[FLPERMACULTURE] The end of cheap food

[Michael Burns]

The End of Cheap food
Gwynne Dyer

Monday, July 9th 2007

The era of cheap food is over. The price of corn has doubled in a  
year, and wheat futures are at their highest in a decade. The food  
price index in India has risen 11 per cent in one year, and in Mexico  
in January there were riots after the price of corn flour (used in  
making the staple food of the poor, tortillas) went up fourfold. Even  
in the developed countries food prices are going up, and they are not  
going to come down again.

Cheap food lasted for only 50 years. Before the Second World War most  
families in the developed countries spent a third or more of their  
income on food (as the poor majority in developing countries still  
do). But after the war a series of radical changes, from  
mechanisation to the Green Revolution, raised agricultural  
productivity hugely and caused a long, steep fall in the real price  
of food. For the global middle class, it was the Good Old Days, with  
food taking only a tenth of their income.

It will probably be back up to a quarter within a decade, and it may  
go much higher than that, because we are entering a period when three  
separate factors are converging to drive food prices up. The first is  
simply demand. Not only is the global population continuing to grow  
(about an extra Turkey or Vietnam every year), but as Asian economies  
race ahead more and more people in those populous countries are  
starting to eat significant amounts of meat.

Early this month, in its annual assessment of farming trends, the  
United Nations predicted that by 2016, less than ten years from now,  
people in the developing countries will be eating 30 per cent more  
beef, 50 per cent more pig meat and 25 per cent more poultry. The  
animals will need a great deal of grain, and meeting that demand will  
require shifting huge amounts of grain-growing land from human to  
animal consumption-so the price of grain and of meat will both go up.

The global poor don't care about the price of meat, because they  
can't afford it even now-but if the price of grain goes up, some of  
them will starve. And maybe they won't have to wait until 2016,  
because the mania for "bio-fuels" is shifting huge amounts of land  
out of food production. One-sixth of all the grain grown in the  
United States this year will be "industrial corn" destined to be  
converted into ethanol and burned in cars, and Europe, Brazil and  
China are all heading in the same direction.

The attraction of bio-fuels for politicians is obvious: they can  
claim that they are doing something useful to combat emissions and  
global warming (though the claims are deeply suspect), without  
actually demanding any sacrifices from business or the voters. The  
amount of US farmland devoted to bio-fuels grew by 48 per cent in the  
last year alone, and hardly any new land was brought under the plough  
to replace the lost food production. In other big bio-fuel producers  
like China and Brazil it's the same straight switch from food to  
fuel. In fact, the food market and the energy market are becoming  
closely linked, which is very bad news for the poor.

As oil prices rise (and the rapid economic growth in Asia guarantees  
that they will), they pull up the price of bio-fuels as well, and it  
gets even more attractive for farmers to switch from food to fuel.

Nor will politics save the day. As economist Lester Brown of the  
Earth Policy Institute told the US Congress last month: "The stage is  
now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million  
people who own automobiles, and the world's two billion poorest  
people." Guess who wins.

Soaring Asian demand and bio-fuels mean expensive food now and in the  
near future, but then it gets worse. Global warming hits crop yields,  
but only recently has anybody quantified how hard. The answer,  
published in "Environmental Research Letters" in March by Christopher  
Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California and David  
Lobell of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is quite simple:  
for every 0.5C (0.9F) hotter, crop yields fall between three and five  
per cent. So two degrees C hotter (3.6F), the lower end of the range  
of predicted temperature rise in this century, means a twelve to  
twenty percent fall in global food production.

This is science, of course, so that answer could be wrong-but it  
could be wrong by being too conservative. Last year in New Delhi, I  
interviewed the director of a think tank who had just completed a  
contract to estimate the impact on Indian food production of a rise  
of just two degrees C in global temperature. The answer, at least for  
India, was 25 per cent. That would mean mass starvation, for if India  
were in that situation, every other major food-producing country  
would be too, and there would be no imports available at any price.

In the early stages of this process, higher food prices will help  
millions of farmers who have been scraping along on very poor returns  
for their effort because political power lies in the cities, but  
later it gets uglier. The price of food relative to average income is  
heading for levels that have not been seen since the early 19th  
century, and it will not come down again in our lifetimes.

-Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles  
are published in 45 countries.


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