STWR - Share The World's Resources

This time last year it cost me about £7.50 a month to feed a pig on my small farm in Somerset; today it's nearer £15. In a year, wheat prices have doubled, leading not only to increased bread prices, but also to demonstrations by pig farmers, who are going out of business as fast as you can fry bacon.

28th March 08 - Rosie Boycott, The Guardian (UK)

Almost all the food we eat - 95% - is oil-dependent, so as oil prices rise, the cost of food does too. Oil is central to fertilisers, mechanised production, transportation and packaging. However, between 1950 - when mechanisation and fertilisers transformed farming into agribusiness - and 1984, world grain production increased by 250%. The consequent cheapness of food kept inflation down and allowed for the postwar consumer boom.

For years experts have been asking what will we eat when the crises of climate change and oil depletion converge, with the possible end of our globalised food supply. Our tea and coffee and spices might still come from abroad, but what about salad vegetables, beef and fresh orange juice? Cheap oil has let the west regard the whole world as its farmyard, always seeking the cheapest place to produce and process. But last year's rate of factory-gate inflation was the highest for more than 16 years, with increases ranging from 7.5% for bread to 15% for milk, cheese and eggs and 60% for rice. Overall food inflation is 6.6%, in a year when oil prices have risen by 70%. No wonder those on the bottom of the ladder are starting to feel the strain.

Britain currently imports about £22bn worth of food and drink a year, 68% from the EU. Britain has not been self-sufficient in food since the late 18th century, but the situation is rapidly worsening. In 2006, 37% of the UK's food was imported, with London dependent on imports for 80% of its food. For the capital, a food shortage would clearly be disastrous.

We have become a meat-eating world, and in developing countries meat is seen as a sign of prosperity. However, while it takes 2kg of grain to produce 1kg of chicken, 7kg of grain is needed to make 1kg of beef. When I was a child, my family ate meat maybe once a week: now it is considered a daily prerequisite. The average Briton eats 80kg of meat a year, while the equivalent figure for Americans is 124kg - but the startling, and frightening, change is taking place in China. In 1962, there was just 4kg of meat in the average Chinese diet; by 2005 that figure was 60kg and rising.

It is not simply that we do not have enough land to grow the grain to feed the animals that in turn feed us. In the past two decades in the US, the use of hydrocarbon pesticides has increased 33 times, and yet, as soil structures weaken due to overuse and mono-crop cultivation, more crops are being lost to pests every year.

The water situation is also alarming. The world has a finite supply of fresh water yet we blithely continue to eat more meat, even though it takes between 100 and 1,000 times more water to produce 1kg of beef than it does to produce 1kg of wheat. Indeed, 70% of all fresh water is used for agriculture, so when you buy imported food, you are buying another country's water allocation. Each Kenyan green bean stem is equivalent to four litres of water from a certified "water-stressed" country. Moreover, the UN says that animal husbandry now accounts for a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, due to forest clearances and the methane emitted by cattle.

It's an explosive mix: rising oil prices; land shortages due to our gargantuan appetite for meat; the pressures imposed on arable land by biofuels; and the growing effect of climate change, which is rapidly reducing large areas of Africa to deserts that are no longer able to support agriculture. Put all these together, and you have a crisis that is both very real and very near.

The dominance of the supermarkets in food retailing contributes massively to our dependence and vulnerability. Rising energy prices have an immediate impact on many practices, including "just in time delivery", "warehousing on wheels" and plastic packaging - not to mention the transportation of processed foods and raw materials, which encourages the Scottish seafood outfit Young's, for example, to fly prawns to Thailand to be cleaned and de-shelled, before then flying them back home for packaging. The fuel protests of September 2000 gave us a glimpse of how even the supply of basic foodstuffs is dependent on oil: Justin King, the CEO of Sainsbury's, warned Tony Blair that we would be "out of food" within "days not weeks" if the protests continued.

In the words of Tim Lang, the professor of food policy at the University of Leeds: "We are sleepwalking into a crisis." At the very least he predicts the end of the era of cheap food, which will in itself amount to a big shift in our eating habits. But if the process of rising costs and diminishing grain supplies accelerates (as it may well do), we could be seeing actual shortages of basic foodstuffs. One report last month said that the world is only 10 weeks from running out of wheat supplies after stocks fell to their lowest level for 50 years.

It is worth noting that when we last had a food crisis, in 1939, we still had productive orchards and plenty of farmers. In recent decades our dependence on imported food has become phenomenal: half of all vegetables and 95% of all fruit consumed in the UK now come from overseas (even in September, the height of the domestic growing year, supermarkets stock predominantly South African and New Zealand apples). On average 37 farmers are leaving the land every day in Britain; there are now more people in jail than farmers. The decline in the rural labour force is a predictable consequence of the industrialisation of agriculture. Only 1% of the UK's workforce is now employed in land-related activities, compared with 35% a century ago.

