11
Famine and food shortages are not new in world history but fortunately have never seriously affected Australians’ access to food. Indeed, Australia has one of the highest per capita rates of consumption of food and energy in the world—and one of the highest percentages of overweight people. We are hardly starving. This may console us as we sit back in our comfortable dining chairs, but it should not make us complacent. The climate is changing, and in more ways than one. There is no guarantee that the global, corporate, industrialised, liberalised food market—of which Australia is a part—will be able to meet our food needs into the future.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines ‘food security’ as ‘when all people at all times have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.’[1] By this definition there would be few parts of the world untouched, not even a wealthy, politically stable country like Australia.
While it pales into insignificance compared to the food crisis in the poor countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Australians had a small taste of food shortages and price rises in Australia in early 2011. This was caused by the floods in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, and the cyclone in north Queensland, and was exacerbated by ongoing drought in Western Australia. It is unlikely anyone starved but many did have to go without. Food crops were destroyed and farm infrastructure damaged or washed away, reducing the amount of food available and the farmer’s ability to get it to market.
The effects of the floods highlighted the vulnerability of our seemingly bulletproof centralised system of food production and distribution in Australia. A big impact was the disruption to the intricate transport system of food across Queensland. Flooding and road damage halted deliveries of food to supermarkets. Because milk is now mainly produced in the south-eastern corner of Queensland and on the Atherton Tablelands in the far north of the state, most areas in Queensland experienced milk shortages. During the January floods, the massive centralised fruit and vegetable market at Rocklea in Brisbane was washed away. This meant a halt in fresh food supplies state-wide, despite many growing areas around the state being unaffected by weather. It took only one outburst from Mother Nature to demonstrate just how vulnerable our system is.
Unfortunately, many Australians don’t need a natural disaster to find themselves short of food. We already have food insecurity in some sections of Australian society. The fact that 2.2 million Australian adults do not have enough money to consistently buy food for themselves and their families is unimaginable to many of us.[2] Yet, up to a million Australian children do not regularly get enough to eat and rely on charitable food relief. Foodbank Australia is the largest charitable hunger relief organisation in the country. It collects unwanted food from supermarkets and distributes it to low-income families who can’t afford to buy food. It cannot keep up with demand.[3] While the problem is episodic, rather than chronic as found in many developing nations, sporadic hunger affects many Australian children. Despite an apparent abundance of food in Australia some sections of society miss out. It is caused not by a shortage of food, but by social and economic inequality.
Having said all this, most Australians are blasé about food security. After all, there is always plenty on the supermarket shelves. This confidence extends from the supermarket shopper to the farm gate. We are often reminded how our nation was built on agriculture. The National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) brags that farmers feed all Australians and then export overseas enough food to feed twice that many people again. So what’s the problem? Australians spend only 14 per cent of an average weekly income on food. Like the rest of the world we have experienced food price-rises too. But because we spend such a small portion of our income on food it does not hit us like it does poor people in Asia, where 50 per cent of income is spent on food, and in Africa where that figure can be up to 80 per cent of household income.
Predictions that Australian farmers will continue to produce in excess of what we consume have kept us, using the words of former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, ‘comfortable and relaxed’ about ourselves and our future.[4] In fact, some sectors are doing quite nicely out of selling expensive, high-end food products into export markets in the developing world where the majority of the population can’t afford to buy staple foods like rice. While India’s growing beef and dairy consumption is to our advantage, it is at the expense of India’s underclass and certainly their poor African cousins.
Australian Farm Institute Executive Director, Mick Keogh, told the 2009 NFF conference that rising world food prices meant better returns for Australian farmers. ‘This is good news for Australian agriculture, despite the fact that higher food prices initially means more people going hungry around the world. However, in the medium to longer term, higher food prices are good news for the world’s undernourished people. This is because without a period of higher food prices, solutions to the world’s future food needs are unlikely to be found,’ he said.[5] The better the return farmers received on world markets, the more incentive there was for more crops to be planted and therefore more food harvested. ‘For Australian agriculture, these global trends appear to present significant opportunities and bring with them the potential of a happy co-incidence of outcomes,’ Mr Keogh noted.
