Is farming efficient?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pot calling the kettle black

Global Trends by Martin Khor
Star, 23 Sept 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reproduced with the permission of the Third World Network.  

Energy slaves revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start by reading the book.

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

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

Dmitry Orlov’s Excellent New Book

Review: The Five Stages of Collapse by Dmitry Orlov

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

Gain weight with organic!

A few months ago I visited the Yasofman farmers group in the dry Yatta area in Kenya, on the road to Somalia. As customary we started the visit to the farmers by a meeting with selected leaders in their dark office in the trading centre, to get some information and be properly greeted before taking to the field. 

Joseph Manyala from the Yasofman group

Joseph Manyala, demonstrated the progress of the group with his own body. He proudly recounted that before they started their work in organic his weight was just 50 kg. Even for a slim Kenyan that is clearly not enough! But now, with the organic project he has gained 25 kg and thus has more or less the ideal weight for his stature. I found this a very direct and concrete measure of progress and the relevance of organic for food security.
 

The way it works is like this. With organic production there is more variety in the production and thus also in the diet of the farm families. The diversity caters for a more resilient system as well. Even if there is a spell of bad weather some crops will do better than others. Also, with organic production, crops can withstand drought better. Finally, if the farmer are also able to access a better market they can increase their income. And income is the strongest factor for food security in a farming system which is already integrated into markets. Income means ability to buy missing food, to invest in production, e.g. buying a cow, develop irrigation etc.  

The movie below is from three different organic groups in East Africa, of which the Yatta group is one. Watch it, seeing is believing.

The movie was made by the IFOAM OSEA project (for which I am the Project Leader). If you want more facts and details there are several interesting reports to download on the OSEA project web site. E.g. a study on productivity in organic farming concludes that: 

 “The limited literature available clearly points to significant yield increases when Organic Agriculture practices are used to improve low input conventional traditional agriculture in East Africa.”

And a consumer survey shows that:

“Once the respondents are exposed to the definition of organic, an overwhelming majority (93%) felt that indeed eating organic products is good and most of them also agreed that it would be very important to know whether what they consume is organic or not.”

Clean up the cloud

First I deleted a travel blog I kept during an epic bicycle trip from Sweden down to Turkey and back. Then I deleted most of my pictures in the Picasa files on the net. Then I closed down two domains and their web sites, and cancelled two more cloud services. And deleted a lot of files in the two services I still use.  If I knew how I could delete my old facebook entries I would do that as well. I see no value whatsoever that they are kept more than a few weeks. Who looks at them anyway.

Why? Why do I do this. It is not primarily because I am afraid by NSA or other big brothers - well I am afraid of them but I think they will find out that I don't like them in any case. It is also not that I am afraid of getting used to "free services" which sooner or later will come at a price - which they clearly will.

There are two other reasons.
First. DON'T LITTER. We know we shouldn't spread all our rubbish in the place we live and we shouldn't throw it on the street, so why do we think it is fine to do it on the internet?
Second and most important DON'T WASTE. Even if many of these services are for free in the sense that you and I don't have to pay for them, they consume a lot of resources, and I mean A LOT

The Facebook server halls now built in Sweden will consume the same amount of energy as 16,000 private homes. In addition the halls need backup diesel generators; in case of a blackout, construction designs call for each building to have 14 backup diesel generators with a total output of 40 MW.  Read more on Facebook receives massive support for Swedish data centre

It is very hard to calculate the real energy use for the whole IT sector and the growing cloud, figures vary from a couple of percent up to ten. What is indisputable is that it is a sector with almost explosive growth and that its share of energy use is also growing very rapidly.

This might require some large-scale societal response. But as always we also have individual responsibility. Some chose to opt out altogether, others thinks that the internet is the best that happened the world since sliced bread. I tread the middle way of mild skepticism.
The least you and I can do is to empty the trash can
And we can sort out all those old photos and lousy videos on YouTube (I forgot them!). I am sure that half of the stuff in the cloud could be deleted NOW and we could close down a dozen coal powered plants in a blink.

