Canadian mennonite article series: #5: energy and food
We have, as a nation, become amazingly flippant about food.
We are ignorant about where food comes from, we utterly rely on “the system” for food security, we appear willing to consume the strangest concoctions of chemicals made to appear as food, we insist on eating only “perfect looking” food, and we buy food as cheaply as possible.
Compared to any other part of the world, North Americans spend the smallest fraction of their income (approximately 10%) on food, making it clear that we really care about only one thing: price. There is a cost, however, to cheap food.
Our society expects food to be cheap and resists paying for food, therefore the government looks for ways to make food cheap (subsidies, trade barriers), and farmers are pressured to look for ways to make food cheap (mono-cropping, pesticides), especially by relying on cheap energy (leading to excessive fertilizer use and industrial-scale-farming). The reliance on energy has progressed to the point that, by the time the food reaches your plate, approximately ten calories of fuel energy have gone into every single food calorie that you eat.
However consider the following example. A government which maintains spending, but lowers taxes, must take on debt. However the debt is essentially a hidden tax, levied on the future. The low taxes are misleading, because the hidden taxes are accumulating, causing an erosion of future capital.
In precisely the same way, cheap food is likely eroding future agricultural capital. To produce food (temporarily!) at the lowest possible price is easy: wreck the land! Plant like mad, erode the soil, deplete the topsoil, irrigate the land and drain the groundwater, fertilize and poison the ecosystem, and take advantage of cheap fossil fuels. The food is cheap only because our economic system fails to account for any of these capital losses – the loss of topsoil, fertility, groundwater etc. However just like ballooning credit-card debt, eating away at agricultural capital can continue only so long.
Now it is true that food prices have increased, but not because North American consumers have embraced quality food. The reason is far more pernicious: in the same way that we can use fuel to produce food, it is also possible to convert the energy in food into fuel. In principle, producing biodiesel or ethanol seems like a good idea: they are carbon-neutral (no extra carbon into the atmosphere) and can be locally produced from a wide range of agricultural outputs.
However producing fuel from agricultural output most definitely does not mean that this is good for the environment. Large-scale production of bio-fuel is most convenient from large-scale production of single crops, mostly corn for ethanol and soyabeans or Jatropha (a tropical plant) for biodiesel. We are now seeing extensive mono-cropping (no rotation) of corn in North America, clearing of Amazon rainforest for soyabeans, and clearing of Indonesian rainforest for Jatropha; all three of these are ecological disasters (and, in many cases, human/cultural disasters too).
Next, although the world grows vast amounts of produce, it pales in comparison with our energy use. Read the following sentences twice:
Total worldwide food production has an energy of only one fifth to one sixth as much
as the fossil fuel energy which we consume.
The entire U.S. corn crop, if converted into ethanol, would come nowhere near replacing U.S. gasoline consumption. It is important to really, clearly understand, therefore, that to replace even a modest fraction of fossil fuel use will require a rather substantial amount of food. It is also important to understand that there are limits to food production, given limits to arable land, fertilizer (from natural gas) and fresh water. And finding a new, huge market for a constrained food supply almost certainly means an increase in food prices.
And who ends up suffering when food starts getting converted into fuel? The same group that has suffered terribly through decades of distorted, subsidized, see-sawing food policies: the poor, mostly in Africa and Asia.
Terrible political games have been played with food prices, primarily between the United States and Europe, causing periodic price drops (destroying export income for agriculturally-dependent third-world countries) and price rises (pricing poor consumers out of basic staples). Even worse are the deliberate, systematic targeting of the poor, such as the despicable history of the United Fruit Company in Central America, or the trade practices between the United States and Haiti around cotton and rice.
Now the food-to-fuel race will be yet one more, great slap against the world poor. First, the energy crops (corn, beans) are staples, so increases in the costs of these products affect the poor very strongly. Second, many of the third-world cash crops (coffee, cocoa, bananas) are not energy crops, so their export value will increase more slowly than the import cost of staples. Third, the poor already spend a large fraction of their income on food, and have far less economic room to manoeuvre than most North Americans do.
There is no single person to be held accountable for this mess. If there are people are willing to pay for energy, then “the system” finds a way to provide it. Every time you book a flight or fill the tank of your car you declare yourself willing to pay for the energy, regardless where it comes from. If you don't like the sound of fuel-versus-food, the only rational response is to work at your reducing energy consumption, to declare your unwillingness to have energy at any cost.
In contrast to the daunting issues of global energy, food consumption is one place where the individual has clear choices. One can buy organic, local foods from farmer's markets, participate in community-shared-agriculture (CSA), buy fair-trade, or plant a vegetable garden. One can purchase dry goods by the sack, purchase dry beans instead of tinned, purchase butchered meat in bulk from a local farmer, and buy fruit and vegetables by the bushel in the summer to freeze or can.
You are commanded, in no uncertain terms, to love your neighbour as yourself. I therefore see a responsibility to yourself (to your health, to the health of your family), to your community (promoting sustainable development of the ecosystem, not eating into capital), to the rest of humanity (fair forms of trade which do not deliberately create impoverishment or indebtedness), and to all of creation (the global environment).