The Creaking Chain of Life

In 2008 a sharp climb in food prices on the global markets caused economic chaos across the world. Wheat prices rose 130%, soya spiked 87% and rice shot up 74% in just 12 months.

On British breakfast tables, that meant a 45% rise in the price of a four-pack of croissants. In Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat importer, it meant many couldn’t eat and triggered riots.

Consumers globally are vulnerable to a complex and highly globalised food supply chain. Here in the UK, we import 40% of the total food consumed and the proportion is rising.

We are in what writer Kalle Lasn terms “ecological debt” –  if most western industrialised nations were cut off from global trade “they would immediately collapse, their resource bases far below what is necessary for their populations to survive.”

Perhaps that doesn’t worry you: We can’t all exist in a state of crude autarky or revert to being subsistence farmers. Yet most analysts are aware that we are teetering on the brink of a monumental crisis when it comes to food security – one that could be truly cataclysmic.

Do I read too many dystopian novels? Perhaps, but their narrative staple of ferocious competition for primary resources and fragile access to food, energy and water in the face of easily disrupted distribution networks, rampant biodiversity loss and disease are now staples in the news too.  

Here’s how the sober partners at think tank The Munden Project put it (their partners work in environmental sector risk assessment, drawing on signficant expertise in commodities trading and systems analysis).

We are in an increasingly interconnected world, one based on the assumption that we can quickly deliver food, energy, fiber or medicine across great distances. Our view is that these systems are every bit as fragile… as the financial system was in 2007.

We therefore expect, within no more than 15 years, for there to be a major, systemic breakdown in how we deliver basic goods (such as food or energy) that will demand immediate action.

The “Three Ds” of work are typically known as “dirty, dangerous and difficult”. The fragile food supply chain has “four Ds” which could be crudely summarised as “demand, distribution, diesel and disease”…

Demand:

It is no secret that the global population is growing fast. That means more mouths to feed. Analysts estimate that the world needs to bring around 10.3m hectares of new land a year into food production “just to keep stocks steady”.

Changes in eating habits are also having massive impact. Worldwide meat production has tripled over the last four decades and increased 20 percent in just the last 10 years.

More than two-thirds of all agricultural land is devoted to growing feed for livestock, while only 8 percent is used to grow food for direct human consumption.

The global livestock industry uses dwindling supplies of freshwater, destroys forests and grasslands, and causes soil erosion, while pollution and the runoff of fertilizer and animal waste create dead zones in coastal areas and smother coral reefs. There also is concern over increased antibiotic resistance, since livestock accounts for 50 percent of antibiotic use globally, according to the FAO’s Livestock, Environment and Development initiative.

Few of us in the west are likely to give up our bacon and eggs, but if everyone in the world ate as much meat as we did, we’d need two-thirds more arable land than the world has got. And even the land that is free is increasingly being used to grow crops for biofuels… Which brings us to the next big problem.

“People will wonder why every new recession is a bit worse then the previous one” Richard Heinberg. “The End of Suburbia”

Diesel:

Well, crude oil really. The fuel strikes of 2000 in Britain made many realise how dependent our food supplies were on smoothly flowing supplies of petrol. With depots blockaded, supermarket shelves were empty in a flash, deliveries halted, panic buying ratcheted up, ambulances struggled to get people to hospital. As the government later put it after some head-scratching:

The disruption in the energy sector created a chain reaction among other critical infrastructure sectors such as transportation, health care, food distribution, financial and government services due to their interconnectivity and interdependencies.

Any major and sustained disruption to energy and our imports stutter badly. If they dry up for a protracted period, a lot of people would starve to death.

For behind the always full supermarket shelves meanwhile, as the UK’s Global Food Security group notes, lies a supply chain sensitive to economic and environmental events and exposed to volatile global markets for products like animal feed that have strong impacts on supermarket prices. 

Of those “economic and environmental events” the oil markets are one of the most influential. Senior IMF research economist Samya Beidas-Strom has pointed out that the food crisis was exacerbated by many forms of export restrictions by major food exporters – but “energy prices played a big role in the last crisis”. 

Our declining arable land and growing demand for food is echoed in the energy sector, where finite supplies of easily accessible crude are diminishing. The “Arab Spring”s relationship to an apparent “fossil fuel autumn” was no coincidence.

It came as financial analysts Raymond James issued a report stating that global production of petroleum had peaked in the first quarter of 2008, in “a paradigm shift of historic proportions”.  Crude demand falls during an economic contraction – with many believing that provides a timeless self-correcting mechanism, driving down prices.

