Michael Pollan for Secretary of Agriculture

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Real Solutions to the Global Food Crisis

A few words worth repeating...

Published on Tuesday, July 8, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

A Women’s Declaration to the G8: Support Real Solutions to the Global Food Crisis

by MADRE

To:

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda (Japan)
Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Canada)
President Nicolas Sarkozy (France)
Chancellor Angela Merkel (Germany)
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (Italy)
President Dmitry Medvedev (Russia)
Prime Minister Gordon Brown (United Kingdom)
President George Bush (United States)

This year, the world’s eight richest governments (the G8) meet
against the backdrop of a global food crisis. With prices for all major
food commodities at a 50-year-high, world leaders are discussing
pervasive “food shortages” that threaten to destabilize dozens of
countries. But worsening hunger is the result of cost inflation, not
any absolute food shortage. In fact, the world produces more food than the global population can consume.

The root cause of the food crisis is not scarcity, but the failed
economic policies long championed by the G8, namely, trade
liberalization and industrial agriculture. These policies, which treat
food as a commodity rather than a human right, have induced chaotic
climate change, oil dependency, and the depletion of the Earth’s land
and water resources as well as today’s food crisis.

Yet, in the search for solutions, the G8 is considering expanded
support for the very measures that caused this web of problems. Calls
for more tariff reductions, biofuel plantations, genetically modified
crops, and wider use of petroleum-based fertilizers and chemical
pesticides are at the forefront of discussions in Japan.

These measures cannot resolve the global food crisis. They may, however, further boost this year’s record profits for agricultural corporations. There are viable solutions to the food
crisis, but they will not emerge from a narrow pursuit of the financial
interests of multinational corporations.

For nearly 30 years, the G8 has insisted that corporations replace
governments in shaping and implementing national agriculture policies
in the world’s poorest countries. This demand has not maximized
efficiency or reduced poverty, as promised. In fact, it has ushered in a sharp rise in hunger and malnutrition. As the World Bank itself acknowledged in its 2008 World Development Report, the private sector has failed as a substitute for government when it comes to agriculture.

In fact, corporations have no legal duty to reduce poverty or fight
world hunger. Governments, including the G8-and not the private
sector-are the ones mandated to resolve the global food crisis. The international human rights framework,
which governments are obligated to uphold, is the starting point for a
global New Deal on agriculture. In particular, the human rights of
small farmers-the majority of whom are women-and rural and Indigenous
Peoples must be protected in order to meet the twin challenges of
feeding people and protecting the planet.

As women’s human rights advocates working with communities on the
front-lines of the global food crisis, we call on the G8 to promote a
worldwide shift from industrial to sustainable agriculture and to enact
the economic policies needed to support this transition.

The Imperative of Sustainable Agriculture

In April 2008, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology (IAASTD) released an independent, four-year study
conducted by over 400 experts. The study was co-sponsored by the World
Bank and multiple agencies of the United Nations and endorsed by over
60 governments. It confirms that large-scale, chemical-intensive
agriculture is a major contributor to pollution, climate change,
deforestation, social inequity, and the destruction of diversity, both
biological and cultural. The study urges a fundamental overhaul of
agricultural policy towards sustainable farming, including small-scale
and organic agriculture.

The IAASTD report follows numerous other credible studies
demonstrating that small-holder organic farms can produce enough food
for the global population and avoid the environmental destruction
associated with industrial agriculture.

We emphasize that support for small farmers must include a focus on
women, who produce most of the world’s food. Indeed, in much of Africa,
where the food crisis is at its worst, women grow and process 80
percent of all food.

However, the capacity of these farmers is badly undermined by laws
and customs that discriminate against women. In many countries, women
who grow the food that sustains the majority of the population are not
even recognized as farmers. They are denied the right to own land and
excluded from government programs that facilitate access to credit,
seeds, tools, and training.

We call on the G8 to:

• Recognize gender discrimination as a threat to global food security;
• Uphold the rights of agricultural workers under the International Labor Organization’s Conventions;
• Support national policies that provide small-scale farmers with
  access to land, seeds, water, credit and other inputs and that uphold
  the rights of farmers to make informed decisions about land use and
  food production.

