FOOD FACTS
DID YOU KNOW THE FOLLOWING?
Well, I could go on like this for several more pages. But there is little doubt that the world’s food-supply chain is threatened by massive “complexification” of the food industry. Industrialization of farming, genetic modifications, pesticides, monoculture, climate instability, population growth, encroachment of cities on farm land (and their water)—take your pick. All these are individually and collectively creating conditions for an X-event-type collapse of the world’s food production and distribution network. Industrialization of food has led to an overreliance on certain crops—corn, wheat, soybeans—leaving us with a dramatically reduced natural diversity, a diversity that has long shielded us from plagues, climatic variation, and the like. Some fear that pesticides are contributing to the evolution of “superpests” (just as antibiotics led to superviruses) that could ravage the globe, immune to all attempts to stop them.
The competing complexities in the different parts of the global food system seem much more likely to increase the complexity overload on the system rather than reduce it unless more, much more, international cooperation takes place to reduce the imbalances. Otherwise, the third horseman of the apocalypse, famine, will ride roughshod over the globe and force the world into facing the food problem on far less favorable terms than we enjoy today.
Most of us living in the industrialized world are accustomed to supermarket shelves sagging under the weight of inexpensive food of a bewildering variety of types. It’s hard for us to imagine that life could ever be different. But like a lot of other eras I cover in this book, the era of easily accessible, cheap food is one that is ending, as we embark on a journey to a time when there simply won’t be enough food for everyone. If you’re starting to think this is just another Malthusian scare story waiting to be quashed by another “green revolution,” read on.
BLACK PLAGUE 2.0
IN THE LATE 1800S, A FUNGUS ORIGINALLY FROM THE HIMALAYAS traveled to Europe from the Dutch East Indies and later moved to North America, where it ran through the forests of eastern Canada and the United States killing the vast majority of elm trees, earning the sobriquet Dutch elm disease from its identification by Dutch scientists in 1917. New strains emerged in the 1970s in the United Kingdom, where over three-quarters of the elms perished. Now meet its much more aggressive younger brother, Phytophthora ramorum (PR), another fungus pathogen also thought to have started in Asia and moved to Europe and the United Kingdom via shipping containers in the 1990s. But instead of the elms, which have pretty much disappeared, PR is attacking the larch trees that cover rural regions in Devon, Cornwall, and South Wales.
As with some human afflictions, such as ovarian cancer, the first you know about a PR infection is when it’s already too late to save the tree. The outward signs begin when the tree’s foliage starts to blacken, the inner bark turns brown instead of green, and a black liquid oozes out of the tree from various breaches in its bark. At this point, the tree cannot be saved and must be cut down and removed in an effort to protect the rest of the forest. And it’s not just larch trees that can be infected. The PR fungus can also attack beech, sweet and horse chestnut trees, as well as a range of plants that include rhododendron, lilac, and viburnum.
The first appearance of PR in the United Kingdom was in 2002 on a viburnum plant in East Sussex. The fungus then “leapt” to rhododendrons, and from there to other species of plants through the rhododendron spores that traveled in water, air, and mists to other plants. Until 2009 tree scientists saw only about a hundred infected trees, usually near rhododendrons. But then PR spores began sprouting up all over Wales, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic. Even worse was that the spores in the trees were reproducing more than five times faster than on rhododendrons. So the race to save the forests was on, pitting the skills of the scientists against the virulence of the PR spores.
If you stand on a hilltop overlooking a forest in South Wales today, what you see is more reminiscent of a World War I battlefield than a forest, as the acres of stumps and branches of cut trees give testament to the fact that there is still no known cure for the PR fungus other than the “cut-and-burn,” scorched-earth strategy of ancient times. By February 2011, nearly 1.5 million larches had been cut in the preceding fifteen months, with another 1.2 million due for the chopping block over the following three months—in order to stave off an even worse catastrophe.
What’s even more disturbing is that the PR pathogen remains in the soil for at least five years. So the future of larch trees in the United Kingdom looks distinctly bleak. And the big fear is that once the larches are removed, PR will jump to yet another species. Some informed analysts suggest that blueberries or even heather are strong possibilities. Currently, plant experts seem to have abandoned the idea of actually eradicating PR and are focusing their efforts on simply containing it. Truly, a plague of biblical proportions is brewing in the woodlands of Britain, but one unlike the plague of the Middle Ages in that it’s unlikely to disappear anytime soon. To get a sense for what the world might be like if a plant killer like PR started running amok over the entire globe, consider the following story.