Despite better returns in the last couple of years, most Australian farmers still deal with the ever-increasing, everyday challenges of farming: water shortages, soil degradation, extreme weather patterns such as droughts and events like cyclones or floods that reduce yields or destroy crops. Farmers must foot rising input costs of fuel, fertiliser and agricultural labour. Then there are the man-made challenges of the market, all of which have been discussed in previous chapters.
Australian economist and academic Dr Mark McGovern says there is a growing threat to Australia’s food security to which most Australians are completely oblivious.[6] He notes that economic research shows declining farm profitability is making farmers unviable and they are going out of business at an increasing rate. Without farmers we will not have locally produced food. Australian farmers have amalgamated and become highly efficient as demanded by the Australian government’s policies of trade liberalisation and market deregulation. They have geared their businesses towards the export market. The underlying principle of the free-market system assumes that ‘the market will sort it out’.
Well, the market is sorting it out. It is market conditions that are reducing farmers’ profitability, not farmer inefficiency. The high value of the Australian dollar, export price fluctuations and an unfair international trading environment have caused the current situation our farmers find themselves in. This is in contrast to most of our heavily subsidised and protected competitors in other countries who are doing nicely, thank you very much.[7] Overseas government policies of support are ensuring those countries’ farmers stay in business and keep producing food and that those countries remain food secure. These farmers may not do it as efficiently as Australian farmers (or they may) but at the end of the day, who cares? For a few extra dollars of taxpayers’ money, their country’s food supply will be guaranteed.
Successive Australian governments, preoccupied with the export market, have neglected the domestic market and put Australia at risk of becoming a net food importer. In a food-insecure world, this is not a good place to be. Queensland’s peak horticulture organisation, Growcom, says that already 34 per cent of fruit and 19 per cent of vegetables eaten in Australia are imported.[8] This is increasing. However, Growcom CEO Alex Livingstone says Australia’s food security should not be measured by how much is exported. He notes that figures used to promote the success of Australian food exports pertain largely to bulk commodities of meat and grain and are not representative of other food-producing sectors. After all, a nation cannot live on bread alone.
But what’s wrong with being a net food importer anyway? The Chinese do a great job growing vegetables. We will still eat well and still play our part in the global community—exporting coal, iron ore and gas. (You can’t eat them though.) Well, the problems arise when China can’t produce enough to feed their own population, let alone us.
In 2010, the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC) recognised there will be challenges for Australia to remain food secure. PMSEIC predicted a 15 to 30 per cent decline in food production in Australia during the next 30 years.[9] Domestic factors affecting Australia’s ability to produce food include irrigation water shortages, fertiliser shortages, extremes of temperature and weather events. Climate change alone was expected to decrease Australian farm productivity by 15 per cent.[10] It was also expected to increase by 10 to 20 per cent the number of people in the world at risk of hunger by 2050.[11] Effective strategies to reduce climate change—which will impact everyone—will therefore be necessary to increase Australia’s food security.
While the Australian farm sector has maintained an average productivity growth of 2.8 per cent since the 1960s, it has fallen during the last ten years. With it, government investment in food production research has decreased significantly. In past times agricultural research has proven a good investment but more recently it has come to be considered as risky and low profile—very unattractive to government funders.[12] Farmers say good government policy will be critical to ensure Australian farmers keep growing food. They are calling for a 50 per cent increase in research and development investment by government to help meet the above challenges, seeing science and technology—particularly biotechnology—as the answer to increasing production levels.
There are plenty of farmers and their representative organisations who believe current government policies that allow mining, gas drilling and other industrial developments on prime agricultural land will jeopardise Australia’s ability to feed itself in the longer term. Government restrictions on farmers’ rights to clear trees and develop new country, to build dams and harvest water and to remove pest animals in ways they see fit also slow their productivity. Combined with government adherence to international free-trade policies and faith in market economics, how much control do Australian farmers really have over our food production?
There are 7 billion people in the world today. One billion of those are starving because they do not have enough food to eat. By 2050 the world population is expected to increase to 9 billion. Competition for land on which to grow food, land degradation, water shortages, depletion of fertiliser supplies and climate change will exacerbate this problem. Population growth and increased wealth in countries like China and India mean there is already a new and increased demand for food worldwide.
