizing.

What we know from previous modeling is that generalists fit into a system fine as long as they do this switching behavior. If they focus on just one species, its abundances will go down, and it will be harder for the predator to find and capture the species. So it will naturally switch to another prey because they can’t get their preferred thing anymore. So this is what generalist predators do — it’s good for the predators and releases pressure on the prey periodically. You get this cycling, with a predator feeding on something, switching to something else, and then the first prey item starts to recover. That’s very well documented. They’re constantly switching between habitats, between freshwater and terrestrial . This is what non-human generalist predators do.

So in our commercial food industry, are we messing up this natural cycle?

Here’s my take on commercial fisheries. Modern humans are homo-economicus, or humans in an economic system. Think about what happens in a blue fin tuna fishery: They’re becoming increasingly rare, because we are hunting them to extension.

We’re not talking about hunter-gatherers; we’re talking about people motivated by the global sushi industry. So even though they are harder and harder to catch, their value is increasing. With hunter-gatherers, as abundance goes down, the value decreases. In this case, the more rare they become, the more valuable they become. So instead of the system causing the predators to fish something else, it’s increasing the rate of the fishing because they’re trying to get those last few blue fin tuna. It’s obvious it’s bad for the tuna. But what people don’t really understand is that it could be destabilizing for the system – not just for the blue fin tuna but for those organisms that are indirectly connected to the tuna.

So instead of decreasing the rate on low abundance, you are increasing it and making it potentially unstable. We’re just modeling it now for the potential impact of these economically driven activities that introduce an unnatural dynamic to the system. If we fish blue fin tuna to extension, it could have a ripple effect.

A lot of fisheries around he world have failed because fishery managers have thought much too narrowly. There’s a new emphasis to do ecosystem management and to think about the whole system. People are pushing it very much in the context of fishery management. There’s many stakeholders — local fisherman, commercial fisherman, sport fishermen, scientists, managers, policy makers. Getting them all at the table and getting them to agree on a good way forward is difficult. I’m interested in how we can take things from basic science research and how to translate them to management practices.

Tell me about some of your other research areas.

One of the things I’m most excited about is working with paleo-biologists to try to understand food webs from ancient ecosystems — hundreds of millions of years ago, like a dinosaur food web. There’s a lot of evidence in the fossil records from these ecosystems to show what they ate, who ate them. The reason that’s important is that understanding ancient ecosystems gives us a context to understand current ecosystems. We can start to understand whether ancient systems were organized similarly to modern ecosystems. It gives us a baseline, so if we see a change in the fundamental organization of an ecosystem, that’s radical. It gives us a way to understand the severity of changes and to understand big macro-evolutionary patterns. Plus, working with the paleo-biologists is really fun.'

The New Geopolitics of Food

Reposted in full from Foreign Policy, May/June 2011

'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.'

Jamie Oliver - Why I Was Banned From Los Angeles Schools

Sourced from The Daily Show, 7 April 2011

Jamie's last point: 'They don't want me washing their dirty laundry in public...but when its public money and your taxes pay for it, then maybe transparency is quite a good thing in a democracy...' cue huge cheers of support from the audience.

Can the Market Really Provide Food Security?

Reposted in full from Online Opinion, 20 May 2011

'Victoria now has a Minister for Food Security – part of the portfolio of Nationals MP Peter Walsh – and the Federal coalition too has rebranded its shadow minister Minister for Agriculture and Food Security. The conservative side of Australian politics thinks there's something compelling and politically useful in this notion of food security, and I'm sure they are right. It is a notion that over the last 3 years has burst into the Australian media landscape like the powdery mildew on Mildura's grape crops last summer. "Food security" was mentioned in a total of 177 articles in The Age, The Herald Sun and The Weekly Times in 2010 – a new record topping the 111 articles in 2009 and the 127 in 2008, and a nine-fold increase on the average of 19 articles per year for the 10 years up to 2007.

Whence this new interest in the security of our food supply? There is no doubt that Australians share with others around the world a heightened awareness of the constraints facing world food production: limited resources of land, water, energy and nutrients; growing demand due to growing population and dietary changes; competition over production resources between food crops and agri-fuel crops, and looming over it all the challenges of maintaining production levels under a changing climate. While writers such as Australia's Julian Cribb have been sowing the seeds many years, it was the world food crisis of 2008, during which the prices of major food commodities trebled and "food riots" occurred in some thirty countries which appears to have fertilised the public conversation.