It seems to me that our eating habits are unsustainable. The Stockholm Environment Institute at York University recently calculated that the UK's food and farming ecological footprint - its land, energy and sea-space use - is up to six times the UK's food-growing area.

Clearly, the government has not woken up to the looming crisis. Food and related issues straddle no less than 19 ministries. Professor Lang believes that nothing short of a radical change in our diets - away from meat and towards vegetables and grains - will solve the problem long term. Meanwhile, as he says, we are governed by the politics of Tesco - and that is truly scary.

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Rosie Boycott is a British journalist, writer, broadcaster and feminist.

Food for thought: Famine, Farm Prices and Aid

28th March 08 - The Economist

For years, anti-poverty campaigners railed against low commodity prices, which depressed farmers' incomes in developing countries. In recent months, the world price of virtually all staples has shot up, but the activists are still not cheering. They worry that this boom (intensified by “green” subsidies for biofuel crops) may worsen poverty even more than low agricultural prices did.

High food prices do help poor farmers, but they also hurt the more numerous category of people (poor city-dwellers as well as landless rural folk) who must buy food to survive. That “unintended consequence”—in the words of Gawain Kripke of Oxfam International, a British charity—has caused serious problems for the organisations that bring food aid to the poorest. The World Food Programme (WFP), a UN agency, has just issued an urgent appeal for $500m, to cover higher food costs. America's Agency for International Development (USAID), a huge financer of food aid, is asking for $350m.

The short-term outlook seems grim, both for the poor and the agencies that supposedly help them. Even before the current price boom started two years ago, food aid was running at historically low levels, perhaps half the real-terms total of two decades earlier. And the WFP says hunger is on the rise in the countries it watches. It classifies as “hotspots” the places—most of central Africa, plus Afghanistan—where more than a third of the people do not get as much food as is needed. A second tier, where between a fifth and a third lack adequate food, includes much of West Africa, the Indian sub-continent and Bolivia. David Kauck of CARE, an American charity, says that pockets of real hunger also exist in many rich countries.

Dismal as all this sounds, there are some grounds for hope. Today's woes may lead to fundamental changes for the better in the world's approach to hunger and food shortages. And not before time, in the view of experts who see something crazy about the way many food-aid efforts are now conceived and executed.

One mistake, arguably, is the very idea of defining the main problem as massive hunger, and hence the solution as providing food by any means necessary. “There is simply no shortage of food,” insists Rachel Nugent of America's Centre for Global Development. Of course, there are places—like North Korea or Darfur—where political (and in some cases ecological) factors cause an intense local shortage of food. In those cases, insists Josette Sheeran, head of the WFP, food aid is the only option. She also fears that the world is getting less resilient in its ability to respond to a growing number of food emergencies.

But leaving aside those extraordinary events, most pundits, including Ms Sheeran, agree that the world now has plenty of food: last year saw a record cereal harvest. And the investments spurred by today's high prices promise even more food in future. Even if one allows for rising demand from Asia's middle classes, the real challenge is not the volume of food available; it is the problem of food being in the wrong place and at a price the poorest cannot afford. Michael Hess of USAID adds that famines are made inevitable by poor governance, not natural disasters. After all, “America has droughts, but not famine.”

Moreover, hunger as such is the wrong target, says Meera Shekar of the World Bank. Hunger is transient and hard to measure, but malnutrition, she notes, is a pernicious killer (with lack of food as only one contributing variable). She points out that South Asia, which has plentiful food, suffers from twice the level of malnutrition as crisis-prone sub-Saharan Africa.

The snag is that tackling malnutrition is harder than sending bags of grain. It means fixing health systems, improving the delivery of nutrients in the food chain, educating people about hygiene and other unpopular and unprofitable jobs. Small wonder, then, that this burdensome task has fewer political cheerleaders.

Oxfam's Mr Kripke holds out hope that today's price shock may yet “help fix a broken system”. The United States, in particular, monetises food aid in a bizarre way. Tax dollars are used to buy food in America, which is then sold by charities in poor-country markets to fund development. Christopher Barrett, an economist at Cornell University, calls this “a clever way to turn a dollar of taxpayer money into 50 cents for a non-governmental organisation to spend.” The requirement that most food aid must be sent on American ships raises costs, and benefits just a few shippers.

Change may be coming. Over the objections of some tough lobbies, George Bush has proposed fixing some of the distorting aspects of America's food policies. The president has called for more emphasis on procuring produce from local farmers in poor countries. And in a bold gesture, CARE has said it will no longer accept any American government donations using the monetisation approach.

Most encouraging are some proposed changes at the WFP. Ms Sheeran hopes to persuade her board at a meeting in June to shift her agency's focus away from emergency food aid and towards a wider remit. She wants to expand its role in surveillance, stockpiling and risk-insurance. She also speaks of targeting subsidies or vouchers “in ways that complement markets rather than distort them”, as current subsidies often do. If this sort of clarity prevails, it would be a silver lining on the dark cloud that now looms over the poor.

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