Despite the Green Revolution of the 1970s, which produced new agricultural technology, high yielding plant varieties, hybrid seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and more than doubled world food production, many parts of the world are still short of food. The production, marketing and distribution of food today is a massive global business. It is not only the poor countries that are worried about whether their people will have enough to eat into the future, but also the wealthy, developed nations who have devised and participated in complex world food markets. While Australia can feed itself now, will this always be the case? What should our role be in global food security? What are our humanitarian responsibilities to both our own people and the poor people of the world?
Food shortages caused the price of food to skyrocket across the world in 2007–08 and then again in early 2011. This, in turn, caused street riots and social and economic unrest in parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Seventy-four low-income and 71 middle-income countries were significantly affected by food and oil price rises. These are not trivial matters. Between 2004 and 2008 world rice prices shot up 255 per cent while wheat and maize prices rose by 80 to 90 per cent.[13] These are the three staple foods of the world. This was especially significant for poor countries like Morocco, which relies on wheat imports. It is not just droughts, floods and plagues that cause crop failure and food shortages. Drought did drop food production in these countries in 2008, but there are many more complex reasons for food shortages—ones that will affect Australia as much as Ethiopia.
One is the price of oil. It has increased dramatically. Oil is used to make petroleum which fuels crop planting, harvesting, processing and transport. Petroleum by-products are used to make fertilisers and pesticides, which are essential to grow food in our 21st-century, global, industrialised food-production system. In September 2003 a barrel of crude oil cost $25 per barrel. By July 2008 it had reached $147.50 per barrel. It has since settled at between $60 and $100 per barrel but is not expected to remain stable. At present, Australia has no viable alternative to oil with which to produce our food. Peak oil production worldwide is expected by about 2020, although some believe it may already have occurred.[14] From then, production is predicted to fall until the world’s oil reserves run out in about 100 years’ time.
The diversion of food crops to produce bio-fuel is thought to be one of the major causes of grain shortages throughout the world in the past ten years. Twenty-eight per cent of the US maize (corn) crop is currently used to make ethanol to fuel cars. Maize is Africa’s staple food crop and precisely what African people were short of during the food riots in 2008. The World Bank estimates bio-fuels have pushed up world food prices by as much as 75 per cent.[15] The governments of the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom have supported the bio-fuel industry growth by providing tax breaks, mandating or making the use of bio-fuels compulsory, and providing subsidies. Many believe that if these incentives were removed, it would immediately free up substantial amounts of grain and oilseed crops for human consumption. This would go a long way to reducing world prices and hence global food security concerns.
The Australian government also supports a small but growing ethanol industry, mainly through a production grant that offsets the excise tax applied to ethanol thereby making the production of ethanol financially viable. Bio-fuel use in Australia is increasing largely due to government mandates in New South Wales, which legislate that at least 4 per cent of ethanol be added to petrol, and 5 per cent biodiesel to diesel. A similar mandate is pending in Queensland. There are six major ethanol production plants in Australia: four located on the Queensland coast using sugar cane by-products; one in Nowra, New South Wales, using wheat; and one in Dalby, Queensland, using sorghum and other grains. There are many other small-scale producers of ethanol and bio-diesel in Australia located throughout the country.
While Australia’s production of bio-fuel from grain, sugar and oilseeds is minuscule compared to the world’s largest producers, the United States and Brazil, we are part of a worldwide industry. We import US-produced ethanol. We export grain, sugar and oilseeds to be used for bio-fuel production elsewhere. Austrade has welcomed the further expansion of large US grain-trader Gavilon’s reach into Australia.[16] The Nebraska-based grain buyer opened a second trading office in Brisbane in 2010. Gavilon not only buys and sells grain on the global market but is a major player in the energy market for crude oil, natural gas and renewable fuels such as ethanol and bio-diesel. One can make an educated guess as to where some of Australia’s wheat crop will end up this year.
