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The international food system and the climate crisis
“Small-scale family farming should become the cornerstone of food production again.”
Today’s global food system, with all its high-tech seeds and fancy packaging, cannot fulfil its most basic function of feeding people. Despite this monumental failure, there is no talk in the corridors of power of changing direction. Large and growing movements of people clamour for change, but the world’s governments and international agencies keep pushing more of the same: more agribusiness, more industrial agriculture, more globalisation. As the planet moves into an accelerating period of climate change, driven, in large part, by this very model of agriculture, such failure to take meaningful action will rapidly worsen an already intolerable situation. But in the worldwide movement for food sovereignty, there is a promising way out.
GRAIN
This year more than one billion people will go hungry, while another half a billion people will suffer from obesity. Three-quarters of those without enough to eat will be farmers and farm workers (those who produce food), while the handful of agribusiness corporations that control the food chain (those who decide where the food goes) will amass billions of dollars in profits. Now the latest scientific studies are predicting that, in a business-as-usual scenario, rising temperatures, extreme climate conditions and the severe water and soil problems related to them will push many more millions into the ranks of the hungry. As population growth raises demand for food, climate change will sap our capacities to produce it. Certain countries already struggling with severe hunger problems could see their food production cut by half before the end of this century. Yet where elites gather to talk about climate change, very little is being said about such consequences for food production and supply, and even less is being done to address them.
There is another dimension to this interaction between climate change and the global food system that reinforces the urgent need for action. Not only is today’s dysfunctional food system utterly ill-equipped for climate change, it is also one of the main engines behind it. The model of industrial agriculture that supplies the global food system essentially functions by converting oil into food, producing tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the process. The use of huge amounts of chemical fertilisers, the expansion of the industrial meat industry, and the ploughing under of the world’s savannahs and forests to grow agricultural commodities are together responsible for at least 30 per cent of the global GHG emissions that cause climate change.
But that is only a part of the current food system’s contribution to the climate crisis. Turning food into global industrial commodities results in a tremendous waste of fossil-fuel energy in transporting it around the world, processing it, storing it and freezing it, and getting it to people’s homes. All these processes are contributing to the climate bill. When added together, it is not at all an exaggeration to say that the current global food system could be responsible for nearly half of the world’s GHG emissions.
The rationale and urgency for an overhaul to the world’s food system has never been more stark. From a practical point of view, there is nothing preventing transition to a saner system, and people everywhere are showing willingness to change – whether they be consumers searching out local foods or peasants barricading highways to defend their lands. What stands in the way is the structure of power – and it is this, more than anything, that requires transformation.
Box 1. The roots of deforestation
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The forecast is for famine
In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its long-awaited report on the state of Earth’s climate. The report, while stating in unequivocal terms that global warming is happening and saying that it is “very likely” that humans are responsible for it, cautiously forecasts that the planet will heat up by 0.2° Celsius (C) per decade if nothing is done to reduce our GHG emissions. The report warns that a rise in temperature of 2–4°C, which may be reached by the end of the century, would produce a dramatic rise in sea levels and a sharply increased frequency of climatic catastrophes.
Now, just two years later, it appears that the IPCC was too optimistic. Today’s scientific consensus is that a 2°C increase over the next few decades is already a virtual certainty, and that the business-as-usual scenario could heat up the planet by as much as 8°C by 2100, pushing us over the tipping point and deep into what is described as dangerous and irreversible climate change. [2] Already, the impact of much milder climate change is hitting hard. According to the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum, climate change is seriously affecting 325 million people a year – with 315,000 dying from hunger, sickness and weather disasters induced by climate change. [3] It predicts that the annual death toll from climate change will rise to half a million by 2030, with 10 per cent of the world’s population (700–800 million people) seriously affected.
