Does vegan farming work?

Koryama proudly shows his carrots. The leaves are not very impressive, but the roots are. He grows according to the Shizen Natural Farming concept, which essentially is about not applying any fertilizers, manures or composts. They claim that yields are somewhat lower than organic farming but that taste is superior. I can at least confirm that taste was very good.

Koryama pulls a very decent carrot!

Having grown vegetables myself for 32 years on rather poor soils, I am not particularly easy to convince that it is possible to do this without major soil building. This can be in the form of green manures and, at least on poor soils, some addition of e.g potash or phosphorus-rich minerals if not animal manure is admitted. Having promoting organic for 35 years I am also aware of how easily an alternative thought is dismissed, so I agree with myself to be open minded.

I ask Koryama if he applies the method for the Japanese staple food rice also, but no, this was only for fruits and vegetables. However, fruit and vegs are greedy and spoiled crops, so in my opinion, if it works for them, it should also work for other crops. The soils of Koryama, in Narita in Japan, are volcanic and I believe very rich, so it is of course possible that he is still “mining fertility”. But he has farmed with the method for more than 30 years, so one can’t easily say that he will soon run out of nutrients. His crops are sold by the Shizen Organic and Natural Food Ltd. They sell for the same price as organic and are also certified organic. His yield is lower but he says he can sell lower grades to the clients that want his produce and in addition he doesn’t have to buy any inputs, so it compares quite well with “normal” organic, for which he is also certified.


My starting point in thinking is that the various production systems that mankind developed over centuries have been rather well adapted to the ecological conditions where they developed. That is why the Mediterranean production system is quite different from the system in Western Europe or in the river valleys of India. But even if they were different, there were no systems without animals. And if all these systems had animals there were probably some quite good reasons for it. Even in India, where they supposedly are vegetarians (a truth with big modification) their system has been very much based on keeping cows and buffaloes – they are the worlds biggest milk producer and the biggest beef exporter!

Natural systems also have animals and plants mixed. We can’t easily integrate wild animals in our crop production systems, as they mostly will destroy the crops. Humans are not a replacement for the grazing animals, as we can’t break down cellulose. Animals also eat a lot of stuff that we don’t want to eat. Not only people, but also a lot of soil micro-organisms like animals, or at least their droppings. So for my simplistic mind, that prefers mimicking nature, an ecologically sound system is most likely to have animals.

I have seen other farms who have basically been independent from brought in compost, manure or other fertilizers, e,g. grain farms having rotations with a lot of legumes and green manures. But in most cases the same farm get a better yield – and far better economy – by introducing animals in the production system. This was essentially what happened in Europe some 150-200 years ago. Before that, most farms grew grain crops in almost monocultures, but the soils were exhausted and yields low and land was let fallow, every second, third or fourth year. With crop rotations including clover-grass and similar, farmers could suddenly both produce more grain and meat and milk from the same area.

It is possible that the same can be accomplished with a crop rotation where the legumes and grasses can be used for other purposes, e.g. for biogas production. But also here, it seems that it in almost all cases makes more sense to feed the animals and make biogas from the manure, in which case you can make better use of bio mass. If you think it is immoral for humans to keep domesticated animals this is irrelevant, and you would argue that there is no major difference between my argument and the arguments people use in favour of factory farming. Well, I do think there is a difference, because my discussion is about an appropriate way to produce food for 9-10 billion people with as small ecological footprint as possible, and keeping animals in a way that respect their animalness. This means that we need to use resources smartly.

Perhaps the vegan culture will develop such systems in the future. Perhaps I will then stop eating meat. Meanwhile, I hope we don’t have to hear the stories about that meat-eating, as a principle, takes away food from people. That is simply not true (and if you don’t believe that read some of the blog posts listed below).


Some reading:
Proponents of vegan farming:
even my mama grows vegan-organic
viva

Some of my posts on meat production:
Producing meat (for export) or food for the people
The complicated story of meat

 

Paying farmers for environmental services in Japan

 

An organic farm in the densly populated area close to the Narita airport

Japan is perhaps not a pioneer in paying farmers for environmental services, but it has some interesting schemes. The value of the eco system services of farming in Japan equals the value of production.

At the seminar linked to the launch of my book in Japan, Mashahito Enomoto,  Director of the Policy Division for the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries held an interesting presentation about what the government is doing in support of more environmentally friendly farming in Japan. He stated that the estimated value of production from agriculture was 9.5 trillion Yen (some 120 billion dollars at today's rate) while the value of the ecosystem services were estimated to 8.2 trillion Yen, i.e. almost at par with the production value.

This shows clearly how important it is that we get in place mechanism that ensures that farmers take care of the management of the eco systems. (I have some very strong concerns about using market incentives for this. Read for example Ecosystems: Invaluable and worthless). 

Payment for ecosystem services has a long history in Japan. Already 1901, the Government of Tokyo implemented a scheme for forest management in the catchment area for its water supply (read more).For farms, Japan is partly using similar systems of support as in Europe. Organic farmers in Japan can get support in the same way, with a flat payment per area unit approximately of 64,000 Yen (800 dollar) per hectare (mind you, most Japanese farms are VERY small, outside of Hokkaido, average size is about 1 hectare). The uptake of organic farming in Japan is still rather slow (I will write more about this in a later post).

Some countries, such as the US pays farmers to take land out of production. The US Conservation Reserve Program has some 30 million acres that are taken out of production and the EU has during various periods have had set-aside programs. In Japan, an overarching concern is abandonment of land (see my previous post), and Japan has had a program for maintaining land under cultivation since 2000. Farmers could get anything between JPY3,000 up to JPY210,000 depending on site and kind of production.  By 2004, 660,000 farmers in 33,000 communities received in total JPY55 billion for active management of the farms.

