Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (6 page)

CAFOs, however, are not going away anytime soon. They are the only reason we can afford to eat so much animal protein every single day. And global meat and poultry consumption is set to increase by 25 percent by 2015.
¹⁴
The pressure to produce more meat cheaply will come from developing nations. Right now, most of the world's population eats a plant-based diet, but as countries industrialize, so do their diets. This shift to animal protein-rich diets puts even more of a strain on the planet's limited cropland and water resources. Moreover, it diverts a lot of plant-based calories away from the immediate human food chain, into the animal food chain.

To “grow” each pound of meat, the animal must eat ten pounds of feed.
¹⁵
In Canada, this means that 73 percent of the grain crop is used for livestock feed.
¹⁶
In the United States, it's 60 percent.
¹⁷
In the United States, one million acres (400,000 hectares)—an area larger than Germany—are used simply to grow grains to feed livestock.
¹⁸
This results in 1.3 million tons of manure, which in CAFOs creates devastating pollution problems. And consider this: it requires 800 gallons (3,000 liters) of water to produce 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) of dry-weight rice, but it takes a mind-boggling 4,000 gallons (15,000 liters) of water to produce 2.2 pounds (one kilogram) of beef.

We used to produce our beef, poultry, and pork at home, but now we're outsourcing our livestock production to resource-rich yet cash-poor countries to keep the prices down. The South American rain forest—the lungs of our asthmatic planet—is being decimated by one and a half acres per second, in large part to feed our hunger for a meat-based diet.
¹⁹
But since it's happening in the developing world, we tend not to have to face or pay for this environmental degradation. Someone else does.

I
NDUSTRIAL
E
ATERS
III: M
ACHINES

The sudden rise in the cost of food staples during 2007 and 2008, as well as another round of food price spikes in 2011, suggests that we have come to the end of cheap food. But what about that record harvest in 2007, and then again in 2008? Why didn't that at least offset the rising cost of the fossil fuels that industrial agriculture depends on? Shouldn't more supply lower the price in a free market? No, and that's because the food market is now tied to the fuel market.

To guard against a fossil fuel crisis, there was a shift into “green fuels” made from corn, wheat, and other grain crops this past decade. Staple crops suddenly had to compete against fuel prices. Writing in
Der Spiegel
, Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington and author of
Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
, states, “In effect, the price of oil becomes the support price for food commodities. Whenever the food value of a commodity drops below its fuel value, the market will convert it into fuel.”
²⁰

This is especially disturbing, given that in the same article, Brown points out that the grain required to fill a twenty-five-gallon SUV's gas tank with ethanol can feed one person for one year. The grain it takes to fill the tank over the year—assuming two fill-ups a week—could feed twenty-six people.
²¹
And as we approach peak oil—the point at which the finite oil supplies start their slide down the bell curve of extraction, creating increasing scarcity and inflating value—it will be increasingly profitable to convert our food into fuel. In attempting to solve one problem—fuel shortages—we'll create an even bigger, more serious one.

Even a mere 5 percent of the world's cereals being diverted to agrofuels has caused as much as a 75 percent jump in world grain prices.
²²
The whole idea of biofuels has been such a disaster for food prices that the European Union is reevaluating its agrofuels policies.

Paying the Full Price for Our Food Choices

The average American eats about two hundred pounds (ninety kilograms) of meat each year,
²³
as does the average Canadian (238 pounds/ 108 kilograms).
²⁴
Every second child born to parents of color after the year 2000 in the United States will get early-onset diabetes; for children born into Caucasian families, the statistics are slightly more favorable: one in three will develop the disease.
²⁵
One-third of the adult population in the United States is overweight, and a further third of adults are obese, according to the US government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's most recent statistics.
²⁶

Yet we pay so very little for all this food we consume. In North America, our food budgets are at an all-time low. Americans, on average per household, typically spend 9.4 percent of their disposable personal income on food purchases.
²⁷
This is the lowest ratio of income-to-food expenditures in the world. But that's because the industrial food system is particularly good at hiding the real costs, like the environmental and social costs that our cheap food is incurring. We're on a “buy now, pay later” program, in terms of both the health consequences of our food choices and the environmental impact.

