First it was oil. Now it’s food, and the people of the developing world are, as usual, copping the worst of it:
Basic access to food is slipping out of reach for many people in developing countries. The cost of the rice has risen by more than three-quarters in two months and the price of wheat has more than doubled in the same time.
The desperation in dozens of countries has turned deadly of late. In the past week alone there have been violent, food-related riots in Haiti, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cameroon.
While there are short term factors pushing up food prices - amongst them, the drought in south-eastern Australia - there are also long-term factors pushing the price up, some not easily fixable, and some that are.
When impoverished people increase their income, one of the first things they do is improve their diet. And, like me, they reckon meat improves a meal. So, as many of the more than two billion people in China and India begin to lift themselves out of grinding poverty, their consumption of meat, eggs, fish, and dairy products have gone up considerably. So those two countries are either a) importing more of those products - thus making New Zealand’s dairy farmers rich as hell - or b) importing more grain to feed to animals to grow more cows, pigs, chickens, and fish. Now, as any chemical engineer knows, adding another stage in a chemical process adds another source of inefficiency, and warm-blooded mammals are pretty damned inefficient. Maybe a factor of 10 or 20 times less efficient than just eating whatever crop it was directly. It should be noted that much of Australia’s meat is grass-fed, from areas less suitable for cropping, so this argument is less applicable locally. But, on a global scale, a greater proportion of the world’s grain is now feeding developing countries’ farm animals, rather than directly into the mouths of the very poor.
Then we have a second factor pushing prices up - biofuels. While I can’t find exact statistics for 2007, perhaps 20% of the US’s corn crop is being turned into ethanol fuel. Throw in the EU’s biofuels mandate, and the IMF thinks that the biofuel push accounts for roughly half the increase in food prices.
There’s nothing much that can be done about the shift to a more meat-based diet in rapidly industrializing countries. But biofuels are largely a creation of government mandates (and I should note that the Australian Greens were proposing such a mandate at the last election). It used to be that famines occurred not because of a shortage of food, but the inability to get it to the people who needed it because of wars. It seems now that the poorest people in the world won’t get enough food, in substantial part because the rich world prefers putting food into their petrol tanks instead of people’s mouths.
I don’t understand how giving the relevant UN bodies $500M is going to make much difference. If there ain’t enough food there ain’t enough and more money just means pushing up the price a bit .. no?
George Monbiot gets a roasting from the RWDBs (they call him moonbat), but by crikey he was on the money four years ago:
If you could see the crap that gets caught in the E10 servo fuel pumps and the gunk on the storage tank dipsticks you would never put it in your car’s fuel tank.
The NSW govt is going to make E10 the one and only standard ULP from 2010. If you don’t want it, for whatever reason, you’re going to have buy the more expensive higher octane petrol.
If you culd see what it did to the fibreglass tank on my bike, you would nearly cry.
Well, I did.
Sorry Rodney, but the higher octane fuels are very likely to have a fair whack of ethanol in them.
In the future, it is entirely likely that they will contain ethanol, as MTBE is removed from high octane fuel and replaced by ethanol.
Monbiot may be a command-and-control lefty and fond of elaborate five-year plans, but at least the man can use Google and a calculator.
That puts him ahead of at least 95% of the commentary on energy and greenhouse issues…
Aidan: the point is whether it gets fed to people, or to farm animals…
Isn’t it possible to make biofuels out of scrub/grass, rather than food grains? Pity it is the hungry who meed corn as grain that go without, rather than those that use it as a syrup/sweetener, that I understand is in a lot of our processed foods.
I heard somewhere in the last couple of days that there is in fact enough food to feed the world, its just that its prohibitively expensive. Also ths rather horrifying statement:
From today’s Melbourne Age.
My 95 octane petrol is 10% Australian sugar cane derived ethanol. I think I’m saving a few trips to the dentists that way (while stuffing up the barrier reef I expect).
The ‘crisis’ is merely a simple and non-dramatic extension of current economics regarding first world wants versus third world needs. People have been starving for a long long time while cash crops get exported to first world countries. I’m sure there are local, market-based solutions whereby farmers in third world countries can meet their own food needs. Is more food aid the long-term answer?
Becker and Posner comment here and here, in that order.