Recipients of the support have to make an agreement with local communities that stipulates conservation activities to be conducted for the duration of no less than five years. This include management of fields and the maintenance of common resources such as irrigation canals, ponds and community roads. Local governments (both prefectural and municipal) play key roles in propagating, implementing and enforcing the program.


I find it very interesting that it is only through the local communities that farmers can get this kind of compensation. I believe this has a lot of additional values. First it means that the local communities, and the municipalities, get influence over how the systems develop, secondly, I believe the monitoring and control of the support must be quite easy, and to a large extent can be informal and finally it clearly must strengthen the local communities as such. This is very different from how the EU agri-environmental support works. I am quite convinced that this model in Japan is superior.You can read more about it in: Direct Payments for Environmental Services from Mountain Agriculture in Japan: Evaluating its Effectiveness and Drawing Lessons for Developing Countries, by Takumi Sakuyama. The evaluation points to some shortcomings of the program, which have a lot to do with the criteria for support, where to few indicators have been used to determine who should get support and at which level.


More about ecosystem services in my blogposts:
The Polluter Gets Paid Principle
Ecosystems: Invaluable and worthless
carbon projects drives land grabbing and GMOs?
Man: more dependent on nature than ever
The market is not a management system for the planet

 

Launching Garden Earth in Japan

I am in Japan for the launch of my book, Garden Earth in Japanese. It is published by Doyosha, a smaller publisher.

JONA, Japan Organic & Natural Foods Association is my host here and have made a very intensive visit program. The first day brought us two two organic farms, a cooperativa, a wholesaler, the Ministry of Agriculture and JICA, the Japan public development agency.

Ageing farmers is a very big problem in Japan (see my earlier post Will there be farmers? about this global problem). Only some 5% of the farms are operated by people below 45 years. Paradoxically enough there is quite some land agriculture land abandoned in Japan which seems strange in a country with so little agriculture land and the lowest food self-sufficiency in the world (of the bigger countries at least). This seems to have many reasons, among others, global specialization and competition, the small scale of Japanese farms combined with zoning and other regulations making it hard to consolidate farms into larger units, and the aging farmers that continue to own the land, but stopped managing it.


The government is now supporting young farmers with subsidies in the range of JPY1.5 million per farmer and year for five years. Many of these young farmers go for organic farming, and the Sanbu-Yasai Cooperative has a special program to find land and train young organic farms. A great initiative!

Burning food?

Small scale biofuel (Jatropha) production in Zambia

If the EU commission really cared about the poor and the hungry in developing countries, it should be concerned with the effects of its own agriculture and trade policies on these people, rather than engaging in fruitless discussions over biofuel competing with food.

“BRUSSELS, Oct 17 (Reuters) - New EU rules to limit how much food can be made into biofuels are "not perfect" and make it harder to achieve overall goals on switching to low carbon energy, European Commissioners said on Wednesday. But they insisted the proposals sent out the right signal to the biofuel industry, which would have to move on to new-generation fuels that do not compete with demand for food.”

If the EU commission really cared about the low carbon economy, it should be more concerned with the 95% of the fuel that is fossil than the 5% that is renewable. Or as a matter of fact, it should be concerned with a transportation system built around the private car. Cars and petrol are the culprits – not biofuel. Actions to reduce car traffic and total fuel use is much more important that the application of sustainability criteria on the 5% that should be biofuel. 

And if the EU commission really cared about the poor and the hungry in developing countries, it should be concerned with the effects of its own agriculture and trade policies on these people, rather than engaging in fruitless discussions over bio fuel competing with food. Why single out biofuel? What about the liquor, wine and tobacco cultivation? What about cotton? We can wear nylon instead. What about all land that is used of golf courses or hobby horses? In Sweden we use more than half a million hectare to feed our hobby horses. What about feed stuff? The EU commission seems to forget that most biofuel production also produces highly valuable animal feed stuff, so the net land use for biofuel is not as big as it looks like. 

The EU commission seems to have no understanding of how global food and agriculture markets work. From the perspective of farmers, the food sector has been a buyer’s market for most of the time. Increased food prices and more alternative uses for farmland is a boon for farmers. It is also in general positive for rural areas, and for those living in the rural areas. Most hungry people in the world live in rural areas and even those that are net buyers of food (e.g. agriculture workers and small farmers) will in most cases benefit from increased incomes in the area as it means more employment, more demand for services, better infrastructure. Admittedly, higher prices, are a problem for the poor in the slums of the mega cities. But there is not a very strong link between biofuel and higher food prices. The price hikes the last five years are more strongly linked to increased oil price than anything else. See more in Why oil price and grain price follow each other.

 

If the biofuel production of the US, the EU and Brazil would cease, there would be a massive fall in global agriculture prices. For a short while, poor people in the slums would get cheaper food. But within a few years, masses of farmers in both developed and developing countries would have been forced off the land and in developing countries, most would become dirt poor. They and the people working for them would be worse off than today, and more hungry.

Having said that, there are many issues to discuss around biofuel:

Like the rest of the agriculture sector, biofuels too are subject to large political interventions. Globally, biofuels received some US$ 11–12 billion in subsidies in 2006 (FAO 2008). During 2006/2007, one-fifth of the maize yield in the United States was used for biofuels, stimulated by heavy subsidies, and still the amount only corresponded to some 3% of petrol consumption (World Bank 2007). A report for Friends of the Earth states:

 [A] realistic bioenergy potential on cropland and grazing land in the year 2050 may be around 70–100 EJ/yr,[1] with the lower number being environmentally considerably more favourable than the higher one. For comparison, we note that the global technical use of primary energy is currently around 550 EJ/yr (fossil energy use around 450 EJ/yr). This means that the bioenergy potential from cropland and grazing land is in the order of magnitude of 15–22% of current fossil energy use. (Erb et al. 2009: 25)

 The results of the report Agriculture as Provider of Both Food and Fuel, Kersti Johansson, Karin Liljequist, Lars Ohlander, Kjell Aleklett are more or less the same. This shows that biofuels present a very limited possibility for reducing society’s dependency on oil. This doesn’t have to be an argument against biofuels by itself, rather an argument for the need to totally redesign transport systems. This also means that we have to address the growth in transportation as the main problem (for those saying that electric cars are the solution, read this).