SOME YEARS BEFORE ONLINE BOOKSELLERS LIKE AMAZON MADE tracking down just about any book in or out of print as easy as a few clicks of a mouse, I undertook a worldwide odyssey through secondhand bookshops from New York to Christchurch to Rio de Janeiro in an effort to find the one hundred greatest science-fiction novels of all time. This quixotic undertaking was sparked by the 1986 book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, by sci-fi critic and publisher David Pringle. To Pringle’s credit, he didn’t try to rank-order his top one hundred, but simply listed them by order of publication, starting with Nineteen Eight-Four by George Orwell (1949) and ending with William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which coincidentally was published in…1984. Somewhere in between these marvelous classics, both of which trace out a somewhat dark vision of the future, was the equally classic—and equally dark—1956 tale The Death of Grass by British writer John Christopher.
The premise of Christopher’s story is that an uncontrollable plant virus, the Chung-Li, wipes out all grasses in China, leading to the starvation of hundreds of millions of Chinese. This all seems hopelessly remote to the middle-class Custance family in Britain, one branch of which tills the soil in the Lake District; the other branch, headed by lawyer John Custance, lives and plays in London. As the story unfolds, John Custance has heard from Roger, a friend in the British government, that the Chung-Li virus has spread to Britain. The following exchange captures the essence of the story:
“Damn it!” John said. “This isn’t China.”
“No,” Roger said. “This is a country of fifty million people that imports near half its food requirements.”
“We might have to tighten our belts.”
“A tight belt,” said Roger, “looks silly on a skeleton.”
All scientific attempts to stem the virus come to nothing, and after a year the entire world is affected. John then hears from his friend in government that the army is about to seal off the major cities, since only a small fraction of the population can survive on root plants and fish. So the government has decided that the only solution is to “downsize” the population by killing off all city dwellers. Most of the book is then devoted to John’s journey with his family to his brother’s farm. On the way, they encounter marauding bands of city folks like themselves, who have escaped the cities and are raping, looting, and murdering their way through the countryside. John’s own party has to rob and kill in order to survive. Ultimately, John and his family reach the haven of his brother’s farm, which is located in a secluded—and protected—valley where they feel they’ll be better positioned to defend their turf against all comers.
AS A REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE OF AN ENDGAME SITUATION, ALBEIT one not quite as apocalyptic as that portrayed in The Death of Grass, the PR fungus discussed earlier could possibly drive larch trees, rhododendrons, and their like to extinction. Although the “death of larch trees” is hardly an existential threat, such a fungus could spread out to a global catastrophe if it were to mutate and threaten grain crops as well. In recognition of this general possibility of plant species extinction, in 2008 the government of Norway established a “doomsday” seed vault deep inside a mountain in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, about one thousand kilometers from the North Pole. As Norway’s prime minister Jens Stoltenberg stated, “It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations.” Buried within the permafrost of a mountain, the vault is designed to withstand earthquakes, a nuclear strike, perhaps even an asteroid impact.
The underlying motivation for such a vault rests with the industrialization of the global food supply. Big firms that dominate food production severely restrict genetic diversity by employing just a few varieties of plant seed, sometimes just a single variety. If a disease struck that particular variety, food production would be in big trouble, and the entire food-supply system could collapse. Hence, the Svalbard vault.
Even though the Arctic region would seem to be plenty cold enough to preserve the seeds, the temperatures there apparently vary sufficiently widely that the doomsday vault needs huge air conditioners to chill the vault to temperatures just below zero degrees Fahrenheit, in order to deep-freeze the seeds to a temperature where they can survive for a thousand years. The seeds themselves are packed in silvery foil containers and placed on blue and orange metal shelves inside the storage rooms. A total of about four and a half million seed types ranging from carrots to wheat to corn can be stored. For the record, the first seeds deposited at the opening ceremony were a collection of rice seeds from 104 countries.
To most of us, I think, it will come as a surprise to know that there already exist about fourteen hundred seed banks around the world. But many of them are in politically unstable areas or face threats from the natural environment where they’re located. For example, seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan were wiped out by war, and one in the Philippines was destroyed by a typhoon in 2006. Thus, it was important to establish a kind of “last resort” seed bank that could withstand just about everything nature and humans could throw at it. As stated by Geoff Hawtin of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, who organized and funded the operation, “What will go into the cave is a copy of all the material that is currently in collections [spread] all around the world.” Even though Norway is the vault’s formal owner, any country may deposit seeds without charge into the doomsday vault and reserve the right to withdraw them as needed.
