The synthetic meat scam

"It will be functional, natural, designed food," Vladimir Mironov says. "How do you want it to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design exactly what you want. We can design texture.” In a small laboratory on an upper floor of the basic science building at the Medical University of South Carolina Mironov has been working for a decade to grow meat. He envisions football field-sized buildings filled with large bioreactors which he calls carnaries[i]. And as I write this text Mark Post, sponsored by Google co-funder Sergey Brin with US$ 300,000, presents the first synthetic hamburger for the world’s media. 

The Postburger, Photo: David Parry / PA Wire

 

There are many issues around these synthetic foods. With genetic engineering we certainly will see more of it in the future. There are reasons to be cautious about the health effect of eating the stuff. Some of them will probably show to be harmful, some might be perfectly safe. We will realize this by the same crude process of trial and error that humans have used all along...and sometimes, well "shit happens". 

Yeast biomass was used as human food in Germany already during the First World War. The development of large-scale processes for the production of commercial protein began in earnest in the late 1960s, against the backdrop of looming food crisis. Most of the initiatives failed due to technical or economic reasons. The ICI Pruteen process for the production of bacterial Single Cell Protein for animal feed was a milestone in the development of the fermentation industry. This process utilized continuous culture on an enormous scale. BBC presented the factory like this in 1986: 

 “Protein is a necessary part of the diet of both man and animals. Many countries don't have enough land or a suitable climate to grow sufficient ICI has developed a single cell protein process using Methanol as a substrate. The product which is called Pruteen contains about 70% protein and has been used effectively in the diets of animals as a replacement for traditional protein sources[ii].”

However, even if the production worked it was never economically viable – it could simply not compete with soya and fish, and the site was blasted with dynamite. On the site of the Pruteen factory there is now a much smaller factory for a continuous fermentation process for the production of Fusarium venenatum biomass, marketed as Quorn, a vegetarian alternative to meat, with a price higher than meat.

Few people seem to realize that also so called lab-food needs a feedstock. Energy can't be created out of nothing, and even less can proteins etc. be that. All synthetic foods grown are using biologically derived materials as feed stock. It's not like you can take oil, nitrogen from the air, phosphorus from the soil crust and shake it and you have high quality food. I am sure that there are technical possibilities to do something like that, with massive investments (Mironov in South Carolina wants a billion dollars to develop his process). But nature already does it. And there are few signs that our labs can make it better. To grow corn for feedstock for artificial food or for the production of chicken is in a way not a big difference. Chicken production, as it looks like in many parts of the world, is already landless production, a kind of (disgusting) feed converter factory. And it is obvious that you can do a similar thing with fungi or bacteria. It is not obvious, however, that the process will be much more efficient. Perhaps more appealing for vegans; the only argument for synthetic meat that holds to date is that one wouldn’t have to kill animals[iii]. 

In a last data check for the book I look up if Mironov has been successful with his carnaries, and see that the University locked his laboratory in 2011. The latest recording I find of him on the internet is from September 2013, where he promised to develop 3D printing of human organs in Russia[iv] - another rabbit to be pulled out of hats.

(the text is a draft from my new book, tentatively called Global eating disorder - the true cost of cheap food)

 

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[i] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/30/us-food-meat-laboratory-feature-idUSTRE70T1WZ20110130

[ii] http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday/dblock/GB-448000-522000/page/18

[iii] Personally i believe there are enough natural plants to satisfy vegans, and I were a vegan I would not like to eat a product that mimics what I don’t want to eat.

[iv] http://indrus.in/multimedia/video/2013/09/11/which_3d_organ_will_be_bioprinted_in_moscow_first_29299.html

Why the GMO promises are hollow

Resistant weeds in a soybean field, Pana, Ill 2012

Many promote GMOs as a main solution for future food production. However, among those engaged in actual farming you rarely hear such bold statements. For sure, the uptake of GMO crops in the United States and a few other countries is great. But we are not talking about any break-through technologies here; we are talking about technologies that can save farmers a few dollars per acre, in the same way as pesticides. The reality in the field is, so far, very far from the discussion about feeding the world that is used by GMO proponents.

There is a growing problem with weeds that have become resistant to glyphosate, the most common herbicide used by American corn, soybean and cotton farmers. New strategies are needed to combat them, according to David Mortensen, professor of weed ecology at Penn State. During the period since the introduction of glyphosate-resistant crops, the number of weedy plant species that have evolved resistance to glyphosate has increased dramatically, from zero in 1995 to 21 in 2013. The reported acreage infested with glyphosate-resistant weeds has risen from 32.6 million acres in 2010 to 40.7 million acres in 2011 and 61.2 million acres in 2012, according to Mortensen[i].