Displaying forethought, the Australian government in partnership with private enterprise is currently investigating ‘second-generation’ bio-fuels. These are made from crop stubble, forestry residue, municipal waste and algae—not food products.[17] So far, the production of second-generation bio-fuels is too costly to compete with petroleum, but if successfully developed they could mitigate the ‘food for fuel’ arguments against bio-fuels.[18]
Meanwhile, the Australian farm sector, in general, has been hesitant to jump into bio-fuel production. Not because of its impact on poor people’s food security, or even our own food security, but because there is more money to be made elsewhere. Using grain to produce animal protein to supply increased demand in Asia and service domestic needs is much more lucrative. Eighty per cent of Australia’s east coast grain crop is already used to produce Australian beef, chicken, pork and milk. The Australian Farm Institute says the diversion of grain to a bio-fuel industry would push up grain prices and hence meat and dairy farmers’ costs, making Australian meat and dairy uncompetitive internationally. It could also mean higher prices for Australian consumers.[19] Nor would it enable Australia to achieve fuel self-sufficiency. The Australian Farm Institute points out that if Australia’s entire sugar and wheat crop was diverted to ethanol production it would supply only 20 per cent of our transport fuel use.
The change in eating patterns in the developing world is another factor driving up world food prices. A burgeoning middle class, particularly in India and China, are demanding a diet rich in meat, dairy and processed foods as opposed to their traditional rice and grain dishes. As we know, meat and dairy use a lot of grain, land, water and fuel to produce. Thirty per cent of the world grain crop is now used to fatten cattle in feedlots, feed meat chickens and make milk. At the same time, poor countries in Africa are demanding more grain just to sustain their people. But feeding grain to animals is more profitable for food processors, retailers and government GDP bean counters (not beans you can eat) than feeding it to people. Off the supermarket shelf, a kilogram of mid-range beef fetches $20. A kilogram of plain flour costs about $3.[20] Wealthy consumers are demanding the beef and wealthy countries like Australia are providing it.
However, this does raise some ethical questions. It takes 7 kilograms of grain to produce 1 kilogram of beef. One kilogram of beef (based on a recommended 120-gram serve) will feed approximately eight people. In big meat-eating countries like Australia the serving is likely to be larger (and the meal generously augmented by a tower of carbohydrates). Alternatively, 7 kilograms of grain will make about fourteen loaves of wholemeal bread. That, on its own, will feed closer to 30 people—a veritable starving Ethiopian army. Meat and grain are Australia’s export specialities. Australian farmers and food processors, backed by consumer demand, have the right to produce whatever provides the best return. But with rights surely there come responsibilities?
Also compounding the world food crisis is the fact that world food stockpiles have fallen in recent years. With trade liberalisation and technological advances, which enable food to be produced and transported quickly, many nations no longer stockpile food to the extent they did 30 or 40 years ago. In the late 2000s, supplies were low. Failed crops and continuing droughts put pressure on supplies and prompted big grain-producing countries such as Russia and the Ukraine to ban food exports in 2010. Likewise, major world rice exporters such as China, Brazil, India and Vietnam have restricted exports of rice. Many nations stopped exporting to ensure they could feed their own people first. Simply the fear of food shortages has exacerbated actual shortage.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) all blame hunger, or food insecurity, on poverty. Twenty per cent of people in the world are too poor to afford to buy food, which is at the heart of the problem. Why are they poor? The World Bank says it is because they don’t have open-market economies which, in theory, facilitate wealth to be invested back in food security, infrastructure, education, health, the law and good governance.
The World Bank was set up in 1945 to provide loans to poor countries for development. It has 187 shareholders, or member countries, who all contribute money to the Bank. Australia has been a member since 1947 and contributes millions of dollars each year towards the World Bank’s operations.[21] Those who give the most, naturally, have the most say. These are the United States, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada and Russia—not the tiny, poor African nations.
