Policies for Sustainable Food Systems, National and Global

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14 Sep 2005 13:05:39 -0000

Policies for Sustainable Food Systems, National and Global

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This article can be found on the I-SIS website at

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ISIS Press Release 14/09/05

 

Policies for Sustainable Food Systems, National and Global

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Michael Meacher

 

Why our current agriculture and food production is not

sustainable

 

There are five reasons why our current food system is not

sustainable. First, the increasingly mechanised agriculture

depends on oil, but the supply of oil is beginning to run

out, or at least half of the 2 trillion barrels of oil

available has already been used and oil demand from China,

India and other major developing countries which are

industrialising fast is rising so sharply that production

cannot keep up with demand, and permanent shortages of oil

will kick in within a decade or less. The price of oil will

escalate to $100-$200+, and oil-driven food production will

sharply decline.

 

Second, the growing shortage of water means that half a

billion people now already live in water-stressed areas, and

the UN expects this to rise 5-6 fold to half the world

population by 2025. This will lead to massive shifts of

populations and water wars. Frankly, the current use of

water in agriculture is extravagant and utterly

unsustainable. For example, US prairie farmers and East

Anglian barley barons need 1 000 tonnes of water to produce

1 tonne of grain, plus 1 000 energy units are used for every

1 energy unit of processed food. That is just not

sustainable.

 

Third, the intensification of climate change has led to a

ten-fold increase in the incidence and ferocity of climatic

catastrophes in the past 40 years. These include major-scale

hurricanes, cyclones, floods, as well as increasing drought,

desertification, inextinguishable forest fires, which are

now rendering more and more croplands unusable or infertile.

Half a billion of the world population now do not have

croplands on which they can maintain themselves. The latest

UN report says one sixth of countries in the world (up to 30

nations) now face food shortages because of climate change.

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimates

160 000 now die every year from climate-change induced

malnutrition, dysentery and malaria.

 

Fourth, the loss of biodiversity from monocultures imposed

by industrialised farming, not least GM crops. A quarter of

the world's GM crops are grown in Argentina, where huge

areas were cleared to grow GM soya, especially Argentina's

pampas, previously one of the most organically productive

areas in the world.

 

Fifth, long-distance transportation of food across the world

is incompatible with the requirement to reduce greenhouse

gas emissions by 60 percent by 2050. Between 1968-88, world

food production increased 84 percent and the world

population 91 percent, but world food trade increased 184

percent (i.e. doubled), yet planes and cars are the fastest

rising causes of greenhouse gas emissions. To put that in

household terms – a typical UK family of four emits per year

4 tonnes of CO2 from the house, 4 tonnes from the car, but 8

tonnes from production, processing, packaging and

distribution of the food they eat.

 

So what should be done?

 

I have five proposals. First, we need a massive switch from

highly mechanised, pesticide-driven agriculture to low-

input/organic agriculture with energy saving up to 10-fold.

How? The current food system is linear in design, treating

inputs like energy and raw materials as infinitely available

(which they are not) and the environment as infinitely

capable of absorbing waste (which it is not). This is not

sustainable. To change this, we need a tax system that

factors in the full cost of all these finite items and uses

the proceeds to subsidise organic, low input and localised

agriculture systems. In contrast, organic production

systems are an example of sustainable circular methods of

food production in harmony with the natural eco-system. Is

this happening? Well, although sales of organic food in the

UK have quadrupled from £260 million in 1997 to over £1

billion now, the one million acres now devoted to organic

production is still only 2-3% of agricultural land in the

UK.

 

Second, developing a sustainable food system should become a

major Government policy based on setting targets for:

 

Sustainable food production

Import substitution

Fair trade

Local sourcing of food

 

These targets are to be achieved within specific timescales.

The Government's Organic Action Plan Group, which I chaired,

did set a target to increase the percentage of organic food

consumed in the UK which was produced in the UK from 30

percent to 70 percent by 2010, but (as so often) the

mechanisms to deliver it were delayed and weak – the UK was

until recently the only country in the EU15 which did not

offer post-conversion aid to new organic farmers. Moreover,

none of the other necessary objectives I have listed are

currently subject to targets, apart from agri-environmental

schemes to encourage broad and shallow adoption of very

modest environmental standards.

