The acronyms that bring us our daily bread

"Give us this day our daily bread"  says the (Christian) the Lord's prayer. But these days we seem to be more at the mercy of the RDCs to get our daily bread.


There is an impressive number of acronyms each representing small itemized tasks in the flow of goods from producers to consumers in the food chain. Almost all supplies to British supermarkets go through the RDCs (Regional Distribution Centers). 3PL (Third-party logistic) specialists deal with the shipping and there are just a few companies dominating this market. Each time you buy something an automatic order goes to the RDC to replace the purchased item. In many cases the RDC are further linked to the suppliers so that also they know that I have bought my liter of organic milk. This is ensured by CPFR (Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment).

In January 2005, Wal-Mart required its top 100 suppliers to apply RFID (Radio-frequency identification) labels with unique EPCs (Electronic Product Codes) to all shipments. In the future, RFID chips embedded in the packaging will allow supermarket to trace food all the way to your home, when finally we will get those intelligent refrigerators they have been talking about – those that will make your shopping list, or why not even make the order to the shop which can let 3PL specialists deliver it to your doorstep. And the QR (Quick Response) codes – those are the funny squares which look like labyrinths—will give the consumer information to read in the smartphone or in the fridge display.

Perhaps the RFID, your fridge and the QR code can cooperate in activating streaming of cows moo-ing when you open the yoghurt package. You might even hear the farmer producing the milk telling you something about the life on the farm, which is how the food system tries to respond to the increasing disconnect between consumers and producers and increasing distrust in the system.

Alternatively you might want to grow food yourself, together with others or perhaps become a member of a Community Supported Agriculture initiative. If you are tired of acronyms.

The making of food into commodities

"Land, water, seeds livestock, labor, cheese, wine and bread are all treated as exchangeable commodities with monetary values assigned by the omnipresent and omnipotent market. It converts land, nature, humans, animals and food to real estate, ecosystem services, labor, McBurgers and calories."

(from the upcoming book Global Eating Disorder)

Who does what?

It is an interesting paradox that many things that are not well taken care of by either governments or markets (say the provision of shelters to homeless) are solved by civil society and communities directly. But when it comes to functions which the state is interested in controlling (city planning) or where the market sees an opportunity for profit (health care), then suddenly communities are supposedly no longer able to do the job properly.

Wisdom of Sonmi~451

"All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities" (Sonmi~451)

History of humankind in six frames

great illustration: Cassandra's legacy: History of humankind in six frames

The Market is not a management system for the planet

Olle harvesting cabbage at Torfolk

Even the most convinced proponents of a free market realise that there are things that can't be left to the market to sort out. Human rights, law and order, security, basic social security have, in almost all societies, been regulated by some other institution than the market, often by a state. Most of our social relations are within the context of family, kinship, communities, etc. and thus also are not regulated by markets. And even for those things that are, mostly, regulated by markets there are many government rules. Even in the market-oriented United States there are supposedly 130,000 regulations for how economic agents may, or may not, behave. And the more central an issue is to our society, the more regulations there are. For example, all countries have labour regulations. They are there because we realize that the workers are a weaker party in an alleged "free" labour market: they need some kind of protection. There is no doubt, in my view, that some market regulations go too far, and that governments should refrain from micro-managing economic activity. A bigger threat, however, is when governments want markets to regulate things that are not at all suitable for market regulation.

Agriculture is a very complex activity. It provides us with our most essential need, food.  Throughout history, food supply has always been subject to political intervention. The Romans tried to regulate prices, although they failed, like most other subsequent efforts; the record of government interventions in food markets is rather poor. Faced with the prospect of food shortages, we now see country after country making bilateral food deals. They no longer trust the global trading system to safeguard their food supplies. The fact that we have major famine, e.g. in the Horn of Africa, while lots of food is wasted in other parts of the world is also an indication that markets in food don't work very well in safeguarding the survival of fellow humans. Agriculture is also largely the foundation of society. Human relations in the farming system shaped social structures over millennia. Even modern industrial societies have grown out of a context where agriculture played a pivotal role. The preservation of farming is not only about food production but also about culture, society and heritage.

