Week 7: Food Production
Food Crisis
The April 19th 2008 Economist called the emerging food crisis a "silent tsunami", meaning that it is going to harm or kill as many people as the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2005, but without the immediate drama. The symptom is the recent sharp rise in food prices. What caused this, and what do we do about it?
The Problem
Summarizing recent reports: there have been food protests or food riots in several countries, including Haiti, the Phillipines, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Cameroon. Egypt has prepared. The BBC reports that wheat and rice prices have nearly doubled in the last year, while the charts in the Economist suggest it is worst than that.
Aid agencies expect an additional 100 million people to fall back to the $1 per day level (joining the 1 billion people there). This kind of desperation threatens political stability as well.
The Cause
There are several causes, and different groups emphasize different causes. Some prominent ones:
- The rising standard of living in India and China. As these countries industrialize and grow more wealthy, they can afford more food. The Economist asserts that The prices mainly reflect changes in demand--not problems in supply, such as harvest failure. More affluent people also start eating more meat, and it takes more grain to feed a cow to feed a person than it does to feed a person directly. At least, if your cows are eating grains.
- Biofuels: global warming and the Iraq war have combined to make both liberals and conservatives search for alternatives to oil. Biofuels were an economic natural, because they already have massive industry in place. This is another form of demand.
- Supply: Several countries have had droughts. Not enough to explain things alone, but another factor. In a complex system, small changes can have big effects. Australia has been one of the largest wheat exporters in recent times, and their severe 10-year drought has really decreased their production, especially last year when early rains encouraged ill-founded optimism.
- Speculation & Regulation: Several nations have restricted food exports, in response to increasing prices, to protect their own consumers. Although locally sensible, that exacerbates the global shortage.
- Other government policies: The Economist lists several policies that were put in place to solve particular problems, from subsidies on food crops or biofuels, to payments for not farming, to quotas and tariffs. All of these were in place for a 30-year run of "cheap food". Indeed, while other U.S. prices have gone up about 10x during that second half of the 20th century, food prices have only doubled, and farmer's earnings have effectively gone down.
The Solution
Different groups emphasize different solutions, based on what they see as the worst part of the problem. Clearly it is hard to see the ramifications of everything at once, which is how we got into this mess. For example, the recent promotion of biofuels was done thinking about global warming, with a mindset of having more than enough crops, especially U.S. corn. But the biofuels market has responded efficiently to the incentives, leading at least one U.N. panel to suggest that biofuels were unethical, because they made food scarcer.
Not surprisingly, the Economist favors less regulation. Exactly what kinds of regulation will help and hurt is beyond our ability to tell. But one thing is almost surely right: encouraging more production by the many small farmers around the world is likely to be more effective than concentrating new production in the few industrialized countries.
This is happening in some places, like India. But not all. The Economist writes: In parts of east Africa, farmers are cutting back on the area planted, mostly because they cannot afford fertilisers (driven by oil, fertiliser prices have soared, too). In addition, they claim: higher yields also need better irrigation and fancier seeds. ... Creating a new seed is a bit like designing a flu vaccine: you need to keep updating it, or pests and disease will negate its effectiveness. On top of that, food dumping from over-producing industrial countries killed any incentive for developing countries to invest in advanced agriculture.
Questioning the Dominant Technology
Notice that we are watching --- live --- a debate about technology and policy. There is a dominant technology: industrial agriculture. At least, it is dominant in the discussion, as revealed by the assumptions: that cows eat grain (an industrial adaptation), that agriculture requires high-tech petroleum-based fertilizer (an industrial invention), and that higher yields require fancy seeds (an industrial technology).
These and other industrial advances have indeed yielded amazing benefits in the form of lower food prices. But like antibacterial resistance, they have caused side effects. Possibly --- and only possibly --- the current food crisis is a sign of problems we are going to face because of the success of the dominant technology. Regardless, a crisis affords a chance to re-examine, so here we take the chance to re-examine modern U.S. industrial agriculture.
Power Steer
Pollan notes that a modern Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) can bring a beef cow to slaughter at 16 months, where it used to take 5 years. That requires "enormous quantities of corn, protein supplements--and drugs, including growth hormones." Much of his article discusses the hidden costs of these efficiencies. In short:
- Diseases of cannibalism: protein supplements recently came from dead cows; they still come from dead chickens
- Filth: a CAFO is not a nice place; certainly not a farm
- Antibiotic resistance: to combat the filth, close quarters, and such, the cows have to be given lots of antibiotics. the only reason contemporary animal cities aren't as plague-ridden as their medieval counterparts is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic. At minimum, that ensures our food contains low doses -- exactly what we don't want. Low doses just engender resistance.
- Disease transfer: corn diets acidify the cow stomach, giving it a pH closer to ours, helping it to breed E. Coli that we too can catch.
- Waste problems: a result of concetrated filth
- Animal welfare: people who see these operations, or the massive slaugterhouses down the "pipe" are tempted to become vegetarians
- Bad human diet: Pollan suggests that corn-fed beef is relatively less healthy
Tracing back the food chain again, he notes that industrial beef production relies on the river of cheap corn, that itself has the environmental costs of monoculture. It is likely this monoculture that requires the massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides, produced and transported with oil, which itself is becoming much more expensive.
Are there alternatives?
If we are to believe Pollan and others, yes. Some farmers have returned to "grass farming" and after many years of careful polyculture, have managed to improve the yields while keeping a more-or-less closed ecosystem -- one not requiring massive energy inputs in the form of chemical fertilizer, etc. Indeed, one of the interesting claims is that they do not have the same pest problems as monoculture farms, because the rotations of animals and plants reduces them naturally. For example, chickens following cows into pasture will eat many pests.
(This is in contrast to intensive polyculture, such as practiced in SE Asia, where many different are kept in very close proximity. It is a remarkably interesting and efficient system, but also very good at producing new strains of influenza. Once again, efficiency depends on what you measure.)
Assuming No. 534 continues to eat 25 pounds of corn a day and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil. We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine.
Conclusion
Grass-fed beef is not the answer to the current food crisis. It is a crisis, and needs an emergency response. Indeed, a less industrial food chain will almost certainly make food more expensive "at the pump". However, first, the discussion does provide an interesting critique of the invisible assumptions of the dominant technology, at a time where crisis helps us to see the assumptions. Second, it may be that adding in all the costs would change the apparent economics.
Pollan and others are suggesting that moving away from industrial agriculture would solve more problems than they cause. Doing so would reverse many of the trends that we examined in More Work for Mother. Even if the claims are right, it remains to be seen whether the solution is achievable. It is very hard to choose the more expensive option today because it promises to be less expensive later. Especially when there is hardly agreement about what would happen later.
But I have tried to show how the themes we saw in historical episodes are always at work, by picking a current example that interests me. For purposes of this class, I am less interested in a particular conclusion that in using the tools we have developed to pry open some boxes that get sealed and put on shelves: the technology we have is not inevitable.
Next week, we return to history proper.