(The relationship between energy prices/peak oil and the rest of the economy is fairly succinctly summed up by this cartoon, which shows how peak oil doesn’t have to mean a linear growth in wholesale oil prices – a timely reminder as analysts get bearish on crude… But meanwhile, despite weak economic growth, demand for agricultural commodities remains robust. People have to eat…

Cartoon by John Kinhart and half-inched from The Oil Drum.

DISTRIBUTION:

With agriculture so dependent on crude – whether to fuel agricultural machinery, ship crops or produce vast quantities of pesticides and artificial fertilisers – it is distribution that is another weak link in the chain that “delivers” the goods we depend on.

Smelling the weakness (and the profits) the multinationals that dominate global grain trading have tightened their grip on the global supply chain amid recent price volatility. Just four companies – ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus – already control up to 90% of global trade.

Farmers are often dependent on the grain trading companies for their seed and fertilisers as well as providing a buyer for their crops. “It (grain market consolidation) has a negative impact, both on the many producers that feed into this very small number of traders and on the other end on their customers and ultimately consumers,” said Jodie Thorpe, policy adviser for Oxfam.

Disease:

“Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less dependent on nature’s services in a world of close to seven billion people”.

Achim Steiner: UNEP Executive Director 

It is disease and decline in biodiversity that is the final and perhaps most worrying weak link in the global food supply chain. That our soil, species and sustenance are all at risk has not gone unnoticed by scientists and increasingly the wider public – not least a sharp fall in the populations of insect pollinators, such as bees, moths and butterflies.

In the UK alone, bee populations have collapsed by 10-15% in just two years (with the decline nowhere near halted). A third of crops are pollinated by insects, and further declines could lead to higher food costs and potential shortages. (Honey bee colony declines in recent years have reached 10 to 30 percent in Europe, 30 percent in the United States, up to 85 percent in Middle East, says scientist Peter Neumann, one of the authors of the first ever UN report on the issue…)

And while the EC is set to vote for a ban on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides widely blamed for the collapse (although the UK’s environment secretary told the chemicals company Syngenta that he was “extremely disappointed” by the proposed ban and said “the UK has been very active” in opposing it) loss of habitat, another key factor, is unlikely to stop soon.

Crop scientists meanwhile, facing a rise in plant pathogens like “wheat rust”, fear the “Ug99” fungus could wipe out more than 80% of worldwide wheat crops, with its capability of infecting a healthy crop in hours and “turning it into a useless mulch in days”. Wheat crops are no joke, accounting for a fifth of humanity’s food, second only to rice as a source of calories in the diets of developing country consumers and first as a source of protein, providing 21% of food calories and 20% of protein to 4.5 billion people in 94 developing countries.

With virulent new mutations of wheat rust emerging, the threat is growing. The variant of Ug99 identified in Kenya, for example, went from first detection in trace amounts in one year to epidemic proportions the next year. GM crops were believed by many – not least the companies promoting their product – to have been the answer to food security and threats such as wheat rust. But as Dan Basse, president of AgResource, one of Chicago’s most respected commodity analyst companies and GM grower himself, told the Guardian:

Superweeds are coming on so fast with GM that US farmers are going to have to go back to more traditional cultivation methods [as opposed to the practice with GM seeds of not tilling the soil and simply spraying to control pests] – but they don’t have the capacity to do that.

Biodiversity is considered by many to prove a better bulwark against disease. But with extinction rates high and the use of monocrops widespread (the FAO estimates that 75 percent of crop diversity was lost between 1900 and 2000) there seems little hope currently of increased biodiversity being taken seriously as an answer. It ought to be:

Transmission rates in communities depend heavily on the level of species richness. In diverse ecosystems, pathogens are more likely to find themselves in unsuitable or “dead-end” hosts that wont (or cant) transmit the disease. Additionally, since there is more heterospecific contact where diversity is high, transmission rates generally decline in diverse ecosystems.

And meanwhile despite despite consumer resistance, it is increasingly hard to keep GM crops out of the food chain, with Tesco having recently announced that it could no longer confirm its poultry feed was GM-free and other supermarkets already having caved in to industry pressure,

That may infuriate consumers, but it is at the production end that the real concerns are. Both superweeds and a corresponding more intensive use of arguably carcinogenic glyophosate herbicides are a result of increased GM crop growing, which – for example in the case of GM Alfafa, a perennial used primarily for animal feed – has raised significant fears of contamination of other crops.  