World Bank and IMF policies since the 1980s have attached conditions to loans, forcing developing countries to liberalise trade and investment and deregulate and privatise national industries. This has pressured poor nations, many of whom already had large and overdue debts with the World Bank, to drop agricultural subsidies to their peasant farmers, deregulate their markets and merrily join the global commodity market. As a result, largely through international aid and business investment, many peasant farmers now grow cash crops on their land for purchase by international cartels. In these very poor countries, where 99 per cent of food production is still done by small subsistence farmers, there is much room for ‘development’. This is the reason wealthy commercial investors representing diverse interests are lining up to ‘help’.[22]
In theory, an open-market economy should provide farmers with money to buy food and other goods, which would further stimulate growth—and hence wealth—in developing economies. But some argue that, in practice, the market mechanism actually serves to keep poor people poor. Those small farmers going it alone have dutifully adopted the industrial farming practices promoted by their benefactors. They use modern machinery, grow monocrops and use fertilisers, pesticides and genetically engineered seeds—the technology developed and sold to them by wealthy nations. But they have gone into debt to afford it. Poor farmers are lured into the modern market system of farming by promises of higher incomes. But as farmers all over the ‘liberalised’ world know, when the market takes control, bumper crops actually bring prices down, reducing a farmer’s income. The costs of production keep rising. Likewise, a bad season and low yields reduces income. No crop means no money. On top of this, many Third World peasant farmers have little education or experience with financial management. Many are sick, suffering from HIV/AIDS, malaria or tuberculosis. Many deal on a daily basis with non-existent or decaying infrastructure, tribal warfare, civil unrest, lawlessness and political corruption, and get no support or protection from their own government. Australian farmers lament the world’s unfair playing field, but we have nothing to whinge about compared to the poor farmers of Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Liberia or Eritrea. Many struggle to literally stay alive, let alone compete in the open global economy.
Another negative flow-on effect is that subsistence farmers are often displaced from their traditional lands when the big corporations buy or lease this land for monocropping of commodity crops. The modernisation of agriculture has effectively stopped many traditional farming practices in poor nations. With mechanisation, fewer farm workers are needed. With no work, many farmers have been forced to the slums of big cities like New Delhi in India and Mexico City in Mexico. Peasant farmers, for whom growing food was a way of life, traditionally could survive off 200 square metres of land. Given 2000 square metres, they could feed a village. Many believe the traditional farmers and gardeners of China, India, Africa and Latin America, left to their own devices, are perfectly capable of feeding themselves as they have done for thousands of years.[23]
But is this just a comfortable, middle class, ‘Western’ value judgement? Ask a peasant Mozambican farmer now growing sugar cane on a company estate for the South African Illovo Sugar Company, if he is better off. The company rebuilt the Maragra Sugar Mill on the outskirts of Mozambique’s capital city, Maputo, after it and the sugar industry was destroyed during the civil war fought between 1977 and 1992. Illovo has leased or bought up local land and employs local farmers to grow the sugar cane crop. In some cases, existing farmers are financed to expand their crops and enter into contracts to sell to the sugar company. In return, the farmer has an income and can put food on the table for his family. This farmer will say he is now better off. It doesn’t make any difference to him that the company he works for is a subsidiary of Associated British Foods plc, a global food, ingredients and retail company based in London that is making a fortune selling his sugar into the European Union and United States markets. He is just grateful he is not starving.
But ask another twenty former farmers forced from their land to the cities in search of work whether they are happy trawling the stinking, disease-ridden dumps of Maputo, seeking food for their families, and the answer will be very different. While some parts of society clearly have benefited from foreign aid and investment, some have not. The industrialisation of agriculture and liberalisation of the market has created stark inequalities among people of poor nations.
Many commentators argue it is not availability of food but its unfair distribution that is the cause of world hunger. The FAO figures show the world produces enough food to feed 12 billion people. There are 7 billion in the world today. While the number of people in the world has grown, the population growth rate is actually slowing. Over the past twenty years world food production has risen by 2 per cent per year. At the same time, world population growth has actually dropped to 1.14 per cent per year.[24] So population is not outstripping food supply. Relax. You haven’t eaten your last hot chook yet. It is just that many poor people can’t reach the ones left in the bain-marie.
