Sunday, April 19, 2015

The illusion of cheap food under commodified agriculture

EVEN as hundreds of millions go hungry, food has a low price tag attached to it in the global market. This is because we have externalised many of the costs of producing and consuming it. We let someone else - nature, other people, future generations, taxpayers - foot the bill for climate change, for loss of biodiversity, for eutrophication, for nitrates and pesticides in our groundwater or even for losing the water or the soil altogether. It has become painfully clear that we can no longer afford cheap food. 

An unsustainable system
Cheap food allows a growing proportion of the global population to eat meat, fresh vegetables and fruits all year round, something most people could only dream of a few generations back - and something many people in the world can still only dream of. People live longer, are taller and are generally healthier than in the agrarian societies of the 18th and 19th centuries. But the current food system has also produced obesity, allergies and other diseases, and destroyed the environment and devastated farming communities.
Our whole food system contributes at least a third of manmade total greenhouse gas emissions. The extraction of water for irrigation exceeds the regeneration of water sources in many parts of the world. Pesticides cause a major loss of biodiversity and hundreds of thousands of direct deaths among farmers and farm workers. Nobody really knows how they affect other aspects of our health. The European Nitrogen Assessment concluded that farmers using nitrogen fertilisers create costs for society at large that are on par with the economic benefits for them.1 European chickens or Chinese pigs are, to a very large extent, fed soy protein from Latin America, much of it from the Cerrado, the Amazon or the Pampa, landscapes which are razed and raped by agribusiness. The extinction of species and the greenhouse gas emissions caused by this are also not included in the price of chicken breast or pulled pork. 

That almost a billion people don't have enough to eat, while even more eat too much and huge quantities of food are simply wasted, also shows that the food and farming system is socially unsustainable. For most farmers in the world, farming is not economically viable. Global competition causes the abandonment of farms even in large parts of Europe where almost a hundred million hectares of farmland has been abandoned in the last 50 years.2 Rich countries such as Sweden which could be almost self-sufficient in food import increasing quantities of foods, but even more troubling is that many of the least developed countries have become net importers of food. Sub-Saharan Africa went from a 14% surplus of calories to a 13% deficit in the last 50 years.3

Farming has become one of the most capital-intensive businesses. The very successful Danish farms have an average debt of $1.6 million per farm.4 In the United States the total farm assets in 2014 amounted to $3 trillion,5 corresponding to $1.2 million per full-time job. Low labour cost is no longer a comparative advantage in crops where production is easily mechanised, such as the main staples. On the contrary, low prices for staple crops make it impossible for small farms to mechanise production, which is why more than 80% of the farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and around half of the farmers in Asia and Latin America still farm manually. Such farmers would have to devote all their monetary income over a whole lifetime to upgrade to ox-ploughing. However, they are still, mostly, (just) above the threshold of survival, which means that they will continue to farm as long as there are no more promising alternatives beyond agriculture.6

By and large farmers are stuck on a treadmill. They are forced by competition to increase productivity, and the increased productivity leads to lower prices. Vanguard farms will constantly develop and improve and mostly increase in size, at the expense of their less successful counterparts. Larger farms are not normally more productive per area unit, but they do have lower costs of production. They will establish a new level of costs and prices, each time racking up the notch for the minimum efficiency needed to stay in business. For farmers who cannot participate in this stiff competition, there is no option except to get out. The fact that 'people will always need food' is small comfort for the farmer who cannot compete.

Chickens and commodification
A closer look at the major agricultural commodities helps us understand why things are as they are. Chicken consumption increased tenfold from 1961 to 2009 globally. The past practice of chicken rearing saw small numbers of chickens raised on waste products or seeking their own feed in the farmer's yard, the thicket or the manure heap - a very popular place for the animals. Chicken meat was relatively scarce and thus expensive in many cultures. Today chicken from broilers in the shape of nuggets, wings or strips are munched 24/7. There is hardly any other food that has increased its market share at such speed in such a short period. Why is that?

A trend analyst would explain that consumer choice is driving this, that consumers prefer white meat to red for health reasons, that chicken is low in fat, that chicken is an international food or that chicken is better for the climate than eating beef. Well, I'm no trend analyst and venture that the main explanation is that chicken has become much cheaper compared to other foodstuffs.

But we can go one step further and ask why chicken has become so much cheaper. In my book Global Eating Disorder, I examine why our food and farming system has developed the way it has and explore the underlying causes. There are three megatrends that have shaped our food system over the last couple of centuries: 1) the commercialisation of the entire food system; 2) the use of energy and applied technology (e.g., in the form of machinery or nitrogen fertilisers) to replace animate labour and processes; and 3) demographic changes, such as population growth and urbanisation, and the related lifestyle changes.7
These three megatrends are mutually reinforcing. For example, the application of energy and mechanisation in farming, in particular the use of fossil fuels, has increased productivity per agriculture worker by between 50-200 times, which meant that the share of population engaged in farming dropped tremendously. Without fossil fuels, globalisation and massive urbanisation could not have happened. And without urbanisation, there would be little development of markets for agricultural products. Similarly, without commercialisation of farming, there would be little incentive to mechanise and use chemical fertilisers, as both presuppose market-driven farming.

With these mega-drivers as a background, we can discern some factors which have played a major role in the transformation of the luxury that was Sunday chicken into a very cheap food. Earlier, most farms with animals also produced their own feed. With the large-scale introduction of chemical fertilisers after World War II and improvements in transportation technologies, farms no longer had to integrate animals and crops. With increasing mechanisation, crop farmers could produce much cheaper grain, and later on also soybeans - increasingly grown in monocultures. The grains were sold to specialised livestock farmers, including chicken producers.

Chickens, just like humans, depend on sunlight to produce vitamin D. Therefore chickens would feed on worms and other insects in the yard and would be fed maize when they went back into the chicken house. Once farmers realised they could simply add vitamin D and other vitamins and medications to the chicken feed, they no longer had to let the chickens outdoors. Meanwhile, technology for automatic feeding had been invented. Now, the industrialisation of both broilers and laying hens could proceed apace. Mechanisation of the whole slaughtering process helped to reduce prices and increase volumes. In just over 50 years, the number of chickens produced in the United States increased 14-fold, while the number of farms having chickens dropped from 1.6 million to just 27,000.8 Half of all American broilers now come from farms producing more than 700,000 chicks per year.9 Big food industries came in and contracted producers for their brands and provided them with technologies and markets. At the beginning of this century three-quarters of global chicken production were in the hands of agribusiness companies.10

The development of broiler production was paralleled by developments in the processing, marketing and consumer side. The birds themselves are torn into pieces and reconfigured in a multitude of products such as nuggets and strips. In 1930 the then 40-year-old KFC founder Harland Sanders (who never was a real Colonel) was operating a service station in Corbin, Kentucky, and it was there that he began cooking for hungry travellers who stopped in for gas. He called it 'Sunday Dinner, Seven Days a Week'. Today, KFC, together with Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, is part of Yum! Brands, Inc., the world's leading restaurant company with over 40,000 restaurants and 1.5 million people employed in more than 125 countries and territories.11

Chicken breeding is extremely concentrated as a result of high research expenditure and the capital-intensive nature of the chicken business. By the late 2000s only three sizeable breeding groups remained for broilers: Cobb-Vantress, Aviagen and Groupe Grimaud.12 Two breeders control 94% of the supply of laying hens.13 All these developments have had profound impact on the main character of the story, Gallus gallus. In just half a century, the breeders created two different specialist chickens, each one incredibly efficient for its specific purpose. A typical laying hen of today needs 1.99 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of eggs, while a broiler hen will need 5.22 kg of feed for the same quantity. But the broiler chicken is far superior in converting feed to meat. To produce 1 kg of live weight the broiler needs only 1.7 kg of feed, while the chicken of a laying hen needs 3.8 kg.14 Unfortunately, both the broiler and the laying hen are less efficient than their common ancestor in being a chicken.
Today 300 million male chicks of egg-laying hens are killed in the European Union each year as soon as they hatch, because it is uneconomical to raise them for meat15 since meat from chickens especially bred for meat production is cheaper. Many of them, and their American siblings, are consigned to 'Instantaneous Mechanical Destruction', which is a technical way of saying they are ground up alive.16 Hens that no longer lay eggs also pose a disposal problem and are burnt or thrown into wood-chipping machines, sometimes alive.17
The chicken industry provided a blueprint for the industrialisation of livestock. The capital-intensive model cuts out small farmers and pastoralists and is built on the use of bought-in inputs: feeds, medicines, technologies and breeding stock as well as external knowledge. The production model bears a close resemblance to assembly industries, and producers all over the world use the same breeds, feed and technology. The notion of landscape, place or culture in our foods has totally lost any meaning under these conditions. What is particularly disturbing with the commercialisation of animal production is that it doesn't take into account that animals are living, sentient beings. Through the commodification of animals, their welfare and their ability to exercise their natural behaviours have become externalities - side factors of production - just as the landscape has in plant production.