The Imperative of Sustainable Economic Policies

A global New Deal on agriculture requires not only different modes
of farming, but a new policy environment for food production and
agricultural trade. National policies, including investment, funding,
and research, as well as international trade rules, must be redirected
in support of small farmers and sustainable agriculture. Towards that
end, the G8 should:

1. End Food Dependency

The G8, through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, has
required developing countries to reduce support to small farmers, cut
investment in food production, slash tariffs that protected domestic
agriculture, dismantle the marketing boards that once stabilized food
prices, and shift land use from food production to export agriculture.

Developing countries were forced to accept these demands as
conditions for loans needed to repay their debts to the financial
institutions, development banks, and governments of the North. Yet, it
is the G8 itself which is largely responsible for the debt crisis,
brought on by massive lending to illegitimate regimes and decades of
costly, ill-conceived development projects.

The economic policies demanded by the G8 have destroyed the
livelihoods of small farmers in the Global South, leaving millions of
people at the mercy of international commodity markets to be able to
buy food. The shift from food to cash crops has meant that women, who
are responsible for growing food, have lost access to valuable farm
land. As a result, rural families have lost a main source of food and
nutrition.

Economic policies driven by the G8 eventually transformed
food-producing countries in the Global South into net food importers.
In the 1960’s, developing countries enjoyed an agricultural trade
surplus of US $7 billion a year. Today, almost three out of four developing countries are net food importers, although they have the capacity to feed themselves.

We call on the G8 to:

• Move beyond the partial commitment it made to debt cancellation at
  the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland and enact immediate and unconditional
  debt cancellation for all developing countries;
• Allow governments to determine their own agricultural policies in consultation with citizens;
• Institute international mechanisms for market stabilization that
  protect the livelihoods of farmers and guarantee affordable food for
  all people;
• Endorse the call of Jacques Diouf, Secretary General of the United
  Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, for developing countries to
  be enabled to achieve food self-sufficiency.

2. Change Trade Rules

Trade rules demanded by the G8 and administered by the World Trade
Organization have bankrupted millions of farmers in poor countries,
undermined the role of women in agriculture, and contributed to the
current food crisis.

The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture forbids
governments in the Global South from providing farmers with subsidies
or low-cost seeds and other inputs. These farmers have been turned into
a “market” for international agribusiness companies selling seeds,
pesticides and fertilizers.

Women, who are traditionally responsible for conserving, exchanging,
and breeding agricultural seeds, are threatened by the WTO’s Trade
Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement. By granting patents to
corporations, the WTO transfers ownership of seeds-the basis of all
agriculture-from women farmers to multinational corporations.

The WTO has allowed wealthy countries to subsidize corporate farming
by $1 billion a day. The subsidies enable companies based in the Global
North to sell food internationally at a price below the cost of
production. Recently, British International Development Secretary
Douglas Alexander estimated that subsidies to Northern agribusiness
cost farmers in the Global South $100 billion a year in lost income because small farmers cannot compete with the subsidized cost of imported food.

We call on the G8 to:

• Recognize that food is first and foremost a human right and only secondarily a tradable commodity;
• Support a process for an international Convention to replace the
  WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture. Such a Convention must uphold the full
  range of human rights standards and should implement the concept of
  food sovereignty, whereby communities control their own food systems;
• Respect the rights of small farmers to save and exchange seeds between communities and internationally;
• Initiate a conversion of national agricultural subsidies from
  support for agribusiness to incentives for sustainable farming,
  including small-scale and organic farms.

These demands reflect the rights and priorities of the world’s food
producers, in particular, rural women, who are directly responsible for
feeding most of the world’s people.

Central to our policy proposals is the understanding that global
challenges regarding food, climate change and natural resource
depletion are interrelated and must be resolved together. Policies that
seek to solve one aspect of the problem by deepening another will only
worsen the crisis as a whole. We see this dynamic in the US and
European Union decision to subsidize the conversion of food crops into
biofuels: the move to address energy demands at the expense of food
needs has greatly exacerbated the current food crisis.

We urge the G8 to ground integrated solutions to the food crisis in
the framework of human rights. That framework, rather than further
pursuit of corporate profits, has the strongest potential to yield
policies that can resolve the global food crisis in tandem with the
other urgent issues of climate change and development being addressed
by the G8.