One disturbing aspect is that a lot of biofuel production has a bad energy ratio; some examples even show ratios below 1, implying that the production of biofuel uses more energy than the energy content of the fuel itself, something that is obviously only possible to achieve with massive political distortion. For grain-based biofuels, the energy ratio in a number of cases studied ranged from 0.7 to 2.8.[2] The energy ratio of biofuels from lignocellulose is normally higher as is the energy efficiency of sugar cane ethanol.

The biggest problem with biofuel is the potential competition with other land use, as increased biofuel production is likely to either take place in now-low-on-production, but highly biodiverse, rangelands or expand into ‘virgin’[3] lands, such as wetlands and primary and secondary forests. Biofuel is also often grown in monoculture, uses a lot of agrochemicals and can be the reason for ”land-grabbing”. But none of these apply for all forms of biofuel, and can’t be used as an argument against biofuel as such. Small scale biogas made from manure and other waste fuels the cooking of many million of people around the globe. Several hundred million animals provide power to pull farm implements and transport goods all over the globe – their fuel is all from agriculture lands. 

Read More:
Biofuel in many shapes, about biofuel for the local market in Zambia
BBC had a very interesting article about biofuels in Germany
Energy and agriculture about the general questions about energy in agriculture
Financial times on the EU proposal
The Guardian

---

[1]            Here ‘EJ’ stands for Exa Joule; 1 EJ=10¹⁸ J.

[2]            This also means that if you want to replace 100 EJ of oil with biofuel, you might need 200 EJ of biofuel, because 100 EJ will be lost in the process of making biofuels if the ratio is 2. 

[3]            I put virgin in quotation marks to indicate that there is no such thing. All landscapes today, with the exception of land under the glaciers, are influenced by human activity.

Standards as tools for power

Standards are not innocent technical specifications, but tools of power and dominance. Standards and the conformity assessment linked to them are a vital components of the neo-liberal project. Review of Standards: Recipes for Reality by Lawrence Busch, The MIT Press, 408 pages.

We hear the news every day about the price of oil expressed in dollars per barrel. The standard barrel of crude oil is 42 US gallons (34.9723 imp gal; 158.9873 L). This measurement originated in the early Pennsylvania oil fields. Oil has not actually been shipped in barrels since the introduction of oil tankers, but the 42-US-gallon size is still used as a unit for measurement. Interestingly enough, the ”standard oil drum” that you see in use is a 55-US-gallon barrel! The two sizes of oil drums represent some of the millions of standards that shape the society we live in. Almost all products and services we are exposed to are subject to one or, mostly, many standards. A life without standards is almost incomprehensible today. Just think about how to conduct simple trade without standards. There would be no agreed measures (scales), no clear quality standards, no agreed value reference (currency), and there would be no standard terms of trade etc. We would be back to the situation of two unrelated civilizations have their first encounter. Standards, and their cousin norms, give us predictability in an otherwise rather chaotic world.

Within most professions, there are heated debates about the standards to apply, and people spend a lot of time arguing over them, write them and revise them. But very few actually think about standards as a social institution, their governance and how they can be used in the interest of some groups against others. In the excellent book Standards: Recipes for Reality, Lawrence Busch, Professor at Michigan State University, makes us aware of how standards shape our lives every day. More importantly, he puts standards in a wider economic, social and political context.

Busch questions many of the claims normally related to standards. For example, in the language of ISO and others, standards are developed based on consensus. Busch argue that consensus is not at all a salient feature of standards. It is rather that they are taken for granted or forced upon people that ensure that people conform to them. The organic sectors shows ample evidence of this. Even more striking is how certain proprietary technical standards can dominate markets, e.g. Microsoft Windows and its associated programs. Even governments yields to their powers in many cases.

For a frequent traveler like me it is a normal hassle to carry adapters. For some reasons sockets developed differently in different countries, and today we sit with huge assets built with one type of socket in each country. It is an example of “path dependence”, i.e. that we follow a certain path, not because it is the best one, but it is the one we choose in an early stage, and the cost to go back and start all over is simply too big. On the larger scale, the automobile transportation system is a another example of path dependence, where all those within the system have an interest to continue developing it, despite the fact that neither the car itself nor the combustion engines use to propel them, are the best transport solution for cities of today. So while we have thousands of car models to chose from, and each model has hundreds of variations, many people can’t chose whether they want a car or not. This situation is what the priest and sociologist Ivan Illich called “radical monopolies”. Unfortunately, second-best solutions are likely to remain in the future as a result of path dependency, says Mr Busch. 

Busch calls the combination of standards, certification and accreditation for the tripartite standards regime (TSR) and sees the TSR emerging as an alternative mode of governance for most aspects of social life. He is rather critical towards the TSR and claim among others that audits often do violence to the subject of certification. This is particularly the case when the audits are weakly related to the real purpose of the standards; when audits take away attention from other important but difficult to measure aspects, when the audits follow an approach of ”mechanical objectivity” which relieves the certification body from responsibility or when audits intrude into the subjects pursuance of whatever goals they have. It seems to me that all those four points apply to how organic certification is mastered. The problem, and the violence done, is exacerbated when standards are written into law, says Busch. Busch concurs with the Michael Power in his book The Audit Society that one main requirement of the TRS is that organizations subject to certification are forced to reorganize their work to be more easily auditable, but that such a reorganization to satisfy the auditors may backfire, and risk to confuse predictability with trustworthiness.