Never mind, biotech profits were at a record high last year.

 

In a world of finite resources but one based around the notion that perpetual growth is the only way forward, it is clear that something is going to give. Quite how fast and hard it gives remains to be seen, but the omens are not looking good.

There are other ways: Biologist Mae Wan Ho of the Institute of Science in Society, for example, has been developing the notion of sustainable systems as organisms. How that works in food production I sketched out here.

 

The Renewables Conundrum

“Last November the chairman of E.ON, the big German electricity and gas utility, told shareholders that his company’s gas-fired facilities had become “barely profitable,” and natural-gas fired power was being replaced by renewable sources, which, he noted, are fed into the grid as a priority when demand is highest.”

Fascinating look behind the scenes at the German energy industry as renewables drive down wholesale prices – but use of coal grows. If, as Platts note however, there weren’t intermittency problems with wind and solar, they could theoretically cover the country’s entire daily need for power.

 

Belligerent Bluster & Bombastic Bellicosity

Mangyongdae School Palace, North Korea. By Eric Lafforgue

Nothing arouses the press like conflict easily juxtaposed. And the divided Korean peninsula pretty much has that game trademarked.

South and North, capitalist and communist, prosperous and impoverished, reasonable and rabid; if it is dichotomies you are after, look no further.

The same goes for easy adjectives – and for Pyongyang you don’t usually need to get past “b” in the dictionary; for bellicose, belligerent, bluster, bombast (or bomb blast).

Manichean dichotomies seldom season cool analysis however and with the goose-stepping soldiers and bizarre KCNA hyperbole in such rich supply, dispassionate deconstruction of what is actually going on in the region tends to be in short supply.

Nuclear tests, missile tests, satellite launches; for anyone who has paid attention to the peninsula for long, the predictable trajectories of both press coverage and political reaction elicit little reaction, even as the broader hysteria grows ever more shrill.

Out come all the established tropes: The “international community” will be “united in its outrage at Pyongyang’s escalation of tension”. The Japanese or Americans will pledge to shoot down the missile, then back-peddle furiously. North Korea will be a “grave threat” to world peace. Elderly South Koreans will burn an effigy of the latest Kim and the more hawkish of its statesmen will announce that Seoul must also become a nuclear power. It is a pattern as predictable as West Sea clashes in the contentious crab fishing season, North Korean fury at routine military exercises across the border or provocations by Pyongyang ahead of South Korean elections. And it changes nothing (although it allows us our continued outrage).

Nobody likes moral relativism, particularly when it pertains to perhaps the most obnoxious regime in the world, but it is an interesting exercise to consider how North Korea views itself. From Pyongyang, the narrative is that it is defending itself; that it is perennially on the cusp of American invasion, that its poverty is the result of vicious sanctions; how dare the US call it “evil” over a smattering of nuclear tests: America has conducted over 1000 (1030 to be precise) and as for those “gulags”, what about Guantanamo Bay or the fact that the federal prison population has soared a staggering 790 percent in just three decades? To each – in a phrase beloved by international relations specialists – their own shit smells sweet and this is worth remembering, because in the eyes of the octogenarian players and their pudgy new overlord in the North Korean capital, they – with their universal healthcare and their excellent traffic cops, their clinging to a perceived cachet as the last holdouts against US hegemony – they are the rational ones.

The mainstream meme, meanwhile, remains as constant as the geostrategically comfortable status quo sometimes gets vaguely shaken but rarely properly stirred: North Korea is a rogue state, it is irrational, it has threatened its neighbours by conducting a nuclear test/missile test/threatening war. It must be punished like a recalcitrant child, have its inappropriate toys taken away, be firmly slapped and then shut in its famine-ridden bedroom while it wails and smashes things. Careful, meanwhile, not to get too heavy-handed (or too diplomatically engaged) in case something actually changes… Rewinding four years, to when the North tested a nuclear weapon, foreign policy doyenne and Harvard professor Stephen Walt had the most reasonable response. As the perennial crises on the peninsula are so contained by the geostrategic facts on the ground, it applies this time round too.

“North Korea’s defiance is annoying, perhaps, but it’s not like the act of testing a nuclear weapon tells us something new about their regime… “The other reason not to get too bent out of shape is that there is little we can do about it…There are two reasons why our hands are largely tied. First, we don’t have extensive economic ties with North Korea, so we can’t pressure them by threatening to cut off aid, trade, or investment. Second, using military force to disarm or topple Kim Jong Il’s regime or to impose a full economic blockade could unleash an all-out war on the Korean peninsula. All-out war could do considerable damage to Seoul, which lies within artillery range of the border, and the sudden collapse of the North Korean state could create a massive humanitarian problem and make it more likely that some of its nuclear materials would escape reliable custody.