A plant virus like the Chung-Li strikes right at the deepest level of the food chain beginning with grasses, destroying that vital first link. But a virus isn’t the only way to undo the plant world as there are other links in the chain from grass to the foodstuffs that end on your dinner plate. Here’s one of those links that’s also of deep concern today.
THE DEATH OF BEES
ONE OF THE MOST ACCLAIMED DOCUMENTARY FILMS IN RECENT YEARS was The Vanishing of the Bees, which told the tale of the mystifying disappearance of over one-third of the honeybees in North America and Europe from 2006 through 2008. This vanishing act, termed “colony collapse disorder” (CCD), is portrayed in the film by following actual beekeepers, as we observe them opening their hives in the morning and seeing that all the bees have flown the coop, so to speak, literally overnight.
The idea that bees are disappearing has now embedded itself into the public consciousness, and the film plays into that fear in many ways. There’s no denying that pollination of plants by bees, as well as other animals like butterflies and birds, plays a crucial role for the production of fruits and seeds. Over 80 percent of the quarter of a million flowering plants on the planet are pollinated by such animals. It is also undeniable that honeybees, which are the main pollinators among the many species of bees, suffered a huge die-off beginning in 2006. In effect, disappearance of the honeybees constitutes a huge reduction in the complexity of the food production process, creating a complexity imbalance between the variety of tools needed to pollinate plants and those available, since without the honeybees the process would have to be carried out by a smaller set of pollinators.
These facts raise two huge questions for the human food-supply system: (1) Why are the honeybees dying? and (2) How crucial is bee pollination in the overall scheme of things as far as food production is concerned? Well, let’s see.
The honeybees have a hard life in today’s world. They are trucked around the country by their keepers to pollinate fruit and nut crops, starting with almonds in California in early spring and ending with pears and apples in Oregon in the early autumn. Note here that these are the so-called commercial honeybees, which far outdistance bees from the wild, the feral bees, as pollinators. To get an idea of the damage that would be caused if these bees didn’t show up any longer, consider that California provides nearly 80 percent of the world’s almond supplies, which are used in products ranging from ice cream to cosmetics. So it’s no surprise to hear that firms like Häagen-Dazs are funding efforts to raise public awareness of the importance of bees in agriculture. To put the matter bluntly, no bees, no crops, no products.
To get an idea of how CCD has impacted the economics of honeybees, almond growers paid a rental fee of about $175 per hive in 2009, which was more than double the price just four years earlier. So if you place one hive per acre of planted trees and you have 2,000 acres, then you’re looking at an increase in production costs of $200,000 or more in pollination fees alone. As industry professional John Replogle, former CEO of Burt’s Bees, a cosmetics firm that offers almond-based creams, put it: “So go the bees, so go the almonds.” And this economic vignette is just for almonds. Scale it up to apples, pears, blueberries, and zillions of other fruits, nuts, and plants that bees pollinate and you begin to get some sense of the magnitude of the problem if the bees go AWOL. What do conservation biologists and bee specialists say about the causes of CCD?
Following the CCD outbreak in 2006, researchers worked overtime to try to identify just what it is that caused the bees to flee. In early 2011, the betting odds seemed to favor an explanation that it’s in the genes; the factories in the cell that create the proteins bees use to carry on their activities seem to have broken down in those bees associated with CCD. To put it succinctly, the bees’ cellular structure couldn’t manufacture the energy necessary for the bees to function. But what were the factors that gave rise to this breakdown in the cellular energy-manufacturing facilities in the first place?
The best account going is that three rather different factors combined in a perfect storm of sorts to interfere with the affected bees’ genetic operation. This infernal triangle consists of the following steps.
In this same direction, genetic modification of crop seed to reduce the need for insecticides have given rise to an evolutionary arms race between the farmers and the insects, whose latest manifestation is a population of “superinsects” that can resist the genetically implanted pesticide placed into popular strains of corn. Yet once again this is an example of complexity overload, in which the immune system of the insects has evolved to a level of complexity far greater than the low-complexity level of the genetically engineered defenses hardwired in to the plant’s genome.
Traveling bees, too, are exposed to increasing levels of pesticides as each year goes by. This exposure, coupled with the simple stress of being pollinating traveling salesmen, takes a toll on the health of the bees, reducing their ability to resist other pathogens.