When I visited farmers in Illinois and Mato Grosso in Brazil 2012, I realized that the “new strategies” is to combine roundup with nastier herbicides such as paraquat in Brazil or atrazine in Illinois. Paraquat was banned in the European Union since 2007. The ingestion of small to medium amounts of paraquat may lead to heart failure, kidney failure, liver failure or lung scarring within several days to several weeks. If a person survives the toxic effects of paraquat poisoning, long-term lung damage is highly likely. People with large ingestions of paraquat are not likely to survive according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention[ii]. It is exported from Switzerland where its use also is forbidden. More than 3 million liters of paraquat is used in Brazil, mainly in GMO soy plantations. According to the rhetoric for GMO proponents, use of herbicides would be lower when herbicide resistance crops are grown, but this is clearly not the case. In Brazil, the use of herbicides has increased from 7 kg per hectare to 10 kg and a survey in the state of Paraná show that farmers growing GMO soy use more pesticides than farmer that don’t grow GMO soy[iii]. Atrazine, which is commonly used in United States to deal with glyphosate resistant weeds in corn is also prohibited in the European Union. It is an estrogen disruptor and is suspected of causing birth defects. Atrazine was found in 80 percent of drinking water samples taken in 153 public water systems in United States[iv].

As a rule, GMO technology has a limited potential to radically increase yields; there is simply no “high-yield” gene that can simply be put in place in the various crops, if there were such simple traits, they certainly would already have been developed through the normal process of evolution[v]. High yields are a result of many synergetic factors of which the genetic factors are only a small proportion and the genes involved are many. The same is the case for many other GMO promises. Frost tolerant potatoes have been talked about for decades, but are still far away. There is apparently some progress in draught tolerant corn, but the size of the challenge is perhaps best understood when realizing that ag-tech giant Monsanto has to team up with competitor BASF in order to have the muscles to realize this, and again, there will be trade-offs. Draught tolerance will come at some kind of “cost” for the plant, or for the farmer[vi]. “One can never change only one thing” as Garret Hardin says. And in few areas is that as apparent as in our food and farm system. 

GMOs have the potential to solve certain technical problems, problems that in most cases have also other solutions. And those other solution compete with GMOs for research funds and attention. The biggest danger with GMO in my view is perhaps not health effects or super-weeds bringing havoc to nature. Bigger dangers with GMO are the increased reliance of farmers on purchased proprietary technology and that because of very high development costs, GMOs will lead to fewer varieties and even more monoculture. In addition, the outcrowding effect of GMO research is massive. BASF is investing around EUR188 million annually in plant biotechnology research[vii] and Monsanto invested more than US$1.5 billion in 2012 on research of which a very large proportion is for biotech[viii]. It is a field that can much more easily attract funds than solutions based on local resources and on-farm solutions, as there is no money to be made from such solutions, while the GMO solutions are based on proprietary technologies. It may also make people complacent in facing the problems we actually have. If the knee-jerk response to any agriculture challenge is that we will fix it with GMOs we are in serious problems.

Lately the strategy of GMO proponents is to promote them as a solution for poor farmers in developing countries. In this way they use moral arguments against the opponents, making it look like that those that are against GMOs are to blame for that people are starving or that some are blind because of vitamin A deficiency. As explained above, I think they have no basis for their claims. I have worked long enough in developing countries to know that the problems poor smallholders face are of a different nature and more often rooted in economic and social conditions than in agronomy. In any case, existing technologies can very well solve the problems which GMOs are supposed to fix. 

Some proponents of GMOs dismiss the objections with that they are not really rooted in fear that GMOs would be harmful for environment or for human health but that the resistance is a protest against capitalism, privatization and globalization. I tend to agree with that. I don’t exclude that GM technologies could produce some useful traits in the future. I am not convinced that it can justify the risks and the enormous investments. And in general I believe that the patenting of genetic materials, GMOs or not GMOs, is fundamentally wrong, unjust and yet another step towards full privatization of nature. GMOs or not GMOs is essentially a political and ethical choice and not a choice of technology.

This is an draft extract from my upcoming book.

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[i] Brown, Diane, 2,4-D and dicamba-resistant crops and their implications for susceptible non-target crops, Posted on November 7, 2013 Michigan State University Extension, http://msue.anr.msu.edu/news/24_d_and_dicamba_resistant_crops_and_their_implications_for_susceptible_non accessed 13 December 2013.

[ii] http://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/paraquat/basics/facts.asp

[iii] GM crops push up pesticide sales in Brazil, AgroNews, 13 Augusti 2012

[iv] Still poisoning the well, Wu, Mae, Mayra Quirindongo, Jennifer Sass, and Andrew Wetzler, NRDC, April 2010

[v] Bengtson, Jan, In which ways could modern biotechnlogy be part of sustainable agriculture, , Sveriges Utsädesförenings Tidskrift 1-2013

[vi] Bengtson, Jan, In which ways could modern biotechnlogy be part of sustainable agriculture, , Sveriges Utsädesförenings Tidskrift 1-2013

[vii] May 23, 2013, 7:11 a.m. EDT, BASF, Monsanto to launch new GM corn in U.S. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/basf-monsanto-to-launch-new-gm-corn-in-us-2013-05-23

[viii] Monsanto Corporate Profile 6 September 2013, http://www.monsanto.com/investors/Pages/corporate-profile.aspx

Vote for the title of my new book

I am busy writing a new book with the Title: ??? - VOTE !!!! (see poll on the side)

Industrial food and farming have been very successful in producing more food, and cheaper food. But it has come at a very high price. The practices have wrecked havoc in important biological systems, in particular in bio-diversity and the nitrogen and carbon cycles. It also squanders its own resource base and the most precious resource on the planet, the soil. Animals are treated in a disgraceful way. While food is abundant, the distribution system, the market, fails to reach 1 billion people which are hungry. More and more people are opposing the modern food system, a few have the energy to build a new different parts of a new system.