“So the best response is to remain calm, and stop talking as if this event is a test of Obama’s resolve or a fundamental challenge to U.S. policy.  In fact, the tests are just “business as usual” for North Korea, and it would better if the United States “under-reacts” rather than overreacts. Instead of giving Pyongyang the attention it wants, the United States should use this incident as an opportunity to build consensus among the main interested parties (China, Russia, South Korea, Japan) and let China take the lead in addressing it. Above all, the Obama administration should avoid making a lot of sweeping statements about how it will not “tolerate” a North Korean nuclear capability. The fact is that we’ve tolerated it for some time now, and since we don’t have good options for dealing with it, that’s precisely what we will continue to do.”

There are alternatives. There is waiting for a North Korean revolution, reform or state collapse – and many have been predicting the imminent above for decades. There is ramped up military pressure and sanctions that have done little to affect change. There is sustained diplomatic engagement of the kind that so nearly bore fruit at the tail-end of the Clinton administration. Or there is war; devastating war guaranteed to bring in every regional player – and once more have China, Japan and the United States jostling for influence on the peninsula as they have since the nineteenth century – but war so unsavoury and unsettling that for all the cries of alarm, a nuclear North Korea safely in its cage provides a reassuring buffer against the thought of it.

Those with a cooler eye note meanwhile the relationship between Japan and China should be the more genuine cause of alarm when eyes turn to Northeast Asia. A recent report by the International Crisis Group is a case in point. Titled “Dangerous Waters” the executive summary pointed out that the two countries “lack the mutual trust and communication mechanisms to manage incidents, let alone to discuss intentions or operating protocols … In the event of a skirmish, heightened nationalism, especially in China, could constrict the room for diplomacy to de-escalate the situation” The report by the respected think tank went on to state starkly: “The two countries’ traditional means for defusing crises have been unravelling. Top leaders mistrust each other; back-channel diplomacy has waned.” With historic animosity rife and nationalism rampant, the highly disputed waters of the East China Sea are of far greater concern than the heavily mined DMZ between the two Koreas. As for what to actually do about the ossified face-off between the latter, that is a tale for another time – and one that involves considerably less histrionics and considerably more historical context.

Hedges

In the winter, the A253 is cold and pockmarked with potholes; the skeletons of hedges obscuring with no great enthusiasm a bleak expanse of fields to either side. The cars fly down it eager to be elsewhere; a flat roar of rubber on road surface leaving grey puddles broken but unrepentant.

By spring the hedges, hawthorn mostly, are a barricade of white bloom, heavy on the verges and pungent from the open car window. The puddles are still grey but flecked with the reflection of fragments of blue sky and the fields, the fields are invisible to the driver.

Small turnings break the hedges at intermittent intervals and in summer somehow they are enticing. Perhaps there are poppies growing in the fields. Wheat thick, John Barleycorn. A blanket spread amidst the flowers, making love as the cars roar past unknowing. The hedges, verdant; viridian.

Brittle are the stems of autumn. The grains rattle at the tremor of trucks passing. The leaves in the hedges – palisade mesophyll, stoma, guard cells – are fading, flaring, flaming, soon to be fallen; the skeleton of the hedge, the cars cutting past, the bleak expanse of fields to either side.

Electric Bikes and Petrol Cars

Manufacturers such as Mazda are betting heavily that the combustion engine is going to be the main motor for at least the next decade, investing heavily in efficiency measures that don’t involve expensive hybrids. You can see where they’re coming from, particularly as the platforms and engines they’re introducing can be used across all their models rather than just for a niche “eco” range.

Zero Motorcycles is betting in the other direction. Again, you can see where they’re coming from, with bikes having to pull less weight for starters. Their line-up for 2013 looks really good, with a claimed range of 130 miles per charge and solid top speeds of over 80mph. Realistically they claim a range 70 miles at 70 mph – but with the possibility of a 96% charge in an hour with optional charging kit, you can see for urban commuters how they would make a lot of sense.

Battery R&D must be a major area of investor interest at the moment, with power storage a growing issue particularly given the increasing prevalence of renewables and the complexities (and again expense) of their grid integration (although researchers at the University of Delaware think renewables “could fully power a large electric grid 99.9 percent of the time by 2030 at costs comparable to today’s electricity”). An off-grid renewables powered home charging an electric bike for work commutes sounds like a pretty good future option though; shame about the capital required!