He sees the standards movement of the last century as part of the industrialisation concept, linked to the division of labour, economies of scale and to the whole organization of the factories. The same standardization enables global markets and unlimited competition. Through standardization in transportation, such as containerization, improved communications etc., the competition is now also truly global in many markets. The container itself, once it was standardised in 1965, determined shapes of the ships but also of pallets, boxes and of goods to fit into the standardized boxes. This competition in turn drives the ”technological treadmill”. I can’t raise the price (as the quality is fixed) which means that I have to lower costs of production, e.g. by using chemical fertilizers or by using more efficient machinery.

As a counter-reaction to this development, there has been a drive last decade to use standards for differentiation. Organic standards and certification is one of the most prominent examples of such differentiation. Classic standardization leads producers down the path of ”commodity hell”. It has cleared the market from unique products, made to order or in a one-by-one production process and transformed it to ”same” products. With the new standards differentiation, we get a market where we can ”chose between hundreds of different, but equally standardized – varieties of ketchup, automobiles or airline tickets”. But Busch also notes that ”their (the differentiating standards) value as such is diminished as their numbers increase”. Busch explores how this contradiction came into being.

He sees the rapid increase in use of standards coinciding with the neo-liberal project, with less central planning and retreating states. He sees an inherent conflict in that managers of companies on the one hand want less regulation on the other hand are afraid of the vacuum created by the retreating state. The total free market situations favoured in most liberal economic theories have been abolished by the companies themselves through the development of closely knitted supply-chains which in turn are a pre-condition for lean management, outsourcing and other modern trends. To make all participants in a supply-chain subject to standards and certification means they are tied together and the market is less free, and therefore predictable. ”No large firm can afford to subject itself to the instabilities and risks associated with the free market”. In this way, the Tripartite Standards Regime becomes a new model for governance. The lead firm or lead firms in the supply-chains or value-chains will mostly impose their standards on others. The standards themselves often also distribute burden and costs unevenly in the value-chain. Busch mentions GlobalGAP as such an example, where small farmers are not able to carry the substantial direct and indirect costs involved . He also discusses how NGOs have turned to certifications and supply chains in attempts to advance their goals, instead of lobbying increasingly powerless governments.

Busch shows how standards are intimately connected to power–that they often serve to empower some and disempower others; ”in our modern world standards are arguably the most important manifestation of power relations”. He points to the dual character of the English word “ruler” as a manifestation of this, on the one hand, it is someone who rules, on the other hand a measuring device. Busch gives examples from colonial times of how schools in the British colonies taught medieval British history, but didn’t include the history of the countries where the books were used. The imposition of Western standards for private property in conflict with customary ownership systems is another example.

Also today, standards are tools of power and domination, but now in the hands of companies. By means of standard, conflicts are seemingly resolved or at least transferred from a political domain into a technical, technocratic domain. The claimed “voluntary” nature of standards also adds to the perception that the use of the standard is just an economic choice which is made in the market place. In this way, standards are stealthily becoming weapons for power and blurs power relationships. Because of the perceived technical nature of the standards, the standards governance model (the TPR) falls short of ethics, justice and democracy. In a recent article, Can Fairy Tales Come True Mr Busch writes: 

The TSR is a new and ubiquitous form of governance that, although supported by the state, is fundamentally responsible only to itself and not to any democratically elected legislative body. Hence, while it can do good, it can just as easily do harm, with little or no democratic oversight.

 That standards are power tools is shown by the many social movement that are formed around standards such as the women’s suffrage movement, anti-apartheid movement, labour movement and lately gay rights movement. Many of these movements want rights to be extended to their constituency, instead of being limited to just some group, e.g. the right of marriage to be limited to heterosexual couples.

The privatization of public services requires further standardization as services that before were just provided (say schools and electric utilities)  now have to be purchased in the market place, and therefore made comparable, i.e. standardized. This development transforms all sorts of habitual action into decisions where we are forced to make rational choices. To this can be added the stress of the market place where we are supposed to decide whether we want, for example, fair trade or organic products. The increase in choices by the differentiation in the market as well as by privatization of former public services may not be very democratic according to Busch, all the choices and decisions to be made are time consuming and require skill-”skills that the middle class might have, the upper class can buy, the lower class is rarely able to pursue and the ”underclass” cannot pursue at all.”

“Standards” is a book to read for those professionally engaged in the tripartite regime of standards, certification and accreditation. It will pose some hard questions, and give some ideas for improvements. While the tone is critical, Busch makes no attempt to trash standards as a whole:  "Thus, the challenge is not to eliminate standards, to return to some mythical past during which standards were of trivial importance, Instead [...] to ensure that seemingly benign standards do not lead to gross injustices." Before embarking on making a standard, we should ask the central question: Is standards the most appropriate form of governance in this particular situation? There are laws, regulations, statutes, customs, norms and habit that could perhaps be a better alternative. He makes a list of qualities –standards for standards if you so wish - that he believe standards should have such as subsidiarity; use of precaution; do minimal violence; make actionable standards; encourage participation in standard setting; and review standards frequently. 

Read and enjoy.  

Other reviews of this book: 
Wall street Journal
Galveston daily news 
 

We get richer also without growth

World manufacturing output grows much quicker than GDP. This is shown quite convincingly by Peter Marsh in his recent book "The New Industrial Revolution" which I am currently reading. His main point is that manufacturing is still very important, contrary to what we may believe when we live in a post-industrial society. He also states that the notion of "de-industrialization" of western econonmies is exaggerated.

While I agree with his point, the book raised some other thoughts. I picked the graph above from the book. Between 1800 and 2010, world manufacturing increased 200 times, while the GDP increased "only" some 60 times (for those interested in the effect of rather small differences in growth rate, this means that manufacturing output grew with 2.6% per year against 2% for GDP - not a big difference is it?)

