Amanda Lang's Library tagged Food →  View Popular

In Nzvere, a group of scrawny men sat under a Musasa tree, rolling cigarettes in bits of newspaper and chewing over the central fact of life in rural Zimbabwe: It is impossible to make a living as a farmer anymore.

In the 1990s, these men said, they harvested a cornucopia of vegetables on their small farms and sold the surplus in Harare. Now their land doesn’t yield nearly as much. With the formerly white-owned, large-scale farms no longer productive, the economies of scale that kept prices low for hybrid seed and fertilizer are gone. These small farmers cannot afford the higher prices.

The dollars and cents of farming simply do not add up, they said. The government monopolizes the buying and selling of corn through the Grain Marketing Board. With inflation running officially at hundreds of millions of percent, anything the board pays them is worthless by the time they get it out of the bank.

The farm redistribution has done them no good, they said, instead benefiting those who helped the ruling party grab the land. Even when food aid has come, only those in the ruling party hierarchy have gotten any, the farmers said.

So they have become scavengers, living off the land and surviving on field mice and wild fruit, white ants and black beetles.

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

You may have watched the video to your right. If you haven't, it's Barack Obama's recent address on his commitment to fighting global climate change. Other than the 'clean' coal business, it sounds very reassuring if you spend a lot of time worrying about the environment.

Still, when I say, "the environment," I do remember the areas and issue sets I used to think about when someone else said that: waste from heavy industry, urban air quality, water pollution (via manufacturing, chemical dumping and road runoff in urban areas), bad logging practices, and wilderness reserves. But the environment includes the whole planet, including that half of the land mass (give or take) devoted to food and fiber production for human uses. Agriculture is the largest source of what's called non-point water pollution, basically runoff from large areas, and the primary cause of the enormous ocean dead zones at the mouths of our rivers. It's a major factor in soil erosion, and depending on who you ask, may be responsible for nearly 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

It's simply impossible to fix our environmental problems as a whole without taking agriculture into account. Further, agriculture, as one of the few professions that remains heavily weather dependent, is already taking hits from global climate disruption. Global grain productivity is already dropping in the face of droughts and warmer weather, which is leading farmers to further overuse rapidly depleting sources of fresh water, while common land management practices further diminish the availability of that water.

The major agribusiness consortiums are peddling all sorts of snake oil to supposedly address these crises, as well as the global hunger problem. But their solutions are retreads of the Green Revolution strategy that substituted petrochemical fertilizer and broadly damaging pesticides for soil-building, and patented hybrid crops for locally adapted varieties.

The Green Revolution did temporarily sol

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

When world leaders met in June for a U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization summit, says Steve Suppan, senior policy analyst for the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a research and advocacy group, “there was an urgent recognition of the food crisis but a more urgent sense of the need to salvage neoliberalism.”

And Raj Patel, author of the recent book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System (See review on page 40), adds, “It’s preposterous that the Bush administration and EU are pushing us toward precisely the policies that got us into this mess.”

Many developments may have triggered the food price crisis, including bad weather conditions (from droughts in Australia to more recent floods in the Midwest), oil price increases, and rising biofuel and consumer demand.

But the current food crisis ultimately stems from over-reliance on deregulated global markets and increasingly concentrated corporate control of an ecologically unsound world food system. Pushing free-market fundamentalism harder will only intensify the fault lines, setting the stage for even more serious crises in the future.

Call it a bizarre water season or think of it as our future. In the Midwest, 500-year level floods. That means hydrologists believe that "a flood of this magnitude has a 0.2 percent chance (1 in 500) of happening in a given year in a specific location." Of course, the last 500-year Midwestern floods happened only an uncomfortable 15 years ago in 1993. In the Southwest and Southeast, there have been droughts that, in the last year, have threatened to outrun recorded history, and then, of course, there's California. That state has received a "record lack of rainfall" -- state capital Sacramento got only 0.17 of an inch of rain this spring, thoroughly wiping out the previous record set in 1934. The result, of course, has left the state burning up well before its normal fire season officially begins about now.

You might think that Mother Nature, acting like some vengeful goddess, was sending a message to our legislators, but, as former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega points out below, don't count on them paying much attention. We seem, in short, to be up a swollen creek without a paddle. (Or is it a dry gulch with lots of tinder and too many matches?) De la Vega "indicted" George W. Bush at this site back in November 2006 and wrote the popular book -- a TomDispatch spinoff -- United States v. George W. Bush et al.. She now returns focused on a remarkably crucial long-term problem -- water -- and a remarkably consistent, do-nothing Congress.

In the discussion of the global food emergency, one underlying factor is barely mentioned: The world is running out of water. A British science writer, who authored a major book on water resources, here explores the nexus between water overconsumption and current food shortages.