Subsidised biofuels are another perfect example of the inability of governments of any stripe to get it right. It will be interesting to see what the unintended consequences of a few million (subsidised) windmills and a couple of thousand square kilometers of (subsidised) solar panels will be.
Great post Robert.
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I was part of the biofuel cheersquad ’til an authentic AGW on Catallaxy poiinted out the impracticality of it. (No I’m not talking about Graeme Bird. There’s a distinction between the genuinely skeptical and denialist lunacy.)Your article points out the costs and benefits of policy which is something ironically not considered much by those most concerned about sustainability. The Greens don’t appear to do this at all.
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What is interesting is that the government-sanctioned/managed policy is ineffective and creates poverty. However a shift in consumption patterns - individual choice - might just do this. Banning meat won’t work as it’ll create an immediate (and I’d say distinctly unpleasant) black market. Funnily enough a drastic reduction in the consumptiom of meat one way or another might be inevitable. Can people act rationally and self-restrict for the sake of planetary health - that is the question and has always been.
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The Ecologically-concerned Left have never doubted this. However their approach, if we take the biofuel example, is political where it should be ethical and vice versa. People will campaign for Kyoto, for biofuel mandates, for subsidized solar station - for solutions by government mandate and design - without once considering the criticisms made of such policies. Naturally as so many of these criticisms have been made by people who blatantly disregard both conservation concerns and economic impact on the environment the tendency is to listen only to rebutt. We never concede that they may have a point.
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I’d say the point is to consider stuff such as Robert has with all environmental policy. Always ask the cost/benefit question and try to get a range of views. Read people you hate. This is a fight we can only win but not fighting.
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Well except this - [link]
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But that’s all in good fun.
two and a half thoushand comments on that post. Holy crap.
Wilful, I wonder how many of these cash crop deals are the brain-child of the World Bank and IMF? They grow cash crops to pay off their loans and import food grown in the first world, at a vastly inflated price.
I agree laura ….holy crap and then some.
I have a question which is about the damage caused to engines by ethanol. Some others have mentioned it here and I’ve been advised by the helpful guy at my local station that it is very corrosive to the internal workings of our engines. Is this a new urban myth or founded in fact?
We aren’t the only people paying a lot for our meat by the way. The best quality cuts are usually exported or find their way to local providors supplying the fancy restaurant market. The biggest export markets for this high quality meat seems to be Asia - often China. So it is ironic that the newly rich are showing their superior social and economic status by eating such high quality meat and by so doing eroding the opportunity for their less fortuante compatriots to eat at all.
The amazing thing is that only 7 of ‘em are actually about the topic - a carbon tax - which seems to me a much better policy than carbon trading which is already getting a bad rep.
Early capitalism is famously venal. And this is a worry. How do you tell people enjoying the first fruits of modern life they’ve gotta tighten their belt? You can’t. Try going into a fantasy Moscow nightclub, telling the black clad Armani’d dudes there about cutting emmissions and live to tell the tale.
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This post also highlights an unpleasant possibility. Good environmental policy might be incompatible with issues of equity and access. In the event that that was an incontestable certianty which way would you go?
I don’t think all this biofuel stuff is all the fault of either greenhouse amelioration efforts or lefty activists. If I recall correctly (and I think I do) there was outrage a few election cycles back when it was discovered that a large ethanol subsidy was being given to John Howard’s mate at Manildra. And if I recall, this ethanol subsidy started at the same time as the petrol excise was cut loose from inflation (or was it just cut? I can’t recall), and the subsidy was marketed as a way to reduce the cost of petrol - hardly a pro-greeny move. I also recall the newspapers were quite fond of the policy until it was revealed that the chief (and only?) beneficiary was John Howard’s mate. This of course was back in his denialist stage.
I would have thought that the best way to cut first and 3rd world meat consumption would be to introduce a methane tax on all foods (and hydroelectric power?), which would presumably push up the cost of rice a little and meat a lot, without all that dreaded government subsidization that is so bad unless the banks are collapsing. Then we can achieve the triple goals of reducing meat eating (which is bad for one’s health when done to excess), reducing animal cruelty (eating beef being bad for cows, generally) and reducing greenhouse gasses. Of course, this would require cooperation around the world, and we all know that the kind of people who post on catallaxy are incapable of saying the word “cooperation” - it always comes out of their mouths as “coercion”.