Why competition is unsustainable

Large farms now dominate crop production in the United States. Although most cropland was operated by farms with less than 600 crop acres in the early 1980s, today most cropland is on farms with at least 1,100 acres, and many farms are 5 and 10 times that size. Meanwhile In 1987, the midpoint dairy herd size was 80 cows; by 2007, it was 570 cows. The change in hogs was even more striking, from 1,200 hogs removed in a year to 30,000. This long-term shifts in farm size have been accompanied by greater specialization—beginning with a separation of livestock farming from crop farming in the latter half of the 20th century. For instance in 1900, there were dairy cows and hogs on three-fourth of the farms, while in 2005 only one farm in twenty had either hogs or dairy cows. This allowed crop farmers could devote more time to crop production, invest in crop production and gradually increase yields and acreages[i].

Larger crop farms perform better financially, on average, than smaller farms. The difference is mainly in the cost of production. The larger farms don’t have higher revenue or yields per acre, but they simply have lower costs or as expressed by a report 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 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 labour and double the amount for equipment[ii].

At he same time, the number of production and marketing contracts to govern the sale of products has increased, which also acts as a driver for increased size of farms. Contracts covered 32 percent of United States crop production in 2011, compared with 23 percent in the mid-1990s. Larger operations are more likely to use contracts, which can reduce the price and marketing risks faced by farmers[iii]. The same report, Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming, also explains that it is cost saving that is the main driver for the use of GM crops. By and large, similar developments are seen in other parts of the world, e.g. in Sweden 1927 there were 350,000 farms having an average of 4 hogs, while 2010 there were only 1,700 farms having hogs and they had an average of 1,900 hogs[iv].


Agriculture suffers from a paradox which many outside of the sector is not aware of and even fewer understand. The secretary of agriculture of the United States wrote in his annual report 1910 that “year after year it has been my privilege to record ‘another prosperous year in agriculture’”. What has been called a golden age for American agriculture, the period between 1900 and 1914, was a period of almost no growth in the sector. Output per worker increased with only 1 percent between 1900 and 1910. And total farm output only 8 percent. Meanwhile the population increased by a whopping 21 percent. The result of this was better prices for farmers and thus the prosperous years.

Conversely in the 1950s, agriculture output increased in a rapid pace, and all of it as a result of increased agriculture productivity. However, the decade is remembered as a time of hardship for most farm families. Input prices went up and farm product prices fell. A million and a half farm families ultimately gave up farming in this decade as they couldn’t make ends meet. Those that survived were of course the more advanced and commercially successful farmers, which could buy up the land from those that lost out. A similar period came in the 1980s when productivity grew with 3 percent annually, while product prices fell, input prices and interest rates soared. “in term of agricultural development for the national economy the decade of 1980s was a huge success; in terms of the financial well-being of most farmers it was an economic nightmare” writes Willard W. Cochrane[v].

By and large farmers are stuck in a treadmill. They are forced by competition to increase productivity, and the increased productivity leads to lower prices. Product development and innovation which allows industrial companies to stay out of a similar treadmill is taking place in the subsequent chains in the food chains, among food processors and retailers. And even there, there are much less elasticity in food consumption than for most other products. The fact that “people will always need food” is a small comfort for the farmer who can’t compete. This treadmill is the reason for the enormous pace in increase in size and productivity in farming. The vanguard farmers will constantly develop and improve and mostly increase in size, at the expense of their less successful colleagues.

For farmers who can’t participate in this stiff competition there is no way out – or rather there is only the way out – get out! This is the fact for a group of farmer with similar conditions. But ultimately it works in the same way globally, where all farmers compete with each other. Some production disappear all together. In some parts of the world the available nature resources are clearly limiting the possibilities for large scale farming. Compare for instance the conditions for a farmer growing grain in a traditional agriculture areas in Europe. The landscape is varied and roads, rivulets, hills and not the least buildings make fields small. Because of scarcity of land, land prices are also high and not determined primarily by agricultural productivity. The farmer will end up with a small farm and the size of machinery can never be the same as on the Great Plains. Those farmers can never produce grain for the same costs as their competitors in United States, Russia or Argentina, even if they can intensify production and get higher yields per hectare.

Of course, for economic development at large, this constant productivity increase in farming sets free resources that are used in other sectors. It is quite clear that reducing the proportion of workers in the farm sector from eighty percent to, say, twenty percent was a precondition for a lot of modern developments, including both good and bad developments. But one might wonder if there are advantages to continue this process in an endless treadmill? But “enough” is a word that doesn’t really exist in the language of economist, or politicians for that matter.

