By Tony Weis
Rapidly rising food prices around the world are casting tens of millions into increasingly desperate circumstances of malnourishment and hunger. Related to this have been intensifying social tensions in many places, witness food-price riots in more than 30 countries. In the Caribbean, the problems and tensions have been most dramatic in Haiti, where food riots and scenes of people eating mud-cakes to stave off pangs of hunger have recently made news.The rapid doubling in global market prices of cereals has occurred at a time when aggregate global grain production has never been greater, part of the reason why many believe higher food prices are not a short-term blip but rather are likely to mark a new era – what The Economist has called ‘the end of cheap food’ — posing deep questions about dominant approaches to food security.
A basic assumption associated with global market integration is that nations should focus their productive resources in sectors where they hold a comparative advantage in order to enhance their export capacity and foreign exchange earnings, and open their markets to maximize access to the most competitive goods and services, wherever these might be sourced from. This has been at the crux of the economic prescriptions of the World Bank and IMF, and the mandate of the WTO.
For adherents of this logic, food is no different; irrespective of all of the social, cultural, and environmental implications bound up in agriculture, it is to be treated as a commodity which should be sourced from global markets when cheaper than domestic production. In short, freer markets have been framed as the best means to food security.
Increasingly, food security on a world scale rests upon on a small number of agro-exporting countries. More than half of the world’s agro-exports and an even bigger share of all grain and livestock exports come from very large-scale, industrialized producers in a small number of countries such as the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and France, which are together home to a tiny fraction of the world’s farmers. The flipside of this global, industrialized ‘breadbasket’ is the precarious dependence upon grain imports in many developing countries, especially the poorest among them. The world’s low income countries collectively run a large net agro-trade deficit while struggling to generate foreign exchange, importation the FAO projects will increase in the coming decades.
The disjuncture between rosy theory and vulnerability in practice grows further when the enormous distortions of the global food economy are considered.
These distortions are both overt, in the well-known subsidy regimes of the US and EU, and implicit and less recognized, hidden in the un- and under-valued biophysical costs of industrial agriculture and the long-distance transhipment of food, in particular through the relatively cheap cost of fossil energy and derivatives. These overt and implicit subsidies have long boosted the competitiveness of the industrialized breadbasket and fostered food import dependence amongst poor countries, but some of the implicit subsidies are now quickly breaking down.
When the range of fossilized inputs into industrial monocultures is considered – energy to run heavy machinery for ploughing, spraying, and harvesting and many large-scale irrigation systems; the large volumes of natural gas-derived synthetic fertilizers (given heightened susceptibility to erosion); and petrochemical-based pesticides and herbicides (given heightened vulnerability to pest and weed infestation) – coupled with the energy involved in long-distance transhipment, cheap industrial foods are akin to ‘eating fossil fuels’, as one recent book puts it.
While there are obvious uncertainties about the extent of the world’s oil reserves, most industry estimates are that roughly 1.2-1.3 T barrels remain, about the same volume as has been consumed since the late 19th century. There are also clear uncertainties about the rate of growth in consumption, but even holding 2007 consumption levels constant this supply would only last roughly 3 more decades.
This is presented bluntly in a recent Chevron ad: “It took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil. We’ll use the next trillion in 30.”
The rising costs and scarcity of oil is putting pressure on global food prices in two basic ways. First and most obviously, as the price of oil rises the implicit subsidy it provides to industrial agriculture and long-distance shipping falls. Second, industrial agriculture is increasingly being posed as a technological fix for the looming shortage of liquid fuel, with many governments, led by the US, promoting a race into biofuel production. On a global scale, the share of global cereal production devoted to biofuels increased by 15 percent from 2006 to 2007 alone, and this is expected to continue rising as many countries have set ambitious targets for biofuel expansion. In addition to the biofuel boom, global cereal prices are also being influenced by the strong pull contained in growing livestock consumption in fast industrializing parts of Asia, led by China. Given how ‘hot’ agricultural commodities are in this context, some suggest that speculative capital flows are driving prices even higher.
All of this poses profound questions for the Caribbean region, where food security is so utterly wedded to global markets and heretofore cheap breadbasket imports. In relative terms, no region in the world is more dependent upon imported food than the islands of the Caribbean, and the costs of this food import dependence are going to be much higher in the future than they have been through the period in which this dependence was sown. The spectre of export prohibitions has also reared up in some countries in recent months, casting the vulnerabilities of breadbasket dependence in even starker terms.
In this new era, Caribbean leaders will be challenged to think about long forgotten ideas of agrarian reform, food security through enhanced domestic and regional production (and integration), and the need to support small farming. This will require an urgent re-conceptualization of small farmers, not as vestiges of an outdated past or as a residual vocation that acts a sponge for unemployment, but as key agents in building productive, sustainable, and low external input agricultural systems into the future. The skill and knowledge of small farmers, enhanced by modern scientific approaches to managing functional diversity in agriculture, will be at the heart of future food security beyond the age of cheap oil.