Good point SG a lot of the biofuel thing can be attributed to the Corporatocracy trying to keep the party going. However the policy, generally speaking, is a command and cotrol style one. These policies are generally associated with the Left tho’ as you point out they hardly have the monopoly on them.
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People might call bullshit but I’m not a market fundamentalist. However I do think the Greens could make a better contribution if they focused on energy policy without recourse the ideological projects of the Left-past or the attendent anti-capitalist prejudices. I know: fat chance.
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Still some of the solutions might just be in liberalising the market. Breaking the collusion between politicians and energy companies, for example.
Further I note that in the last few years Australians and Americans have been getting fat rapidly, mostly on cheap corn syrup and sugar. This suggests a worldwide market glut, and I wonder (I don’t know, I wonder) whether the people at the top of the big market players in these two highly corporatized markets didn’t realise a few years ago that supply was outstripping demand. I think some people realised they needed to create demand in a hurry, and latched onto the best model and the best actor - global warming and the US government. I suspect there is a lobbyist’s hand at work in these big command-and-control decisions, and that lobbyist doesn’t give two hoots about global warming.
In this case I think as in many others (and is that one being pointed out in a post above this?), the environmentalist movement has proven to be a willing patsy easily manipulated.
Murph,
10% Ethanol is fine in most modern fuel injected engines and actually has a moderate cleaning effect on valves, etc.
On older carburettor vehicles, it is a very dodgy proposition.
BigBob [20]:
Way back in the ancient history of the ‘Eighties, I regularly filled my naturally-aspirated, single carburettor vehicle with the petrol-ethanol mixture sold by BP in Mackay. This was both during the Wet Season and during the Dry. It consistently ran better on the mixture than on straight petrol and with absolutely none of the widely-publicized problems. Nor did anyone I know have any of the problems said to afflict vehicles using petrol-ethanol mixture.
Caroline: ah, the long-promised cellulosic ethanol!
Cellulose is the structural material in most plants. Scientists have been trying to figure out how to turn it into ethanol for a while; the stumbling block is the cost of the enzymes and the plant required to do so. Robert Rapier, who has been looking into these issues for a long time, called this idea dead earlier this year.
However, there’s number of other ways that plant matter can potentially be turned into transport fuel. The simplest is to turn it into methane - natural gas - which can then be turned into virtually any petrochemical you want. This is what Choren is trying to do with their SunDiesel product, if I recall correctly. However, this is still early-stage startup stuff. Don’t hold your breath.
Caroline, that’s probably about right. And that illustrates that the idea that we somehow lack the ability to feed everyone on the planet is nonsense. It’s just that first-world cars are a higher-value customer for agricultural products than third-world people, as wilful has pointed out.
That said, I suspect the solution in the longer term is improving the productivity of third-world agriculture, as there is almost certainly a lot of low-hanging fruit there (so to speak). But, in the short term, biofuel mandates are doing a lot of damage, and are bad policy.
On another point, I’m not convinced that cash crops and importing food are necessarily TEH EVIL, either. Do you all grow your own food?
It’s my impression that the US’ push on biofuels has more to do with reducing dependency on Middle East oil than global warming.
Two interesting facts. First:
Second:
The first link points out that increased prices are not always flowing through to smallholder farmers. But in some places the higher prices is bringing more land into production. In the end, however, the collision between fuel and food is madness, as Monbiot pointed out.
I did hear a Brit talking last year about a fruit that couldn’t be eaten (it was a natural laxative) and grew on semi-arid lands not used for food production. He headed a company that was setting up production in southern Africa and India. He saw it as entirely ethical in that it didn’t interrupt food production and provided a cash income to people who didn’t have much. I can’t think of a key word to google - sorry!
There are already calls within East Timor for the government to take over (and subsidise) all rice imports.
The growing shortage of oil is also directly playing a part in pushing up the prices of food. Production and transport costs.
What market fundamentalists fail to understand is that (like oil) arable land is a non substitutable and finite resource. We have reached some of the limits the Club of Rome warned us about thirty years ago. We try to compensate for lack of oil by turning pasture over to fuel production. So something (food in this case) gives elsewhere in the production system.