The willingness of investors and companies to go along with speculative bubbles and the prevalence of a huge amount of speculative capital in the global economy generally may have grave implications. These conditions suggest that the bubbles may not be the disease in themselves, but the symptoms of something much deeper. The market may be so based on speculation, and speculative investors have such a tendency to herd together, that we are in a chronic bubble economy. The economic bubble of the day may change - "emerging markets" bonds one day, tech stocks the next, and home mortgages the day after that - but the presence of a bubble may be ubiquitous.

Count core inflation as another vestige of the Greenspan era that's slowly falling out of fashion. Throughout the 1990's, Greenspan referred to core readings -- those excluding food and energy prices -- as more relevant to understanding the true rate of inflation.

The rationale was that those two components tended to be more volatile than other goods and services tracked by the government, and hence distorted the underlying inflation rate. But a new paper from economists at the Philadelphia Fed casts doubt on this view.

Well, we're up to six months of job losses (pdf). The long term carnage in manufacturing had spread to construction some time ago. It has now been joined in administrative services, with admin and support services shedding over 70K jobs. The temp market is drying up, but so is office hiring of all kinds.

What hasn't shown up on this report, but will be showing up in months to come is a contraction in bad jobs. Starbucks, for example, will be closing 600 stores. That's a lot of jobs. This won't be isolated to Starbucks; retail and hospitality of all kinds will start contracting as people shop less and eat in more. With consumer credit being restricted by banks, with jobs being lost and with fixed expenses for heating, gasoline and food going up, the consumer is not going to be able to keep up the spending pace. This crisis didn't start out as a classic consumer demand recession, but it's about to experience some significant consumer demand contraction nonetheless.

Governments increased hiring last month, but government hiring is also going to come under significant pressure. State revenues dropped 5.3% from last year, they will continue to drop. Municipal tax bases are going to be absolutely annihilated by the real estate meltdown, which still has at least 2, and possibly 4 years to play out and which will see declines of at least 20% on average before it's done. As real estate is revalued, tax assessments will crash. Municipal and state governments will find themselves with a lot less money than they're used to and will be forced to make cuts.

Meanwhile the Feds are going to have lower receipts than they expected. The carnage in the markets is going to lead to a huge decline in capital gains taxes and unemployment will lead to lower than expected taxes on wages and payroll taxes. If the Fed starts increasing interest rates to fight inflation, interest rates will go through the roof. Indeed, even if it doesn't, the market is likely to start demanding higher

It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it.

The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.

The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted...

“The world is suddenly awakening to the folly of subsidized biofuels. All it took was a mere global ‘food crisis.’”

Food prices have risen 83 percent worldwide since 2005 and some staples such as rice and wheat have risen 141 percent and 130 percent respectively in the last year alone. Yet only 4 percent of world grain is currently being used in biofuel production. These numbers just don’t add up.

So what are the main causes of the food crisis? The answer: changing diets, global warming and drought, high energy costs, and (as our sister organization the Center for American Progress Action Fund points out) investors fleeing the dollar and going into commodities.

Changing Diets: Meat is highly inefficient; it takes 8.3 grams of corn feed to produce 1 gram of beef. Global demand for meat is increasing with changing diets, particularly in countries such as China. where vast quantities of grain are going to livestock over humans.

Global Warming: Drought and volatile weather in key grain producing countries such as Australia and the Ukraine have also limited supply. As Australia enters its 10th year of drought, many analysts predict that climate change will exacerbate competition for natural resources and reduce crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa by 20 percent in some scenarios.

High Energy Costs: High energy prices have increased costs at every stage of agricultural production from the farming itself to the transportation. This in turn bumps up the price for food. Yet since most consumers are similarly strapped by the high price of gas and energy, they’re also less likely to be able to afford the increased cost of food.

The tremendous recent growth in first generation biofuels is certainly playing a role in planting decisions and global grain prices. But at present it’s only a very small slice of the problem.

“The perfect biofuel is always just out of reach, only a few more billion dollars in subsidies away from commercial viability. But sometimes eve

The importance of marginal farmers in India using an emergent agricultural knowledge system against the corporate takeover of farms.

Hedge Funds Driving Up the Price of Gasoline & Other Commodities
My Corporate Governance class at the Texas Tech University School of Law was discussing Institutional Investors, including hedge funds, as a potential monitor for the boards of directors of publicly traded companies. In the course of the discussion, we also talked about a big negative impact hedge funds and pensions funds are having on the current price of gasoline, corn, and other basic commodities.

Thanks to Tadd Tobkin for this controversial article which raises the argument that even Calpers, which most people think of as one of the most socially concerned institutional investors, must assume some blame for the fact that food prices in third world countries have risen to the point that people are starving -- a result of institutional investors "pushing a wall of money into the $200bn commodity index funds."