THUS Magazine

We need to double food production, but we’re running out of oil and water. Obviously the market will sort this one out…
By Daniel Taghioff, India

When the Food and Agricultural Organisation says that another 40 million were pushed into hunger in 2008, what images spring into your mind? Is it possible to imagine that many people starving? Well imagine it or not, we had better get used to it. Because the other thing that the FAO announced was that to bring the truly mind-boggling 973 million people who are starving now into the land of plenty, we need to double food production by 2050. Quite a challenge, bearing in mind we also have to totally rejig our energy systems in the meantime.

Global food markets are effectively trade in water. Tony Allen coined the phrase “Virtual Water” to point out that water mainly travels around inside other things. And these other things are mostly food: a tonne of which takes 1000 tonnes of water to make. Another thing the food trade uses a lot of is oil. We are talking (in 1974) a calorie of oil to grow a calorie of food, and then you have to ship it. And even though a thousand times lighter than the water it embodies, food is still bulky. Think about the heaviest things that regularly come in and out of your house. It is lugging food shopping in and waste out that breaks up our sedentary lifestyles.

All that bulk gets moved around, a sample shopping basket of 26 imported organic items having travelled a total of 150,000 miles, or six times around the Earth. The US food system alone uses  as much energy as France and 80% of this is used outside the farm in transport and processing. This huge oil-driven industry is a way of redistributing water across the globe, albeit guided by purchasing power. The dry parts of the world rely on the food trade to a very great extent, and as it gets harder to grow food in the tropics under climate change, this dependency is likely to increase.

The IEA now forecasts that the production of conventional oils is likely to peak around 2020. That’s only 12 years away, and is likely to drive the price of energy up sharply across the board, as people try and substitute on type of fuel for another. This is bound to affect the food trade, partly because of the oil that goes into food,  but also because it makes it ever more tempting to use land for growing fuel.  The food price rises in 2008 were 75% caused by the increased demand from bio-fuels. It all adds up. The extra 40 million hungry in 2008 was with an oil price peaking around $100 a barrel. But the coming oil peak, dubbed “The last oil shock”, could raise the price to $300 a barrel. So this international trade in food (AKA water) is likely to get a lot more expensive. We could be seeing a lot of inflation (Thus Passim).

Countries will find it increasingly expensive to buy in the food they need. This will mean an increasing need, in the tropics especially, for countries to rely on the water they have in order to grow food. If you combine this with population growth in places like India, you get a worrying picture of massively declining amounts of water available per person even as you need more of it.

As if this were not enough to put you off your muesli, take a look at industrialisation. The US uses as much water for industry as it does for agriculture, and the EU uses twice as much. These are both areas with tight environmental regulations, particularly in relation to water pollution: This was the original cause celebre of the environmental movement, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” And let’s not forget Erin Brokovich.

In many tropical countries there is not much water to spare. In India 80-90% of the water demand is already from agriculture. Whilst there are a lot of good environmental laws on the books, the enforcement is weak, what with all the corruption. In 2006, pushed on by the World Trade Organisation, the Indian government rushed through 2 new laws. The first allowed major sections of Industry to self-certify their environmental impacts, which is a bit like asking them nicely for a confession, pretty please . The other was a directive that all natural resources should be exploited to the maximum benefit of “the people”. How the people will get a slice of the profits is not made clear.

This all seems a bit schizophrenic, because the same government is so concerned about water shortage that it is proposing the largest development project in the history of humanity. This is a 1 billion US$ proposal to link all of India’s rivers together.  The joke being that without enforced environmental regulations, this is likely to turn into a national pollution network. So what to do? Buy food from abroad? Fat chance.

Well one thing is to get the existing environmental regulations enforced. This is a global problem, as the food-oil-water link indicates, so a global treaty about the enforcement of environmental regulations in international trade looks ever more urgent. Otherwise international organisations will keep on lobbying to weaken the laws that protect the increasingly scarce water in the tropics.

The other way is from the ground up. There are plenty of traditional crops in Asia and Africa that have been displaced by markets for “modern” “luxury” food. Millets and Ragi in India have suffered this fate, replaced by water-guzzling rice paddy. Promoting these crops, which can get by on 5 times less water than wheat, is one way towards food security. Another is to reduce oil dependence in food production, especially in poor countries like India, where farmers already face huge problems with debt.

However, until international policy-makers wake up to these issues, and moderate the market fundamentalism that got us into our current mess, these types of solution are likely to remain drops in the ocean. Doing things mainly by markets and purchasing power means it is cheaper to let the poor starve. So don’t you know, we’re talking about a revolution.