There is little low hanging fruit to be had Robert in improving agricultural output further. Fertiliser and irrigation which were the magic ingredients of the Green Revolution are not easy to extend much further. Fertiliser is produced from fossil fuels which are rising in price (read: are now in short supply - see North Korea for the endgame on that score); irrigation - well, if you can find a river system or water table in proximity to arable land on this earth that isn’t already utilised to the max by the unsustainable pressure of 7 billion hungry humans, you’d be doing well.
But of course there are short term solutions which could be had - but politically they are impossible. We do not share outside the tribe when the chips are down.
How would subsidised rice imports affect their capacity for domestic rice production?
Where will they get the money to subsidise rice imports?
You can look to just about the whole of sub-Saharan Africa for a start and that’s an awfully big area. And then you might also look to northern Australia, which is barely touched as to agricultural capacity.
North Korea’s economic woes, including its famines, are the consequence of the insane economic policies of the criminal dictatorship which runs it, not of any supply and demand issues. Compare and contrast it with South Korea.
I have a modest proposal…which if implemented with some rigour would also resolve the issue of people left homeless by the subprime meltdown.
Policy details and recipes on application.
wbb: that’s not entirely true.
In the USA and Europe, a lot of former agricultural land has been taken out of production through the 20th century, for instance in the Northeast.
At least some of that could be put into production again.
Can’t answer the first, but on the second, I heard on the Beeb last night that Indonesia had put a stop to rice exports. The graph at the bottom of this article shows that Indonesia is consuming more than it produces at present. Also:
The World Bank has commissioned a report.
They do have some suggestions for improved production, however. As do the authors of a UNESCO report that’s just hit the deck.
Sea level rise might be a problem, though.
The Age carried an interesting analysis on Tuesday.
The actual Greens policy states that:
Ethanol and biofuels generally may well also be a crock on other grounds, but the Greens aren’t unaware of the implications for food production.
Attempts in this direction have been made at various times, and have frequently foundered due to the local climatic and ecological conditions (extreme heat, extreme humidity, lots of pests and parasites, etc.) being unfavourable to the growing of the crops which were planted, frequently as part of government-mandated schemes such as the Ord River Scheme in Western Australia, which was a bonanza for the local wild geese who fed on rice to their hearts’ content. A thorough study of ecological constraints and possibilities in nothern Australia, taking into account the probable effects of climate change and the environmental services being provided by the land and waterways in their undeveloped state, would be required before decisions should be made about which of these areas could be turned over to agriculture, and in particular about which crops should be planted, which species of livestock farmed, etc.
Rob Merkel,
I am involved in the enzyme industry and I can safely say that the enzyme side of cellulosic ethanol is pretty much cracked - both from a cost and efficiency viewpoint.
The two major enzyme companies have met their committments to the US government on bringing enzyme costs down (off the top of my head, to something around 3-4% of the initial costs). The enzymes will be so cheap, that the cellulosic plants will have their own primitive enzyme manufacturing facilities - as the cost of transport:enzyme cost is too high. The first generation of these new enzymes are available for pilot trials currently. They will improve further yet.
The biggest issues are to do with the process pre-enzymatic action - the collection of bulky, low density feedstock and the pre-treatment regimes needed to allow the enzymes to get to the cellulose.
Which isn’t to say that it will be ready tomorrow or next year - but it isn’t dead by a long shot.
Also a lot of very good quality agricultural land in and around Australian capital cities has been taken out of production, and continues to be taken out of production, due to suburban sprawl. This could be curtailed and even reversed to some extent with better urban planning.
‘How would subsidised rice imports affect their capacity for domestic rice production?’
There have been shortages for years - despite domestic production increasing, except one setback year owing to poor rain. Indonesian occupation gave ET a taste for rice, which is considered a prestige food. Older Timorese say they never ate it before 75.
‘Where will they get the money to subsidise rice imports?’
They’re loaded on oil money. The problem is getting a supplier - traditional exporters (eg Vietnam) are increasongly keeping it for their own markets.
Paul, that’s not really true. Urban sprawl may be locally important, but in the scale of things it doesn’t add to much.
