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Sustainable Food Production
The author of this article discusses 5 reasons why our current food system is not sustainable, and proposes 5 ways to convert our current agricultural and food distribution practices to sustainability.
Date: 9/18/2005 5:35:11 PM ( 19 y ) ... viewed 1581 times ISIS Press Release 9/14/05
Policies for Sustainable Food Systems, National and Global
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/PFSFSNG.php
Michael Meacher
Why our current agriculture and food production is not
sustainable
There are five reasons why our current food system is not
sustainable. First, the increasingly mechanised agriculture
depends on oil, but the supply of oil is beginning to run
out, or at least half of the 2 trillion barrels of oil
available has already been used and oil demand from China,
India and other major developing countries which are
industrialising fast is rising so sharply that production
cannot keep up with demand, and permanent shortages of oil
will kick in within a decade or less. The price of oil will
escalate to $100-$200+, and oil-driven food production will
sharply decline.
Second, the growing shortage of water means that half a
billion people now already live in water-stressed areas, and
the UN expects this to rise 5-6 fold to half the world
population by 2025. This will lead to massive shifts of
populations and water wars. Frankly, the current use of
water in agriculture is extravagant and utterly
unsustainable. For example, US prairie farmers and East
Anglian barley barons need 1 000 tonnes of water to produce
1 tonne of grain, plus 1 000 energy units are used for every
1 energy unit of processed food. That is just not
sustainable.
Third, the intensification of climate change has led to a
ten-fold increase in the incidence and ferocity of climatic
catastrophes in the past 40 years. These include major-scale
hurricanes, cyclones, floods, as well as increasing drought,
desertification, inextinguishable forest fires, which are
now rendering more and more croplands unusable or infertile.
Half a billion of the world population now do not have
croplands on which they can maintain themselves. The latest
UN report says one sixth of countries in the world (up to 30
nations) now face food shortages because of climate change.
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimates
160 000 now die every year from climate-change induced
malnutrition, dysentery and malaria.
Fourth, the loss of biodiversity from monocultures imposed
by industrialised farming, not least GM crops. A quarter of
the world’s GM crops are grown in Argentina, where huge
areas were cleared to grow GM soya, especially Argentina’s
pampas, previously one of the most organically productive
areas in the world.
Fifth, long-distance transportation of food across the world
is incompatible with the requirement to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions by 60 percent by 2050. Between 1968-88, world
food production increased 84 percent and the world
population 91 percent, but world food trade increased 184
percent (i.e. doubled), yet planes and cars are the fastest
rising causes of greenhouse gas emissions. To put that in
household terms – a typical UK family of four emits per year
4 tonnes of CO2 from the house, 4 tonnes from the car, but 8
tonnes from production, processing, packaging and
distribution of the food they eat.
So what should be done?
I have five proposals. First, we need a massive switch from
highly mechanised, pesticide-driven agriculture to low-
input/organic agriculture with energy saving up to 10-fold.
How? The current food system is linear in design, treating
inputs like energy and raw materials as infinitely available
(which they are not) and the environment as infinitely
capable of absorbing waste (which it is not). This is not
sustainable. To change this, we need a tax system that
factors in the full cost of all these finite items and uses
the proceeds to subsidise organic, low input and localised
agriculture systems. In contrast, organic production
systems are an example of sustainable circular methods of
food production in harmony with the natural eco-system. Is
this happening? Well, although sales of organic food in the
UK have quadrupled from £260 million in 1997 to over £1
billion now, the one million acres now devoted to organic
production is still only 2-3% of agricultural land in the
UK.
Second, developing a sustainable food system should become a
major Government policy based on setting targets for:
Sustainable food production
Import substitution
Fair trade
Local sourcing of food
These targets are to be achieved within specific timescales.
The Government’s Organic Action Plan Group, which I chaired,
did set a target to increase the percentage of organic food
consumed in the UK which was produced in the UK from 30
percent to 70 percent by 2010, but (as so often) the
mechanisms to deliver it were delayed and weak – the UK was
until recently the only country in the EU15 which did not
offer post-conversion aid to new organic farmers. Moreover,
none of the other necessary objectives I have listed are
currently subject to targets, apart from agri-environmental
schemes to encourage broad and shallow adoption of very
modest environmental standards.