Sincerely,

Vivian Stromberg
MADRE
USA

Rose Cunningham
Wangki Tangni Women’s Center
Nicaragua

Adriana Gonzalez
LIMPAL
Colombia

Sandra Gonzalez Maldonado
Comité de Trabajadoras de la Maquila Bárcenas; Women Workers’ Committee
Guatemala

Anne Sosin
KOFAVIV - Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim; The Commission of Women Victims for Victims
Haiti

Ethanol, corn, and the weather

The NYT today had an article about the perfect storm brewing with ethanol and energy prices. They are arguing that the reliance on ethanol really makes energy prices vulnerable to weather disturbances, as they already are with all the refining and drilling capacity in the gulf of mexico.

Just think of how bad its going to get when the corn committed to ethanol almost quintuples over the next 12 years. We are really going to need some new way of producing ethanol, and if has to be corn, it has to be the whole plant, not just the cobs. That probably means genetic engineering, either engineering the corn plant to digest itself (like the Michigan State one with the enzyme in the vaccuole), or new enzymes to digest the whole plant in some kind of fermentation reactor... and with this the assocaited food safety and ecological risks... unless switchgrass, elephant grass, or some other exotic perrenial weed takes off... But that won't happen unless they work it into the farm bill....

July 1, 2008

Weather Risks Cloud Promise of Biofuel

By JAD MOUAWAD

The record storms and floods that swept through the Midwest last month struck at the heart of America’s corn region, drowning fields and dashing hopes of a bumper crop.

They also brought into sharp relief a new economic hazard. As America grows more reliant on corn for its fuel supply, it is becoming vulnerable to the many hazards that can damage crops, ranging from droughts to plagues to storms.

The floods have helped send the price of ethanol up 19 percent in a month. They appear to have had little effect on the price of gasoline at the pump, as ethanol represents only about 6 percent of the nation’s transport fuel today.

But that share is expected to rise to at least 20 percent in coming decades. Experts fear that a future crop failure could take so much fuel out of the market that it would send prices soaring at the pump. Eventually, the cost of filling Americans’ gas tanks could be influenced as much by hail in Iowa as by the bombing of an oil pipeline in Nigeria.

“We are holding ourselves hostage to the weather,” said John M. Reilly, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an ethanol expert. “Agricultural markets are subject to wide variability and big price spikes, just like oil markets.”

Three years ago, Americans discovered that the vicissitudes of the weather could have a powerful effect on energy prices when two hurricanes struck the Gulf Coast. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita interrupted a quarter of the nation’s oil production and closed dozens of refineries for weeks. Lines formed for the first time since the 1970s as gasoline spiked above $3 a gallon, a record at the time. The nation’s increasing dependence on crops for motor fuel adds another level of vulnerability from the weather.

It is still too early to estimate damage to corn crops from the recent floods, or their impact on ethanol output. Iowa, the biggest corn state, may have lost as much as 10 percent of its harvest, according to preliminary estimates.

But concerns that the floods could tighten corn supplies this year have pushed up both corn and ethanol prices. Ethanol, which was already rising before the floods, has nearly doubled from its low of $1.50 a gallon in September.

Unexpected interruptions in oil supplies have been a factor driving oil prices above $140 a barrel lately. Given the tight oil market, there is little untapped capacity that can be brought online to make up for sudden supply interruptions, whether of oil itself or of the biofuels that are increasingly substituting for oil.

In the 1980s, the oil capacity cushion peaked at around 20 percent of global consumption. Today, it represents only about 2 percent — less than Iran’s petroleum exports. Analysts have warned that such record-low levels of spare capacity pose unprecedented risks to the stability of oil markets and introduce a significant premium in the price of oil.

“There is now a vulnerability to perfect storms, not just in a metaphorical sense, but increasingly in a literal sense,” said Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm. “In addition to geopolitical risks, you must now add weather risks.”

While storms, torrential rains and hurricanes have always been a part of energy production, the areas where most of the nation’s new oil and ethanol supplies are coming from — the corn belt and the Gulf of Mexico — are especially vulnerable to hazardous weather.

“Our energy policy is like playing Russian roulette with every chamber loaded,” said Lawrence J. Goldstein, an energy analyst at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, a group backed by the oil industry. “We’ve doubled up on the weather risk.”

Both the government and the ethanol industry recognize the risks of tying fuels to crops. The secretaries of energy and agriculture, in a joint letter to the Senate, recently said: “If we assumed a supply disruption of ethanol, we would expect a fairly large increase in the price of gasoline until ethanol supply were re-established or new market equilibriums were achieved.”