Fortunately, bee populations seem to be on the rise again. But new pollination problems are looming on the horizon due to the dramatic increase in total agricultural production over the past five decades. In that time, human population has doubled. But the small proportion of agricultural output that depends on bee pollination has quadrupled over the same period. This heightened agricultural output of crops like cashews, cherries, and almonds has happened mostly by increasing the amount of land under cultivation.
Unfortunately, creating cultivated land from the natural habitat of wild pollinators, along with increased demand for pollinators, dramatically outstrips the increase in population of the domestic bees, which in turn is putting a serious strain on pollination capacity. So the rise in demand for pollinator-dependent crops, coupled with these factors reducing the pollinating capacity, has created the potential for a problem of unprecedented magnitude. The good news is that the bees are back; the bad news is that recent events may be an early-warning signal that we will have a real pollination problem on our hands very soon.
The PR fungus and the disappearance of bees vividly illustrate the need for a global plant seed backup like the doomsday vault to preserve the diversity of plant life. But food crises don’t just come from problems with plants; they can arise in many ways and on many timescales. Reduced diversity from disease and infection is one of the more dramatic types of threats, generally unfolding on a medium-term timescale of a few months to a year or so. But one might well argue that these are at best borderline examples of how food-supply crises might arise from human actions. So let’s take a harder look at the emerging food crisis, one whose focus is more short term, and see what kinds of storms appear to be brewing up on the horizon.
FAM(IN)E AND (MIS)FORTUNE
SHORTLY AFTER TEN O’CLOCK ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 24, 2008, Mary Ann Galviso, a real estate broker from the rural community of Orosi in central California, snapped up two fifty-pound bags of Thai jasmine rice from the San Francisco branch of the warehouse club Costco. Her purchase was a small contribution to the emptying of three full pallets of rice at the club within an hour’s time, despite the fact that the store had imposed a limit of two bags per customer. What made Ms. Galviso’s story marginally noteworthy was that she had traveled more than two hundred miles from her home to make this purchase, as the local store in Orosi had run out of the rice that served as a staple in meals for Mary Ann and her family.
This story highlights hoarding behavior on the part of not only home shoppers, but Asian and Indian restaurant owners as well, whose panic buying forced not only Costco, but also Sam’s Club, a branch of Walmart, to impose limits on the amount of rice that customers could buy. One manager at Costco stated, “We’ve heard of cases where restaurant owners are hoarding three weeks’ supply of rice in their basement.”
Rice rationing in the United States in 2008 came as commodity price increases sparked violence over food supplies and costs. And, in fact, three years later the price increases had not abated and contributed mightily to the social unrest and violence that led to the ouster of the political regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. To appreciate the magnitude of the problem, in February 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that its food price index composed of a basket of key commodities such as wheat, milk, oil, and sugar had risen 2.2 percent from its January level and sat at its highest level since the organization started monitoring prices more than two decades earlier. Let’s take a quick look at the constellation of problems leading to this continuing escalation of food prices worldwide.
The huge increase in food prices over the past five years can be accounted for by factors acting to simultaneously reduce the supply of food and greatly increase its demand. As we all know from Economics 101, these two factors constitute the perfect one-two combo to punch a hole in the food budget of every household. The supply-side factors leading to a decline in food production include the following:
Water Shortages: Overpumping of underground water aquifers in many countries, including China, India, and the United States, has artificially inflated food production in the past few decades. For example, Saudi Arabia was self-sufficient in wheat harvesting for over twenty years. Now the wheat harvest there is likely to disappear entirely over the next couple of years due to a lack of underground water to irrigate crops.
Soil Erosion and Loss of Croplands: Experts estimate that a third of the world’s cropland is losing topsoil faster than it can be replaced through natural processes. In northwestern China and western Mongolia, a huge dust bowl is forming that will make the dust bowls in the United States during the Great Depression look minuscule by comparison. A similar dust bowl is also growing in central Africa. So in these regions, grain harvests are shrinking and farmers will eventually have to abandon the land and move to the cities.
Extreme Weather and Climate Phenomena: Global warming is not a myth, and rising temperatures are here to stay. It’s estimated that for each one degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum for the growing season, there is a 10 percent decline in the yield of grain. Photos of burnt-out wheat fields in Russia during the summer of 2010 give graphic evidence of the impact climate change is making in dramatically reducing harvests.
High Oil Prices: There is a second “oil shock” taking place alongside the one you see at the gas station when you fill up your tank. This is the dramatic rise in the price of cooking oils like palm oil, soybean oil, corn oil, and many other vegetable oils. And there is also the strong impact a rising price of petroleum products makes on food supply, since oil enters into every aspect of food supply. As one wag put it, “Soil is nature’s way of transforming oil into food.”