The treadmill is both driven by specialization and drives further specialization, filling each area with just one or two crops or huge livestock operations. The economic and social implications are huge, but the environmental implications are even bigger. The large scale landscapes are stripped of variation and bio-diversity, it doesn’t produce the eco system services we need and we will have to produce them elsewhere at high costs. The systems also cost direct and indirect damages on nature which have to be compensated for.

This model has replaced most local reproductive systems and energy with a linear model, an industrial model of production. This model is part and parcel of the success and therefore the agriculture treadmill och unlimited competition will never be sustainable. It leads us further astray.

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[i] Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming, ERR-152, Economic Research Service/USDA
[ii] Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming, ERR-152, Economic Research Service/USDA
[iii] Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming, ERR-152, Economic Research Service/USDA
[iv] Hållbarhet i svenskt jordbruk 2012, SCB 2012
[v] The Development of American Agriculture, Willard W. Cochrane, University of Minnesota Press 1993

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A mosaic of regenerative agriculture systems

"The world needs a paradigm shift in agricultural development: from a “green revolution” to an “ecological intensification” approach. This implies a rapid and significant shift from conventional, monoculture-based and high- external-input-dependent industrial production towards mosaics of sustainable, regenerative production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers. We need to recognize that a farmer is not only a producer of agricultural goods, but also a manager of an agro-ecological system that provides quite a number of public goods and services (e.g. water, soil, landscape, energy, biodiversity, and recreation)".

This is one of the key messages of a new report from United Nations Conference of Trade and Development, UNCTAD. The Trade and Environment Report 2013, subtitled Wake up before it is too late: Make agriculture truly sustainable now for food security in a changing climate, warns that continuing rural poverty, persistent hunger around the world, growing populations, and mounting environmental concerns must be treated as a collective crisis. It says that urgent and far-reaching action is needed before climate change begins to cause major disruptions to agriculture, especially in developing countries.

Agricultural development, the report underlines, is at a true crossroads. Food prices in the period 2011 to mid-2013 were almost 80% higher than for the period 2003-2008. Global fertilizer use increased by 8 times in the past 40 years, although global cereal production has scarcely doubled at the same time. The growth rates of agricultural productivity have recently declined from 2% to below 1% per annum. The two global environmental limits that have already been crossed (nitrogen contamination of soils and waters and biodiversity loss) were caused by agriculture. GHG emissions from agriculture are not only the single biggest source of global warming in the South, besides the transport sector, they are also the most dynamic. The scale of foreign land acquisitions (often also termed land grabbing) dwarfs the level of Official Development Assistance, the former being 5-10 times higher in value than the latter in recent years.

But most important of all are the persistent problems with hunger, malnutrition, and access to food. Almost 1 billion people currently suffer from hunger, and another 1 billion are malnourished, the report notes, even though current global agricultural production already provides sufficient calories to feed a population of 12 to 14 billion. Some 70 per cent of the hungry or malnourished are themselves small-scale farmers or agricultural labourers, indicating that poverty and access to food are the most critical challenges.

The report recommends adjusting trade rules to encourage “as much regionalized/localized food production as possible; as much traded food as necessary.” The past strategy of relying on international markets to meet staple food demand, while specializing in the production and export of “lucrative” cash crops, has recently failed to deliver its desired results, because it has relied on low staple food prices and no shortage of supply in international markets, conditions that have drastically changed since the turn of the century, the report notes.

TER13 highlights that the required transformation is much more profound than simply tweaking the existing industrial agricultural system. However, the sheer scale at which modified production methods would have to be adopted, the significant governance issues, the power asymmetries' problems in food input and output markets as well as the current trade rules for agriculture pose considerable challenges.

More than 60 international experts contributed to the report’s analysis of the topic. It is incredibly comprehensive with a lot of interesting discussion, some of which I will comment on later on this blog. The full report is available at http://unctad.org/en/pages/PublicationWebflyer.aspx?publicationid=666. I have written one of the chapters in the report on Agriculture, Food and Energy.

A new book is emerging

From Extraction to Regeneration: Food and Farming for the 21^st Century

 

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

From extraction to regeneration: Food and Farming for the 21st century explains how our food and farm system developed into the system we have today, and how interdependent our food system and society are. Gunnar Rundgren demonstrates how farming and food processing technologies have transformed our lives and our relationship not only with nature, the plants we grow and the animals we raise, but also the relationships among ourselves.

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

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

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

From extraction to regeneration: Food and Farming for the 21st century shows a path forward. A path of regeneration and co-production of resources, innovation, knowledge and meaning embedded in new social and economic relationships. 