Backers of biofuels contend that growing ethanol supply is keeping gasoline prices from rising even higher than they have, by anywhere from 35 cents to 50 cents a gallon, in their estimation. They also point out that the government’s ethanol mandate, which requires oil companies to blend ethanol into motor fuel, can be suspended in an emergency. Finally, they say that future ethanol supplies will be derived from materials like switchgrass or wood chips that are resistant to bad weather.

Bob Dinneen, the president of the Renewable Fuels Association, the industry’s main trade group, said only two out of 160 ethanol refineries nationwide shut down because of the storms. Both will reopen soon, he said.

“There is a lot of overblown concern that is not really justified by the facts on the ground,” Mr. Dinneen said. “Certainly the weather is going to have an impact on all sorts of industries. It had an impact when Katrina wreaked havoc on the refining industry. It has an impact on ethanol production, but it has been minimal.”

In recent years, corn ethanol has been one of the few sources of supply growth in transport fuels. Indeed, biofuels have become the single biggest source of new fuels produced outside of countries belonging to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Production worldwide is expected to grow by 330,000 barrels a day this year, to 1.4 million barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency.

In the United States, bipartisan public policies have driven the rise of the ethanol industry. Congress has set rising requirements for oil companies to blend ethanol with gasoline, backed with generous subsidies that should total $12 billion this year, according to estimates by Barclays Capital.

The ethanol mandate is set at nine billion gallons for 2008 and is scheduled to rise to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022. By various estimates, that would represent 20 to 25 percent of the nation’s gasoline consumption by then.

Corn ethanol is capped at 15 billion gallons from 2015 onward. The rest is supposed to come from advanced biofuels. They would not require food crops, but bringing them to market depends on perfecting techniques that are still experimental.

Farmers who support the government’s ethanol policy argue that truly disastrous weather in the corn belt does not happen often.

“The last time we had real weather problems in the corn belt was 1988,” said Tom Buis, the president of the National Farmers Union. “That’s pretty rare.”

Emerson D. Nafziger, a professor of agronomy at the University of Illinois, said farmers still had time to recover this year, to some degree. But he said this year’s storms were the first real test for the nascent ethanol industry.

“We may end up feeling we dodged a bullet this year,” he said. “We’ve had a run of fairly favorable weather in recent years. But there is no guarantee it will stay that way.”

Malthus Redux: Is Doomsday Upon Us, Again?

A very sophisticated interpretation of a complex problem. Or, is it simply the problem of US and EU subsidies?

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

LAST RESORT Haitians searching for food or anything else at a dump. Rising food prices led to riots in April. Most Haitians earn less than $2 a day.

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: June 15, 2008

During the last American food-and-gas-price crisis, in the 1970s, one of my colleagues on the Berkeley student newspaper told me that he and his semi-communal housemates had taken a vote. They'd calculated they could afford meat or coffee. They chose coffee.

The decision was slightly less effete than it sounds now — the Starbucks clone wars were still some years off, so he was talking about choosing Yuban over ground chuck. But it nonetheless said something about us as spoiled Americans. Riots were relatively common in Berkeley in those days. But they were never about food. (That particular revolution was starting without us on Shattuck Avenue, where Chez Panisse had just opened.)

However, elsewhere on the globe, people were on the edge of starvation. Grain prices were soaring, rice stocks plummeting. In Ethiopia and Cambodia, people were well over the edge, and food riots helped lead to the downfall of Emperor Haile Selassie and the victory of the Khmer Rouge.

Now it's happening again. While Americans grumble about gasoline prices, food riots have seared Bangladesh, Egypt and African countries. In Haiti, they cost the prime minister his job. Rice-bowl countries like China, India and Indonesia have restricted exports and rice is shipped under armed guard.

And again, Thomas Malthus, a British economist and demographer at the turn of the 19th century, is being recalled to duty. His basic theory was that populations, which grow geometrically, will inevitably outpace food production, which grows arithmetically. Famine would result. The thought has underlain doomsday scenarios both real and imagined, from the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to the Population Bomb of 1968.

But over the last 200 years, with the Industrial Revolution, the Transportation Revolution, the Green Revolution and the Biotech Revolution, Malthus has been largely discredited. The wrenching dislocations of the last few months do not change that, most experts say. But they do show the kinds of problems that can emerge.