 

Third, the very large external/environmental costs of

transportation must be internalised. Transporting

agricultural products in the UK (mainly big heavy goods

vehicles) emits 1.1mt CO2 per year, and transporting

beverages and other foodstuffs emits 3 mt CO2 per year. So,

transporting crops and food together accounts for one

fortieth of all the UK's CO2 emissions per year. That is

not sustainable and indeed, at the start of the foot and

mouth outbreak, one of the reasons why disease took hold so

quickly was huge transportation of animals across the

country every day for marketing. We have what is

euphemistically called a `cheap food' policy in this country

– it is no such thing: it takes no account for example of

costs of water purification after agriculture and pesticide

run-off, nor of damage to the environment from long-distance

transportation and exacerbating climate change. At the very

least, we should require all food products to be labelled to

indicate the environmental impact of distribution, and

organic and other assurance schemes should take the lead by

introducing the proximity principle into certification. But

what is fundamentally needed is a revolution in

environmental and social accounting, so that a flat-rate VAT

is supplemented by a tax surcharge on over-exploitation of

natural resources and on long-distance transport of certain

agricultural products (those which can be cultivated locally

under EU rules).

 

Fourth, sustainable food system should promote human health

and certainly not harm it. There is now increasingly

convincing evidence that industrialised farming systems do

the reverse. Here are two pieces of evidence:

 

Latest Government figures, just released, reveal continuing

massive increases in the use of pesticides – the area of

crops sprayed with pesticides increased by another 1 million

hectares in the last two years; altogether over the last

decade the use of pesticides in the UK has increased by over

30 percent.

 

Evidence linking pesticides and brain diseases

like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and motor neurone disease is

now compelling – the Association of Clinical Pathologist

reviewed the issue in depth in 2001 and concluded " there is

an apparent consistency of epidemiological reports link

Parkinson's Disease with pesticide exposure " and the most

recent finding is that farmers exposed to pesticides are 43

percent more likely to develop Parkinson's Disease. This

urgently needs to be followed up by the Government.

 

But why is this not followed up by the Government? Might

the fact that DEFRA's Pesticide Safety Directorate depends

for 60 percent of its revenue on agro-chemical industries

have something to do with it?

 

Fifth, globally, what is making so much of the world's food

systems unsustainable is climate change. Drying out of

croplands and the growth of continental and Indonesian fires

on a rising scale and the rising frequency and ferocity of

storms, cyclones, flooding and rising sea level,

increasingly put at risk feeding of up to 9 billion people

on this planet by 2050. Climate change will only be

reversed by fundamental changes in the world economy,

national societies and our individual way of life, but the

minimum requirement is already clear.

 

 

Massive switch out of fossil fuels to renewables, on a far

bigger scale than any country (including the UK) has yet

envisaged, that is what is now urgently needed, not a

revival of nuclear power.

 

A system of contraction and convergence negotiated between

the industrialised North of the world and the developing

South, which requires the North to contract greenhouse gas

emissions by over 60 percent by 2050 while allowing the

South to industrialise cleanly, and overall keeping global

greenhouse gas emissions within a level which scientists

believe safe.

 

A huge uplift in energy efficiency is needed

to end the current prodigious waste. US power stations

discard more waste heat than they generate; only one seventh

of the energy from cars reaches the wheels; only one

quarters of the energy from ovens reaches the food.

 

Sustainable food systems should be at the heart of global

policy, not (as now) another device for exercise of imperial

power by the strongest nations. The pressure for reform

could hardly be stronger. If we do not learn lessons of

what is facing us, our planet Earth will apply those lessons

itself, but at a price which at worst could cast

considerable doubt on the survival of our own species.

 

This article was a speech delivered at Sustainable World

International Conference 14 July 2005, Westminster, London.

 

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