This means that we don't only have more money today than ever before, we also get a lot more "stuff" for that money. E.g. between 1900 and 2000 US residential prices fell by approximately 94 %, adjusted for inflation - and people say energy has become expensive!
In the early industrialization of textile manufacturing productivity in spinning increased 1000-fold in two generations from the end of the eighteenth century in England (Ayres 1989). The increase in productivity is not unique for manufacturing. As a matter of fact the productivity gains in farming are equally impressive if not more. In the areas with lowest productivity, where farmers produce with more or less the same technology as 200 years ago, one person can produce not even 1 ton of grain per year, whereas the most productive farms exceed 2000 tons per person-year (Rundgren, Garden Earth, 2012). 150 years ago it took Swedish farms 250 hours of work to get one ton of barley from the field into the barn - today it takes five minutes with a combine harvester (Jordbruk och skogsbruk i Sverige sedan år 1900).

 

Endless fields of corn in Mato Grosso

There are many different observations possible from this. 

1) One obvious observation is that manufacturing will go in the same direction of farming, albeit slower. That is, the relative importance of manufacturing in the GDP will continue to decrease.Our needs of manufactured good certainly is not as easily saturated as our needs for food, but clearly there are limits to how many new "things" we need, and want to buy all the time.

A farmer in Zambia working manually

2) Because of productivity gains quicker than economic growth we can actually increase our standard of living (measured in "things") even without any economic growth, we get richer even if we don't get more money. Every year the same money buys us more things. This seams to be a rather strong argument for a non-growth economy.


3) Because of saturation in markets for manufacturing, and increasing competition, there are small possibilities to make profit from manufacturing:

"Stagnating demand will affect large segments of the industry in a similar way as agriculture suffered from lack of demand and falling prices for 100 years, despite an enormous population growth. The combination of increased competition, increased productivity and automation means constantly falling prices up to point where there is no profit to be made." (Garden Earth). Capital and capitalists need to find new arenas, and they find them today in three areas: 

• In privatization of society functions (schools, utilities, railroads etc.). I don't think i need to give any examples, they are everywhere in European countries and elsewhere
• In financial capital. The value of swaps and derivatives at the end of 2007 was US$ 454 trillion (ISDA 2009). This corresponded to some eight times the world GDP and around four times the global household wealth (Davies et al. 2008). The value of stocks in the 54 biggest markets in 2007 was more or less on par with the world GDP and the value of currency trading amounted to more than US$ 2 trillion per day (Reuters 2007), that is, more than 10 times the world GDP in a year.
• and in ecosystem services - measures to reduce carbon emissions or to compensate for emissions already represented a market worth US$ 143 billion in 2009 (World Bank 2010b). Following this path, we see more and more ecosystem services being regulated by market mechanisms, which is a euphemism for privatization.

4) That manufacturing output grows quicker than GDP contributes to the understanding why there is still such a strong link between GDP and use of energy and other nature resources. It is the production side of the so called "rebound effect" or "Jevons paradox", i.e. that saving are offset by increased consumption.

Will there be farmers?

I visited the beautiful village of Jatiluwih in Java some years ago. The women were harvesting rice, with the girls assisting. The boys were swimming in a nearby stream, while the men were idling in the shadow of a huge tree - assumingly pondering over important matters....The place has been named a world heritage. The grow organic red rice with traditional methods. They get good yields, some five tons per hectare, and as they take two crops per year, it is a lot. The certified organic rice fetch a nice price. The system is certainly ecologically sustainable and also economically. But it is not socially sustainable because the children prefer to work in the Balinese tourist industry. A more glamorous job, where you can be clean, indoors and comfortable.

A year ago my colleague in Thailand told me that they had to change their strategies for farm development. Before they had propagated composting and other labour intensive methods to increase crop yields and income. But the population is now aging and the old peoples' bodies are tired.

Fred Pearce  has written an interesting post about this:

"Making firm predictions is difficult.  But I suggest that agriculture may face a new food security issue in coming decades.  Never mind the land and water, will there be enough people to work on the farms?" Forget future land and water scarcity, will there be enough farmers?

Aditi Mukherji, a water professional from India just awarded the Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application 
notes in an interesting post from Bihar that of 5006 households in three villages 40% do not report any income from agriculture at all. Of the rest 60% of villagers who reported some income from agriculture, only 25% reported it as their most important source of income. Another 35% households said that daily wage earning was their main income source.  "it looks like these villages are indeed ‘villages without agriculture’ or more like, ‘villages without much of agriculture’." she says. 

It would be ironic if we would run out of people to work the land, while we are worrying that land or water will run out...

To respect nature is to respect ourselves

Spider web at Torfolk Gård 2007

Nothing human beings do can compete with a piece of nature in complexity. A square metre of land contains so many organisms with so complicated and complex relationships that one can’t understand them. A gramme of forest soil may contain over a million bacteria colonies. It is estimated that several million individual animals and over a thousand different species may reside beneath a square metre of soil surface (Perry 1994); all of them are constituted by many, many cells and there is interaction between them, an exchange of energy and nutrients. Most likely, a square metre of nature is more complex and contains more information than the whole Internet.

Apart from the direct and indirect services obtained from nature, nature also has great aesthetical and cultural value. It gives another perspective, many reference points; it is an unprecedented piece of art. Natural environments have, for centuries, been known for their healing properties for people in spiritual need or mental stress. It is good to have respect for nature. The respect should be based on what it is; for its beauty and for its value, both apparent values and those not discovered. This respect should of course also include ourselves. A level of development has been reached where we are already managing most of the terrestrial ecosystems. This gives human beings unique powers among the creatures on the planet and unique responsibility too. We can’t pretend that we don’t have that power or that responsibility; both have to be exercised with due diligence, humbly realizing that there are so many things we don’t know.