Kai the Hitchhiker

I don’t usually go in for these viral videos, but this is a slice of genuine comedy, rich with pathos and full of great lines. Lovely little interview, the sort of story and interviewee every local journalist would love to stumble across.

Prince Harry vs the Taliban

A few thoughts on this whole Prince Harry vs the Taliban Top Gun satire. Firstly, he’s essentially fighting in an illegal war, under both the Nuremberg Tribunal and the UN Charter. I’ll come to the details of that momentarily. A few of the more immediate facts first:

The war in Afghanistan has been going on for over a decade. It has cost the British tax payer (currently being made to suffer for the iniquities of greedy bankers & venal property speculators) over £18 billion in that time.

The US Congress meanwhile has provided more than $51 billion to build the Afghan National Army. (That’s an army with an unsurprising 10% desertion rate and 20% failure to re-enlist rate given 110 of its soldiers get killed each month; still less than the 200 police per month killed…)

Worth noting: 22% of all children in the US live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level. 49.7 million Americans live in poverty.

In terms of bloodshed, the war has resulted in 3,169 coalition deaths and counting; 17,400 civilian deaths (can’t find the link but the UNAMA puts the figure just from 2007 at 12, 793) and counting (roughly one-third from coalition attacks, two thirds down to the Taliban) and countless incidents of traumatic brain injury, amputations, PTSD and suicide.

(I haven’t got the figures for the UK, but here’s a few from the US: Traumatic brain injuries in the US military – not just in Afghanistan – 2007: 23,002; 2008: 28,557; 2009: 27,862; medical evacuations just from Afghanistan between 2001 and 2010 meanwhile totalled 13,851).

There are some facts and figures. Here’s some other food for thought:

“The U.N. Charter states that all member states must settle international disputes by peaceful means and no nation can use military force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 9/11 attacks, the council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan.

“Resolutions 1368 and 1373 condemned the Sept. 11 attacks and ordered the freezing of assets; the criminalizing of terrorist activity; the prevention of the commission of and support for terrorist attacks; and the taking of necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist activity, including the sharing of information. In addition, it urged ratification and enforcement of the international conventions against terrorism.

“The invasion of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of the charter because the attacks on Sept. 11 were criminal attacks, not “armed attacks” by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after Sept. 11, or Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign.

The necessity for self-defense must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly.”

So it’s an illegal war of aggression. Glad that’s been cleared up.

It’s worth noting meanwhile whilst everyone finds it nicely normal to hear about our Princeling out blowing people up from the air, like Princes do, that a hell of a lot of wedding parties seem to end up getting massacred from the air. The Wech Baghtu one was a biggie; 37 women and children. There’s been plenty more since then, like the nine Afghan kids mowed down by machine gun from a helicopter whilst out collecting firewood in 2011. Or there’s the October 20, 2012 NATO airstrike that killed four children tending livestock, the March 11, 2012 Kandahar massacre of 16 civilians – including nine children.

You can argue, I suppose, that these things happen in war. I’m sure they certainly happen more often when an air war – whether by Apache or drone – is viewed as a computer game; Prince Harry: Rocking the Xbox, Mowing down some Pashtuns. Anyhow. Those are just some of the things I think when I see the comments sections in newspapers under the Prince Harry articles, most of which are full of people saying “good lad, one of the boys, putting himself in harm’s way” and so on and I felt like jotting them down.

There are of course, some good people trying to do reconstructive work and billions have been spent there. So how are things in 2013 after all that effort? Here’s what the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says in its Common Humanitarian Action Plan (CHAP) for 2013: “The worsening conflict trends over the last five years indicate that civilians will continue to suffer because of armed violence and that the humanitarian situation will deteriorate.”

So there we go. We’ve spent billions, killed tens of thousands and got absolutely nowhere in an illegal war that has done nothing to eradicate the amorphous, ideologically driven “Taliban”. (Note, you can’t bomb an ideology out of existence). Finally, by even daring to criticise this war a bit fiercely, I’m putting myself at risk. A chap called Azhar Ahmed was found guilty of sending out a “grossly offensive communication” for having a foul-mouthed rant about the war on Facebook. A spokesperson for Yorkshire police said: “He didn’t make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother.” I hope I’ve made my point a little better because apparently the penalty for making a point badly about an illegal war is a criminal record these days.

Peace.