??? - VOTE !!!! explains how our food and farm system developed into the system we have today, and how interdependent our food system and society are. Gunnar Rundgren demonstrates how farming and food processing technologies, how and what we eat have transformed our lives and our relationship not only with nature, the plants we grow and the animals we raise, but also the relationships among ourselves.

The last few hundred years, and in an sharply increasing pace, width and depth, the global market revolution fueled by oil and coal, and shaped by endless competition and rent-seeking has been the factor that has determined the whole food system, from the prairies to the supermarket shelf, from the production of margarine to the emergence of fast food chains. It even transformed the act of eating from an act of confirmation of social relations to individual satisfaction of real or imaginary dietary needs. The meal is replaced by the micro-wave. 

But it left us, the animals and the planet unhappy. Most people feel a profound discomfort over how their food is produced and how this affects both the quality of the food and the world we live in. As a response to this organic farming, local foods, fair trade and alike has developed. However, these systems are by and large still subject to the market imperatives of competition, profit and constant labor productivity increase, and increasingly so the more successful they are. This limits their transformational power.

Real change of our farm and food system must be linked also to changes in social institutions, in particular the market. This has already started with efforts such as community supported agriculture, local food movements, participatory guarantee systems and urban farming. A truly regenerative food and farm system will close loops of flow of energy, nutrients and most importantly meaning and culture. It will also have to reflect the role of our agriculture system for management of the planet at large.

??? - VOTE !!!!  shows a path forward. A path of regeneration and co-production of resources, innovation, knowledge and meaning embedded in new social and economic relationships. 

The book mixes reports from my own experiences and other case studies with solid research. Five special chapters deal with the real heavy weights in human agriculture: Grazing animals, grains, sugar, fats and chicken, all showing important aspects of how our food system evolved. Each chapter starts with a recipe related to the theme. 

This is a presentation of my present book project. I am deep into research now, plan to have manuscript ready by end of the year.  Help me with the title by voting, or posting comments. 

Publishers are more than welcome to contact me for a discussion...

oops, the bread is burning, have to go!!!

Tentative table of content

– 1 – Introduction 4

Part I: What farming is and how we eat and how we farm belong together 8

– 2 – Let there be light 8

– 3 – From foragers to farming civilizations 11

– 4 – Green 16

– 5 – From sickle to combine harvester 17

– 6 – Grain 22

– 7 – Population 25

– 8 – Sweet 29

– 9 – The food revolution 34

– 10 – Fat 42

– 11 – The Earth is Flat 44

– 12 – Crunchy 52

– 13 – The Food Chain 55

– 14 – The Emperors new dish 59

– 15 – Cooking and eating 63

– 16 – Nutrition 68

– 17 – Follow the money 73

Part II: How modern farming threatens our existence 75

– 18 – The greatest single experiment in global geoengineering ever made 75

– 19 – The biological war 78

– 20 – Ecosystem services 81

– 21 – Agriculture and Energy 85

– 22 – Water 89

– 23 – The thin skin of the planet 92

– 24 – Growing hunger 95

– 25 – Speculation 98

– 26 – Food manipulation 101

Part III: discussion 102

– 27 – Productivity in Farming 102

– 28 – Will there be enough food in the future? 106

– 29 – Cars, animals or people? 109

– 30 – New Rabbits 113

– 31 – The agriculture treadmill 116

Part IV Food and farming for the 21st century 121

– 32 – Alternatives 121

– 33 – Where shall the food come from? 125

– 34 – Consumption and life style 128

– 35 – Political solutions 129

– 36 – Economic solutions 131

– 37 – Towards a Land and Food Ethics 132

 

The art of supporting agriculture

A few countries stand out with different food and agriculture policies. The Swiss constitution was amended in 1996 to explicitly include a reference to the multifunctional nature of agriculture – that agriculture contributes to food security, resource conservation, landscape and rural settlements.
As of today various support and remuneration from the government constitute more than half of the farmers’ income. This gives you an idea of how strong the forces of competition are on farms. Certainly this level of support comes at a price. First, much tax money is spent and secondly, there are high tariffs to protect Swiss farm produce. Meat had an average tariff of 126 percent and milk of 102 percent in 2012, which is reflected in very high consumer prices – but also in that Switzerland is almost self-sufficient in these produce. The self-sufficiency rate for animal products was 95 percent in 2009 while it was just 48 percent for the less protected plant products (some if which are imported as feed to the animals) [i].