Whose nature?
It should be kept in mind that exploitation of nature is also a question of whose nature. Different groups are affected by destruction of nature in different ways, and normally the nature of the weaker group is destroyed while the nature of the rich is preserved. This leads some to believe that the rich ‘care more’ for the environment or that only when there is a certain wealth that human beings ‘can afford’ to care about nature, but this mixes up cause and effect to a large extent. The rich can exploit the nature of the poor and even export their waste to the nature of the poor, whereas the poor has no other option than the exploitation of nature, be it in the form or natural resources or in the form of their own labour. To some extent, the whole trick of modern civilization is about exploitation of nature; exploitation of historical production, of which fossil fuel is the primary example; exploitation of the future nature, by dumping waste. But it is also the history of a few people exploiting many other people. At the centre, apart from nature and energy, are technology and society.

Society has four big challenges regarding the use of natural resources; well perhaps using the term ‘challenges’ is an understatement, ‘system errors’ is perhaps a more suitable term. First, humankind uses already too much of the planet’s resources; the capital is being consumed and it is not a question of whether society will go bankrupt[1] but when it will do so. Second, the distribution of these resources is extremely inequitable, between countries and within countries; rich countries and rich people use a totally disproportionate share of the resources (and rich people in rich countries are apparently the worst). Third, economic growth is continuing and seems to be hard-wired into society, which means that resource use will also continue to grow. Fourth, the world’s population is primed to grow for at least 40 more years, perhaps longer. We can’t negotiate with nature and no less can we expect that the poor will, or should, accept that common assets are wasted.

[1] The term is a bit unfortunate, the repercussions of an exhaustion of the natural capital is a lot more dramatic than a financial bankruptcy, which in essence only means a redistribution of money. The terms for bankruptcy with nature can’t be negotiated. There is no bailout.

The text is an extract from Garden Earth

Paticipatory Guarantee Systems - a nice governance model

In 2004, when I was the President of the International Organic Agriculture Movement, IFOAM, I had the pleasure to be instrumental in the first global meeting for the furthering of what is called Participatory Guarantee Systems for organic markets. Those systems developed primarily in Latin America as alternatives to the third party certification model, which has dominated the organic market place since the mid eighties. I have myself been very active in building up this third party certification model, e.g. as the founder of KRAV in Sweden and founding president of the International Organic Accreditation Services, IOAS. Because of that, I also knew its weaknesses and shortcomings....

The workshop was hosted by one of the pioneers, Ecovida.

Presently Ecovida encompasses 180 municipalities and approximately 2,400 families of farmers (around 12,000 persons) organized in 270 groups, associations and cooperatives. They also include 30 NGOs and 10 ecological consumers’ cooperatives as well as several professionals’ partnerships and supporting organizations. All kinds of agriculture products are cultivated and sold by the Ecovida members, for example vegetables, cereals, fruits, juice, fruit-jelly, honey, milk, eggs and meat. In 2003 the sales amount was 13 750 000 USD; 27 % of the sales was to free markets, 20 % for export, 19 % to the institutional market and 34 % for other markets like supermarkets, shops, agro industries etc.You can access more information (in Portuguese) about the Ecovida network on http://www.ecovida.org.br/

I was sick in malaria and spend all the time in a hospital in Porto Alegre instead of participating in the workshop. Nevertheless, or perhaps as a result of my absence(!), the workshop was a great success. And from then on PGS has developed a lot.
IFOAM defines PGS like this:

Participatory Guarantee Systems are locally focused quality assurance systems. They certify producers based on active participation of stakeholders and are built on a foundation of trust, social networks and knowledge exchange

PGS has got a lot of positive attention lately, and it has been recognised as a relevant and legal method for guaranteeing organic products in several Latin American countries as well as in India.There are several reasons for this: one is cost and bureaucracy involved in the traditional certification. But even more important is the ownership of the process and the results. To undergo impartial third party certification with its increasingly bureaucratic procedures, standardized globally, is a rather alienating process. The first organic certification bodies where either farmer organizations or established by associations working closely with farmers, also taking on a promotional and educational role. With the introduction of adherence to the ISO 65 norm, government regulation and internal professionalization of the service, the distance between the certification body and the "subject of certification" has grown tremendously. Organic farmers today always refer to certifers as "them", never as "us".

While there are some strong sides in a third party certification system it also has a lot of weaknesses. The PGS system also has it strong and weak sides. As things stand now, third party certification is the model preferred for the anonymous mass-market, especially when distance between producers and consumers are big and PGS is the choice for direct marketing situations.

For me the thing that makes PGS most interesting is that it is based on a different paradigm and a participatory model of governance. As such it merits attention not only as a method of guarantee of organic quality. The notion that we create credibility by having supposedly "independent" organizations doing "objective" and "impartial" assessment is at best just one way of creating credibility or at worst an illusion.

The PGS models certainly are not perfect. Also, it lies in their nature that they are different and not globally standardized. Some of them may be defunct, some of them may be inefficient or ineffective. But the idea behind them is sound and could be a building block also for strengthening local democracy and building new types of institutions.

P.S. IFOAM has a lot of valuable resources for Participatory Guarantee Systems. 

Where does the buck stop?

‘Passing the buck’ is an English expression. It means letting someone else take care of a problem or take on the responsibility. The former US President Truman famously had a sign on his desk saying that ”the buck stops here”. Clarifying that he was ultimately in charge.

Who is really in charge? Who is to blame? These are questions that come into mind when reading the European Court of Auditor’s report on the EU organic system. Some of their conclusions could have been drawn directly from earlier leaders of The Organic Standard...