Raj Patel makes the case in his book
The Value of Nothing
for calculating the real cost for a hamburger.
²⁸
He argues that if a dollar value was assigned to the environmental degradation of industrial meat production, the loss of biodiversity, and the destruction of ecosystems in places like Brazil, that price tag for a burger at the drive-thru would be $200 not $4. (Patel contends that deforestation for soy crops in Brazil, to grow soy bean feed for animals and to create grazing pasture, should be factored into the retail price of a burger.) These are the costs, moreover, that someone else pays, usually the developing world, which is losing its topsoil, having its water tables polluted, and losing its biodiversity to feed overweight Americans with burgers, fries, and soft drinks for sometimes less than five dollars. The cost is real, but deferred, hidden on a layaway
plan, or too often pushed over to be paid by developing countries. It's out of sight and therefore out of mind.

While we may not have to pay the environmental debt directly, we're certainly paying for cheap food with healthcare costs that just keep rising. The obesity epidemic in the United States adds a whopping $147 billion a year to healthcare budgets just for a drive-thru lifestyle.
²⁹
One healthcare dollar of every five in the United States is spent on care for people with diabetes, according to Patel.
³⁰
Yet the US government insists on maintaining obscene subsidies for corn and cereal crops, which enables the very cheap-food diet that has rendered two out of three Americans overweight and strains the healthcare system to the breaking point.

Canada doesn't have such subsidies, but the modern sedentary lifestyle and the fast-food diet is still wreaking havoc. One in four Canadians are obese, taking a $4.3 billion bite out of the $202 billion national healthcare bill.
³¹

But since these two figures of healthcare costs and household food costs are calculated in different columns of the ledger, they are rarely part of the same discussion. We're subsidizing agriculture—albeit the wrong parts of it—and then we're stuck with the healthcare bills caused by our overeating. It's comedic, if you can get past the tragedy of it all.

S
trip a system of redundancy, and you increase its efficiency; but you also reduce its adaptability and resilience. Centralize to take advantage of economies of scale, and you create an easy target to disrupt the whole of a system. Strip a food system of diversity and you get the Great Potato Famine.

With profit comes risk. With efficiencies come vulnerabilities. Cheapness for some is paid for by others. With capitalism and trade liberalization, one gets deregulation and speculation. These are the tradeoffs that we don't often hear about.

In the era of globalism and free trade, industrial agriculture's promise to produce cheap, abundant food actually came true for a few decades. Our big factory farms produced food at an unprecedented rate, and the costs of farm labor in developing nations meant that food became the cheapest it had ever been. Corn became so cheap that food scientists worked overtime to find new ways to use it. Corn ended up in everything from carbonated beverages (high-fructose corn syrup replaced cane and beet sugar as sweetener) to cosmetics (cornstarch and corn oil) and disposable diapers (cornstarch). Corn also fattens livestock
faster than pasture grazing. Steak, chicken, and fish, once luxury items, became daily food choices.

Take Atlantic salmon, for example. Salmon is a sturdy fish that grows fast, even in aquatic farms, and holds up under freeze-thaw cycles. It is well suited to be an industrial product. Economist Jeff Rubin points to the rise in consumption of Atlantic salmon as an example of how cheap oil makes cheap food possible in his best-seller
Why Your World Is about to Get a Whole Lot Smaller.
Salmon caught off the coast of Norway, he writes, are frozen whole onboard a small fishing boat and taken to port. The frozen salmon are then transferred to a larger boat and taken to a larger port, maybe somewhere like Rotterdam or Hamburg. From there they are shipped to China, where the fish are then thawed, skinned, filleted, and deboned by factory workers who make a pittance for a day's work. The salmon are refrozen for the return voyage back west, perhaps ending up in a Costco store in North America or a Tesco store in the United Kingdom. The fact that the fish are affordable, despite two major ocean journeys and months of refrigeration, is a testament to the era of cheap oil and labor we have been living in.
¹
But the entire point of Rubin's book is that we are at the end of cheap oil. And as it ends, so does globalization.

It's hard to get worked up about the middle classes of North America losing their weekly salmon dinners when most of the world's population has had the bitter taste of globalization in its mouth for years. Industrial food production was supposed to end world hunger, especially among the nations most at risk of famine and malnutrition, but the number of hungry people has just gone up since the Green Revolution began in the 1960s.