Scientists now speak about the Anthropcene, the era in which planet Earth's big systems, hydrological, biological, climatic and even geological, are mainly shaped by humans. Farming already occupies around forty percent of the planet's terrestrial surface and with the urban and peri-urban areas, human activity covers perhaps sixty percent. We also know that farming and land-use accounts for around one third of the greenhouse gas emissions, the second largest source after fossil fuels. This means that farming is the most significant human management system of the planet; that the future of humans on the planet largely rests upon how we manage the farmscape. And markets are not the right tool for managing the planet.

Column in upcoming issue of ecology and farming 

Advise for Christmas

Don't buy too much stuff this Christmas!
Why?
Well, if you haven't understood that yet, you have some homework to do....

says anti-Santa Gunnar, here with the Sydney opera as a hat.

What will be left for our grandchildren?

"Nothing has a value but everything has a price"

......said singer poet etc Emil Jensen at the event I visited today - the 25 years anniversary of KRAV, the organic standard setter and mark of Sweden (which I was one of the founders of).

I am normally skeptic about catchy one-liners, but this one does cover a lot of the problems of today's society. You can listen to Emil below (in Swedish).

Fiction as forecaster

I am reading a book of environmental historian Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power, I can recommend it. Apart from a wealth of interesting facts Radkau also have a lot of interesting perspectives. Below an intriguing quote:
“The readers of horror fiction could most easily [compared to the scientists] foresee Chernobyl and September 11, 2001. Since the greatest environmental threats are hypothetical in nature, it takes imagination to create a mental picture of what they might entail. [...] The person who knows only secure facts cannot join the conversation about modern risks.”

Don't despair!

I want to make some promotion of this web site, we are all worth a laugh now and then aren't we? http://despair.com/index.html.

What about a few more people in farming?

In the USA 2008 there were 9.6 milion people employed in restaurants , drinking places and catering. There were 1.5 million in the food manufacturing industry. There were some 15.3 million involved in retail trade. Obviously a lot of those are in the food retail.
There are just above 2 million people employed in farming, hunting and fishing.
^{Source: Employment Projections Program, U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics}

Another way of looking at the situation, in a global perspective is that the coffee in your cup, for which you pay one,two or three Euro costs less than 5 cents, of which in turn the farmer only get som 2-3 cents, i.e. one hundredth of what you pay for it.

That is called value-addition....I hope you enjoy the cup!

Election campaign in Sweden

We have elections coming up in Sweden. This is my contribution to the election campaign.
The sculpture is from the Engelsbergs works, a World Heritage site

How to use the land?

(Photovoltaic elements outside of Heby in Sweden)

Will solar energy farms be a solution for the future? Is it really more efficient to use solar panels on farm land than to grow biomass?

Well, photovoltaic elements seem to have an efficiency of 12-15 percent, e.g. 12-15 percent of the incoming solar energy is captured by the cells and converted to electricity. The photosynthesis supposedly has only a few percents efficiency. I am not hundred percent sure of the math here, but that is what you get from literature. So from that perspective the choice is easy.

Notably, the miracle of the photosynthesis is NOT to just capture energy but to (re)produce life, something quite more remarkable than electricity. Nevertheless, in an energy scarce future we will have these kinds of discussions. Not to speak about the conflict between energy and food...


Another similarly interesting discussion is if you have a dam of water. Will you use that water for:
1. Hydropower
2. Irrigation of biofuel crops
3. Irrigation of food crops
4. Industrial water
5. Household water
6. Tourists water
7. Flooding wet lands to preserve bio-diversity
8. Tear down the dam to restore nature?

In a nature scarce world, there are tough choices to be made.