This is a presentation of my present book project. I am deep into research now, plan to have manuscript ready by end of the year.  The title is tentative. Any interesting leads related to the themes is appreciated, in particular those that link food processing to either farming technologies or food habits, or society change. Most literature on food processing is simply about the technologies and not what the technologies mean upstream or downstream, or even in the food processing itself. 

Ethics for sale?

Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker, opened a store in Baltimore 1836 which sold only goods obtained by labor from free people. This is an early example of ethical marketing which continued up to the end of slavery in the United States in 1865.

Ethical marketing based on voluntary standards and certification has spread in a rapid pace the last decades, as a result of converging - and interacting – trends. Most notably,
- a trend towards emphasizing the market and consumer choice as important tools to accomplish ethical, economic, environmental or social goals;
- a trend of government de-regulation, which leaves more self-regulation to the industries; and
- stiff global competition which makes differentiation in the market place an essential survival strategy to escape ‘commodity hell’;

When you buy a cup of coffee for €2 the farmer gets 3-4 cents for the coffee in that cup. If you buy a cup of organic and fair trade coffee you are likely to have to cough-up €2.50 - and the farmer will get 4-5 cents. The farmer’s income will increase, perhaps with impressive 20-25 percent. Looking from another perspective, however, you spend 50 cents to increase the farmer’s income with 1 or 2 cents. This example begs the question if the market mechanism is efficient in transforming consumers’ willingness to pay for direct or indirect benefits of a product to an increase in income for producers.

We don’t have voluntary standards for social conditions for labor in Scandinavia – but there is a Food Justice Certified scheme developed in the United States now. Why? Because it is needed in the United States but not in Scandinavia. These systems mainly emerge in the space between what is well regulated by markets and by governments respectively. Whether they are results of “policy failures” or “market failures” or if they should be seen as permanent institutions is a topic for debate – a debate that is kept here.

Some sector wide commodity schemes, such as the Roundtables on sustainable Palm oil, soya and biofuels have the ambition of being “floor standards”, that is de facto a license to make business. The impact of such standards on trade is substantial. And if they are de facto compulsory, one can of course ask if they should not be subject of regulation and thereby follow the same lines of accountability both nationally and internationally. Many, in particular developing countries, see these voluntary standards as barriers to trade.

In most cases they are dictated by the strong actors in the market place. The most notable example of that is the GLOBAL GAP standard, where supermarkets dictate standards which effectively exclude millions of smallholders from the market place. The same supermarkets which market fair trade products intended to help smallholders.

In Sweden, like in most countries, governments say that it is consumer choice that will determine if farms will farm organically or not. But governments could prohibit, or impose prohibitive fees, on chemical pesticides if they so wished. They could ban factory farming, it they so wished, and if we demand that as citizens.

There are some 100,000 chemicals in use. Certainly, I didn’t make any conscious choice if my computer should be soaked in this or that flame retardant or which chemicals are in my new sofa. To have to select “environmentally friendly” products means that the government authorizes the sale of products that are harmful for the environment. I don’t think it should be a matter of consumer choice if there is Bisphenol A or not in our food.

My conclusion after working with this for some thirty years is that the market mechanism is not efficient in dealing with problems that are rooted in fundamental structures of society, the market itself and the economy. Which is why the buying of fair trade coffee never will end poverty. This was also realized by those fighting against slavery in the United States. The market for products from free labor didn’t abolish slavery. It was political action, and even a Civil War, that led to the abolition of slavery.

Our acts as consumers and our acts as citizens can be linked, and one can bear the seeds for the other one. For instance:
-For a while ethical consumers boycotted eggs from layers in cages, until there was a public ban.
-For a while environmental activists refused to buy refrigerators with CFC, or Freon, as it was called. Then governments agreed to phase it out with the Montreal protocol 1 January 1989.
-There were massive consumer and academic boycotts of South Africa for the apartheid policy. These lasted twenty years until most Western countries agreed to international sanctions.

Clearly this is not an either-or discussion. Most people, including myself, don’t want a nanny state where the government tells us in detail what to do, what to buy or not buy. It is also not a question about the market or the state only. There are many more, non market and non-state, ways of organizing our life and our food. The most apparent is of course to produce the food yourself. But new initiatives such as community supported agriculture are also based on non-market relations, even if they use some of the tools of the market, such as money.