In late 2007 and early 2008, the cost of food rocketed skyward. Despite record global grain harvests in those years, double-digit—even triple-digit—inflation in food prices within weeks ripped through cities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Years of cheap food had actually forced incomes into a downward spiral for those already struggling to
get enough to eat. The fuse was the global banking crisis, but it only exposed the underlying catastrophe that had been in the making for years. The United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization announced that there were 862 million hungry people in the world in 2008 and that the figure would reach one billion in 2009.
²
One-sixth of the global population would be hungry.

In response to this, the Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy in Oakland, California, issued a policy brief in October 2008 titled “The World Food Crisis.” It pointed the finger at the “decades of skewed agricultural policies, inequitable trade, and unsustainable development” that has finally “thrown the world's food systems into a volatile boom and bust cycle,” where the gap is now widening between the rich and the poor.
³
The paper's author and Food First Institute's executive director, Eric Holt-Giménez, also challenged the myths that are behind the huge lobbying efforts of corporate agriculture to continue the legacy of the Green Revolution into the genetically modified foods revolution—namely, that the world must employ industrial agriculture and genetically engineered crops and livestock to feed the growing population.
(Of course
corporate agriculture and biotechnology businesses are going to insist that the world cannot support its growing population without their proprietary technologies.) However, Holt-Giménez points out that production is not the problem, cost and distribution are. Global food production has actually increased by 2 percent a year over the past twenty years, while population growth has slowed to 1.14 percent. “Population is not outstripping food supply. People are just too poor to buy the food that is available.”
⁴
As food has become cheaper, people's purchasing power, especially in developing nations, has diminished even faster. Three billion people worldwide live on less than two dollars per day.
⁵
Cheap
and
abundant
is irrelevant to people who can only afford to window-shop.

More than thirty countries experienced food riots in late 2007 and 2008. These riots often turned violent. And just because there haven't
been food riots in the United States doesn't mean that the world food crisis hasn't been taking its toll on Americans. Food banks were being overwhelmed. In the United States, 50.2 million people—15 percent of the population, including 17.2 million children—weren't getting enough to eat.
⁶

This was just the first wave of the global food crisis, as it turned out. The second wave was touched off by weather events in just a few key food-growing regions. Russia, which accounts for 11 percent of global wheat exports, had a heat wave on top of a drought in the summer of 2010.
⁷
Record high temperatures and wildfires devastated its wheat crop, and President Vladimir Putin announced a nationwide ban on wheat exports. Australia, the world's fourth-largest exporter of wheat and a source of another 11 percent of global wheat exports, experienced flooding over an area the size of France and Germany combined in January 2011.
⁸
Australian sugar exports had to be reduced by 25 percent because of the flood damage as well.
⁹
The United Nations reported that global food prices had risen above the 2008 record, and, predictably, deadly riots began again in early 2011.

We have arrived at a point at which industrial agriculture can no longer continue to make good on its promise of cheap, limitless food. The variables have changed, and the system is breaking down. We are losing cropland and predictable weather cycles through climate change. We're using up our fresh water and land at unprecedented rates. And we're coming to the end of cheap oil. We have reached the end of the era of cheap food.

C
LIMATE
C
HANGE

The earth's temperature has been warming up significantly since the 1950s.
¹⁰
This is primarily a result of our industrious, transportation-crazy species. We've been burning fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide
into the air, and we've been chopping down and burning our forests to make way for more agricultural and residential land. (In a balanced ecosystem, kingdom
Plantae
turns carbon dioxide into oxygen for kingdom
Animalia
, which takes in oxygen and breathes out carbon dioxide in a nice, tidy cycle. Cutting down the great global forests and building carbon dioxide-emitting machines is definitely upsetting the natural balance.) Moreover, we've been piling our garbage in giant heaps that produce methane as they eventually decompose. Methane, like carbon dioxide, is a greenhouse gas. Together, they are the two main culprits for the steady global warming over the past several decades.