Responses to the current ructions in food supply have all been very 80s style bandaid solutions. I haven’t heard much of any sort of structural fixes to ensure that developing world people are able to ensure tehir own food security. Mostly it’s “give em food from our (non-existent) government stockpiles” combined with export restrictions. All a bit silly, wont stop it happening again.
I think debt relief, making capital and training/education available, and avoiding perverse subsidies would go a lot further to keeping these people fed.
At the nastiest level however, as Nabs alluded to, can the world afford a few more billion people (of whatever hue)?
Wilful: without doubt, if we ate less meat. Most of the crops produced in the USA go to feeding animals, not people.
If current diet trends continue, the problem becomes harder; but then, I think there’s plenty of room to improve the state of agricultural practice around the world, particularly in places like Russia.
Nice Swiftian reference, Nabakov, but I do _not_ wish to eat soylent green. It might make good fertiliser for my garden, though …
Wilful, the problem with urban sprawl is not so much the amount of land that is no longer producing food, rather that it tends to have been the best farmland in the state (which is why the city was sited there in the first place).
Actually, food and water wars around about now (and I’m talking actual military conflict, not metaphor) were predicted in a series of New Scientist articles (by Fred Pearce, I think) back in the early 1990s.
And of course, Malthus described the basic problem some time back.
How?
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It’s the question that never gets answered.
Nabokov [28] and David [37]:
Was it soylent green you were talking about …. or something else?
Quick! Tell us! Before we are overwhelmed in the First Malthusian War.
Today there was an interview on Bush Telegraph on this topic. I couldn’t give it complete attention, but Julian Cribb said we had reached “peak land”. He also said that a big effort was required on agricultural research, but this had been cut back here and all over the world in recent times.
On that theme, on Monday we were told that Australia currently produced 800 Agricultural science students each year, whereas 2000 were needed.
Peak Land!
Absolutely.
There’s only one ten tonne elephant in this room. And he’s looking straight back at me in the mirror.
Adrien says:
“It’s the question that never gets answered.”
That isn’t correct, as John Quiggin notes: “The current food crisis should make subsidies for food-based biofuels politically and economically untenable, pushing the industry away from this easy short term solution and in the direction of sources such as switch grass, grown on marginal or non-arable land.” [link]
There is actually plenty of material on this Adrien, if you care to look. Sugar cane waste and forest waste are already fueling power plants in Australia. [link] Obviously these are not endangering food security.
As to Paul Norton’s point about urban sprawl, I imagine the meat consumption of household cats and dogs is a greater land pressure. Another is the the growth in acreages- such as mine!
“As to Paul Norton’s point about urban sprawl, I imagine the meat consumption of household cats and dogs is a greater land pressure. Another is the the growth in acreages- such as mine!”
Poppycock. Cats and dogs food is mostly made of cereal and meat we won’t eat - offal, culled kangaroo, horse, marine by-catch. Same as it ever was, they get our scraps.
Graham Bell, Soylent Green is people.
Or which we will eat if we dine at one of the less salubrious curry or spaghetti restaurants.
Sod that! I’m not giving up meat!
I’ve just begun doing some thinking and research on this and hence may be about ten days behind the rest of you.
There’s an interesting article in the most recent edition of socialist worker in the UK that says actually food production has increased 17 per cent more than population in the last 30 years and that we now produce enough grain, wheat and rice to give everyone 3500 calories a day. That is before we talk about meat, veggies and fruit. The UK health department estimates we can live on 2,500 calories a day.
The problem seems to be the way capitalism is organised - for profit not people. These people are starving because they can’t afford the food, not because there isn’t enough to go around. Anyway, I’ll start on the long road of research on this. The article can be found at [link]
Jane: Sod that! I’m not giving up meat!
This really is the problem. People who are quite willing to consider giving up their gas guzzlers or paying more for renewable energy won’t even think about a low-meat diet (I’m vegetarian but in terms of dealing with the food crisis we’d be best off if the global average diet had a small amount of meat rather than none at all).
We all know how important progress in renewable energy and low-emitting transport will be to getting through the coming crisis. I sometimes thing however, that the first person to produce a vegetable-based food indistinguishable from meat will do even more for our survival than Martin Green.