A negative effect of the high support levels is that it can trigger surplus production which has to be dumped in global markets, thereby suppressing the world market prices. While there are some such effects of the Swiss agriculture support there are small and shrinking. It shall be noted, however, that the forces of competition also works inside the country and that ultimately, Swiss farmers quit, farms get bigger also through these internal forces. There were 90,000 farmers in 1990 while in 2011 there were 58,000 farms of which 41,000 could be considered full-time operations. Still, small farms persist, or as expressed ina 2013 report from the OECD, “Switzerland’s heavy support sustains inefficient farming structures”. Almost one third of the considerable Swiss agriculture support is explicitly for ensuring domestic food supplies. Switzerland, contrary to most other countries, still maintains emergency food reserves for several months for a variety of food stuffs[ii].

It is hard to assess how good the Swiss support is and how it plays out in reality. Also, Switzerland is a very wealthy country and many countries would find it hard to extend this level of support. It is still interesting to compare the developments in Switzerland and in other countries. For example, in my native Sweden, which through the EU already has some support and protection, but not at all on the level of Switzerland, we import half of our meat, despite the fact that the farming conditions are quite good.

In the 1980s, the World Bank investigated agriculture policies in eighteen developing countries and found that in most of them, Brazil being an exception, governments extracted more resources from their agriculture sector than they supported them with, a striking difference to OECD countries[iii]. To make matters worse, the money that does get spent is often spent on in­efficient and/or harmful subsidies, especially subsidies for chemical fertilizers. Of the farm budget in Zambia 80% is used for fertilizers and price support to maize. In 2012 Zambia had a surplus of maize it couldn’tsell for the price they ask, and mountains of maize were rotting. In India, subsidies reached new record heights in 2009. The Food Corporation of India used US$ 10 billion for food subsidies and the Ministry of Fertilizers used US$ 20 billion dollars for subsidies of chemical fertilizers. To this one can add federal support for food security and crop insurance as well as state programs for energy, seeds, seed­lings, livestock, tractors, pumps, irrigation, etc. Despite all support measures, Indian farmers are under huge stress. Just in 2007, 16,600 suicides were reported among Indian farmers (Tehelka 2009).

All in all, shaping agriculture policies is hard. Often citizens and politicians want to combine low cost policies with cheap food based on free trade with extensive care for environment. But sorry, it isn't working and we should stop fooling ourselves. Unlimited competition is simply not sustainable.

[i] The Agri-food Situation and Policies in Switzerland, Peter Jarrett, Charlotte Moeser, OECD 2013

[ii] The Agri-food Situation and Policies in Switzerland, Peter Jarrett, Charlotte Moeser, OECD 2013

[iii] Feeding the World, Giovanni Federico, Princeton 2005

The fast food sandwich

In the 19th century, bakers obtained their yeast from beer brewers. However, beer brewers slowly switched from top-fermenting to bottom-fermenting yeast and this created a shortage of yeast for making bread. Therefore a prize was offered in 1845 by the Association of Vienna Bakers, for the independent production of a good yeast. Adolf Ignaz Mautner won the prize for the production of his cereal press-yeast in 1850. Meanwhile there was a rapid development in milling technology. The mills of Budapest, erected or enlarged between 1865 and 1869, had 500 run of stones, and 168 walz sets (of three pairs each) of steel rollers, with a a capacity of about 1,000,000,000 pounds of wheat per annum. 

The yeast and the new mills changed the baking-industry throughout the Austrian empire, and at the Paris Exposition in 1867 the Vienna bakery was recognized as the best in the world. This was all so sensational that the US government printed the Report on Vienna Bread by Eben Norton Horsford in 1875. He stated that the purity, whiteness, yield and keeping qualities of the wheat flour of Austria was not equaled by that of any other country. But this was all to change. All followed in the footsteps of Austria. 

The new roller mills allowed the production of a white wheat flour meal, which wasn’t really possible with the stone mills. In modern mills wheat is passed through a series of rolls rotating at different speeds. These rolls are set so that they do not crush the wheat but shear it open, separating the white, inner portion from the outer skins. At the next step the fragments of wheat grain are separated by a complex arrangement of sieves. White endosperm particles are channeled to a series of smooth 'reduction' rolls for final milling into white flour. Coarser pieces of bran with endosperm still attached go to a second break roll, and stages 1 and 2 are repeated until the flour, bran and wheatgerm are completely separated. The result is a number of flour streams containing white flour, bran and wheatgerm. To produce wholemeal flour, all the streams must be blended back together.

 

This industrial development had two main effects. Wite wheat bread in all forms is a real fast food, it is quick to eat, has not to much own taste and can be complemented with various forms of smears or covers, and with industrial yeast it was also quick to produce. That it gives a bigger volume, is more porous, in baking combines the two benefits that it is quicker to chew and that it gives the consumer a bigger bread for the same amount of flour.