The myth of choice
We might believe that we chose to eat a certain food, that it is the consumer who is the conductor of the whole food system, but that is an erroneous starting point for a conversation about which foods we eat and which we should eat. Our palates have been shaped over centuries to like some things and dislike others. Differences in local foods and food preferences are proof not of how different from each other we are, but of how well we adapt to what is available. Swedes liked herring and cheese, Bantu people liked cassava and goat stew, and people in South East Asia preferred rice. Fermentation, drying, freezing and curing have all played different roles in different countries. If you lived in the humid tropics, your culture would never develop cured ham, as the conditions for making the ham do not exist in such a climate. The availability of fats and fuels determined your favourite style of frying or roasting or if you mostly ate food boiled in water.  Our food preferences were thus by and large dictated by the local ecological context we lived in.

With fossil fuel and capitalism, this all changed. Today, our food choices are by and large determined by the economy instead of ecology. In most parts of the industrial and urbanised world, people hardly eat anything that comes from close by. Consumption has no direct link to local agriculture, which is organised in the same way as modern assembly lines, with parts being delivered from all over the globe to be assembled as a Gorby's pizza, a McDonald's hamburger or a Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Indonesians consumed a stunning 14 billion packages of instant wheat noodles in 2012.18 What is strange about that? Indonesia produces no wheat at all - what has become a national dish is based on a raw material that is completely imported. The history of wheat in Indonesia began in 1969 when the United States extended food aid in the form of wheat flour and wheat to Indonesia. Indonesia's wheat imports outweigh the total agriculture development budget in this nation of 250 million people.19

Does this mean that people have almost unlimited choice from the global supermarket? Not quite. To be sure, when one stands in front of a supermarket shelf or sits at a table reading a restaurant menu, there are many choices. But before we face all those choices, a number of people have already made the selection for us to choose from. Governments and agribusiness are choice architects and they shape what consumers can and cannot buy.
The modern food system is simultaneously moving towards uniformity and diversity. Globalisation gives many people access to many more kinds of foods than before, but at the same time the differences between regional cuisines are diminishing. We are easily duped by the bright colours of marketing messages and packaging. A supermarket may carry some 50,000 food items, but a very large part of them are variations made out of the 'Big Five' - wheat, maize, palm oil, sugar and soybeans - spiced, coloured, preserved and texturised with additives.

Globally our farming system is still based on a few grains, root crops and oil crops supplemented with animals. Most meat is also produced from the same staples. Almost no new plants or animals have been domesticated in the last centuries, so in that regard our food system is still determined by the choices of generations of ancient farmers. The balance between the staples has changed and instead of being bound to one or two staples, we can now eat rice, pasta, potatoes, cornflakes, meat, milk, cheese etc.

Armies provided a development field for logistics, food processing and, not least, mass catering, which also served the masses in the rapidly growing cities. World War II reshaped the food preferences of American citizens, both those who were drafted into the armed forces and civilians at home. This transformation of diet was influenced by the food industry and government alike. It also helped American food industries to conquer new markets. The President of Coca-Cola, Robert Woodruff, ordered that every man in uniform should be able to get a bottle of the beverage for 5 cents wherever he was and whatever it cost the company. In 1943, General Dwight D Eisenhower sent an urgent cablegram to Coca-Cola requesting shipment of materials for 10 bottling plants. 'During the war, many people enjoyed their first taste of the beverage, and when peace finally came, the foundations were laid for Coca-Cola to do business overseas,' is how the Coca-Cola Company describes the effect on its website.20

In the United States, four companies control 80% of the meat market, three companies control 80% of maize exports and 65% of soy exports, and four companies control 60% of the domestic grain market. The top 10 food and beverage firms (the three largest are Nestl‚, Pepsico and Kraft) control an estimated 28% of the global market. The top five breweries have around 50% of the market while the top 10 wine marketers have around 16% of the market.21 And if you cannot beat your competition, you can just buy them out. Increasingly, huge multinationals have bought up pioneer organic companies or other premium brands. Many companies integrate 'upstream' production (i.e., farmers and other suppliers) and 'downstream' sales (outlets, agents), which allows them to extend their control of the chain. Most of the transnational companies in the food sector are from the United States or Western Europe, but times are changing. Brazil-based JBS SA is now bigger than Unilever, Cargill and Danone, and slaughters 85,000 heads of cattle, 70,000 pigs and 12 million birds. Each day. In September 2013, China's Shuanghui International Holdings Ltd. bought US-based Smithfield, the world's biggest pork producer.22

The production and supply of inputs to farms is also highly concentrated. The global commercial seed market in 2009 was worth $27 billion, with the top 10 companies having three-quarters of the market. Three of them controlled more than half of the market and one, Monsanto, now controls more than one-quarter of the commercial seed market. The concentration in the agrochemical market is even higher, with the top 10 having 90% of the global market.23 Five of the top six agrochemical companies are also on the list of the world's biggest seed companies. Monsanto is the world's largest seed company and fourth-largest pesticide company. Monsanto's seeds that are genetically modified to work together with the company's flagship herbicide, Roundup, constitute a clear example of a successful strategy.

The most spectacular development in the food chain in recent decades, however, is not the might of Coca-Cola or Nestl‚, but the increased influence of retailers. In 2008, Walmart recorded sales of $436 billion from 7,657 stores (this corresponded to the GDP of Sweden), Carrefour $161 billion, Metro Group $116 billion and Tesco $109 billion. In 1992, the top five supermarket chains in the United States had a market share of less than 20%; by 1999, that share had increased to one-third and in 2012 the four largest retailers sold more than half of the groceries. In Australia, the two giants Coles and Woolworths now control about 80% of grocery sales, and in Sweden, ICA alone has half the retail market.24

The power of the supermarkets is also strengthened by the spread of retailer-owned brands and private labels. The retail share of private labels among food products has reached almost 60% in Switzerland and between 20% and 40% in most other Western European countries.25 The retailers try to uphold the idea that we have choices by introducing many different private brands. The biggest retailer in Britain, Tesco, has many own brands: Value, Standard, Finest, Discount, Light Choices, Organic, Free From, Whole Foods and finally Disney Kids, which was introduced in 2007 'to help parents by providing a range of nutritionally balanced food that children will engage with and enjoy'. This range includes a Mickey Mouse-shaped pizza.26

Cooking and eating were for a long time social and cultural activities done within the household or in the community, with the work being done without pay and for no costs. Gradually, cooking and eating have become commercialised and acquired a totally different meaning and role in society. In the supermarkets we find a large supply of fully prepared meals, including ready meals of all types and takeaway food for consumption at home. In any week, 45% of Europeans and Americans consume such meals.27 The habit is also spreading rapidly to emerging economies where the consumption of convenience foods is increasing, partly due to increasing urbanisation: retail sales of ready meals in India and China grew by 26.9% and 11.8% respectively from 2003 to 2008.28

We have seen how food processing and retail follow an industrial logic. The same is true of the production of convenience foods. The web of suppliers to these operations is soÿcomplex that it proved very difficult to pin down the point at which horsemeat became beef in the European horsemeat scandal in early 2013. The factory that supplied Tesco with its 'horseburgers' was using 'multiple ingredients from some 40 suppliers in production batches, and the mixture could vary every half hour', according to the Irish department of agriculture.29

The tragedy of the market
Earlier, trade in foods was very limited and determined by needs or ecological adaptation. For example, farmers in plains traded grain for meat or yoghurt from pastoralists in mountains or deserts. In most cultures there existed 'markets' for exchange, but there were few cases where farmers oriented their production fully to sales in the market, and when they did so the market was mostly the town close by.