But what does food security mean in Australia? Presumably its about the food on our plates and on our supermarket shelves - it's is about having enough food. The definition adopted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations is "food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life." So why is food security being added to the agriculture portfolio? Wouldn't it be better added to public health – which is concerned with our nutrition, or industry and trade, or perhaps consumer affairs? In India, China or sub-Saharan Africa where upwards of half the population eat mostly the food they grow themselves food security is clearly very closely linked to the productivity achieved on farms. But in Australia?

According to the DAFF's Australian Food Statistics, currently around 80% of the food that Australians eat comes from Australian farms, but that's an artefact of history not current policy, and has declined from closer to 90% ten years ago. There's currently no policy at State or Federal level that links our food supply to domestic food production, in fact quite the opposite. Our policy since the mid-1970's is that agriculture, like other industries, should operate in a competitive global market where producers sell to the highest bidder wherever they are, and buyers are free to buy the cheapest produce, wherever it comes from. Farmers are to make production decisions on the basis not of food needs in Australia or anywhere else, but on the basis of price signals.

Why are our supermarkets full of Chinese garlic (and why since 2007 have we been importing a greater value of fruit and vegetables then we have been exporting)?. Why does Australian farmland get converted into suburbs or mines, or sold to overseas investors? Why during the recent drought was irrigation water in northern Victoria sold by dairy farmers to wine and almond growers? Because the market has been working its magic, directing resources to the most economically efficient and profitable uses, delivering cheaper food for consumers along the way.

Our policy position is clear – we look to the market, and not to Australian farmers, for our food security. It's a policy that has much to commend it. If we get a greater economic return on labour from mining than from picking apples, and if China can grow apples at lower cost than what we can, then it's a good deal. We sell them our coal and buy their apples and everyone (except our orchardists) is better off. As long as we are cashed up (as a nation and as individuals), and as long as there is food to buy, our supermarket shelves and our plates will be full. It's bitter fruit for some farmers and their communities who find themselves competed out of a livelihood, but that's life in the global marketplace.

But what if there isn't food to buy? Remember the global food crisis of 2008, which was more or less repeated in 2010-11. The first response to rocketing food prices by some food exporting countries was to ban food exports – World Trade Organisation rules be damned. If we look at the world food situation there is real cause for concern. Food production is critically dependent on fossil fuel energy and non-renewable phosphate rock – supply of both of which is close to or at its peak. Water resources are in decline in many of the world's food bowls (including our own Murray-Darling Basin), and investment in, and productivity dividends from, agricultural technology R&D are also in decline. Markets are good at many things – but foreseeing major surprises down the track is not one of them.

Facing such an array of destabilising influences I wonder if it is wise to put all our trust in global markets. If I was Minister for Food Security I'd be thinking about a more diversified policy portfolio that hedges risks. Let's think about local food systems as well as global ones. Let's think about production systems that are less dependent on diminishing input supplies, and let's think about the value of maintaining a critical mass of skilled farmers who feel valued for producing high-quality food for Australians as well as for export income.'

OzHarvest Launches in Adelaide

Food rescue charity OzHarvest launched in Adelaide on 17 May. South Australian identity and Adelaide 5AA Radio's Keith Conlon, an OzHarvest Ambassador, offers a peek into how this free service (backed by philanthropic funding) works!

Sourced from 5aa Radio, 17 May 2011

The Cooking, Eating and Business of Shared Food

Another stunningly wonderful piece, reposted in full from Shareable, 19 April 2011

'For conscious eaters, the dinner table is composed of thoughtfully sourced ingredients – local, organic, sustainable, etc. However, for many of us, quality food isn’t enough. Today, the chairs around the table and the people, often strangers, who fill them are equally concerned about the integrity of the food’s path to the plate and the community built upon that plate.

Growing and producing food – from cooking it and consuming it to making a profit from it – have become collaborative in unprecedented and innovative milestones. Eating has become a political/conceptual – even, dare I say it, socialist! – act delving deeply into peer-production and egalitarian, off-the-grid practices in labor and profit.

Food eaters everywhere are beginning to question and transform the meaning of a commercial kitchen space and the elasticity of a restaurants’ four walls. Demand for quality, sustainable ingredients on the table has transformed they way we’ve thought about food for the past few decades. And now, food eaters and culinary thinkers alike are growing increasingly more concerned with the issues and circumstances surrounding their food’s production, distribution, preparation, and consumption.

Communal Food Production


Why toil behind a hot stove alone? While collaborative cooking has gone the way of the farmhouse in recent decades, urbanites have once again realized the benefits of cooking together for communal benefit. With the elevated interested in canning produce, jams, and even trotters and anchovies, canning instructor Anya Feral organized Yes We Can, a group of newbie canners banded together buying directly from local farmers and learning to put food by. Participants from the canning club walk away with finished cases of canned produce to enjoy beyond the season, and a new skill to practice at home to stock their own pantry.