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Food is and will remain at the centre of this unfolding climate crisis. Everyone agrees that agricultural production has to continue to rise significantly over coming decades to feed the growing population. Climate change, however, is likely to put agricultural production into reverse. In the most comprehensive survey of studies modelling the impact of global warming on agriculture to date, William Cline estimates that by 2080, in a business-as-usual scenario, climate change will reduce the potential output of global agriculture by more than 3.2 per cent as compared with today. Developing countries will suffer the most, with a potential 9.1 per cent decline in agricultural output. Africa will suffer a 16.6 per cent decline. These are horrific numbers, but, as Cline says, the actual impacts are likely to be much worse than even these figures suggest. [4]
A major weakness in the forecasts of the IPCC and others when it comes to agriculture is that their predictions accept a theory of “carbon fertilisation”, which argues that higher levels CO2 in the atmosphere will enhance photosynthesis in many key crops, and boost their yields. Recent studies show that this is a mirage. Not only does any initial acceleration in growth slow down significantly after a few days or weeks, but the increase in CO2 reduces nitrogen and protein in the leaves by more than 12 per cent. This means that, with climate change, there will be less protein for humans in major cereals such as wheat and rice. There will also be less nitrogen in the leaves for bugs, which means that bugs will eat more leaf, leading to important reductions in yield. [5]
When Cline removed carbon fertilisation from his calculations, the results were much more gruesome (see Table 1). Global yields would decline by 15.9 per cent by the 2080s, with yields declining 24.3 per cent in Latin America, 19.3 per cent in Asia (38 per cent in India) and 27.5 per cent in Africa (more than 50 percent in Senegal and Sudan). [6]
But even this dreadful forecast may be an underestimate. Cline’s study, like the IPCC report and other major reports dealing with agriculture and climate change, did not factor in the looming water crisis associated with climate change. Currently 2.4 billion people live in highly water-stressed environments, and recent predictions indicate that this number will rise to 4 billion by the second half of this century. Sources of water for agriculture have run out or are running dangerously low in many parts of the world, and global warming is predicted to compound the problem, as higher temperatures generate drier conditions and increase the amount of water needed for agriculture. [7] It is going to get much harder to sustain current levels of food production even as the demand for it grows with increasing populations. [8]
Also outside Cline’s forecast are the impacts from the increase in extreme weather that climate change will foster. Droughts, floods and other “natural” disasters are expected to increase in frequency and intensity, wreaking havoc for agriculture. The World Bank forecasts that the intensification of storms caused by climate change will make an additional three million hectares of farmland in coastal areas vulnerable to inundation. [9] At the same time, wild fires, which already affect an estimated 350 million hectares of land each year,10 are expected to increase dramatically as a result of global warming, creating a serious problem of carbon aerosol pollution, which would further aggravate the greenhouse effect. One study foresees a 50 per cent increase in wild fires in the western USA by 2055 as a result of the predicted increase in air temperature. [11]
And then there is the market to consider. The global food supply is increasingly controlled by a small number of transnational corporations that exert near-monopoly positions all along the food chains – from seeds to supermarkets. The amount of speculative capital in agricultural trade is also on the rise. In this context, any disruptions to the food supply, or even perceived disruptions, lead to tumultuous price increases and extreme profit-taking by the speculators, which makes food inaccessible to the urban poor and derails agricultural production in the countryside. [12] Indeed, talk of a looming global food shortage is already attracting private equity speculators into agriculture and impelling a global farmland grab, the like of which has not been since since the colonial era. [13]
We are moving into an era of severe disruption of food production. There has never been a more pressing need for a system that can ensure that food is distributed to everyone, according to need. Yet never has the world’s food supply been more tightly controlled by a small group, whose decisions are based solely on how much money they can extract for their shareholders.
Box 2: Five key steps towards a food system that can address climate change and the food crisis
1. Move towards sustainable, integrated production methods
2. Rebuild the soil and retain the water
3. De-industrialise agriculture, save energy, and keep the people on the land4. Grow close by and cut the international trade5. Cut the meat economy and change to a healthier diet
Cooking the planet for dinner
Proponents of the Green Revolution boast of how its basic recipe of uniform plant varieties and chemical fertilisers saved much of the world from starvation. Defenders of the so-called Livestock and Blue (aquaculture) Revolutions sell a similar story about uniform breeds and industrial feeds. The narratives, however, sound less convincing today, with nearly a quarter of the planet going hungry and with crop yields stuck on a plateau since the 1980s. In fact, they read more like horror stories when the environmental consequences are considered, especially as the world learns more about the contribution that these transformations in agriculture and the larger food system make to changing the climate.
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