Another, possibly bigger effect was that with earlier technology the oils of the wheat germ was set free in the flour and caused it to rancid with a foul smell if stored for a longer term. The wheat kernel itself can be stored for a longer time, even if the often repeated story of 3,000 old wheat seeds from Pharaonic grave germinating is a myth. Wheat flour was thus a fresh product, milled daily and households bought small quantities from local mills to have fresh flour. The white wheat flour didn’t contain the germ and therefore, was possible to store for a long time.

This was the start of a rapid consolidation of mills, aided by the railroads, which enabled big mills to both source grain ans sell flour in a dramatically bigger area than before. This further industrialization of milling created new opportunities, but also its own set of problems.Whole wheat flour is more nutritious than refined white flour and contains the macronutrients more fiber,  protein, calcium, iron, selenium, folic acid, vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids. 

In this way, white wheat flour came with most of the signs of the industrial food industry: denaturated food stripped to a basic components, longer shelf life, ease in further preparation, large scale processing, storage and handling and lower nutritional value. 

(extract from the draft of a new book in the making)

And I still like my sandwich!

The six-winged chicken

At the beginning of this century three quarters of global chicken production is in the hands of agri-business companies. In the United States, Tyson process 41 million chickens per week, the PHW group in Germany has a 40 percent market share of chicken, 70 percent of the market for chicken breeding and control 80 percent of the market vaccines for poultry production[i]. In 2013, Seara Brazil’s 32 plants slaughter about 1.7 million chickens daily, according to the company’s website[ii]. 

And it is in light of this we should see that chicken consumption has increased five times in hundred years in the USA and ten times from 1961 to 2009 globally[iii], while beef consumption is more or less stable[iv]. Globally diners still eat more pork—some 114m tonnes a year compared with 106m tonnes for poultry. But chicken consumption is growing faster—by 2.5% a year compared with 1.5% for pig meat. Chicken is also to a much larger extent a traded commodity, some 13.3m tonnes a year is shipped compared with 8.6m tonnes of beef and 7.2m tonnes of pork.[v]. 

The birds themselves are torn into pieces and reconfigured in a multitude of products such as nuggets and strips. As the Smithsonian Magazine says: “chicken farming has been a vast national experiment in supply-side gastro-economics[vi]”.  The development of the broiler production was parallelled by developments on the, processing, marketing and consumer side. In 1930, the then 40-year-old Harland Sanders, who never were a real Colonel, was operating a service station in Corbin, Kentucky, and it was there that he began cooking for hungry travelers who stopped in for gas. He invented what's called “home meal replacement” – selling complete meals to busy, time-strapped families. He called it, “Sunday Dinner, Seven Days a Week.”  In 1955, confident of the quality of his fried chicken, Sanders devoted himself to developing his chicken franchising business, Kentucky Fried Chicken. Less than 10 years later, Sanders had more than 600 KFC franchises in the U.S. and Canada. 

In 1964 KFC got new owners. It went public in 1966, was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1969 and eventually was acquired by PepsiCo, Inc. in 1986. In 1997, PepsiCo, Inc. spun-off of its quick service restaurants – including KFC – into an independent restaurant company, Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc. Today, the restaurant company (now YUM! Brands, Inc.), is the world's largest in terms of system units with nearly 37,000 in more than 110 countries  and territories. 

Lately chicken wings have gained popularity and in the Unite States 1.23 billion chicken wings were eaten at Super Bowl Weekend. The National Chicken Council laments: “A chicken has two wings, and chicken companies are not able to produce wings without the rest of the chicken. Therefore, the supply of wings is limited by the total number of chickens produced.” Surprisingly there are no genetically modified chicken in the market.  A four winged chicken ready for Super Bowl should not be a tall order – or why not six wings? 

(extract from the new book in the making, or perhaps extract from draft of the new book in the making)

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[i] Excessive Industrialization of Livestock production: the Need for a New Agricultural Paradign, Friedrich Ostendorrf in Trade and Environment Review 2013.

[ii] Monday, June 10th 2013 - Brazil JBS becomes largest chicken producer; purchases main tannery in Uruguay, http://en.mercopress.com/2013/06/10/brazil-jbs-becomes-largest-chicken-producer-purchases-main-tannery-in-uruguay

[iii] How Food made History, B.H. Higman

[iv] http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/03/15/science/15food_graphic.html?scp=1&sq=meat%20consumption&st=cse

[v] Henmania, Chicken is set to rule the roost in the global meat market

Sep 14th 2013, http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21586306-chicken-set-rule-roost-global-meat-market-henmania

[vi] Smithonian Magazine, How the Chicken Conquered the World, Smithsonian magazine, June 2012, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/How-the-Chicken-Conquered-the-World.html#ixzz2eyiAl0ub

Is farming efficient?

Farming means favoring a few species in the environment, giving them more space and nurturing them. And even for those plants that are selected, we favor the parts that are useful for us, i.e. we favor the grain over the straw and roots, we favor the meat of a chicken over its bones, which is the reason for why many broilers can’t even walk properly. In this way, we can use a higher proportion of the biological production from a farmed system than from a ‘wild’ system. Despite all the efforts in farming, and the tremendous progress in seed breeding, the advances in farming are all about the control of the factors and the favoring of a certain crop. The basic energy-transformation has not improved; the efficiency of the green leave to convert sunlight to calories has not improved.