Climate change is creating havoc in traditionally dependable food-growing regions with significant weather events. It's not just the rise in average temperature; it's also the violent natural events that seem to be on the rise with increasing climate change. Not only are droughts, floods, freezes, fires, and changing weather patterns taking their toll on the food supply; global warming as a whole is threatening to shrink our ability to grow food. In “The Future of Food Riots,” a January 2011 article syndicated in newspapers around the world, Gwynne Dyer, author of the 2008 book
Climate Wars
, wrote, “The rule of thumb is that we lose about ten percent of world food production for every rise of one degree Celsius in average global temperature.”
¹¹
In an even more dire prediction, Dyer continues, “So the shortages will grow and the price of food will rise inexorably over the years. The riots will return again and again.”
¹²

With such high concentration of key crops growing in specialized regions—wheat in Russia and Australia, tomatoes in California and Florida, citrus in Brazil—crop failures in just one location can cause a worldwide shortage and steep price increases even with a relatively localized disaster.

Historically, nations took their food security into their own hands by keeping food stores in reserve. Grains have traditionally been kept in storage to serve as famine insurance. Yet national grain reserves were
seen as unnecessary, even anti-free trade, in the globalization frenzy of the 1990s. Most governments bought the line that the global market would provide, so stockpiling national grain reserves was unnecessary in the new global economy. Developing countries were pressured into privatizing or selling off their national grain reserves in order to qualify for debt relief and other international funding by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. With agricultural subsidies flowing freely from the United States and European governments, the cost of commodity crops on the world market was so low that farmers in nonsubsidized nations, such as those in Central and South America and Africa, couldn't compete. This allowed the big grain companies in the industrialized nations to take control of the global grain trade.

Now, as the world was entering this current food crisis, Holt-Giménez calculated annual profits of some of these companies and found that Archer Daniels Midland's profits were up 38 percent from one year to the next, Cargill's were up 128 percent, and Mosaic Fertilizer, a Cargill subsidiary, posted profits of 1,615 percent from 2006 to 2008, just as the economic crisis was coming to light.
¹³

Now, anytime the world's supply of grain dips below seventy days, which it is often doing, the cost goes up dramatically, making the big multinational corporations that control grain supplies, seed, fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides obscene profits. Scarcity is very good for business if you are a capitalist. And there's even a term for this: disaster capitalism, because companies have learned that disasters can be highly profitable.
¹⁴

P
EAK
L
AND

It is thought that 90 percent of the earth's arable land is already in use. Cutting down forests is one way to create more farmland; buying up cheap virgin land or underutilized (which sometimes actually means sustainably
farmed) farmland in Africa, Central and South America, parts of Asia, and in crisis-bound countries is another.

The Daewoo Logistics Corporation, a major shipping and transportation company in South Korea, envisioned itself a natural resource development player and began investing significant energy and money into Madagascar. By 2008, it was working out a deal with Madagascar's government granting Daewoo a ninety-nine-year lease for 3.2 million acres (1.3 million hectares) for produce corn and palm oil plantations.
¹⁵
It was going to be the biggest deal of one single foreign country securing access to farmland in Africa since the current food crisis began.
¹⁶
And it would provide South Korea with a secure source for half of its own corn needs, which it was getting at the time from the United States and South America. The deal was scuttled when it became known that it would have granted Daewoo access to half of the farmland in Madagascar. Massive public protests forced the government's hand, and the deal was cancelled. Daewoo Logistics Corporation had obviously invested heavily and got burned. The company was banking on huge profits with a secure source of corn and palm oil. It went into receivership in July 2009.

Perhaps it was the audacious scale of this land grab that was its downfall. Yet other land deals are happening today at an unprecedented rate, especially in Africa. Very few governments seem to be paying attention.

Every day, thirty tons of tomatoes and hundreds of tons of pristine, fresh produce leave Awassa in Ethiopia for Addis Ababa.
¹⁷
It is the country's largest greenhouse operation at 50 acres (20 hectares), and it sits on 2,500 acres (1,000 hectares) of land leased for ninety-nine years. The country's capital is by no means the produce's final destination. None of this produce stays in Ethiopia. Instead, the very same day, or the next day, it's in shops in the oil-rich, water-poor countries of the Middle East. The greenhouse is owned by Saudi billionaire Sheikh Mohammed Al Amoudi. He is just one of the “petromonarchs” shifting his investments from oil fields to tomatoes and potatoes.