The EU system is built on competing national certification bodies – in some countries up to thirty certification bodies – with oversight by a plethora of national and sometimes regional authorities, accreditation by national accreditors ( only one per country because they have been granted monopoly by the European Union) and oversight by the European Commission. The system has developed not based on the needs of the sector but on the needs and habits of the governments. That is the only reason why authority for approval of certification bodies follows the divisions of the governments. And it is why in some countries regional authorities are in charge and in most countries several authorities are in charge.

Because of an, unfortunate, reference to the EN 45011 (ISO 65) in the EU Regulation back in 1997, national accreditation bodies came into the game, bringing little added value, but increasing cost and increasing focus on rather unimportant procedures. As they were given a monopoly of accreditation, they also swayed the EU that they should have the monopoly of interpreting the EN 45011, a rather outrageous claim.

All of the actors in the system have resource constraints, and will only do what they are forced to do. Most of them also lack competency. Some of the authorities are even hostile to the organic sector despite it being within their mandate to supervise and approve the certification bodies. How does that make the certification bodies and producers feel? The EU has rarely conducted any supervision of what the Member States do. And the ‘transaction costs’ of keeping all in the systems up to date and informed are astronomical. But the biggest problem is that nobody takes responsibility. A concerned consumer in an EU country or a food processor that suspects you’re a competitor is cheating, has nowhere to go with a query because nobody is in charge.

This mess is likely to lead to calls for more controls and more supervision, probably by strengthening the Commissions oversight, and increased reporting upwards by all concerned. But that is the wrong way to go.

What the system needs is rationalisation and fewer actors. There are several options for this. By integrating organic controls into the normal food control system, like in Denmark, both certification and accreditation can be eliminated, and accountability is clear. The same can be accomplished by having a national monopoly for certification, like in the Netherlands. By recognising one international accreditation system for all certification bodies, such as the IOAS, certification bodies could operate freely within all the European territories. In any case, the national approvals of certification bodies are antiquated and could be abolished; a certification body is approved in one country it should be allowed to operate freely in the other countries.

This is not the place to make the blueprint for a new system, but any new system should be built on fewer actors and fewer layers and clearer lines of responsibility, and as much as possible responsibility should be at the ‘lower’ levels, i.e. with the producers and the certification bodies.

Are we consumers or citizens?

The video Story of Change is a nice attempt to make clear why Green consumerism falls short of inducing the radical shift needed. More than 20 years of the business model of "sustainable development" show how little can be accomplished by just relying on consumers and businesses to make the "right choices". For sure, to make the right individual choices are important - but not enough. And it is a dangerous illusion that we will select a good future by how we consume (i.e. shop). Gradually, the consumerist paradigm takes over also the political sphere and patients are treated as customers in hospitals instead of patients or citizens.

The video is perhaps a bit naive, but less naive than the idea that we will change the world by consumer choice.....





In the end I also wonder if "citizen" is the right term for what we ought to be. It has a connotation of nationalism (as citizenship is linked to a nation), and its link to the "city" as an organism is dubious, but that might be the subject of a later blog post.

The greatest single experiment in global geoengineering

Without knowing it, if you are a European, you might bear costs of over €500 per year for farmers’ use of Nitrogen fertilizers. According to the European Nitrogen Assessment, synthetic N fertilizer has been estimated to sustain nearly 50% of the world’s population, but its use comes with a very big prize tag. The report states that the increased level of reactive Nitrogen in the biosphere might represent the greatest single experiment in global geoengineering ever made. Similar concerns were already expressed by the Millenium Ecosystems Assessment and later echoed by the by now famous article about Planetary Boundaries.

And while this Nitrogen drives yields, a lot of the nitrogen ends up where it isn’t supposed to.The nitrogen recovery (kg N taken up by a crop per kg applied N) for cereals varies between 30% and 0% across Europe, indicating that 40%–70% of the fertilizer N applied is lost to the atmosphere or the hydrosphere.

From the perspective of the individual farmer the use of Nitrogen fertilizer is profitable. The return of one euro invested in nitrogen fertilizer is estimated to between two and five euro. But someone else pays a bigger bill. “Environmental damage related to Nitrogen effects from agriculture in the EU-27 was estimated at €20–€150 billion per year. This can be compared with a benefit of N-fertilizer for farmers of €10–€100 billion per year, with considerable uncertainty about long-term N-benefits for crop yield”  says the report.

This is no European speciality, it is likely the same or worse in many places. In the US the Mississippi, the Columbia, and the Susquehanna rivers together discharge approximately 1 million tons of nitrogen in the form of nitrate per year to coastal waters according to a report from H. John Heinz III Center. In Rwanda, erosion causes loss of almost 1 million tons of organic matter, some 40,000 tons of nitrogen, 280 tons of phosphorus and 3000 tons of potassium—more than the total use of chemical fertilizers according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development assesses that the fertilizer uptake efficiency is less than 30 percent for rice production in South and South East Asia. Globally the nitrogen efficiency in grain production has deteriorated drastically and rapidly. Around 1960, each ton of chemical fertilizer resulted in an increase of grain yield of 75 ton, while in the end of 1990 resulted in just 25 ton, a glaring example of decreasing marginal utility, as nitrogen fertilizer use increased tremendously in the same period.

What comes in - will go out....

In the end there is nothing really surprising in the report. It has always been clear that not only 40%-70% of the nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere or the hydrosphere. It is rather 100% that is lost, as also what is captured in the grain or the grass, ultimately also will leak away, as long as nitrogen is not accumulating in soils. But it isn’t doing that, on the contrary.

Read more:

Overloaded with Nitrogen and approaching peak phosphorus
Scarcity starts to bite
Nitrogen in the biosphere - a cliffhanger
Nitrogen fertilizers destroy soil organic carbon
Plows into Swords and Swords into Plows

The road to food security: What works and what doesn’t?