In essence the primary biological production is more or less the same for a farmed system as for a wild system. Compare a pasture that is established in place of a rainforest or a field that forms when a swamp is drained. In both cases, the biological production is likely to be higher in the original, natural, system than in the farmed system. Biological production increases mainly when external resources are brought into the system; for example, when irrigation is introduced to drylands or when greenhouses are heated in cool climate or when nutrients are brought from outside the system, productivity can in­crease a lot.

In many ‘marginal’ areas, farmed systems are often not very com­petitive and in many cases directly harmful. Carl Linnaeus, the founder of modern classification in biology, noted more than two hundred and fifty years ago that the ‘Swedish’ settlers had a miserable life—and couldn’t pay any taxes—in the mountains whereas the non-farming, reindeer-keeping Sami people did well under the same conditions. Jarred Diamond observes a similar situation for the Viking settlers in Greenland. When the climate changed, their farming system was inferior to the economy of the Greenland Inuits that was based on extraction of wild resources (Diamond 2005). And this is not restricted only to cold areas. The livestock expert R. N. B. Kay says that humans over the centuries have made clumsy attempts to introduce domestic species of plants or animals into arid regions with catastrophic collapse of the ecosystem as a result. He finds that the East African acacia savannah and bushland can carry roughly a five times greater biomass of wild ungulates than of domestic animals (1970: 271–72).

‘Productivity’ can have a completely different meaning if one counted the impact on ecosystems and the external costs caused by farming. Studies of a wetland in Canada, forests in Cameroon and Mangrove forests in Thailand all showed the total value of these ecosystems hugely surpassed the value of the farming systems once they were converted. But, importantly, the benefits of the systems accrue to different people. Choices are made on the basis of the profitability for the person or entity that has managed to, with whatever means, control that piece of nature (MEA 2005).

So the answer to the question in the title is: Who asks?

(this blog post is part of the process of writing my new book, which still hasn't got a title
A new book is emerging).

Pot calling the kettle black

Global Trends by Martin Khor
Star, 23 Sept 2013

Food is one of the most important and emotive of all issues.  As consumers, we  can't survive without it.

Agriculture also employs the most people in most developing countries. Ensuring farmers have enough income is key to development and social stability. Some countries that did not achieve this have faced first rural disgruntlement and then upheaval.

Increasing food self-reliance is a goal in many countries.  Food security became a high priority after global food prices shot up to record highs in 2008, and there was a near-scramble for supplies of some food items including rice because of potential shortages.Also, reducing and eventually eliminating hunger worldwide is one of the key development goals adopted by governments at the United nations.

Against this background, there is a remarkable discussion now taking place at the World Trade Organisation, as part of preparations for its Ministerial Conference in Bali in December. Developing countries grouped under the G33 are asking that their governments be allowed to buy food from their farmers, stock the food and distribute it to poor households, without this being limited by the WTO's rules on agricultural subsidies.

However their proposal is facing resistance, mainly from some major developed countries, especially the United States, whose Ambassador told the WTO earlier this year that such a move would "create a massive new loophole for potentially unlimited trade-distorting subsidies". This clash is outstanding example of the how the agriculture rules of the WTO favour the rich countries whist punishing the developing countries, including their poorest people.

It is well known that the greatest distortions in the trading system lie in agriculture.  This is because the rich countries asked for and obtained a waiver in the 1950s from the liberalization rules of the GATT, the predecessor of the WTO. They were allowed to give huge subsidies to their farm owners, some of who do not even carry out farm activities, and to have very high tariffs.   When the WTO was set up, it had a new agriculture agreement that basically allowed this high farm protection to continue.  The rich countries were obliged only to reduce their "trade distorting subsidies" by 20% and could change the nature of their subsidies and put them into a "Green Box" containing subsidies that are termed "non trade-distorting or minimally trade-distorting."

There is no limit to the Green Box subsidies.  So the trick played by the rich countries has been to move most of their subsidies to the Green Box, including subsidies that are not directly linked to production, or that are tied to environmental protection.  But studies have shown that the Green Box subsidies are in fact trade distorting as well. With this shifting around, the rich world's subsidies have been maintained or actually soared.  WTO data show that the total domestic support of the United States grew from US$61 billion in 1995 (when the WTO started) to US$130 billion in 2010.The European Union's domestic support went down from 90 billion euro in 1995 to 75 billion euro in 2002 and then went up again to 90 billion in 2006 and 79 billion in 2009. A broader measure of farm protection, known as total support estimate, shows the OECD countries' agriculture subsidies soared from US$350 billion in 1996 to US$406 billion in 2011.