But one cannot live on canned peaches alone. Why not take the group production model and create a whole meal? Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley, Calif. is one of many Community Supported Kitchens (CSKs) to sprout in recent years, along with Salt, Fire & Time in Portland, Ore. and Local Sprouts in Portland, Maine, among others in development in Chicago and elsewhere. Just as the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) was a boon to farmers who sold “shares” of their harvest to regular members no matter what the yield, CSKs also seek membership to keep the kitchen fires burning. Members pay in advance to receive regular installments of slow-cooked broths, fermented pickles, hearty whole grain salads, and much more, all of which stems from local agriculturists and producers, some of which relies on member-volunteers to prepare or deliver it.

If any of this is too much commitment for you, why not simply host a picnic, invite a few strangers to a local park, and agree to share the food that you’ve brought on a sunny Sunday afternoon? Such is the concept of EatWithMe.com in Melbourne, Australia. Participants use the website to organize a food-centric social event to meet, converse, and dip a chip or two into a neighbor’s salsa.

For the less crunchy set, get-together cook-togethers are also on-trend, and commercial enterprises such as the burgeoning Dream Dinners are on the rise nationwide. Participants gather at one of the enterprise's dozens of locations and assemble family meals for the week from pre-selected recipes and pre-chopped ingredients. The atmosphere is nearly club-like with music and snacks provided; attendees simply grab a container and start packing their meals for the week.

Swapping Together


Surely all of this food production has made you hungry. But there’s never a need to eat alone when there are so many shared plates, shared tables, and newfangled twists on potlucks to devour.

If the suburban vibe of Dream Dinners isn’t your thing, why not DIY in your own kitchen? Consider the model of Australia’s MamaBake, where mamas gather in home kitchens, make a mass of grub in tandem, and then swap ready-to-eat meals after a splendid afternoon collaborating in the kitchen. Or, Cook Here and Now in San Francisco, Austin, and Melbourne goes upscale of the casserole and focuses instead on producing one excellent meal from many hands. This effort of random participants is a collaborative cooking club that shares a large, rented, commercial kitchen. Cooks/diners bring all of their own equipment and ingredients (Don’t forget the wine!), prep an excellent food lover’s meal, and then sit down and enjoy it around a very large table together. Take the notions of soggy potluck pasta salad and throw it to the curb.

Wanna trade your PB&J for my tuna salad? The concept of the swap has homemade foodstuffs flying off of our own pantry shelves. From soup to complete dinners for two, baby food (hosted by yours truly) to jars of pickles, the proliferation of the food swap has us feeding one another in abundance. A great hub of these happenings occurs at 18 Reasons, a food-centric arts and community center in the heart of San Francisco, where food eaters trade everything from pureed carrots to BPA-free quarts of mulligatawny. And the homemade food swaps of L.A., Oakland, Portland, Austin, Louisville, etc. will allow those with too much quince chutney to broker a deal with their neighbors shelving too much arugula from their garden, homemade English muffins, infused lemon vodka, or homemade salsa. In this culinary dating game, every pot finds its lid.

Collaborative Food Business


Meeting your neighbors is all well and good, but it’s also possible to turn a profit in the new ethics and economy of eating together. It used to be that restaurateurs set out the checkered table cloth and a shingle, and a neighborhood eatery was born. But, alas, a slumped economy, an interest in DIY cooking, and a rise in supporting the independent entrepreneur have given rise to a number of restaurant alternatives that alleviate hefty start-up costs and have food sleuths trekking all over the urban landscape for a great bowl of curry, an astounding Korean taco, a truly homemade pastrami sandwich, or exploring the previously uncharted waters of “gobs”.

The mid-2000s gave rise to the food cart, a long-standing staple of Asian street food life that has at last caught on in America’s food-forward cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York). Food is fast, cheap, cooked fresh, and, more often than not, delicious. And, of course, the initial business investments of a mobile food vehicle are a fraction of what it would cost to open a traditional restaurant, allowing a more egalitarian spectrum of aspiring chefs to stand at the stove. What’s more, food carts buoy one another for their success, collaborating to stage makeshift marketplaces of a half-dozen vendors of more, giving diners that mall food courts sensation of diversity, variety, and value.