Equity and distribution are the problem. There are a billion starving people in the world and a billion overweight people in the world. The wealthy throw away 40 per cent of what they buy from the supermarket. The poor lose 40 per cent of what they grow through poor production, storage and transportation methods. Critics of the current system say the very structure of world trade creates inequity and disadvantages poor nations. Many blame protectionism by rich countries. The European Union spends $365 billion a year supporting unproductive farmers and creating trade barriers to food imports from developing countries. In addition, these developing economies rely on only one or two primary exported products. They have no control over the international prices they are paid for their products. Wealthy nations like the United States and those of Europe limit the amount a developing country can export by enforcing quotas and tariffs on imports. Poor nations can try selling more but this only serves to decrease the world price, reaping them a lower return in the end.
There are other man-made obstacles that block access and equity to food. Investment in food production in developing countries is typically made by large multinational food and agribusiness companies like Cargill, Syngenta, Kraft, Bunge, Archers Daniels Midland, Nestlé, General Mills and Monsanto to name just a few. By the nature of their business—food and agriculture—they stand to gain from their investment. Some would say unfairly, as they act like anti-competitive cartels manipulating the price of food through price-fixing and customer monopolisation. But at the very least these organisations are experienced in the food business. When it is international sovereign wealth funds, investment managers, hedge funds, pension funds, private equity investors and banks investing in food for the developing world, watch out. Global traders who once speculated on money markets are now taking advantage of deregulated global commodity markets, including food markets, and making billions. These facts support the argument that the global food industry is not organised to feed the hungry, but is organised to generate profits for corporate business.
This ‘financialism’ of food, where big investors treat the major traded food commodities (maize, wheat, rice) as an instrument of portfolio investment and speculation, is dangerous.[25] It has made the price of food artificial and neglected supply and demand needs.
The speculative food market opened up in the mid-1990s when contracts (between farmers and food traders) to buy and sell food were turned into ‘derivatives’ that could be bought and sold by traders who had nothing to do with growing food—mainly banks and hedge funds.[26] With the looming US financial crisis in 2007–08, these traders moved billions of dollars from pension and equity funds into safer commodities like food. It drove up the price of food. Many believe these non-agricultural players backed by the United States, Europe and other wealthy nations including Australia manipulated global agricultural commodity prices to their benefit and to the detriment of poor countries. Even former US president Bill Clinton has condemned the commoditisation of food and his government’s part in it. At a speech to the United Nations in 2008 Clinton said that by treating food crops as commodities ‘like colour TVs’, instead of as a vital right of the world’s poor, he and his government ‘blew it’.[27]
Australian governments of all political persuasions are fully supportive of the liberalisation of markets and export orientation of industries in developing nations as well as our own. This is borne out through Australia’s foreign aid and trade policy and involvement with international financial institutions. It is not just the United States, the United Kingdom and other major world powers that want to help poor nations develop.
Australia’s aid budget of $4.8 billion per year has doubled in the past five years and is predicted to double again in the next five years to reach $9 billion.[28] World Vision Australia’s Tim Costello says that aid should primarily be used to address poverty, but it is also an investment in our nation’s own prosperity and security. Australia’s aid budget is taxpayer dollars primarily ‘delivered’ through Australian ‘for-profit’ contractors and consultants, i.e. Australian businesses.[29] Australian governments support this approach. It enables Australian companies to set up business in foreign countries, carry out the aid works—teach, research, develop, build, employ—and make money. Our government believes this is the best way to help developing nations out of poverty and towards food security. But is it a form of new colonialism? Like many developed nations, Australia’s role in ‘helping’ developing countries in the Asia–Pacific has been criticised for containing too much self-interest.[30] Are we in it just for ourselves?
After East Timor’s fight for independence from Indonesia in 1999, Australia stepped in as the major aid-donor country. During the independence conflict it was thought more than a quarter of the population was at risk of starvation and 80 per cent would need food provided for an extended period. While Australia’s strategy was to provide initial food relief and security, its longer-term policy towards East Timor was to foster industry development and trade. This would contribute to the stability of the region of which Australia is a part and would be in Australia’s national interest. Australia is still doing this work.