Being among the 1 percent richest in the world. me, no way!

I work a lot with development issues and think a lot about inequalities in the world. Still I was shocked to realise how privileged I am when I checked my income on the Global Rich List. A great web site.

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has more wealth than the bottom 45 percent of American households combined

Is the sky the limit?

Around thirty-five years ago interest in organic farming developed into a market-oriented concept, and that is when standards and certification were born, to be followed later on, by public regulations. Since then, and recently through a deep global recession, in almost all markets organic sales have maintained their growth. The area of organic farmland also continues to grow, but there are signs that there are limits to this growth. For example, in the last decade, the organic area of a few European countries has actually shrunk or been at a standstill for some years. In most cases this has been associated with changes in how those countries have implemented the European Union support programmes. Small farmers also leave organic certification, not because they stop farming organically, but because they want no involvement with the formalised organic sector and the hassle of certification.

It would be possible for all agriculture to be transformed into following organic methods. It would not be easy. Some aspects of organic farming might have to change. For example, it is hard to see how a total rejection of human waste, now prominent in organic regulations in the EU and the USA, could be combined with a full scale conversion to organic systems. Sewage systems would have to be improved so that what comes out of us could go back to where it came from, as with other cycles in nature. If organic farming was the norm for food production it would also be a logical step to abolish the practice of a special label and special certification. It would be more natural to insist that non-organic food is labelled – with warning messages if needed.

In most countries with an organic movement that has been ‘big’ for many years, most of the farmers that can easily convert to organic systems have already done so. This can be clearly seen by comparing, say, dairy and poultry farms in Northern Europe. In most Northern European countries it is relatively straightforward to convert a dairy farm to organic; the changes in management and infrastructure are not that dramatic. However, a comparable poultry operation is much harder to convert. This can be clearly seen in the proportions of poultry and milk sold respectively. Not only are poultry difficult at the production level; supply is limited and those that do convert demand good prices. So, ultimately market shares are affected as the proportion of buyers shrink when price premiums go from ten to hundred percent.

The strength of consumers’ voluntary choices as a force to change society can be seen when it comes to new technologies that transform our daily lives. Consumers use mobile phones because they are convenient and handy. Consumers buy TVs because they like to watch it. Hundreds of millions are on facebook every day. Certainly, peoples’ voluntary actions have a tremendous potential for change. The organic choice is a somewhat different choice. It is the first, and most the prominent, example of a process-oriented ecolabel, and as such a poster child for those that believe the market can fix all sorts of problem, including the lack of internalisation of costs. Producers and consumers of conventional food do not have to pay the true cost of production of conventional, non-organic food. The cost is paid by tax payers or future generations. If all external costs – that is the costs for water purification, soil degradation, health effects just to mention a few – were incorporated into the price of non-organic food those foods would be more expensive than they are today, some might be on par with organic, some perhaps remain cheaper others more expensive than organic food. The question of whether some consumers should voluntarily shoulder the costs while others can be free-riders is not only a practical one, but also a philosophical and ethical one. It may also be the reason for? that health – the only aspect of consuming organic products where the benefits are accrued by the consumer – is the killer argument in favour of buying organic products. The environmental or animal welfare benefits of buying organic foods are shared by those buying conventional food. It is rather naïve to believe that this system will be the system that carries organic production from a couple percent to the mainstream. The organic labelling system is a forerunner, but it certainly needs assistance for the transformation of agriculture to a situation where ‘organic’ is simply normal.

Leader in the upcoming issue of The Organic Standard

To respect nature is to respect ourselves

Apart from the direct and indirect services we get from nature, nature also has great esthetical and cultural value for us. It gives us another perspective, many reference points; it is an unprecedented piece of art.