The small-scale food producer has come of age in other ways, too. Much as artists and craftspeople have enjoyed a co-operative retail model to sell paintings, hand-painted t-shirts, and jewelry, food producers, such as those behind San Francisco’s 311 Cortland, have joined forces and shared the financial risk to operate a small food co-op market of handmade artisan goods. Cookie and cupcake makers, snack chip masters, jammers, picklers, et al also learn to sell their wares through communal commercial kitchen spaces like La Cocina (offering regular classes, marketplace events, and small business operations training), and more under-the-law venues like the periodic Underground Farmers' Market, a flea market of homemade and handmade edibles both jarred (grapefruit and tarragon jam) and ready-to-eat (barbecued pork shoulder on homemade brioche bun). Even home cooks are getting in on the action. In Paris, web hub SuperMarmite allows those with extra portions of their home cooked dinner to connect to those locals who didn’t have time to cook. Rather than ordering restaurant take-out, participants can buy a serving of their neighbor’s cassoulet or stuffed pork chops. Operations such as this are win-win: You get dinner, and I get to play chef and enjoy some extra cash. Suddenly the line between chef and patron has completely blurred.

For those who wish to play chef on a larger scale (or for those who are actual chefs who only wish to be in the game temporarily), why not jump the pop-up restaurant bandwagon? Those who cook – chefs, caterers, or those who aspire to either – are renting out restaurants during off-peak times, crafting their own menu, producing their own food, and spearheading their own advertising in the hopes of bringing in enough diners to fuel their restaurant-ownership dreams for a night. Imagine an episode of Top Chef’s restaurant wars for fun and profit. And the benefits are manifold: existing restaurants make money on formerly dark nights; wannabe chefs have the benefit of a venue and restaurant ownership without commitment; and diners in-the-know get to enjoy experimental eats and bragging rights to have tasted what’s new and now. In San Francisco, the concept has spread like wildfire, launching The Corner, a well-located, all-pop-up venue with a revolving chef roster in the city’s bustling Mission District.

What else is popping up in the world of collaborative eating? We can only guess. But surely it will continue to feed our growing desire to bring our ethics, our experiments, and our demands for food quality as well as cohesiveness to the table... and to challenge the meaning of what a truly shared table really is.'

The Great Disruption - Paul Gilding

Paul Gilding's talk on his new book, 'The Great Disruption', to the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London (audio only)

Sourced from the RSA, 13 April 2011

www.thersa.org/__data/assets/file/0004/396994/20110413PaulGilding.mp3 (1 hour)

'Paul Gilding is an independent writer, advisor and advocate for action on climate change and sustainability.

An activist and social entrepreneur for 35 years, his personal mission and purpose is to lead, inspire and motivate action globally on the transition of society and the economy to sustainability. He pursues this purpose across all sectors, working around the world with individuals, businesses, NGOs, entrepreneurs, academia and government.

He has served as CEO of a range of innovative NGO’s and companies including Greenpeace International, Ecos Corporation and Easy Being Green. He has also helped to establish and served on the board of a number of new NGOs including Inspire Foundation, the Australian Business Community Network and Climate Coolers. His speaking and work has taken him to over 30 countries including the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, South America, Europe, South Africa, the USA and Mexico.

Paul believes we are now in a global ecological and economic crisis that will lead to a period of major global economic transformation. As he advocated in his 2005 letter Scream Crash Boom and his 2008 update The Great Disruption, he sees this crisis driven change as an enormous opportunity to build a new approach to economic and social development for humanity.'

Open Source Agriculture - Coming to a City Near You

Reposted in full from Grist, 12 April 2011

'Most people attempting to build a viable urban agriculture business are acutely aware of the enormously challenging and time-consuming process of navigating zoning regulations. Having worked in this sector, I can personally testify that the process is tedious and time-sucking. Over the past couple of years, a number of cities such as New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago have begun enacting, or at the very least exploring, new regulations. One of the major challenges facing policymakers, however, is identifying effective policies and best practices.

Which is why I got excited when I learned about Washington, D.C.-based John Reinhardt and the urban agriculture zoning and food sovereignty ordinance maps recently launched on his blog Grown in the City. Among other things covered, Reinhardt and his cousin Bob Wall are using technology to help people understand urban agriculture and food sovereignty policy approaches across the United States. Grown in The City's new iTools column focuses on educating urban agriculturists of all kinds on how they can use open source technology to better communicate food policy and urban planning data, reviews tools, and highlights other resourceful websites.

My interview with Reinhardt gives insight into the maps, why open-source data is crucial for optimizing policy decision-making, and the food and tech trends that he's most excited about.

Q. How did an urban planner get interested in food and tech?

A. I've always been interested in a variety of topics: gardening, food, media, technology, sociology, architecture...I think it's partly why I became an urban planner (an interdisciplinary profession that potentially touches on all of these topics and more). So, I think a better way to answer your question is that I became interested in urban planning through my interests in food and tech (and everything else related to cities).