With the total integration of farms in national and global markets, the market, initially just a tool for distributing surpluses, has become the conductor of the whole food system, from farm to fork, determining how we farm, the whole social fabric and how, where and what we eat.

As farmers become integrated into the market economy, they no longer reproduce and regenerate their production system. The commercialisation of farming also leads us to view land, water and nature as private property and the life of the land, our symbionts, as commodities. It is this process that is the real tragedy for food. It also makes a large contribution to obesity because when food becomes a commodity its main purpose is to be consumed.

The challenge of feeding a growing population is formidable, but managing the planet's ecosystem is an even bigger challenge. Considering that farmed landscapes dominate more than half of the terrestrial area of the Earth,30 it is clear that the way we farm has an enormous impact on the planet's ecosystems; that human agricultural ecosystems must be seen as planetary ecosystems. Yet, the food and farming system is increasingly managed by signals from 'the market', which do not include the signals from these ecosystems: of the species threatened by extinction and the loss of biodiversity, of pollution and of greenhouse gas emissions. The market signals also don't include the feelings of the animals brutalised in our service. The system is simply not geared towards stewardship of the planet and living beings but to the maximisation of marketable output and profit.

The straight rows of endless monocultures in Mato Grosso are reflected in the aisles of the supermarket and the lanes of the highways full of lorries bringing goods into them and cars transporting food to people's homes. But the food system is a life support system and should be based on the principles of living systems, not on the perceived efficiency of the industrial model. Linear thinking and linear processes are fundamentally at odds with the cycles of nature, and, ultimately, nature still rules. The food system is not a smorgasbord where we can pick out the bits we like and keep those we don't like.  What we eat, how we eat and how we farm are all interdependent. There is no way to produce good foods and biologically diverse landscapes in a containerised, standardised and monopolistic food system. We can't combine animal welfare with the view of animals as commodities. And we can't produce healthy foods with the use of chemicals.

It is no longer very controversial to question the direction our food system has taken. Today, expert bodies, such as the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, clarify that 'business as usual is not an option'.31 We simply have to find new ways, whether we want to or not. But we will only be able to find new ways if we understand the factors that determine how we farm, what we grow and what we eat. Most commentaries focus on the technical aspects of food production and farming, such as use of genetically modified organisms and chemical fertilisers, their benefits and drawbacks. But these technical aspects of farming are only parts of the problem or the solution. The food system is a social, ecological and economic system and needs to be viewed as such.

Towards a regenerative food system
Food and farming remain, together with energy, labour and housing, one of the most regulated parts of the economy, even before we consider all the cultural norms surrounding them. This is a recognition that the free market doesn't work. Or rather, that it does indeed work according to the textbooks, but we don't like the result of its workings.
Access to food should be an inalienable right. An equitable world will have the potential to feed everybody. It will certainly ensure that the food is distributed more fairly among the world's population. But distribution by the market is the antithesis of equitable sharing. We can still see in times of disaster, war or disturbance that societies rapidly shun the market as the main mechanism for distribution and public or community control over food are the preferred ways of ensuring proper sharing.

Instead of trying to squeeze more of the commons, such as land, water and seeds, into the market, we should rebalance food towards public goods. In this way ecosystem services and food production can be balanced within the same framework. The rethinking of food as a right, of farming as a management system of the planet and the food system as a commons will lead us to develop new institutions that complement the roles of the market and the state.

There are ample opportunities to produce more foods with regenerative methods, such as organic farming and agroecology. Regenerative methods need nature and humans to be productive, but can't use the shortcuts introduced by linear methods, externalisation of costs and massive external energy use. For example, global plant production can be sustained on a high level with a combination of biological nitrogen fixation by leguminous plants in the fields, reduced losses, integration of animals and plants, and recycling of waste and human sewage (which has to be source separated). We can still feed as many persons as with chemical fertilisers, but under current economic conditions the cost will be higher as we need to use some of the resources to regenerate and reproduce the means of production. With regenerative food systems we will also need a higher share of the population engaged in food production. This in turn affects how many people can be engaged in producing iPhones and cars or serving us coffee. By and large, I think such a shift will only be good for society, culture and nature. 

We need to build new relationships in the food system, new relationships that can gradually take over most of the food system. Those relationships should be based on food and farming as joint common activities. There should not be 'producers' and 'consumers', but co-production. Initiatives such as community-supported agriculture have the seeds for this. Consumption as a separate category should wither and we would cook and eat in harmony with production. There will most likely be markets in the future, but not 'the market' that we know today, the globalised market with unlimited competition.

Political actions of many kinds are needed. Some should be oriented to limiting the harm produced by the current system, such as bans on pesticides and harmful practices. We also need to throw sand or gravel in the machinery of unfettered global trade, as unlimited competition forces farmers and food industries into  externalising costs. This includes opposition to privatisation of common resources, including fighting intellectual property rights; we need to expand the commons again. Other political actions should promote the development of alternatives. This can range from reallocating research funds from industrial farming models to regenerative farming, to revising tax codes to stimulate the numbers of people engaged in farming and facilitating emerging new economic relations. 
Ultimately, it is about us as human beings. Are we ready for the great leap into an unknown future, based on new insights? Do we prefer the sterile and cheap ready-to-eat meal wrapped in plastic from the supermarket to the earthy smells and tastes of nature, combined with more sweat and toil? In the long term I don't think we have much choice. An increasing scarcity of key resources will make the choice for us. But the ride will be easier if we halt the depletion of resources and of nature and build a regenerative food system now, before we are faced with the possibility of worrying whether we will get any food at all before going to bed.      


Endnotes
1     European Science Foundation. 2013. 'Nitrogen in Europe: Current problems and future solutions', part of The European Nitrogen Assessment. www.nine-esf.org.
2     FAOStat.
3     FAO. 2012. Statistical Yearbook 2012. FAO Statistics Division.
4     Statistics Denmark 2014.
5     Schnepf, R. 2014. US Farm Incomes. United States Congressional Research Service.
6     Mazoyer, M. and L. Roudart. 2006. A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis. Monthly Review Press.
7     Rundgren, G. 2014. Global Eating Disorder. Regeneration.
8     PEW Environment Group. 2011. 'Big Chicken'. PEW Environment Group.
9     USDA Economic Research Service. 2013. 'Farm Size and the Organization of US Crop Farming'. Economic Research Report 152. United States Department of Agriculture.
10   Ostendorff, F. 2013. 'Excessive industrialization of livestock production: the need for a new agricultural paradigm'. Trade and Environment Review 2013. UNCTAD.
11   Yum! 2014. 'About Yum! Brands'. 10 May 2014. www.yum.com.
12   Elfick, D. 2013. 'A brief history of broiler selection: How chicken became a global food phenomenon in 50 years'. cn.aviagen.com.
13   Heinrich Boll Foundation. 2014. Meat Atlas.
14   Leenstra, F. 2013. 'Raising cockerels as part of free range egg production'. Low Input Breeds Technical Note 4.6.
15   Idel, A. 2013. 'Livestock production and food security in a context of climate change and environmental and health challenges'. Trade and Environment Review 2013. UNCTAD.
16   Mail Online. 2010. 'The disturbing conveyor belt of death where male chicks are picked off and killed so you can have fresh eggs'. 4 November 2010. www.dailymail.co.uk.
17   Chong, J-R. 2003. 'Wood-chipped chickens fuel outrage'. Los Angeles Times. 22 November 2003.
18   World Instant Noodles Association. 2014. 'Expanding Markets'. instantnoodles.org.
19   Jakarta Post. 2013. 'Indonesia caught in wheat trap'. 11 July 2013.
20   Coca-Cola. 2014. 'History of Coca-Cola: 1941-1959'. www.coca-cola.co.uk.
21   Inglis, D. and D. Gimlin (editors). 2009. The Globalization of Food. Berg.
22   Heinrich Boll Foundation. 2014. Meat Atlas.
23   ETC. 2011. 'Who will control the Green Economy?' ETC Communique No. 107.
24   Rundgren, G. 2014. Global Eating Disorder. Regeneration.
25   Regmi, A. and M. Gehlhar (editors). 2005. New Directions in Global Food Markets. USDA Agriculture Information Bulletin Number 794.
26   Tesco. 2014. 'Our Brands'. realfood.tesco.com.
27   Government of Canada. 2010. 'Consumer Trend Report - Convenience'. Market Analysis Report. June 2010.
28   IMAP. 2010. Food and Beverage Industry Global Report 2010.
29   Lawrence, F., P. Allen and P. Scruton. 2013. 'The complex food supply chain that led to the horsemeat scandal'. The Guardian. 22 October 2013. www.theguardian.com.
30   Ellis, E.C. and N. Ramankutty. 2008. 'Putting people in the map: Anthropogenic biomes of the world'. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6(8): 439-447.
31   IAASTD. 2009. Agriculture at a Crossroads: Global Report. Washington, DC: International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development.