Nothing we do can compete with a piece of nature. A square meter of land contains so many organisms, with so complicated and complex relationships with each other that we can’t understand them. One gram of forest soil may contain over a million bacteria colonies. It is estimated that several million individual animals and over a thousand different species may reside beneath one square meter of soil surface (Perry 1994), and all of them are constituted by many, many cells and there is interaction between them, exchange of energy and nutrient, eating and to be eaten. Most likely a square meter of nature is more complex and contains more information than the whole internet.

There are some 100,000,000,000,000 cells in a human body. I don’t know how many bits of information there is in the cell as such, but there are some 30,000 genes in each cell. Just for the sake of getting some number say there is a million bytes of information per cell and its relation with the other cells. Then we would arrive at 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits which is something like 10 exabyte of information. Never heard about an exabyte? No wonder. The first terabyte (SI prefix, 1000000000000 bytes) hard disk drive was introduced in 2007, and an exabyte is a million terabyte -which in turn is a million gigabyte, to bring it down to the scale of our own hard drives.

OK number-crunchers, anyone up for the challenge of proving me wrong, don’t ask me to prove it right, I haven’t tried!

The purpose with the exercise is not to bash the internet or modern technology and to say that it is worthless and a nit-wit’s accomplishment - it is just to realise how little we know about the wonders of nature; even of ourselves. And then I have only thought about the physical expression of ourselves. Our imagination and ingenuity creates a lot more - drama, movies, songs, love, hate, sensations and emotions all over the place, yes and the internet as well....

Sobering words from Keynes

I wish that world leaders - and people in common would consider Keynes words at the time of the last depression, and perhaps look more inte the real problems of this world:

"But, chiefly, do not let us overestimate the importance of the economic problem, or sacrifice to its supposed necessities other matters of greater and more permanent significance. It should be a matter for specialists-like dentistry. If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!"

Keynes, John Maynard, 1930, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren

The full paper can be found at
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

More people, less nature

One doesn't have to be an economist to realise that we value something higher that is in short supply than something that is abundant. For a long time nature was seen as unlimited, just for us to exploit as we saw fit. Up to the industrial revolution exploitation was fairly proportionate to the growing population. With the industrial revolution we expand exploitation through the application of energy and technology at a raging pace. But we can see that resources are depleted and that we need to take better care of them. At the same time our population has exploded.

Not that I think we should compare humans and trees but to put it a bit provocatively: As we have more and more people and less and less nature, we have to value nature higher and people less, or at least human labour less."Saving" nature must have priority over saving labour. A question is how we make a system of regulations and incentives to cater for that, a system that doesn't erode respect for human rights and human values?

Or is there another logic here?

How the cow and the wheat conquered the human being

We all know the story. We, the humans domesticated plants and animals and thereby created agriculture. Have you ever thought about taking the opposite perspective? That is to see it as an evolutionary strategy of the cow or of the wheat.

The cow saw these humans roaming the plant with forceful weapons (that is a bow and an arrow). She was afraid that she could be exterminated. And "if you can't beat them join them" as Mother Cow always told her subjects. So the cow decided to make the human being dependent on her. In this way she could give the human som service - meat, milk and hides - in exchange for protection.

And even more important, the human would expand the glory of the cow to almost all the corners of the planet. Cows don't like rubbing noses with polar bears or swimming in the ocean very much, so there were limits for cow expansionist. In India we can still see the traces of the religion the Cow so insidiously established to sway the lowly humans to take care of her. So now the cows fills the earth. The wheat had a similar strategy.

The cows are now getting quite worried for several reasons. One is that some people don't think there should be no cow-man cooperation in the future. They believe man should free himself from the dependency of the cow. Another issue is that man blame the cow for causing climate change. In Denmark the cows will now pay a special green house gas tax, as if cows ever liked greenhouses. But ultimately the cow is mostly worried for that in the process she has become so dependent on man. And man seems bound to exterminate himself by wreckless behaviour. And if man goes, cows will also go. Representatives of all cows are about to meet in a big cow-how to try to figure out what to do to save the human being from herself.