In my view, it is a good thing to make educated and ethical consumer choices. It is not only a good thing - it is our responsibility. But in many cases it makes more sense to have those choices made politically. It is mainly the not so important things and matters for which there is a lot of disagreement that are best left to the market.

Telling consumers that they will change the world or eradicate poverty by shopping is to deceive them.

(notes for my introductory talk at the panel Ethics for sale which was part of the 11th EURsafe conference, The Ethics of Consumption: The Citizen, The Market, and The Law)

Yakuniku - The Emperor's new dish

If you eaten in a Japanese restaurant, chances are big that you devoured Yakiniku, grilled meat. You probably believe it is developed from a long tradition of street vendors selling barbecue. Nothing could be further from reality. At the age of twenty, Emperor Meiji staged a remarkable new year’s party in Tokyo January 1873. As part of efforts to modernize Japan into the direction of the model of an enlightened Nation state –Meiji means “enlightened rule” - , guests were dressed in western style cloths and on the plates French style food was served. Most remarkably, there was beef and the Emperor himself ate beef in public. By this he broke a more than thousand year old taboo. The first decree against eating meat was issued on 675 in Japan and was repeated several times over the almost eleven hundred years before that remarkable party.[i]

What we eat and how we eat it is to a very large extent shaped by many other forces than consumer demand. Many of the shifts in diet are consequences of power politics, capitalism and technology of modern imperialism. For example, by introducing, among other things, rice, cattle, coffee and sugar-cane to the Americas, Europeans, in turn, not only altered the local foodways, but also made the economies of American societies part of global markets[ii].

When I grew up in Sweden all our bread was sweetened, and I thought that was normal. But recently I came to realise that this was a result of public policy forty years before I was born. During World War I there was a shortage of grain in Sweden, but a surplus of sugar. Therefore the authorities commanded bakeries to mix sugar with the flour to keep people sated and happy. Once eating the sweet bread we got used to it – it became something we chose.

“War is probably the single most powerful instrument of dietary change in human experience” writes Sydney Mintz in Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Under conditions of war, old habits may be surrendered more easily and new ones established with less resistance than would be the case in peaceful circumstances. Katarzyna J. Cwiertka studied the food in Japanese canteens and observed that the menues in modern day Tokyo are made up of dishes that are luxury versions of those served in the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy half a century earlier.

World War II reshaped food preferences of American citizens, both those who were drafted into the armed forces and civilians at home. This transformation of diet was also on close cooperation with the food industry. The President of Coca Cola, Robert Woodruff, ordered that every man in uniform should get a bottle of Coca-Cola for 5 cents, wherever he is, and whatever it costs 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 Coca Cola company describes the effect on its web site[iii].

As for many other industries, orders from the military have been a major driver of technology change. It is not only penicilin, aircrafts and the internet that are results of military demand but also canning. In 1795, a Parisian chef and confectioner, Nicolas Appert experimented in new ways of preserving foods by putting soups, vegetables, juices, dairy products, jellies, jams, and syrups in glass jars, sealing them and placing them in boiling water. In 1800 Napoleon, who is widely quoted, accurately or not, as saying, "An army marches on its stomach," offered an award of 12,000 francs to anyone who could devise a practical method for food preservation for the armies. The award went to Appert. Since the method was considered to be of strategic importance, Appert was not allowed to publish it until 1810[iv].

In a similar way as for Coca Cola, the Norman Camembert-makers were very successful in selling their cheese to the French military in World War I in sharp competition with Gruyere. Camembert won the war, and became itself part of the myth of the Great War, demanded by the million surviving conscripts[v].

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[i] The politics of food, Marianne Elisabeth Lien & Brigitte Nerlich,  

[ii] Popularizing a Military Diet in Wartime and Postwar Japan, Katarzyna J. CWIERTKA

[iii] http://heritage.coca-cola.com/timeline.swf

[iv] Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) No. 59.

[v] Camembert, a national Myth, Pierre Boisard

Groundbreaking innovations: the shopping cart and the container

Forget the mobile phone and the computer. Forget television and the Green revolution. The two major game-changers of the 20th century were the shopping cart and the container.

The capacity for human shopping is determined by the size of your wallet, but also by the physical ability to carry the stuff. Sylvan Goldman, owner of a food store in Oklahoma City noticed that customers usually quit shopping when the baskets became too heavy, shopping fatigue. In 1937, he invented the shopping cart which largely expanded the customer’s ability to hold and purchase more goods at the same time.