The effects of continuing rich-country subsidies have been devastating to developing countries.  Food products selling at below production costs are still flooding into the poorer countries, often eating into the small farmers' from incomes and livelihoods. Ironically the developing countries, already the victims of the rich world's subsidies, are themselves not allowed to have the same huge subsidies, even if they can afford it.  The reason is that the agriculture rules say that all countries have to cut their distorting subsidies.  So if a developing country has not given subsidies before, they are not allowed to give any, except for a small minimal amount (10 per cent of total production value).

In other words, if you have given $100 billion subsidy, you have to bring it down to $80 billion and you can transfer the rest to the Green Box, but if you haven't given any before, you cannot give one dollar, except for the minimum allowed. This is where the present WTO controversy comes in.  The developing countries are asking that food bought from poor farmers and given to poor consumers  should be considered part of the Green Box without conditions.

The present rule sets an unfair condition :  that any subsidy element in this purchase scheme should be considered a trade-distorting subsidy which for most developing countries is limited to this minimum amount (10% of production value). Other Green Box subsidies, that developed countries mostly use, do not carry such a condition.

The developing countries merely seek to remove the unfair condition that in effect prevents them from adequately helping their poor to get sufficient food. For example, India's parliament has just passed a food bill that entitles the poor (two thirds of the population) to obtain food from a government scheme that buys the food from small farmers.  But the estimated US$20 billion-plus the government will spend annually may exceed the small minimum amout of subsidy it is allowed, because India was not a big subsidiser before the WTO rules came into force. Other developing countries that provide subsidies to their farmers and consumer, such as China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia may also one day find themselves the targets of complaints.

For rich countries who are subsidising a total of US$407 billion a year to disallow poor countries from subsidising their small farmers and poor consumers, is really a specially bad form of discrimination and hypocricy.    An outstanding case of the pot calling the kettle black!

Reproduced with the permission of the Third World Network.  

Energy slaves revisited

"If all the energy we currently derive from fossil fuels alone (i.e. not including nuclear or renewables) was suddenly unavailable, and we had at our disposal a few handy nearby planets populated with well-fed healthy adult human males that we could capture as our 'energy slaves', how many of them would we need to allow us to enjoy the same lifestyle currently being provided by fossil fuels?"

Jason Heppenstall ask this question in a recent blog post, where he use, among others my calculations from Garden Earth where I arrive at that we are dependent on somewhere between 120 and 600 billion energy slaves - and that most of our progress and comfort can easily be explained by this. After all, you could live like a nobleman already thousand years ago if you had hundred slaves working for you. The great ancient empires where founded on an agrarian culture where the farm labourer could only feed his/her own family and at the most an equal number of other people, after all 70-80 percent of the population were farming. 

Jason has compiled some other calculations and they differ some, but not radically. Read the rest of his post.  

The point in any case is to give an illuminating perspective of the huge importance the use of energy has for our civilization. It is not the only factor explaining how we can have all those things we have, but it is in my view the single most important factor. And therefore, it is likely that an energy scarce future will have enormous consequences. 

A recent paper in the "Journal of Cleaner Production" U. Bardi. T. El Asmar and A. Lavacchi,  discuss how energy is used in agriculture and how, in the future, we could obtain this energy from renewable sources. The results?

"As you can imagine, it will not be an easy task; but it is not an impossible one, either. As modern renewables (wind and solar) increase in efficiency and come at lower costs, it is perfectly possible to think of integrating them with the agricultural process, first reducing and then fully eliminating the need of locally using fossil fuels." says Ugo Bardi read more

Systematic collapse or collapsing systems? Review of Orlov's The Five Stages of Collapse

In the parking lot of the guest house where I stay in Banga, Burundi, 105 people were killed in the civil war which ravaged the country from 1995 to 2005. It is a coincidence that I read Orlov’s book The Five Stages of Collapse in Burundi. This small, but densely populated country on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, experienced a deadly kind of collapse in the shape of a civil war. Over 200,000 people were killed in that war.

How does Burundi fit into Orlov’s stages of collapse? Not so well, I am afraid.

Orlov does not spend a lot of time convincing people that collapse is imminent. His readers would have already understood it. Orlov says he wrote the book to help us deal with collapse; we can not avoid it, as it is unavoidable, but survive it, and possibly find our way back to a nice society. His second cardinal accomplishment is to provide us with “taxonomy of collapse.”

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost.

Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost.

Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost.

Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost.

Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost.

The taxonomy is quite helpful. The presentation of collapses as stages which occur in a certain logical order is more problematical. For instance, while there are examples of financial collapse which trigger commercial collapse which trigger political collapse, there are also examples of collapse that are mainly driven by political issues, which in turn might influence finances and markets. Burundi is a case of a political collapse, and perhaps a social collapse, coming before the commercial collapse. Some of Orlov’s own examples, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fate of the people Ik, also contradict the idea that a collapse follows a certain order. To my knowledge financial collapse did not trigger the fall of the Soviet Empire.

It may be a fair assumption that a collapse of the current financial global market system - and thus of modern society - will start in financial markets (as has already happened), and cascade further according to Orlov’s trajectory.  Then again, how can we be sure about that?