Considering that donors spend some US$ 150 billion per year in development aid, and that much of this is oriented to poverty alleviation and food security it is perhaps surprising to know how few thorough international reviews that have been made to assess  what works and what doesn’t work. The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs has now reviewed existing evaluations in the field and make a summary in the study A systematic review of the impact of interventions in agricultural production, value chains, market regulation.  One conclusion is that most evaluations and impact assessments are not solid enough to allow for any far-reaching conclusions. Of 365 evaluations screened only 38 fulfilled the quality criteria the reviewers had developed.

The review assessed four pathways to food security: increasing production; development of value chains; market reform and land security. Interventions based on access to credit; development of non-farm sector; social safety nets; stabilized prices, hygiene and sanitation were thus not part of the review.

Overall conclusions

Interventions improving land tenure security scored mostly positive, especially when combined with other interventions.

Interventions increasing agricultural production scored generally positive, except for sustainability.

Value chain development scored well on increasing trade, but the most vulnerable people did not benefit.

Market regulation reform interventions score lowest, due to the combination with reduced support to the agricultural sector in several African countries.

Success was most likely where different interventions were combined in a favourable national climate.

As I have been working a lot with value chain development I took a particular interest in that: Intervention in value chain comes out as one of the better strategies for improving food security. The report highlights that there is a big potential in the development of domestic value chains. For example, in Kenya approximately 500,000 smallholders produce vegetables and fruits for the domestic markets while only 11,500 smallholders were engaged in the export market. The export market involves many more large plantations with employees. They employ in total also around half a million people, who are food secure through their income. The evaluation also studied value chains built around GlobalGAP, Organic and Fairtrade.

Number of farmers producing certified products for export markets          

Standard	Worldwide	Developing countries	Africa
GlobalGAP (2007)	97,000		2,871
Organic (2009)	1,808,000	1,526,000	511,000
Fairtrade		977,000	589,000

source: IOB study 363, 2012

Clearly donors are disappointed with the very limited impact of all the efforts spent to train smallholders in GlobalGAP systems. There have been many donor financed projects for linking smallholder farmers in developing countries to organic markets in developing countries. For example the Export Promotion of Organic Products from Africa. In that programme, more than 120 thousand smallholders in Uganda and Tanzania were linked to organic markets in Europe, USA and Japan. The estimated earnings reached some US$ 30 million per year.  The review assess the impact of organic value chains as successful, but can’t conclude if the efforts have reached the most vulnerable or not. Successfactors have been linking of farmers to commercial exporters (as opposed tp supporting farmer to export themselves), group certification and efforts to improve quality. Also for Fairtrade it was unclear if the most food insecure people were reached and perhaps surprising the report states that, Fairtrade seems to have reinforced men’s role in household an cooperative decision making around cash crops; in one case women’s income had even declined. For the total household income, in four of six cases in Latin America, there had been no increase of household income with Fair trade: ”The low income for Fairtrade farmers is due to the competition between the Fairtrade crop and other farm and non-farm activities, the additional costs for inputs and (hired) labour, and the limited Fairtrade market - only part of the produce is sold as Fairtrade.”

On the opposing side to organic stands a strong drive to increase use of chemical fertilizers, and sometimes GMOs and pesticides. The reports says that the subsidised fertilizer schemes in Zambia and Malawi have been successful. However, another recent special review of such schemes, Agricultural input subsidies in Sub-Saharan Africa from DANIDA comes to a much less positive conclusion after studying such schemes in Malawi, Zambia, Ghana and Tanzania:

• Significant increases in agricultural productivity and food production is possible, and the potential for improving agricultural productivity by subsidising agricultural inputs exists. However the estimates are somewhat uncertain. Costs are very high, and given uncertainties it is unclear whether the programmes provide value for money.

• There is very little convincing evidence to suggest that outcomes are likely to persist after termination of the programmes. However, the subsidy programmes are designed to address the distortions created by market imperfections rather than the market imperfections themselves. When (if) the programmes are phased out, input use is likely to decline again.

It also concludes that none of the programmes managed to reach the poorest households

On the, rather controversial, effects of market deregulation, the Dutch review shows how market de-regulation in China and Vietnam, in combination with land reform, has contributed tremendously to growth and reduction of poverty. ”The impact of domestic trade reform alone was not evaluated, but together with the other pathways in Vietnam’s agricultural development, it contributed to the production increase, from a deficit of 27% in 1980 to a surplus of 40% in 1999. And for China:

In China, during the so-called household responsibility system reform between 1978 and 1984, national grain production increased from 305 to 407 million tonnes. Increases in efficiency increased labour productivity and reduced production costs and food prices. [... ] As a result, per capita grain consumption increased from 195 to 250 kg per year, and household income increased by 15% per year between 1978 and 1984. The efficiency gains in agriculture made labour available for the rural industry sector that absorbed about one third of the rural labour force by 1996. Poverty declined from 53% in 1981 to 8% in 2001.

On the other hand the report also points to that during the period of big de-regulation

In most African countries, the increase in food import was larger than the increase in agricultural export. The ratio of food import to agricultural export has worsened for all African countries plus Guatemala and Peru, remained the same for Guyana, and had improved for China, India and Chile (1970-2002). In the period 1995-2002, the situation was worst for Senegal which imported food worth more than three times their total  agricultural export. Farmer income from export crops increased in all countries. In contrast, farmer income from liberalised food crops decreased in all countries, except in Chile. Farmer income from food crops that were still protected increased in Cameroon, Nigeria, Morocco, China, India, Chile, Guyana and Peru.

That land reform the report highlights that land titling and solutions based on individual, private ownership may not be the best. As a matter of fact they are likely to benefit more those that are already better off, and exclude women and disadvantaged groups.

As the report points out, there is no silver bullet that by itself can guarantee food security. It stands clear to me that food security – poverty and equality are intrinsically linked, and that the reason for food insecurity is found in an unjust society and unequal access to resources, and therefore,  that the path to food security is to correct those injustices.