Growing up in Staten Island, my family kept a kitchen garden, and this made a huge impression on me. At the same time, four years at a science and tech high school, followed by an undergrad in interdisciplinary humanities and communication gave me all the skills to succeed as an urban planner - which included courses in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), computer graphics, database analysis, and other "techie" things.

It wasn't until the end of my formal urban planning coursework at Penn that I discovered the burgeoning specialty of food systems planning, through the work of Domenic Vitiello, who guest lectured in a sustainable development class. My interest in the topic led me to start Grown in the City, which sits squarely at the intersection of food systems, urban planning, design, gardening, and policy.

Q. Could you tell us about Grown In The City's weekly iTools column?

A. The weeky iTools column is a chance to explicitly link the urban agriculture community and the technology community. As I've seen over the past few years, many large companies such as IBM, Seimens, and GE are starting to focus on "smart city" technology. At the same time, individuals now have the tools to develop iPhone applications, websites, blogs, and other outlets to share information. iTools is the nexus between the techology, the policy, and the practice.

The column is written by Bob Wall, a veteran programmer, who saw a gap between the users and creators of technology. He'll be covering a variety of topics - how to integrate open source technology into food policy and planning blogs, reviews of applications that make urban gardening easier, and even highlights of other websites that are using neat technologies (and how they're doing it). It is hopefully a very empowering column for people who may not have much of a tech background and an eye opener for those who do.

Q. What are your goals with the "Interactive Urban Agriculture Zoning Map" and "Interactive Food Sovereignty Ordinance Map"? Why did you choose mapping as a medium for achieving these goals?

A. The interactive maps were designed to track the urban agriculture zoning and food sovereignty movements. As an urban planner, you learn that how you communicate data is extremely important, and the clean, easy-to-use maps provide immediate visual information (e.g., which states have the most ordinances) while making the information easy to access (just click on your state!). For example, by looking at the Urban Ag Zoning map, you can quickly see that there aren't many policies in the Rocky Mountain Region. It may inspire people in those states who may want to do some digging on their own to see if the policies exist, or even go as far as to propose them if they don't.

You could say that this fascination with visually-represented data goes back to my GIS roots, but I think it's also a really effective way for people who have no real interest in how the technology works to just click on their state and get the info they need. In that respect, I think it straddles both sides of food + tech. We're currently working on drilling down to the ZIP code level, and up to the global scale, but that's still some time off.

Q. What does "open source data sharing" mean to you? Why is it important?

A. Open source data sharing means that the data is available for everyone to download, analyze, update, and contribute to. This is extremely important given the high speed of change in technology, and the speed of change in the current world of policy. By keeping the data open source, it can be consistently updated and analyzed to help policy makers make the best decisions possible in real-time.

In addition, by creating a data hub, we hope to help spur creative thinking and foster critical thinking about the policy approaches taken by different state and local governments. Our current maps are not updated in real time and focus as more of a data-hub, but we are looking at ways to push the envelope, and really welcome suggestions for what would make useful tools, maps, and resources.

Q. How are you incentivizing users to contribute data to the maps? What portion of the maps are user-contributed data?

A. We're hoping that users contribute data because it's something they really care about, and we're trying to make it as easy as possible. Users don't have to register or fill out any complicated forms to submit data. It goes directly into our database system (which is linked to the map), where someone moderates it for quality and accuracy before posting.

Currently, most of the food sovereignty map is user-submitted (we started off with only one local ordinance - Sedgwick, Maine - and the map now includes a dozen or so state and local laws). The urban ag zoning map started from a base dataset, but we've had 5-10 new submissions in the week it's been live.

The urban agriculture/food systems/urban planning community is a very dedicated group (just check out the COMFOOD listserv), so I see Grown in the City's role as providing easy, well designed, good looking, open source tools for people to share data with.

Q. What excites you the most about the way that tech are being leveraged to affect the food system?

A. I think what excites me most is how the internet functions. We see all the time the internet can be used as a "flashpoint" for transmitting memes - everything from Charlie Sheen to Rebecca Black can become the talk of the town (or the world) overnight. In a smaller, kinder way, I think we've seen this with some really interesting urban agriculture stories. The story on Maine food sovereignty has been shared over 1,300 times on Facebook since it was published 10 days ago and was even picked up by Mark Bittman of The New York Times. In that respect, I think new technologies are an incredible media tool for telling the stories we all care about so passionately to a wider audience.