Third, the very large external/environmental costs of
transportation must be internalised. Transporting
agricultural products in the UK (mainly big heavy goods
vehicles) emits 1.1mt CO2 per year, and transporting
beverages and other foodstuffs emits 3 mt CO2 per year. So,
transporting crops and food together accounts for one
fortieth of all the UK’s CO2 emissions per year. That is
not sustainable and indeed, at the start of the foot and
mouth outbreak, one of the reasons why disease took hold so
quickly was huge transportation of animals across the
country every day for marketing. We have what is
euphemistically called a ‘cheap food’ policy in this country
– it is no such thing: it takes no account for example of
costs of water purification after agriculture and pesticide
run-off, nor of damage to the environment from long-distance
transportation and exacerbating climate change. At the very
least, we should require all food products to be labelled to
indicate the environmental impact of distribution, and
organic and other assurance schemes should take the lead by
introducing the proximity principle into certification. But
what is fundamentally needed is a revolution in
environmental and social accounting, so that a flat-rate VAT
is supplemented by a tax surcharge on over-exploitation of
natural resources and on long-distance transport of certain
agricultural products (those which can be cultivated locally
under EU rules).
Fourth, sustainable food system should promote human health
and certainly not harm it. There is now increasingly
convincing evidence that industrialised farming systems do
the reverse. Here are two pieces of evidence:
Latest Government figures, just released, reveal continuing
massive increases in the use of pesticides – the area of
crops sprayed with pesticides increased by another 1 million
hectares in the last two years; altogether over the last
decade the use of pesticides in the UK has increased by over
30 percent.
Evidence linking pesticides and brain diseases
like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and motor neurone disease is
now compelling – the Association of Clinical Pathologist
reviewed the issue in depth in 2001 and concluded “there is
an apparent consistency of epidemiological reports link
Parkinson’s Disease with pesticide exposure” and the most
recent finding is that farmers exposed to pesticides are 43
percent more likely to develop Parkinson’s Disease. This
urgently needs to be followed up by the Government.
But why is this not followed up by the Government? Might
the fact that DEFRA’s Pesticide Safety Directorate depends
for 60 percent of its revenue on agro-chemical industries
have something to do with it?
Fifth, globally, what is making so much of the world’s food
systems unsustainable is climate change. Drying out of
croplands and the growth of continental and Indonesian fires
on a rising scale and the rising frequency and ferocity of
storms, cyclones, flooding and rising sea level,
increasingly put at risk feeding of up to 9 billion people
on this planet by 2050. Climate change will only be
reversed by fundamental changes in the world economy,
national societies and our individual way of life, but the
minimum requirement is already clear.
Massive switch out of fossil fuels to renewables, on a far
bigger scale than any country (including the UK) has yet
envisaged, that is what is now urgently needed, not a
revival of nuclear power.
A system of contraction and convergence negotiated between
the industrialised North of the world and the developing
South, which requires the North to contract greenhouse gas
emissions by over 60 percent by 2050 while allowing the
South to industrialise cleanly, and overall keeping global
greenhouse gas emissions within a level which scientists
believe safe.
A huge uplift in energy efficiency is needed
to end the current prodigious waste. US power stations
discard more waste heat than they generate; only one seventh
of the energy from cars reaches the wheels; only one
quarters of the energy from ovens reaches the food.
Sustainable food systems should be at the heart of global
policy, not (as now) another device for exercise of imperial
power by the strongest nations. The pressure for reform
could hardly be stronger. If we do not learn lessons of
what is facing us, our planet Earth will apply those lessons
itself, but at a price which at worst could cast
considerable doubt on the survival of our own species.
This article was a speech delivered at Sustainable World
International Conference 14 July 2005, Westminster, London.
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This article can be found on the I-SIS website at
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/PFSFSNG.php
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