Published in Third World Resurgence No. 295, March 2015, pp 7-13

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

AgTalk: we can't afford cheap food

I gave a talk in IFAD's AgTalk series in October last year. You can listen to it here.


Thursday, February 12, 2015

Listen to Global Eating Disorder

In the book Global Eating Disorder, Gunnar Rundgren explains why we no longer can afford cheap food. He debunks the myth that consumer choice is shaping our food system and identifies the main drivers and choice architects. This speech from the launch of the book at the Swedish University of Agriculture 29 January contains some of the most pertinent perspectives of the book.

Sunday, February 1, 2015

Conflicts in the food, energy, land and water nexus


There is growing concern over future food production and increas­ing competition for resources in the food, energy and water nexus are reflected in a new interest for investment in land and water. “I cannot farm myself out of this water problem,” says Mark Shannon, a farmer who in 2010 had to let his land in the San Joaquin valley be converted into a solar power field. This is a vivid illustration of the shortage of resources that will be a permanent feature in the future, and how land, water and energy interplay.


Eagle Ford in Texas is one of the fastest-growing shale oil and gas plays (a group of fields in the same geological zone) in the United States. It is also located in one of the driest parts of the country. Following the severe drought of 2011, concerns are mounting that oil and gas extraction is competing with irrigation for scarce water supplies. Drilling and fracturing rock formations to release oil and gas (fracking) uses enormous quantities of water: according to most estimates, each well in Eagle Ford consumes between fifteen to nineteen million liters of water. The economic returns from using groundwater for fracking are enormous and easily outstrip the returns of agriculture, so frackers can easily outbid farmers. If the groundwater owner can claim royalties on the output from oil and gas wells, using groundwater to frack wells could earn more than two thousand times more than growing maize.[i]

Not only oil and gas extraction needs a lot of water. Thermal power plants – fossil fuel-based and nuclear – require water, primarily for cooling. Per unit of energy produced, they are the energy sector’s most intensive users of water.[ii] In Europe, the repeated shut down of river-water cooled thermal power plants, in particular French nuclear reactors, during extended heat waves is a potent reminder of the water-energy nexus.[iii] Also, irrigation itself consumes a lot of electric­ity. Moving and treating water in California accounts for almost 20% of the state’s electricity.[iv]

In 2011, China had to make the tough choice between using water in the Three Gorges Dam to irrigate food crops or for energy. To safeguard food production the government released enough water to fill 2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools for irrigation by June 10. China’s oil demand increased by 300,000 barrels a day to make up for lost hydropower generation from the water used for crops.[v]

The International Energy Agency notes in its 2012 World Energy Outlook that energy production uses some 15% of the world’s water withdrawals and that access to water is an important criterion for assessing the viability of energy projects. The availability of and access to water could pose severe limitations for shale gas development and power generation in parts of China and the United States, India’s power plants, Canadian oil sands production and for reser­voir pressures to support oil output in Iraq.[vi]

Shortage of one resource (land) can partly be compen­sated with another (water), but what happens if all of them are scarce? We see today that the market does not distribute scarce re­sources to those who are poor: if resources become scarcer the poor will be further disenfran­chised. In more extreme cases the rich will drive their cars with fuels made from food crops that the poor cannot afford to buy and lack the resources to produce themselves.


(Extract from Global Eating Disorder)

[ii] IEA 2012 ‘Water for energy, Is energy becoming a thirstier resource?’ World Energy Outlook 2012 IEA.
[iii] Research Councils UK India 2013 ‘Report: Roundtable on Applying Energy Water Food Nexus Thinking’. Research Councils UK India.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Bloomberg 2011 ‘World’s Biggest Dam Opens Sluices to Refill China’s Parched Yangtze, Lake’ 24 May 2011 www.bloomberg.com.
[vi] IEA 2012 ‘Water for energy, Is energy becoming a thirstier resource?’ World Energy Outlook 2012. IEA.




Saturday, December 27, 2014

"We can no longer afford cheap food"


“Global Eating Disorder is one of the most comprehensive and practical analyses of what will soon become dysfunctional in our global industrialized food system given the challenges ahead of us---end of cheap energy, depleting natural resources and impacts of climate change. This is a must read for anyone interested in getting a head start preparing for the changes ahead.”
–Frederick Kirschenmann, author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays From a Farmer Philosopher.

Order Global Eating Disorder  for a 20% discount at: https://www.createspace.com/5020215 using the code: C9RD3464

“The food in your fridge is just the tip of the iceberg. Gunnar Rundgren takes you behind the scene of global food production and shows you who pulls the strings in the agricultural system. He doesn’t mince his words but offers crystal clear argumentation why things are going wrong in the food chain.  After reading this book you will think twice how to fill your shopping basket. A must read for all who want to catch a glimpse of the future of our food!”
–Franz Fischler, President of the European Forum Alpbach and former EU Commissioner for Agriculture and Fisheries.

You can also buy the book from Amazon, and as an ebook from Kindle. More channels will follow.

"Rundgren's book has global reach and vision, and deserves a global audience."
–Frederick Kaufman, food journalist and author of Bet the Farm.


Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Animals - much more than meat

Young boys attending cattle (instead of going to school), Karamoja 2013
The role of animals in the life of humans and in our self-appointed job of taking care of the planet extend far beyond supplying us with meat and milk, wool and skins. Livestock is providing us and other species with a number of valuable "ecosystem services". But the industrial model of animal production is only concerned with the production of commodities, which is why it disregards animal welfare, why it destroys the environment, why it pose risk to human health and don't produce any of the much needed values that traditional livestock systems did.

This and many more interesting things can be gleaned from the report ECOSYSTEM SERVICES PROVIDED BY LIVESTOCK SPECIES AND BREEDS, WITH SPECIAL CONSIDERATION TO THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF SMALL-SCALE LIVESTOCK KEEPERS AND PASTORALISTS by Irene Hoffmann, Tatiana From and David Boerma  written for the FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. The report gives several interesting perspectives on livestock production and a much more nuanced picture than the dominating "cows are climate hooligans", "meat consumption is bad for health" or "eating meat destroys the rainforest" discourses.

The report is built around the concept of ecosystem services, a terminology which I have some issues with (see for instance here) but still use now and then (and will use here when discussing the report). Ecosystem services can be divided into those that can be converted into and marketed as private goods (e.g. provisioning services such as food) and those that are of a non-market public good nature (e.g. regulating, supporting and most cultural services).