The whole world has never come close to outpacing its ability to produce food. Right now, there is enough grain grown on earth to feed 10 billion vegetarians, said Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University and the author of "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" But much of it is being fed to cattle, the S.U.V.'s of the protein world, which are in turn guzzled by the world's wealthy.

Theoretically, there is enough acreage already planted to keep the planet fed forever, because 10 billion humans is roughly where the United Nations predicts that the world population will plateau in 2060. But success depends on portion control; in the late 1980s, Brown University's World Hunger Program calculated that the world then could sustain 5.5 billion vegetarians, 3.7 billion South Americans or 2.8 billion North Americans, who ate more animal protein than South Americans.

Even if fertility rates rose again, many agronomists think the world could easily support 20 billion to 30 billion people.

Anyone who has ever flown across the United States can see how that's possible: there's a lot of empty land down there. The world's entire population, with 1,000 square feet of living space each, could fit into Texas. Pile people atop each other like Manhattanites, and they get even more elbow room.

Water? When it hits $150 a barrel, it will be worth building pipes from the melting polar icecaps, or desalinating the sea as the Saudis do.

The same potential is even more obvious flying around the globe. The slums of Mumbai are vast; but so are the empty arable spaces of Rajasthan. Africa, a huge continent with a mere 944 million people on it, looks practically empty from above. South of the Sahara, the land is rich; south of the Zambezi, the climate is temperate. But it is farmed mostly by people using hoes.

As Harriet Friedmann, an expert on food systems at the University of Toronto, pointed out, Malthus was writing in a Britain that echoed the dichotomy between today's rich countries and the third world: an elite of huge landowners practicing "scientific farming" of wool and wheat who made fat profits; many subsistence farmers barely scratching out livings; migration by those farmers to London slums, followed by emigration. The main difference is that emigration then was to colonies where farmland was waiting, while now it is to richer countries where jobs are.

Malthus's world filled up, and its farmers, defying his predictions, became infinitely more productive. Admittedly, emptying acreage so it can be planted with genetically modified winter wheat and harvested by John Deere combines can be a brutal process, but it is solidly within the Western canon. My Scottish ancestors, for example, became urbanites thanks to the desire of English scientific farmers (for which read "landlords and bribers of clan chiefs") to graze more sheep in the highlands. Four generations later, I got to mull the coffee-meat dilemma while actually living on newsroom pizza.

So it ultimately worked out for one spoiled Scottish-American. But what about the 800 million people who are chronically hungry, even in riot-free years?

Dr. Friedmann argues that there is a Malthusian unsustainability to the way big agriculture is practiced, that it degrades genetic diversity and the environment so much that it will eventually reach a tipping point and hunger will spread.

Others vigorously disagree. In their view, the world is almost endlessly bountiful. If food became as pricey as oil, we would plow Africa, fish-farm the oceans and build hydroponic skyscraper vegetable gardens. But they see the underlying problem in terms more Marxian than Malthusian: the rich grab too much of everything, including biomass.

For the moment, simply ending subsidies to American and European farmers would let poor farmers compete, which besides feeding their families would push down American food prices and American taxes.

Tyler Cowen, a George Mason University economist, notes that global agriculture markets are notoriously unfree and foolishly managed. Rich countries subsidize farmers, but poor governments fix local grain prices or ban exports just when world prices rise — for example, less than 7 percent of the world's rice crosses borders. That discourages the millions of third world farmers who grow enough for themselves and a bit extra for sale from planting that bit extra.

Americans are attracted to Malthusian doom-saying, Dr. Cowen argues, "because it's a pre-emptive way to hedge your fear. Prepare yourself for the worst, and you feel safer than when you're optimistic."

Dr. Cohen, of Rockefeller University, sees it in more sinister terms: Americans like Malthus because he takes the blame off us. Malthus says the problem is too many poor people.

Or, to put it in the terms in which the current crisis is usually explained: too many hard-working Chinese and Indians who think they should be able to eat pizza, meat and coffee and aspire to a reservation at Chez Panisse. They get blamed for raising global prices so much that poor Africans and Asians can't afford porridge and rice. The truth is, the upward pressure was there before they added to it.

America has always been charitable, so the answer has never been, "Let them eat bean sprouts." But it has been, "Let them eat subsidized American corn shipped over in American ships." That may need to change.