In terms of how we are using technology? Tools such as smart phones, which seem to be in the hands of everyone these days, can be used to collect more and better data about our food system in relatively non-intrusive ways. Just think if everyone was entering information about how much and what type of produce they consumed, how much water they used to water their gardens, or what they were growing in their community gardens? Having such data would allow us to get a much clearer picture of the local food systems around us and what our impacts are. But I think it's not too far off, given the new tools we're seeing.

I think the future is one where technology, metrics, and real-time measurement of our impacts are just part of daily life. Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen, but it sure is interesting!'

Open Sourced Blueprints for Civilisation

Sourced from TED, April 2011

'Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing a set of blueprints for 50 farming tools that can be built cheaply from scratch. Call it a "civilization starter kit."

Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).'

Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design (FSPUD) Report Released

Sourced from Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab, April 2011

'Food sensitive planning and urban design (FSPUD) recognises that access to healthy, sustainable and equitable food is an essential part of achieving liveable communities.

VEIL and David Locke Associates were commissioned by the National Heart Foundation of Australia (Victorian Division) to develop a resource further articulating the idea of 'Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design' (first articulated by VEIL in 2008 as Food Sensitive Urban Design).

This new resource - Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design: A conceptual framework for achieving a sustainable and just food system - is intended to raise the awareness of planners, architects, urban designers, engineers, policy makers, community members and elected representatives of the need to integrate food considerations into urban land use and development. It outlines:

• key areas in planning legislation, policy and processes to realise this outcomes;

• how meeting people's food needs contributes to the broader objectives of planning and urban design, including: health and fairness; sustainability and resilience; livelihoods and opportunity; and community and amenity; and

• a challenge to professionals and the broader community to take on a stronger role in ensuring that healthy, sustainable and equitable food is available for all Australians into the future.

Food Sensitive Planning & Urban Design - Conceptual Framework [pdf, 2.4MB]

Food Sensitive Planning & Urban Design - Summary [pdf, 5.4 MB]'

The Food Bubble is About to Burst

Reposted in full from the New Scientist, 10 February 2011

'We're fast draining the fresh water resources our farms rely on, warns Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute

What is a food bubble?

That's when food production is inflated through the unsustainable use of water and land. It's the water bubble we need to worry about now. The World Bank says that 15 per cent of Indians (175 million people) are fed by grain produced through overpumping - when water is pumped out of aquifers faster than they can be replenished. In China, the figure could be 130 million.

Has this bubble already burst anywhere?

Saudi Arabia made itself self-sufficient in wheat by using water from a fossil aquifer, which doesn't refill. It has harvested close to 3 million tonnes a year, but in 2008 the Saudi authorities said the aquifer was largely depleted. Next year could be the last harvest. This is extreme, but about half the world's people live in countries with falling water tables. India and China will lose grain production capacity through aquifer depletion. We don't know when or how abruptly the bubble will burst.

With population rising, a fall in grain production would spell big trouble.

Yes. Tonight at the dinner table there will be 219,000 people who weren't there last night. But that's not all: we also have maybe 3 billion people moving up the food chain, consuming more grain-intensive livestock products. Then there is the conversion of grain into ethanol for cars, mainly in the US, where last year 119 million tonnes went to distilleries out of a harvest of just over 400 million tonnes.

What will happen if we carry on as we are now?

Civilisation as we know it can't withstand the stresses of continuing with business as usual. We've got to move, almost on a war footing, to cut carbon emissions, eradicate poverty, stabilise population. We must also restore the economy's natural support systems: forests and aquifers and soils. No civilisation ever survived that kind of destruction; nor will ours. We haven't gone over the edge, but we're much closer than most people think. If the heatwave that hit Moscow in 2010 had been centred on Chicago instead, we would be in deep trouble. The Russians lost 40 per cent of their 100-million-tonne grain crop, but we would have lost 40 per cent of our 400-million-tonne crop - a massive global setback.

How can we avert a disaster like this?

In many countries, irrigation water is free or comes at a low price, so it's treated as an abundant resource. In fact it's scarce and should be priced accordingly. We must also redefine what we mean by "security". The real threats are not some armed superpower but water or food shortages, climate change and the rising number of failed states.

Can individuals make a difference?

The question I get asked most is "What can I do?" People expect me to say change your light bulbs, recycle newspaper, but I say we must restructure the world economy, especially in energy. It's about becoming politically active. If there's a coal-fired power station near you, organise to close it down.'

Growing Concerns as Food Imports Soar

Reposted in full from The Australian, 18 March 2011

'Australia now imports more than a third of its fruit supply and almost 20 per cent of its vegetables, amid warnings of increasing threats to future food supply from population and land-use pressures.

The proportion of imports has alarmed some Australian growers, who yesterday released a report into food security issues and called for a return to 1970s-level funding of agricultural research and development.