Livestock provide approximately 26 percent of human global protein consumption and 13 percent of total calories. Foods of animal origin, such as meat, eggs, milk and dairy products, supply essential,  nutrients, such as protein, iron, vitamin A, vitamin B12 and zinc. They provide a critical supplement and diversity to staple plant-based diets, and are particularly appropriate for combating malnutrition and a range of nutritional deficiencies. Livestock products, such as milk, can be very useful for children.

Important other "provisioning services" include draught power, manure and urine for fertilizer, manure for methane and energy, skins, hides, fiber, as a genetic resource itself, including for biotechnical and/or medicinal purposes.

Less well understood is the tremendous importance of livestock, and in particular of the grazing ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats etc.) for the many other critical ecosystem services such as:

  • waste recycling and weed control; 
  • biological control and animal/human disease regulation; 
  • maintenance of soil structure and fertility (nutrient cycling and distribution, organic matter, etc.);
  • prevention of land degradation and erosion; 
  • climate regulation; 
  • regulation of water flow and quality;
    moderation of extreme events (shrub control and maintenance of fuel breaks, prevention of landslides
    and avalanches); 
  • pollination and seed dispersal; 
In a wider sense livestock are land stewards and landscape managers facilitating the life cycles of animals and plants, preventing the succession to less valuable ecological states through encroachment of bush and/or invasive species, and the conserving wild-life and protected areas.  There is a close overlap of livestock grazing with nature conservation areas.

Many discuss "nature" and "agriculture" as if they are separate and even opposites. This has probably never been true, as agriculture developed within nature. And it is certainly not true today. The natural environment has co-evolved with agriculture practices. And in grassland management this is most apparent. Considering that grasslands cover up to a third of the terrestrial area, it is apparent that management of grasslands is a key for how we humans manage the planet at large. And tame livestock are the dominating managers of grasslands today.


There is a huge difference in resilience between traditional livestock systems and the industrial ones. The high productivity in modern systems is not only based on neglect or destruction of ecosystem services it is also a result of a meticulous management of inputs to reach the highest efficiency. But this efficiency makes the systems more and more vulnerable, and the modern breeds developed are dependent on this industrial model for their life and production. This is in stark contrast to the traditional systems, where maintaining the ecosystem and regenerating resources were part and parcel of the system. This is also reflected in the breeds, the report concludes:
Generally, the more complex, diverse and risk-prone peasant livelihood systems are, the more they will need animal genetic resources that are flexible, resistant and diverse in order to perform the required functions.
The report also make very clear that the discussion of feed versus food is far too simplistic and that there is a big difference between traditional livestock systems and the industrial model. The industrial model uses huge amounts of human edible crops as feed for livestock and therefore it consumes much more human edible protein than it provides. But traditional livestock systems have not been like that. Grazing ruminants provide much more human edible protein than they consume, and therefore such production don't compete with humans for food. On the contrary, if we also take into account the use of such animals for manure, fuel, draught power and transport it is apparent that it is a very efficient way of using resources. The same goes for animals that largely live on waste products.

Globally, however, industrial livestock systems are on the rise. And what many don't seem to understand is that this is also a main driver  for why traditional livestock systems are disappearing. The industrial model simply produce many more kgs for lower costs. This is assisted by low prices of grain and soybeans, produced with massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides. Pastoralist using traditional methods have more or less the same production costs today as they had hundred years ago. But the relative price of meat is much, much lower today. This means that with all things equal, they have become poorer. Governments also lend a hand to agri-business with (perhaps well intended) regulations on compulsory slaughterhouses, meat inspection, traceability and prohibition of using food waste as animal feed.

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Healthy diets comes from socially and environmentally sustainable food systems

"The effect of individual nutrients was increasingly proving to be an inadequate explanation of the relationship between diet and health. Several studies show, for example, that protection against heart disease and certain types of cancer gained by consumption of substantial amounts of fruits or vegetables is not repeated with interventions based on medicines or supplements that contain such individual nutrients found in those foods. These studies indicate that the beneficial effects are from the food itself, and from the combinations of nutrients and other chemical compounds that are part of the food’s matrix, more so than from individual nutrients."
This can be read in Brazil's new Dietary Guidelines (in English and in Portuguese) . The guidelines are a big rebuttal of the nutritionism that to a large extent is dominating discussions about food and diets. The Guidelines state that healthy diets comes from socially and environmentally sustainable food systems. The contain the following ten key recommendations.
The guidelines include ten steps to healthy diets: 
  1. Make natural or minimally processed foods the basis of your diet
  2. Use oils, fats, salt, and sugar in small amounts when seasoning and cooking natural or minimally processed foods and to create culinary preparations
  3. Limit consumption of processed foods
  4. Avoid consumption of ultra-processed products
  5. Eat regularly and carefully in appropriate environments and, whenever possible, in company
  6. Shop in places that offer a variety of natural or minimally processed foods
  7. Develop, exercise and share culinary skills
  8. Plan your time to make food and eating important in your life
  9. Out of home, prefer places that serve freshly made meals
  10. Be wary of food advertising and marketing
 In Global Eating Disorder I write
"The nutritional needs of the body can already be reduced to chemi­cally known substances that can be synthesized or extracted from natural products”, wrote Nevin S. Scrimshaw, a leading food scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was awarded the prestigious World Food Prize 1991. An important effect of the role that science and politics played in nutrition was that common people could no longer be entrusted to decide for themselves what they should eat. False needs expressed ignorance and should be cured by proper instructions from scientists. We have since been raised not to rely on taste or pleasure to determine what to eat, but to defer our selection of food to experts. I believe this view is mistaken.
and further:
Nutritionism has suited the food industry well. After all, the strength of the food industry is to mix standard components and create a constant flow of new products. ‘Now with omega-3’ or ‘more iron/antioxidants’, or whatever is temporarily in fashion are good marketing pitches. Vitamins, fiber, minerals and lately special proteins for body builders are all ingredients that can be mixed in never-ending combinations and marketed with nutritional arguments – and be marked up a notch compared to the same product without these extras. Dieting and nutritionism create their own industry, so the same companies that first earned money from making people fat, can earn even more from making them slim again. Americans spend between US$40 billion and US$100 billion on dieting. ‘Meal replacement’ shakes and protein bars are sold to those who have ingested too much Coke and too many French fries. In 2008 alone, Nestlé made changes to more than 6,000 products to cater for nutritional issues, real or per­ceived.
Brazil shows the way ahead. 

Monday, November 24, 2014

Using development aid to support multinational fertilizer companies.

The African Fertiliser and Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP), under the guise of empowering smallholder farmers in Africa, is subsidising multinational fertiliser and financial corporations on African soil. AFAP, established in 2012, with a grant of US $25 million from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

According to a new report from the African Centre for Biosafety, AFAP's main focus is the provision of credit guarantees to importers and distributors of fertilisers in Ghana, Mozambique and Tanzania.
In essence, AFAP is using development funds, as well as money from the Ethiopian government-one of the least developed countries in the world-to subsidise multinational fertiliser companies such as Yara, which dominates the fertiliser trade in Africa. ...Far from enabling African smallholder farmers to grow food and profits, this scam will trap small- scale farmers into a never ending cycle of debt and increasing poverty," said Gareth Jones, a researcher with the ACB.

Recent ACB fieldwork in Malawi found that small-scale farmers are using extremely high levels of fertiliser, on soils that are technically infertile, at great additional expense, but with very little material benefits. ACB's research report shows that the adoption of Green Revolution inputs by small scale-farmers has resulted in net transfers away from farming families to multinational agribusiness. Read more;  Running to stand still: Small-scale farmers and the Green Revolution in Malawi.

The findings concur with my own findings from Zambia and Tanzania recounted for instance in:
Millennium Villages: the Great Experiment
Markets don't distribute food to those without money

I have also summarized other reports about Malawi: The Malawi Fertilizer Myth?

