[Reader-list] food, water, climate, oil

[Nagraj Adve]

Food scarcity: the timebomb setting nation against nation

As the UN and Oxfam warn of the dangers ahead, expert analyst Lester
Brown says time to solve the problem is running out

            John Vidal
          o The Observer, Saturday 13 October 2012 19.37 BST


Brandon Hunnicutt has had a year to remember. The young Nebraskan from
Hamilton County farms 2,600 acres of the High Plains with his father
and brother. What looked certain in an almost perfect May to be a
"phenomenal" harvest of maize and soy beans has turned into a near
disaster.

A three-month heatwave and drought with temperatures often well over
38C burned up his crops. He lost a third and was saved only by pumping
irrigation water from the aquifer below his farm.

"From 1 July to 1 October we had 4ins of rain and long stretches when
we didn't have any. Folk in the east had nothing at all. They've been
significantly hurt. We are left wondering whether the same will happen
again," he says.

On the other side of the world, Mary Banda, who lives in Mphaka
village near Nambuma in Malawi, has had a year during which she has
barely been able to feed her children, one of whom has just gone to
hospital with malnutrition.

Government health worker Patrick Kamzitu says: "We are seeing more
hunger among children. The price of maize has doubled in the last
year. Families used to have one or two meals a day; now they are
finding it hard to have one."

Hunnicutt and Banda are linked by food. What she must pay for her
maize is determined largely by how much farmers such as Brandon grow
and export. This year the US maize harvest is down 15% and nearly 40%
of what is left has gone to make vehicle fuel. The result is less food
than usual on to the international market, high prices and people
around the world suffering.

"This situation is not going to go away," says Lester Brown, an
environmental analyst and president of the Earth Policy Institute in
Washington. In a new book, Full Planet, Empty Plates, he predicts ever
increasing food prices, leading to political instability, spreading
hunger and, unless governments act, a catastrophic breakdown in food.
"Food is the new oil and land is the new gold," he says. "We saw early
signs of the food system unravelling in 2008 following an abrupt
doubling of world grain prices. As they climbed, exporting countries
[such as Russia] began restricting exports to keep their domestic
prices down. In response, importing countries panicked and turned to
buying or leasing land in other countries to produce food for
themselves."

"The result is that a new geopolitics of food has emerged, where the
competition for land and water is intensifying and each country is
fending for itself."

Brown has been backed by an Oxfam report released last week. It
calculated that the land sold or leased to richer countries and
speculators in the last decade could have grown enough food to feed a
billion people – almost exactly the number of malnourished people in
the world today. Nearly 60% of global land deals in the last decade
have been to grow crops that can be used for biofuels, says Oxfam.

The next danger signal, says Brown, is in rising food prices. In the
last 10 years prices have doubled as demand for food has increased
with a rapidly growing world population and millions have switched to
animal-based diets, which require more grain and land.

Most grain prices have risen between 10% and 25% this year after
droughts and heatwaves in Ukraine and Australia as well as the US and
other food growing centres. The UN says prices are now close to the
crisis levels of 2008. Meat and dairy prices are likely to surge in
the new year as farmers find it expensive to feed cattle and poultry.
Brown says: "Those who live in the United States, where 9% of income
goes for food, are insulated from these price shifts.

"But how do those who live on the lower rungs of the global economic
ladder cope? They were already spending 50% to 70% of their income on
food. Many were down to one meal a day already before the recent price
rises. What happens with the next price surge?"

Oxfam said last week it expected the price of key food staples,
including wheat and rice, to double again in the next 20 years,
threatening disastrous consequences for the poor.

But the surest sign, says Brown, that food supplies are precarious is
seen in the amount of surplus food that countries hold in reserve, or
"carry over" from one year to the next.

"Ever since agriculture began, carry-over stocks of grain have been
the most basic indicator of food security. From 1986 to 2001 the
annual world carry-over stocks of grain averaged 107 days of
consumption. After that, world consumption exceeded production and
from 2002 to 2011 they averaged just 74 days of consumption," says
Brown. Last week the UN estimated US maize reserves to be at a
historic low, only 6.3% below estimated consumption and the equivalent
of a three-week supply. Global carry-over reserves last week stood at
20%, compared to long term averages of well above 30%.

Although there is still – theoretically – enough food for everyone to
eat, global supplies have fallen this year by 2.6% with grains such as
wheat declining 5.2% and only rice holding level, says the UN.

There is no guarantee, says Brown, that the world can continue to
increase production as it has done for many years. "Yields are
plateauing in many countries and new better seeds have failed to
increase yields very much for some years," he said.

Evan Fraser, author of Empires of Food and a geography lecturer at
Guelph University in Ontario, Canada, says: "For six of the last 11
years the world has consumed more food than it has grown. We do not
have any buffer and are running down reserves. Our stocks are very low
and if we have a dry winter and a poor rice harvest we could see a
major food crisis across the board."

"Even if things do not boil over this year, by next summer we'll have
used up this buffer and consumers in the poorer parts of the world
will once again be exposed to the effects of anything that hurts
production."

Brown says: "An unprecedented period of world food security has come
to an end. The world has lost its safety cushions and is living from
year to year. This is the new politics of food scarcity. We are moving
into a new food era, one in which it is every country for itself."

"What in the past would have been a relatively simple question of
developing better seeds, or opening up new land to grow more food,
cannot work now because the challenge of growing food without
destroying the environment is deepening."

Brown adds: "New trends such as falling water tables, plateauing grain
yields and rising temperatures join soil erosion and climate change to
make it difficult, if not impossible, to expand production fast
enough."

Four pressing needs must be addressed together, he says. Instead of
better seeds, tractors or pumps to raise water, he claims, feeding the
world now depends on new population, energy, and water policies. Water
scarcity, especially, concerns him.

"We live in a world where more than half the people live in countries
with food bubbles based on farmers' over-pumping and draining
aquifers. The question is not whether these bubbles will burst, but
when. The bursting of several national food bubbles as aquifers are
depleted could create unmanageable food shortages.

"If world population growth does not slow dramatically, the number of
people trapped in hydrological poverty and hunger will only grow."

The madness of the food system since 1950 astonishes him. Last year,
the US harvested nearly 400 million tons of grain, of which one third
went to ethanol distilleries to fuel vehicles. Meanwhile, more than
130 million people in China alone, he estimates, live in areas where
the underground water resources are being depleted at record rates.

Why can't politicians understand that every 1C above the optimum in
the growing season equates to roughly a 10% decline in grain yields?
he asks.

"Yet if the world fails to address the climate issue, the earth's
temperature this century could easily rise by 6C, devastating food
supplies."

The ever greater number of weather-related crises suggests strongly
that climate change is beginning to bite and that the heatwaves,
droughts and excessive rainfall around the world in the last few years
have not been a blip, but a new reality

"We have ignored the earth's environmental stop signs. Faced with
falling water tables, not a single country has mobilised to reduce
water use. Unless we can wake up to the risks we are taking, we will
join earlier civilisations that failed to reverse the environmental
trends that undermined their food economies."

He says we know the answers. They include saving water, eating less
meat, stopping soil erosion, controlling populations and changing the
energy economy.

"But they must be addressed together We have to mobilise quickly. Time
is the scarcest resource. Success depends on moving at wartime speed.
It means transforming the world industrial economy, stabilising
populations and rebuilding grain stocks.

"We must redefine security. We have inherited a definition from the
last century that is almost exclusively military in focus. Armed
aggression is no longer the principal threat to our future. The
overriding threats are now climate change, population growth, water
shortages and rising food prices. The challenge is to save
civilisation itself."