Growcom chief executive Alex Livingstone said Australians should snap out of their "complacency", warning that food imports could be threatened by the burgeoning world population - tipped to grow to nine billion by 2050.

He said although exports remained high - about 60 per cent of production - the figures were skewed by Australia's high exports of meats and grains.

"There is also a need to look at how much of the food we eat is imported and consider whether in future imported products will continue to be cheap or even available in the face of forecast burgeoning world populations," Mr Livingstone said.The Gillard government was planning to release an issues paper on the development of the National Food Plan "in the near future", Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig said recently.

Senator Ludwig said he was still assessing the call for increased research funds, given a Productivity Commission recommendation to halve funding over the coming decade, and emphasised imports were largely highly processed foods, beverages and processed fruit and vegetables.

The Food Security Report, released by Growcom in Brisbane yesterday, found increasing population, urbanisation, land and water degradation, speculative trading of commodities, the clash of resources and agriculture and the growing demand for high-protein foods in developing countries could all contribute to a reduction in future food security.

The report highlighted the anticipated squeeze on horticultural farming land close to Sydney, and Melbourne and in southeast Queensland.

Imports of fruit and vegetables, mostly processed, have steadily increased while the fresh-produce balance of trade is diminishing. Much of the imported produce is seasonal, but also includes cheaper tinned products from Asia or Italy.'

Rio+20: Toward a New Green Economy - or a Green-Washed Old Economy?

'...20 years ago, governments at Rio were bold enough to lay out a set of commitments that might credibly have rescued us from some of the dire predicaments we are now in but they never fulfilled their own promises...those promises should not be abandoned for a hollow "green economy" that amounts to a Trojan horse for ongoing destruction-as-usual.''

Reposted in full from Grist, 24 March 2011

'I've got good news and bad news about the future of the planet.

Good news first. Next year, a honking big global Earth Summit is coming our way - one with a proud heritage. Formally titled the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, the meeting is known as RIO+20 because it will come 20 years after the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. That original Earth Summit (itself 20 years after the equally important Stockholm Convention on the Environment and Human Development) gave us an embarrassment of policy riches: the Climate Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, Sustainable Development Commission, the Precautionary Principle, a long and ambitious list of promises called Agenda 21, The Forest Principles, and much more. Over a hundred heads of state turned up to Rio Di Janeiro last time amidst intense global attention. This time, the reunion party is going back to Rio again on June 4-6 2012. Chances are it will all be a big deal again.

At a recent preparatory meeting in New York, the agenda for this next Earth Summit became clear. The leaders will issue a "focused political document" tackling the transition to a global "green economy" and reform of the international institutions responsible for sustainable development. This second "reform" strand could feasibly restructure everything ranging from the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP) and the U.N. Development Program to the 500 different multilateral environmental treaties and agreements currently in place. These cover toxic chemicals, ocean conservation, biodiversity, desertification, climate change, ozone depletion, forest protection, and more. Given the rising trends of global temperature, hunger, water scarcity, and biodiversity loss, the existing mishmash of eco-governance is clearly failing to deliver. RIO+20 is a precious chance for decision-makers to take stock of where the world went wrong in the last 20 years and plan intelligently for the next 20. Hopefully RIO+20 will deliver a jolt of political will to the global environmental agenda, as well as a smart plan to get the planet back on track.

Or at least that's the theory. And now we come to the bad news: Far from cooking up a plan to save the Earth, what may come out of the summit could instead be a deal to surrender the living world to a small cabal of bankers and engineers - one that will dump the promises of the first Rio summit along the way. Tensions are already rising between northern countries and southern countries over the poorly defined concept of a global "Green Economy" that will be the centerpiece of the summit.

What is a global green economy? That, of course, is the multi-trillion dollar question. We can all spell out the problems of our current polluting and unjust economy (thoughtlessly dubbed the "brown economy" by less-than race-sensitive commentators). Yet suspicion is running high that the proposed prescriptions for a "green economy" are more likely to deliver a greenwash economy or the same old, same old "greed" economy. The color-coded theory on offer goes like this: We can move from a brown economy to a green economy by investing more greenbacks in the white heat of technology and PINC (Proactive Investment in Natural Capital) including innovative market mechanisms such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Degredation). Just to round off the color palette, ocean states are further arguing that the green economy also needs to be a blue economy.

Confused? The key words to focus on here are "markets" and "technology." Just as the global climate negotiations, most recently in Cancun, have veered away from the difficult job of agreeing to slash emissions and lurched instead toward politically easy gestures on carbon trading and solar panels, so the green economy brigade would like to steer the RIO+20 summit away from addressing the root causes of our ecological crises. They would like the emphasis to be on a "forward looking" effort to establish new financial arrangements based on so-called "ecosystem services" while liberating funds for iconic "green technologies."