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Rethinking food and farming as a commons


Even the most convinced proponents of a free market realize that there are things that cannot be left to the market to sort out. Human rights, law and order, security, and basic social security have, in almost all societies, been regulated by non-market institutions, often by the state. And even for those things that are regulated by markets there are many governmental rules, some stupid and others very much needed. The more central an issue is to our society, the more regulations there are. For example, all countries have labor regulations. They are there because we realize that the workers are a weaker party in the suppos­edly ‘free’ labor market: they need some kind of protection. It is also apparent that Nature needs protection: far more than we give her today.

Food production and consumption are also subject to myriads of regulations in most countries. Throughout history, the food supply has 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. The fact that we have major famine in several places in the world 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. We cannot deal with food mainly as a marketable commodity – very few societies ever have. If things get rough, governments, civil society and groups of people will step in and regulate, distribute and produce outside of the market system. The market system also has very few levers that guide it to supply food that is nutritious.

The market in food is totally dysfunctional for shaping the farming system in the best way for its role of planetary stewardship, a role that is increasingly important as agriculture occupies more and more of the surface of the planet and natural resources are under immense pres­sure. There are almost no market mechanisms in place for undertaking this important task, and there is a limited potential for them to emerge. Even if they did they will never reach the extent required, considering that the value of agricultural ecosystem services might well be as high as the total value of agricultural production. At present the market is still driving farmers the other way; into more and more specialization and monocultures and less stewardship of nature resources. Already today massive government interventions are directed to compensating for market failure. We need to look in other directions if we wish to sustainably manage the agriculture landscape.

‘Agriculture and food systems, with their associated nature and landscapes, are a common heritage and thus, also a form of common property’ according to Professor Jules Pretty[i] at the University of Essex. Stepping away from market imperatives frees our minds and thinking about food and farm production. This of course has implica­tions for land and other resources needed for farming and food production. The more food is viewed as a public good, the less appropri­ate it is that the productive factors needed to produce foods, seeds, land, water etc, are provided by the market. When food is a right, and the production and distribution of food takes place in the commons instead of in the market and new ways of addressing the unfair distribution of food can emerge.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 already defines food as a human right: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control” (Article 25). The right to food has been re-asserted ever since, for example at the 2009 World Summit on Food Security in Rome. There, world leaders agreed on ‘the right of everyone to have access to safe, sufficient and nutritious food’.[ii] The new constitution of Kenya, approved by a popular referendum in 2010, states the right of every person “to be free from hunger and to have adequate food of acceptable quality” and imposes a duty on the State to respect, protect, promote and fulfill that right. A study in 2011 identified twenty-four countries in which the right to food was explic­itly recognized, many of them in Latin America. Of course, it is one thing to proclaim a right and another one to enact it. Rights need a guarantor, duties and obligations, and an enforcer of some kind. Increasingly courts are using the constitutions or international treaties as a basis to safeguard people’s right to food.[iii] The Special Rappor­teur on the Right to Food for the United Nations, Olivier De Schutter, writes in the report to the General Assembly in August 2013: ‘The right to food has come to the fore as Governments realize that their efforts to combat food insecurity and hunger have been failing and realize the urgent need to strengthen national legal, institutional and policy frameworks’.[iv]

Brazil has been successful in the fight against hunger and in pro­moting the right to food. The Fome Zero (zero hunger) program was initiated during Lula’s presidency. Its most important component is Bolsa Família, whereby poor families get a basic income tied to condi­tions such that the children go to school and are vaccinated. The cost of the whole program is just 0.5% of Brazilian GDP but it reaches 44 million people, more than a fifth of the population. Malnutrition in Brazil decreased from 13% to below 2% between 1994 and 2006. The program also includes the purchasing of local food, often organic, to schools and other support measures to small farmers.[v]

Rethinking food as a right, farming as a management system of the planet and the food system as a commons necessitates the building of new institutions fit for these purposes; Jose Luis Vivero Pol, a food governance researcher describes these as “a third force of governance and resource management by the people as a compliment to the market and the state”.[vi] This will require experimentation at the personal, local, national and international levels. This doesn’t rule out markets as one of several mechanisms for food distribu­tion, but does it reject market hegemony over our food supplies, and rejects the view that market forces are the best way of allocating food producing resources, such as land, water, knowledge and seeds.

[i]            Pretty, J. 2002 Agri-culture: Reconnecting people, land and nature Earthscan.
[ii]           United Nations General Assembly 2013 The Right to Food, Interim report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, 7 August 2013, A/68/288
[iii]           Ibid.
[iv]          Ibid.
[v]           Sanchez-Montero, M. and N. S. Ubach 2010 ‘Undernutrition, What Works?’ ACF International Network.
[vi]          Vivero Pol, J.L. 2013 Food as a Commons: Reframing the narrative of the food system 23 April 2013 Centre for Philosophy of Law, Université Catholique de Louvain.

(Extract from Global Eating Disorder) 

Monday, October 6, 2014

Why did local go global?

When discussing the food system, I find that there is too little effort made to understand why the system is like it is. Some discuss the system in a way where it sounds like Big, Bad and Ugly corporations made the system into what it is today, and all we have to do is to decide that we want a local food system instead. But that view is underestimating the drivers of the economy. My own experiences in food processing and farming has made me understand that the workings of competition ("the market") is the main factor influencing how and where production takes place.



Some thirty years ago, our farm wanted to pursue the value addition of local resources and we started making jam out of local berries. First we picked lingonberries - a North European berry similar to cranberries - ourselves in the forest. But quite soon we reverted to buy up from pickers. But the buckets were full of bad berries, leaves, twigs and droppings from roe deer so we had to spend a lot of time cleaning them. We converted an old grain cleaning machine, but when the berries were really ripe and soft, they were mashed inside the machine, and it was impossible to clean it. In addition, one of us got an involuntary exotic haircut, when leaning too close to the fan of the cleaner. Next solution was to buy from a local berry trader who had a purposely built lingonberry cleaner. But also with this one we had quality problems and ended up having to pick many leaves by ourselves. In addition, as most berry pickers know, the berries don’t grow equally well every year, there is frost in the florescence, it is too dry, too rainy or there is a pest, so we could not rely on the local berries alone. And neither could the local berry cleaning operation, so it closed down. 

Then we were left buying from one of the two big companies controlling the market. They have wonderful machines where each berry is individually quick frozen. Each berry rolls in dedicated tubes where size, color etc. is detected and anything that is not according to specs is blown away. The end product is amazingly clean and comes in 25 kg bags with free flowing berries.  Of course, this means that the berries now are transported all across the country, as such machines existed only in two places in the country. The local business is now part of a global production system whether it likes it or not. And the same companies also trade in berries from China, Chile, Serbia, Ukraine and Russia. We could still get berries from specified areas – for a premium prices. The organic sugar in the jam was imported from Paraguay and the people picking the berries in the Swedish forest were flying in from Thailand. While we made no “local” claim on the label, many of our customers seemed to expect that the berries were local; some even thought we picked them ourselves. 

The story does give a rather good insight is why “local” disappeared. In this particular case, when it comes to physical product quality, the “globalized” standard IQF frozen berry is superior anything we could get locally, unless you think some moss and rotten berries should be part of the recipe. At the same time this kind of development has disconnected us, most of us, from the landscape and natural process that is the basis for human existence. In the end it has also changed what we eat, how we eat, where we eat, with whom we eat – even why we eat. 

(The text above is a "killed darling" from my - very soon forthcoming - book Global Eating Disorder. )

Friday, August 15, 2014

How new brewing methods gave us white bread


Our daily foods don't only give us energy and nutrients. They also embody a lot of societies developments. White bread is not only a product of personal choice. The article  below is from my forthcoming book, Global Eating Disorder. 