© Vladimir Tonic

In 2013 Maersk’s Mc-Kinney Møller made its maiden voyage from the Daewoo shipyard in South Korea. For a while it will be the biggest ship in the world. It carries 18,000 containers, each of them 20ft long, 8ft wide and 8ft high. That’s enough space for 36,000 cars or 111 million pairs of trainers. Over the next two years, Maersk is overseeing the construction of another 19 similar vessels, forming a class of ship it calls “Triple-E” dedicated to the Asia-Europe route.
This ship is a powerful, albeit often neglected symbol of globalization.

Containerization greatly reduced the expense of international trade and increased its speed, especially of consumer goods and commodities. It also dramatically changed the character of port cities worldwide. Prior to highly mechanized container transfers, crews of longshoremen would pack individual cargoes into the hold of a ship. Loading took a lot of time, there was high risk of damage to the goods by bad weather or theft. A common joke at the New York piers was that the dockers’ wages were “twenty dollars a day and all the Scotch you could carry home” From factory to end customer up to twelve handlings are eliminated by the containerization[i].

Malcolm McLean, a trucking entrepreneur from North Carolina wanted to integrate trucking on land and shipping, which so far had been separate business. He let convert a World War II tanker into the Ideal- X, with a reinforced deck to sustain the load of 58 modified lorry trailers. The world's first purpose-built container crane started to operate in 1959 and loaded one 40,000-pound box every three minutes. The productivity gains from using this container crane were staggering, as it could handle 400 tons per hours, more than 40 times the average of a longshore gang.

Three researchers, Daniel M. Bernhofen, Zouheir El-Sahli and Richard Kneller concludes in a recent study that:

"Regarding North-North trade, the cumulative average treatment effects of containerization over a 20 year time period amount to about 700%, can be interpreted as causal, and are much larger than the effects of free trade agreements or the GATT." 

Containers are generally constructed of aluminum or steel with each container size and type built according to the same ISO specifications, regardless of where the container is manufactured. There are more than 17 million container units and every container has its own unique unit number, who owns the container, who is using the container to ship goods and even track the container's whereabouts anywhere in the world[i]

What would Wal-Mart or IKEA be without shopping carts and containers?

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[i] http://www.worldshipping.org/about-the-industry/containers, accessed 6 September 2013

 

[i] Estimating the Effects of the Container Revolution on World Trade  Daniel M. Bernhofen

Zouheir El-Sahli, Richard Kneller, February 2013

How wet is your cucumber?

There are many arguments about the effects of our food consumption. In particular, the consumption of meat is often portrayed as harmful, be it for the climate, for food supply or for our health. What we eat and how we process it effects water consumption, here the concept of water footprint is the most used. Treehugger says that if you really want to reduce your water foot print you should cut back on meat. The Guardian calls for water foot print labelling. 

While a human being needs a few litres of water to drink, at least 1000 times as much water is used for production of food. The water needed for foods varies tremendously and varies for the same product under different conditions. Often the figures mix  ‘blue’ water—water in rivers and lakes, ‘green’ water—water in rainfall and in the soil, and ‘grey’ water—the water needed to absorb or purify the waste. The water footprint - per kg - of beef is big, ten times as big as for grain and fifty times bigger than for vegetables, if water sources are counted.

	Water use (l/kg)
	Green	Blue	Grey	Total
Beef	14414	550	451	15415
Nuts	7106	1367	680	9153
Lamb	8253	457	53	8763
Ckicken	3545	313	467	4325
Egg	2592	244	429	3265
Oil crops	2023	220	121	2364
Grains	1232	228	184	1644
Milk	863	86	72	1021
Root crops	327	16	43	386
Vegetables	194	43	85	322
Sugar crops	130	52	15	197

But statistics can be presented in many ways. Green water as rainfall is not the same as the water in lakes or wells, the blue water. In many places where cattle graze it would still be too dry to grow any crop. Also, water foot print per kg is a dubious measurement. We eat very different quantities of food, and their concentration of useful nutrients differ widely. If we look at use of blue and green water per calorie, nuts has the lowest efficiency in water use and root crops are the best. Vegetables and meat are quite similar.  Looking at blue and grey water use per protein, oil crops are best followed by milk, lamb root crops and grain. Nuts and vegetables are the least efficient.  

In general many people jump to conclusions when it comes to food. Mostly, they jump in the direction of a choice they already made.