Two heavyweight reports from UNEP, on "The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity" (TEEB) and a "Green Economy Report" (GER) set the tone for this plan. They argue that nature, like an industrial contractor, should be precisely measured and valued according to the natural "services" that it provides - such as water cleaning, carbon sequestration, and nitrogen cycling. Such services can then be paid for, offset, or securitized in the form of invented credits that can be traded to raise conservation money. Meanwhile new "eco-efficient" technologies can be developed and deployed increasing the value of these ecosystem services while also generating revenue. If it sounds more like a business plan than an agreement to protect the Earth that's because business is firmly in the driving seat. The lead author of both the TEEB and GER is an investment banker on sabbatical from Deutsche Bank, and the most vocal cheerleaders are the Davos crowd of Fortune 500 companies and G8 diplomats.

Most alarmingly, some of these voices are positioning the "green economy" as an upgrade or replacement to the "outmoded" concept of "sustainable development" that was agreed on 20 years ago. They seem content to throw out Rio's "baby" of sustainable development out for new green bathwater just as the baby reaches the age of maturity. While "sustainable development" has its problems as an approach, it at least explicitly attempted to enmesh environmental goals in larger social and economic goals such as reducing poverty and creating a just and equitable society. By contrast, the idea of a green economy is sustainable-development-lite - long on technical fixes and band-aid solutions, short on confronting the root causes of poverty, inequality, and oppression that drive environmental destruction.

At a packed side event in New York last week entitled "Whose Green Economy?," Bolivian Ambassador Pablo Salon charged that this repackaged green capitalism was a distraction from the real issues and commitments that RIO+20 needs to address to realize sustainable development. He warned that the new forms of mercantilism and speculation being proposed could further despoil nature while entrenching existing injustices. Indigenous peoples and social justice movements who have fought against land displacement brought about by the REDD+ provisions of the recent Cancun agreement are particularly alarmed that the same commodification approach is now being proposed to extend to soils, oceans, and more. As Uruguayan activist Silvia Ribeiro points out, "In the wake of the largest financial crisis in history, the same bankers who can't even keep their own house in order now claim they can manage the planet. Excuse us for not believing them."

The focus on ill-defined "green technologies" is also problematic. The UNEP Green Economy report bullishly includes biomass incineration and biofuels as possible ingredients in a "green economy" - rising food prices, land grabs, and toxic air pollution aside. The report is agnostic on nuclear power and stops short of endorsing genetically modified crops as part of the green package.

Meanwhile the next suite of technological silver bullets are already being reframed as part of the green economy. Synthetic biology, which makes artificial microbes with unknown biosafety impacts, is being touted as the source of green fuels and green plastics. Nanotechnology, whose toxicity problems raise the specter of a rerun of the asbestos fiasco, is being embraced for solar panel production and water cleanup. Meanwhile geoengineering - the idea of re-engineering the entire planet with clouds of sulphur dust or dumps of iron and charcoal - could easily end up in the broad definition of "green technologies."

If RIO+20 is not to become a handy loophole for every technological wolf to assume green clothing (and funds), governments are going to need to get specific about what is and what isn't a "green and just" technology and to resurrect the precautionary principle first agreed at Rio 20 years ago. The green economy needs some trusted gatekeepers. One proposal, backed by several major groups at the U.N., is the establishment of a formal mechanism to evaluate new and emerging technologies -- such as an International Convention for Evaluation of New Technologies (ICENT). Such a convention might provide an early-warning function to governments on pitfalls of technological options before they are deployed. An ICENT might have warned against backing ethanol before food prices spiked, or challenged the wisdom of a risky energy technologies long before the wellhead explodes or the tsunami hits the reactor's cooling system. Tragically, governments agreed to a version of such a technology assessment mechanism back in Rio 20 years ago and then never delivered - an act of negligence we are paying for today in human lives, hunger, and environmental damage.

And there's the rub: 20 years ago, governments at Rio were bold enough to lay out a set of commitments that might credibly have rescued us from some of the dire predicaments we are now in but they never fulfilled their own promises. With under 13 months to go, it's now up to all of us in global society to demand that those promises, however belated, be fulfilled. Most importantly those promises should not be abandoned for a hollow "green economy" that amounts to a Trojan horse for ongoing destruction-as-usual. The bad news on the road to Rio is that the hijackers are already seizing the reins. The good news is that we have time to organize massive campaigns to get the Earth Summit back on course - not just for a green economy, but for a green, equitable, and just future.