Orlov’s perspective on the market economy is damning. He analyzes how global competition drives all economic agents into economically efficient behavior, simultaneously making them inefficient from other perspectives. The selling of one’s labor is described as “desexualized prostitution.” Trade and market relations have been allowed to take command of a too large part of our lives. We care for family, friends and kin, and normally do not interact with them as a market, and engage in monetary transactions. Money and market relationships should, according to Orlov, be reserved for dealing with those you cannot trust, and, largely, for non-essential goods. This, today, is turned on its head. 

When Orlov says that a commercial collapse is not so bad, since we can fall back on a gift economy for essentials and use the market only for luxuries, he assumes that the essentials can be provided within the cozy circle of kin and friends. This might be possible, but it also assumes that our essentials do not include a large number of modern products and infrastructure. Are cotton clothes essential? Are sugar, telephones, computers, bicycle chains, etc., essential? None of them would easily materialize in a barter economy limited to kin and friends.

Orlov’s views of how social collapse will unfold are not pleasant. He does not claim to serve us only what is agreeable either. However, I find his views a bit too negative. I also find them contradictory. He makes much of a story of two communities living side by side: one, a typical middle class, well-educated, well-behaved community with law-abiding citizens, and the other, a typical criminal underworld community with its citizens engaged in drugs, black marketeering and crime. He thinks it is apparent that the criminal sub-culture is superior in hard times. To me that seems to contradict his praise for “mutual aid” as promoted by Pyotr Kropotkin(a Russian anarchist), someone whom he attributes many interesting pages to.

Orlov certainly has a point when he writes, “Under emergency conditions, the previously enacted rules, laws and regulations will amount to an essentially lethal set of inflated standards, unachievable mandates and unreasonable restrictions, and attempting to comply with them or enforce them is bound to lead to inaction at best and armed conflict at worst.” There are probably few, if any, good ways to de-complexify complex societies. Perhaps, I just have a higher faith in humanity to adjust, for better or for worse, to new conditions. In discussing social collapse, Orlov puts his faith (!) in religion being the institution that can take us over to another new social contract and civilization. His argument is based on the premise that religions have been able to survive many social collapses and to some extent have provided a refuge for civilization.

The strategy to try to survive the collapse by being self-sufficient is not a viable one. It may work for a few people but “for the rest, it might be better to abandon the idea of finding a safe place to be, and to concentrate instead on discovering a safe way to be—in company with others.”  In other parts of the book, though, he takes a much more individualistic perspective, and the reader is advised to hoard items which might come in handy when financial and commercial systems have made money meaningless. In line with this is also the analysis of who is best adapted to survive a collapse: they should be indifferent to suffering; have the will to survive; have the ability to persevere in spite of loneliness and lack of support from anyone else, and, have “the sheer stubborn inability to surrender in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, opposing opinions from one’s comrades or even force.”

Orlov sees human social bonds and actions as primitive, leading us to act as a herd of sheep. We have to turn to the solitary geniuses for our salvation. They are more highly evolved according to him, and it is thanks to “brilliant loners and eccentrics” that progress is made. Later in the book, he emphasizes family and similar bonds as being of utmost importance and central to humanity. I wonder if I missed something, or, did he?

The contradictions might have been resolved with more critical editing. Orlov also rants and goes off into side-discussions that are only vaguely related to the main thread of the narrative. For example, he dismisses charities and philanthropy as demeaning (they might be, but it is hardly a central discussion for the stages of collapse); he has a distinctly gender-biased discussion about how men and women react to the threat of collapse; and he discusses the merits of various national languages in some detail, without really making clear to us how Chomsky’s Universal Grammar has anything to do with cultural collapse. They do not add much to the main discourse, though some of them can be amusing and interesting. 

Orlov should be credited for daring to challenge many established views and promoting concepts that are not so often promoted, even within the collapseological community. He has the guts to question the prevailing market religion, not only because it is giving undesired results, which many agree with, but more importantly, because it is built on the wrong foundation.

One can easily be provoked by Orlov, but, then again, this seems to be his mission. After all he wants us to think for ourselves and not just accept what he says. The prose is also full of memorable and entertaining statements such as, “The intelligence of a hierarchically organized group of people is inversely proportional to its size, and mighty military empires are so big, and consequently so dumb, that they never, ever learn anything.” I encourage you to take on Orlov’s challenge.

Start by reading the book.

Dmitry Orlov was born in Russia but moved to the US as a teenager. For the past five years he has been experimenting with off-grid living and renewable energy by giving up the house and the car. Instead, he has been living on a sailboat, sailing it up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and commuting by bicycle. He believes that, given appropriate technology, we can greatly reduce personal resource consumption while remaining perfectly civilized.

Doug's Review of Dmitry Orlov's 'Reinventing Collapse' and 'The Five Stages of Collapse'

Dmitry Orlov’s Excellent New Book

Review: The Five Stages of Collapse by Dmitry Orlov

The Five Stages Of Collapse, By Dmitry Orlov, Reviewed By Carolyn Baker