The earliest cultivated forms of wheat were einkorn and emmer wheats, first cultivated some 10,000 years ago in the south-eastern part of Turkey. Bread wheat developed some one thousand years later. Two very important properties of the wheat plant had to be manipulated to adapt it to farming. First it was necessary to stop the shattering of the ear (also called head or spike) at maturity, which resulted in seed loss at harvesting. Second there was a need to change from hulled forms to forms where the chaff (casing) didn’t stick to the grain in order to allow the processing of the wheat into porridge or bread. Wheat spread via Iran into central Asia, reaching China by about 5,000 years ago and to Africa, initially via Egypt. And it reached most parts of Europe some 5,000 years ago. It was introduced by the Spaniards to Mexico in 1529 and by the British to Australia in 1788. Most wheat grown worldwide is bread wheat, and most of the remaining 5% is durum wheat, which is better adapted to the dry Mediterranean climate than bread wheat and is often called pasta wheat to reflect its major end-use (it is also used for regional foods such as couscous and bulgur). In the 10,000 years it has existed, more than 25,000 types and varieties of wheat have adapted the crop to a wide range of environments. If there is sufficient water and mineral nutrients available and pests and pathogens are controlled, yields can exceed 10 tonnes per ha. But the global average yield stands at less than 3 tonnes per ha.[i]

Wheat can be stored for many years without losing much of its nutritional value,[ii] even if the often repeated story of 3,000 old wheat seeds from a Pharaonic grave germinating is a just a smart marketing myth. Another blessing of wheat, compared to other grains, is that doughs formed from wheat flour allow us to make a wide range of breads and other baked products (including cakes and biscuits), pasta and noodles, and other processed foods. A ship biscuit from 1852, purportedly the oldest existing in the world, is displayed prominently at the maritime museum in Kronborg castle, Elsinore, Denmark,[iii] and still looks edible. Hard tack, pilot bread, ship’s biscuit are all versions of a simple type of cracker or biscuit, made from wheat flour, water, and sometimes salt. Inexpensive and long-lasting, these were used for sustenance in the absence of perishable foods, commonly during long sea voyages and military campaigns. They were also one of the first industrialized food products after sugar. Already by the 18th century they were produced in assembly lines in dockyards and by 1833, the British Royal Navy introduced steam-powered machinery to roll the dough and later a Jonathan Dickson of Carlisle invented a mechanical biscuit stamp, an early example of branding.[iv]

Until the 19th century, bakers obtained their yeast from beer brewers, continuing the symbiosis between beer and bread established more than five thousand years earlier. However, beer brewers slowly switched from top-fermenting to bottom-fermenting yeast and this created a shortage of yeast for making bread.[v] This process got a real boost by invention of artificial refrigeration which made it easier to make lager (lager means storage in German) beer. In response, the Association of Viennese Bakers offered a prize in 1845 for the production of a good yeast that was not dependent on brewers. Ironically, it was a brewer, Adolf Ignaz Mautner, who won the prize for the production of press-yeast in 1850. Meanwhile there was a rapid development in milling technology. The marvelous mills of Budapest had steel rollers with a capacity to mill 1 billion pounds of wheat per year. Roller mills allowed the production of white wheat flour, which wasn’t really possible with stone mills. The yeast and the new mills changed the baking-industry throughout the Austrian empire, and at the Paris Exposition in 1867 the Viennese bakery was recognized as the best in the world. The development was so sensational that the United States government printed the Report on Vienna Bread by Eben Norton Horsford in 1875 in which he stated that the purity, whiteness, yield and keeping qualities of the wheat flour of Austria were unequaled in any other country. But this was to change, as everyone followed in the footsteps of Austria.

This industrial development had many effects, reaching far outside the factory gates. White wheat bread in all forms is easy and quick to eat, has not too much taste in itself and can be complemented with various forms of spreads or covers. With industrial yeast it was also quick to produce. It is more voluminous, more porous, and easier to chew. In this sense the bread became something of a pioneer fast food. Another, possibly bigger, effect was that with earlier stone-milling technology the oils of the wheat germ was set free in the flour and caused it to go rancid and have a foul smell if stored for a longer term. 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 could be stored for a long time, which meant that traders could buy and store bigger quantities and transport it from where it was cheap to where it was dear. This was the start of a rapid consolidation of mills, aided by the railroads and canal networks, which enabled big mills to both source grain and sell flour over a dramatically bigger area than before. In a few decades small mills closed down and in a later stage the same forces led to the concentration of baking into huge factories. Industrial bread was born.

The 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 more fiber, protein, calcium, iron, selenium, folic acid, vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids.[vi] Quite soon after the large-scale introduction of white flour a number of diseases emerged. These were often referred to as “western diseases” as they seemed to follow in the footsteps of the spread of a diet of white bread and sugar. This explains why the British working classes, for whom bread was the main source of sustenance, were more malnourished in 1900 than at any time since Tudor times (the period between 1485 and 1603) according to an article in the British Medical Bulletin.[vii] There was an early counter-reaction with strong arguments being made in favor of whole grain bread and the emergence of breakfast cereals and muesli. In 1880, May Yates founded the Bread Reform League in London to promote a return to wholemeal bread, particularly to improve the nutrition of the children of the poor.[viii] It was evident that some of the problems were a result of the victory of white flour, and industry and government responded with a counter-measure in line with the new industrial process, thinking and profits: fortification. [ix]

Flour treatment agents or additives, euphemistically called ‘flour improvers’ alter the appearance and properties of flours in order ‘to better suit their intended purpose’. For example, inspired by a fashion that arose in the 19th century for whiter-than-white bread, bleaching agents such as chlorine are used to whiten flour (unbleached flour has a pale cream color). Oxidizing agents, such as phosphates and ascorbic acid, are used to develop gluten in flour, making it better for baking bread. Potassium bromate, is widely used in United States as an oxidizing agent but has been found to be carcinogenic and is banned in Europe.[x] The German company Mühlenchemie lists no more than sixty-two flour ‘improvers’ on their web site[1]. Many of the additives are composed of several active ingredients, so the total number is even much higher.[xi]

As with many other shifts in technology, the new milling method had repercussions not only on the processing and the final product but also on the raw material. This is often the forgotten part of the story of our food industry. The new milling technology needed harder wheat that could more easily be worked by the new high-speed machinery. Soft wheats, good for stone milling, were replaced by hard wheats. The hard Turkey Red wheat brought to America by Russian immigrants became a major export commodity, largely as a result of the new milling technology, and wheat production in United States tripled in fifty years.[xii] Similarly, the new industrial baking processes needed wheat with certain qualities in order to work well. Only much later did anybody question if these improved technical properties were detrimental to the nutritional quality of wheat.

White flour is not the only reason for our bread having a lower mineral content, cultivation methods and seed breeding that values higher yields ahead of nutritional value have also contributed. Wheat protein is well suited for human nutrition except for a low lysine content. The lysine content is comparatively lower in white than in whole grain flour and lower in heavily fertilized wheat. One variety of wild emmer wheat in Israel has a protein content that reaches forty percent,[xiii] more than three times higher than in normal wheats. The long-term experiments at Rothamstead[2] – which required vision and commitment to establish and maintain - show that the introduction in 1968 of the new ‘Green Revolution’ varieties of wheat was accompanied by a considerably lower content of zinc, iron, copper and magnesium in the flour.[xiv]

There is also a close interdependence between the new varieties and the new cultivation methods. Semi dwarf varieties of wheat were introduced because they had shorter straw and less roots, which meant that more of the biological production went into the seed (the kernel). But this only worked if the plant got more ‘support’ from the farmer, in the form of artificial fertilizers, pest and weed control. Higher yields also often have a dilution effect, with the protein and mineral content going down and the carbohydrate content going up. The highest wheat yields are recorded in West and North West Europe where farmers use a lot of chemical fertilizers to keep the protein level high enough for industrial breadmaking. For example, United Kingdom farmers currently apply 250–300 kg N per ha in order to achieve the 13% protein content required for the breadmaking process that is most common in the United Kingdom. The quantity of fertilizers used is well above what the plants actually take up. The rest is washed away into the waterways as nitrates or goes up into the atmosphere, some of it as the potent climate gas, nitrous oxide (laughing gas).[xv]

In this way, white wheat flour embodies most of the characteristics of the industrialization of food: stripping it to its basic components, giving a longer shelf life, making further preparation easier, enabling large-scale processing, storage and handling, requiring food additives but giving a lower nutritional value. All this is also combined with an increase in environmental damage. This industrialized food system industry drives, and is driven by, changes in marketing and distribution that together determine what and how we eat and how we interact with each other. The genes of the wheat, the yeast and all the processes involved in making our daily bread are all shaped by industrial and marketing imperatives.