These are but a handful of factors, all contributing to decline in global food supply. Unfortunately, there is an equally “depressive” complementary list on the demand side of the ledger.
Population Growth: The world population is growing at a rate of over two hundred thousand people per day. It doesn’t take an undiscovered genius to know that most of them are entering the dining room in the poorest, most undernourished parts of the world. So while the number of mouths to feed continues to grow, the food available just isn’t there to fill them.
Rising Affluence: Over three billion people are changing their dietary preferences from subsistence diets to more meat, eggs, milk, and grain-intensive products. For instance, it takes up to sixteen pounds of grain to produce just one pound of meat. And more than eleven times as much fossil fuel is needed to make one calorie of animal protein than what’s required to make one calorie of plant protein. In other words, instead of eating the grains directly, half the world’s population is eating “transformed” grain in the form of higher protein, but higher grain content, products like meat and poultry.
Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen illustrates the perversity of this phenomenon by envisioning a country with a lot of poor people that suddenly experiences economic expansion. He then assumes that only half the population shares in this newfound wealth. The rich half spend their wealth on higher-quality, higher-priced food, which drives food prices up. The poor half of the population now faces higher prices but without higher income and thus starves. And this is no fantasy either, as Sen traces just this process as having unfolded in the Bengal famine of 1943.
Grains to Fuel: A substantial fraction of grain, especially corn, is now being diverted from food to the production of ethanol to fuel cars. In the United States, this amounts to nearly one-third of the entire grain harvest. The primary motivation for this diversion rests with misguided policies instituted in 2006 that offered government subsidies to farmers who would convert their grain to automotive fuel.
In addition to these components of food price increases, we have the massive infusion of US dollars into the world’s financial system to combat the ongoing financial crisis. Since commodities are almost all priced in dollars, dollars flooding into the world’s financial system contribute to a huge increase in the price of commodity products worldwide ranging from oil to wheat to frozen pork bellies. As the value of the dollar rises against other currencies, holders of those currencies must pay more for their commodities and thus more for their basket of food. In short, the quantitative “easing” imposed by the US Federal Reserve has become a quantitative “hardship” at the dinner table for much of the world. So what is the solution? Or is there one?
The obvious “solution” to the food crisis, such as it is, would be to attack the supply and demand imbalances at their source. This would involve the following types of actions:
Efficient Management of Water Resources and Cropland: Overpumping of water aquifers and overstressing croplands must both stop. Suburban sprawl and paving over cropland for roads and parking lots, especially in China and India, has to be curbed. Furthermore, the water that is available must be employed in a much more efficient manner, which will require innovative technologies, technologies that currently do not exist: for instance, recycling of water, or the use of less-water-intensive crops.
World Population: There is a need to dramatically speed up the trend to smaller families. Among other things, this will require providing family-planning help and advice to the world’s poorest populations, which have the highest birthrates.
Climate: Carbon emissions need to be cut by 80 percent over the next decade, in order to stave off catastrophic climate events, especially the flooding, hurricanes, droughts, and similar events that seem likely to arise from increased global warming. These events would destroy much current agricultural land.
Government Policy Change: Misguided government policies subsidizing ethanol production must be dropped as soon as possible. Those grain harvests are much more valuable filling empty stomachs than empty gas tanks. Increased governmental regulation of multinational food producers would also be a boon toward stabilizing food production by encouraging less efficiency and more resiliency in the production process, as for instance by forcing the usage of a greater variety of seed types in the production of grain.
ADDING IT ALL UP
THE WORLD IS CURRENTLY FACING A CONFLUENCE OF MOUNTING shortages in three commodities essential to the continuance of human life on this planet: water, energy, and food. These three elements combine into something much greater than the sum of its parts, a looming global disaster by 2030. By 2030 the demand for water will increase by 30 percent, while demands for both energy and food will shoot up 50 percent. All this will be driven by a global population increase to about 8 billion people, placing tremendous stress on our highly industrialized global food system.
It’s important to note that the food shortage leg of this triangle is not being driven by supply-side considerations as much as it is by the demand side. Luckily, even though increasing population is a major factor in stimulating this demand, the rate of world population growth appears to be slowing, and if current patterns of women’s empowerment continue, it can be expected to slow even further. Of course, surprises always occur so there is no guarantee that either of these trends will continue. And, in fact, they almost surely will not continue if the world fails to face up to the most challenging problem, which is the ever-increasing gap between the rich countries and the poor ones in the global economy.