But Australian academic Dr Tim Anderson accuses Australia of advancing its global agricultural economic interests under the guise of development aid to countries like East Timor.[31]Through its AusAID program, Australia has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to East Timor before and since independence in 2002. The people of East Timor in their 2002 National Development Plan (NDP) said their goal was to achieve food security through policies that supported subsistence farming and to a lesser extent the development of export industries. Coffee had been the primary export crop and they had little interest in developing a major cash crop industry such as palm oil, which Australia and the World Bank had supported and funded in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea during that period. Eighty per cent of East Timorese people were subsistence farmers. While farming techniques and rural infrastructure needed improvement, growing a diversity of food crops was the traditional way of feeding the nation and the people wanted this to continue once independent. This policy was in stark contrast to Australia’s views.
It was also in contrast to the World Bank’s policies. Anderson says the World Bank refused to fund East Timor’s proposed public agricultural infrastructure—mainly research and extension services—because it would not be a privately run institution.[32] Australia backed this argument even though the CSIRO in Australia had been publicly run and funded for decades. The World Bank also rejected East Timorese requests to fund a public abattoir and grain silo. It suggested these be set up by private enterprise instead. Anderson noted that Australia was a major exporter of grain and beef to the region at the time and still is.
The East Timorese focus was clearly not on export production. Anderson says East Timor’s approach to food security is still at odds with Australia’s. The Australian government believes the best way to achieve food security for East Timor is by ‘transforming subsistence farming into an export orientated industry’.[33] Rather than respecting a sovereign nation’s right to self-determination, Anderson says Australia is imposing its own economic agenda, under the guise of foreign aid, to benefit Australian business. Australian government and business certainly have a large presence in East Timor. In 2007, Australia, along with Singapore, was the largest foreign investor, mainly in its lucrative offshore petroleum industry. Australian government and private enterprise also play a large part in development in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
Investment by foreign agribusiness in land in developing nations is not new. Governments of developing nations desperate to recover from war, famine and unprecedented population growth are welcoming, with open arms, investment by foreign interests in their agricultural sectors.[34] Foreign investment in Mozambique, Algeria, Sudan, Nigeria, Zambia and numerous Asian and Latin American nations is progressing full-steam ahead. Governments need the income generated from economic activity to do the basic work of the state: develop infrastructure and provide basic health care and education.
Australian companies, too, have been recently encouraged to invest in farming land offshore to counterbalance the foreign buy-up of farmland in Australia and to secure the nation’s future food needs. Australia’s former chief scientist and government advisor, Professor Robin Batterham, told the National Sustainable Food Summit in Canberra in April 2011 that Australia should consider investing in farmland in Mozambique.[35] The South Africans and myriad other nations are already doing this and reaping the rewards. Some may find this suggestion disturbing. Even if it is legal and makes good economic sense, many believe it is morally reprehensible that food produced from Mozambican soils by local labour be exported for a profit to feed overweight Australians while the local population starves. Certainly, on the surface, this looks like new colonialism at its ugliest.
So, what to do? The ever-present challenges to food production are the world’s limited availability of land, water, energy and nutrients and the effects of climate change. There are many in the scientific community who believe a second ‘Green Revolution’ will save us. Mainstream scientists believe it is possible for the world to feed itself in 2050 because there are still big yield gaps in the production of food—particularly of grain in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia.[36] In the 1980s, trial plots using new technologies doubled or tripled crop yields in Africa. So, technically, it can be done. But while the Green Revolution took off in many parts of Asia and Latin America, it failed to do so in Africa. A lack of modern infrastructure—irrigation systems, roads, railways, power grids and developed markets—prevented it. Mainstream scientists and economists believe it can be done today with political will and a huge investment of funds in research and development. They believe the use of genetically engineered crops worldwide will enable farmers to double yields. This will require the acceptance by consumers of genetically modified food. With conservation tillage and transgenic crops used on only 10 per cent of the world’s cropland, there is much more food production to be squeezed from developed and undeveloped landscapes.
There are agricultural scientists who believe intensive agriculture is more environmentally sustainable than traditional agriculture and organic farming. US sustainability expert Dr Roger Cady told an Australian Farm Institute conference on a recent visit that food consumers were being ‘green washed’ into believing that technology-intensive agriculture was not environmentally friendly.[37] This, he said, caused the consumer to make biased food choices like buying organically grown products. He said fewer resources—less water and less land—were used in intensive production, which produced less greenhouse gases per unit of food, than by historical farming methods. Dr Cady claimed that if we were to feed the world’s increasing population we would need more technology-aided intensive agriculture, not less. If this is true we may also need to turn off our moral compasses to do it.