[1] This include 3 different fungal α-amylase products; 9 products of the ;amylase-hemicellulase complexes’; beta-amylase, amyloglucosidase, esterase, lipase, ferulic acid esterase, 4 products of hemicellulases, pentosanases and xylanases; 3 products of glucose oxidase, sulphhydryl oxidase, 2 proteases, 5 bromate substitutes, 6 ascorbic acid preparations, 3 bromate products, 3 azodicarbonamide, calcium peroxide, 2 benzoyl peroxide preparations, 3 lecithin products, 3 malt flours, enzyme-active products, 3 cysteine preparations, inactivated yeast, enzyme-mineral complex, and 2 acid and mineral complexes with a buffering effect.


[2] Rothamstead is an English agricultural research station.



[i] Shewry P. R. 2009 ‘Wheat’ Journal of Experimental Botany 60 (6) pp. 1537–1553.


[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Wikimedia ‘Oldest_ship_biscuit-Kronborg-DK.JPG’ http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Oldest_ship_biscuit-Kronborg-DK.JPG

[iv] Fernández-Armesto, F. 2001 Food, a History Macmillan.

[v] Wikipedia ‘Baker’s yeast’ www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker’s_yeast.

[vi] Pollan, M. 2008 In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto Penguin.

[vii] Welch, R.W. and P.C. Mitchel 2000 ‘Food processing: a century of change’ British Medical Bulletin 2000, 56 (No 1) 1-17

[viii] Shewry P. R. 2009 ‘Wheat’ Journal of Experimental Botany 60 (6) pp 1537–1553.

[ix] FFI Global Update 2008 ‘Flour Fortification Initiative 2008’. URL?

[x] Wilkinson, P.A. et al. 2012 ‘CerealsDB 2.0: an integrated resource for plant breeders and scientists’ BMC Bioinformatics 13 219

[xi] Mülenchemie ‘Products for flour improvement’ http://www.muehlenchemie.de/english/products/flour-improvers.html 13 December 2013.

[xii] Wikipedia ‘Wheat production in the United States’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_production_in_the_United_States

[xiii] Shewry P. R. 2009 ‘Wheat’ Journal of Experimental Botany 60 (6) pp 1537–1553.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] Ibid.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Redefining productivity



We are truly productive if there is more forest next year than today, if there is more fish and if the soil is more fertile by the years instead of exhausted and eroded. 

It is a bit puzzling why most agronomists and institutions to such large extent focus on yield of crops per hectare as the main measure of agriculture productivity, when in reality that is not a driving force for farmers who look more into productivity per labor unit, or if they are modern agri-business operations, productivity of capital invested. If we compare farms globally the farms with the highest yield per hectare are rarely the most competitive. European farmers have mostly much higher yields per hectare of wheat than their Argentinean, American or Australian colleagues, still they can’t compete and are dependent on support programs of the European Union, because their general cost level is higher. Similarly in the dairy sector, the world market is dominated by a country with low milk yield per cow. The dairy industry in New Zealand is still primarily built on grazing cows and the production per cow is low in an international perspective. The average production per cow in Israel was 12,500 kg in 2007, while it was less than 4,000 kg in New Zealand , but New Zealanders produce milk a lot cheaper than Israelis.

If we compare efficiency in various systems, e.g. in farming or food processing, it will in most cases show that the bigger and more technological advanced system is more competitive. But are they more efficient and productive? Often, small farms have higher yield per hectare than large farms, still large farms gradually squeeze smaller farms out of the market because of market access, possibilities for rational specialization, economies of scale, better access to credits or simply governmental policy distortions . Larger crop farms perform better financially, on average, than smaller farms. The larger farms don’t have higher revenue or yields per area unit, but they have lower costs. As expressed by the report Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming from USDA: “larger farms appear to be able to realize more production per unit of labor and capital. These financial advantages have persisted over time, which suggests that shifts of production to larger crop farms will likely continue in the future.” Their yield per hectare is mostly the same as on smaller farms but the research shows that farms with more than 2,000 acres spend 2.7 hours of work per acre of corn and have cost for equipment of $432, while a farmer with 100-249 acres will spend more than four times as much labor and double the amount for equipment per acre. In that limited sense the larger farms are more “efficient” or “productive”.

There are many different ways to look at farm productivity and, depending on what we measure and how we measure, we may draw different conclusions. In principle, it is the factor of which there is a shortage that will, and should, determine which factor is the most important. Farms in high-income countries are shaped by high input of energy and low input of human labor (energy). In high-income countries, there is no shortage of labor but it has been costly and therefore productivity per work-hour has been the strongest driver of change. Close to cities, or in very densely populated areas, land is scarce and farms are shaped differently by high land prices. At a certain land price, grain farming is no longer possible and farming will orient itself to higher value crops, or will become playground for the rich, golf courses or paddocks for race horses.

Economists today talk about “total factor productivity” a rather opaque measure which has a scientific air. It does sound like a good idea to combine all the factors of production in one measure. But as this is measured in monetary terms it will just value things by their market value. So if labor is 200 times more expensive in one country than in another you have to produce 200 times more per hour for the same productivity. And if water is for free, the water productivity will not be reflected at all. In this way, productivity comes to mean more or less the same as profitability and is like a circular reasoning and of little value in a big picture discussion, even if it reflects quite well what guides a modern commercial farmer.

We need to redefine productivity. But it is not enough the redefine productivity in our minds, we also need to redesign the economic system which has created this distorted view of what is productive and what is not.  Today, productivity is measured by how many trees one person can cut down with her chainsaw or how much fish a fisherman can scoop up from the sea. But as nature resources dwindle, the real productivity is how these resources re-generate. We are productive if there is more forest next year than today, if there is more fish and if the soil is more fertile by the years instead of exhausted and eroded. 

(extract from Global Eating Disorder, forthcoming)

Friday, June 13, 2014

Listening to the genius of Sunnansjö Gård

A semi personal update from Gunnar.

 

Tomorrow I will move to Sunnansjö Gård, 30 km west of Uppsala. I bought the farm together with Ann-Helen Meyer von Bremen and she will follow suit, together with her son. 

It is a nice farmstead at a small lake with a lot of wetlands, and I fear quite a vibrant community of mosquitoes. It has some 40 hectares of forest, most of it more than 100 years old, 10 hectares of farmland, most of it poorly drained, 10 hectares of wetland/swamps and peatbogs and part of the lake. The pictures are from the farm.

We will find out what to do on the farm after  "consulting the genius of the place" as Wendell Berry says. But I am sure there will be some fruit trees planted, and certainly vegetables for ourselves and family. I will continue with my writing and some consultancy.

As I am also in the process of finalizing the book Global Eating Disorder, I will not be very active on this blog for a while.







Thursday, June 5, 2014

Screwed economics: how reducing emmissions becomes a cost



The two most disturbing ideological concept of our current time are the notion of "progress", the belief that humanity moves in a linear direction towards an ever "better" world, and the view that the economy (or the market) in some way is an independent system. Taken together those two views are expressed in the faith that economic and technological growth are the main avenues for future human progress, and that this must be based on the imperatives of the competitive market economy - competition and profit-making. This view makes society and nature to subsystems of the economy instead of the other way round. This can be noticed in the current political discourse where the role of public policy mainly is about strengthening the competitiveness of a country in the international markets. 

As an example of the distorted perspective, the current political discussion about climate change is about how we can afford to mitigate it, while the real question should be how we can afford driving those cars that cause the emissions in the first place. To reduce emissions is no more a cost than it is a cost to eat less.  

As cutting emissions will reduce competitiveness and profits (and it will do that) that is not seen as an option. Instead it is by new technologies we will reduce emissions, which indeed will incur costs. But those costs will rapidly be turned into new ways to make money by the private sector. Which is why it is preferred.