Australian CSIRO scientist Peter Carberry says the world will need to produce 70 per cent more food in the next 40 years, but that this rate of production has been achieved before.[38] Carberry concludes productivity must be increased by between 2 and 3 per cent per annum. He notes that this will only happen if scientific research and development can keep pace with providing the new technologies necessary. The world no longer has the luxury of just increasing the amount of water or fertiliser used because these are quickly running out. We need more science.
However, mention the words ‘Green Revolution’ to others and they align the movement with the damage already done to the environment—excessive use of fertiliser, pesticides and irrigation, which ruined the soil and polluted the water. Far from solving hunger and malnutrition, many believe the first Green Revolution was an ecological and economic disaster.[39]
The founder of the international Slow Food Movement, Italian food expert and writer Carlos Petrini, says that new hybrid plant varieties have consumed more water and replaced existing biodiversity. What the Green Revolution did was open up a worldwide market for seeds, fertilisers and pesticides manufactured by multinational companies—many of which now hold the rights over the seeds and have in effect ‘colonised’ poor nations of the world. The dominance of monocultured crops and industrial farming practices has seen the loss of food diversity and the traditions and knowledge of small subsistence farmers in many parts of the world. The FAO claims that 75 per cent of food diversity was lost in the twentieth century. This means 80 per cent of the world’s dietary energy is now supplied by just twelve industrial crops.[40] Why is this a problem? Because crop diversity was humanity’s food insurance. If these twelve crops and the half dozen other crops that feed the world are wiped out by pests or disease, humanity is in trouble.[41] We have all of our eggs in one basket.
Petrini says that instead of a second Green Revolution, the world needs a return to the sustainable agriculture of the past, while not excluding the beneficial use of some of the new technology. This is a return to ‘natural’ methods that do not include the use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers, together with a rejection of intensive production methods, preference for local varieties and breeds, no genetically modified organisms and no monocultured crops.[42] He advocates not just a change of farming practices to organic, biodynamic or small-scale production but an outright rejection of industrial agriculture. He claims industrial agriculture is profit-oriented and has no respect for the environment and life on earth, unlike traditional agriculture that was practised successfully for thousands of years.
The Slow Food Movement’s Manifesto on the Future of Food states that the Green Revolution, industrialisation, and our current resulting system is ‘helping destroy the economic foundations of societies which undermines security and peace and creates a context for social disintegration and violence’.[43] It also blames global trade, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for undermining the rights of farmers and consumers and bringing about food insecurity.
Then there is the third way: the scientists who believe a second Green Revolution, which draws wisdom from the mistakes of the first Green Revolution, could provide a way forward.[44] According to Dr Nick Austin, from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), the second Green Revolution will not be a worldwide, broad-scale revolution but localised to countries and regions.[45] This revolution will be based upon the principles of agroecology—the convergence of the two scientific disciplines of agronomy and ecology. Agroecology is a set of farming principles and practices that enhance agricultural systems by mimicking natural processes.[46] The second Green Revolution must ensure sustainability by managing soil organic matter, recycling nutrients, integrating crops and livestock, diversifying species and incorporating agro-forestry, turning away from the broad-scale industrialisation of farming we have seen over the past 40 years. It will increase yields without increasing the use of water, energy, fertilisers or pesticides.
The revolution will be knowledge-driven. It may incorporate gene technology or as yet undiscovered or undeveloped technologies. It will focus on small holders, particularly in poor nations, but anywhere the food production system allows. It will enable small farmers to move from agricultural subsistence to an agriculture economy. But they will do it in an ecologically sustainable way with the help of science and technology.
To address food security, this revolution must also address the underlying social inequities that lead to poverty and hunger. While there will still be a place for continuing broad-scale commodity agriculture in the world, the new revolution must look at further developing high-value food crops. In short, it will take a series of mini-green revolutions to help small-holder farmers improve their ‘square yard of earth’ while protecting it for future generations of food producers.[47]