Like a tractor driven by a drunk, the Obama administration keeps zigzagging on food/ag policy—sometimes veering in the direction of progressive change, other times whipping back toward the agrichemical status quo.
In the last couple of days, there’s been a sharp turn toward the status quo. As I reported yesterday, Obama plucked Islam “Isi” Siddiqui from the nation’s most powerful agrichemical lobby group and made him our chief negotiator on ag issues in global trade talks. This is a major coup for Big Ag. Ramming open foreign markets for our cheap food commodities and pricey ag inputs is critical to the industry’s future profits—and perilous for global food security and the environment.
And today, Obama’s Big Ag side got the best of him again. He tapped Roger Beachy, long-time president of the Danforth Plant Science Center, as chief of the USDA’s newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).
A creation of the 2008 Farm Bill, the NIFA “replaces the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, which distributes $200 million in competitive grants and about $280 million in ‘formula funding’ to land-grant universities,” Science blog reports.
Science continues:
The Farm Bill adds another $106 million annually of competitive funding for research into organic farming, biomass, and fruits and vegetables. It also calls for a “distinguished scientist” to be appointed for a 6-year term as director.
So this is a critical post. If the sustainable farming movement is going to scale up and really start providing a large portion of the nation’s calories—and deliver on its potentially huge environmental promises—than we’re going to need a significant commitment of federal research dollars.
Roger BeachyPhoto: Courtesy of the Danforth CenterAnd what are we getting with the appointment of Beachy? The Danforth Plant Science Center, nestled in Monsanto’s St. Louis home town, is essentially that company’s NGO research and PR arm. According to its website, the center “was founded in 1998 through gifts from the St. Louis-based Danforth Foundation, the Monsanto Fund (a philanthropic foundation), and a tax credit from the State of Missouri.”
Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant sits on the center’s board of trustees, along with execs from defense giant McDonnell Douglas and pharma titan Merck. Another notable board member is Alfonso Romo, a Mexican magnate who cashed in big during his country’s notoriously corrupt privatization /liberalization bonanza in the early ‘90s.
Romo used his connections to build a company called Seminis into the globe’s biggest vegetable-seed concern, with dreams (as yet unrealized) of loads of new GMO veggie varieties. Monsanto bought Seminis in 2005. Here’s a revealing Wall Street Journal profile of Romo from 1999; and here’s what I wrote about him and the Monsanto/Seminis tie up back in 2005. (Interesting tidbit: Romo claims credit for innovating those insipid and ubiquitous “baby carrots”; and for reducing the spiciness of jalepeno peppers.)
On its short list of “partners” we find several research-oriented universities and one corporation: Monsanto. In the Danforth Center’s 2007 annual report (PDF), Monsanto is mentioned no fewer than ten times funding this or that project.
So essentially, the public face of Monsanto’s research efforts now has his fingers on the USDA’s research purse strings. Score a big one for agribusiness!
So Obama has become an agribiz shill, right? Well, it’s not nearly so simple.
Last winter, the administration tapped Kathleen Merrigan as deputy USDA secretary. This is traditionally a powerful position within the agency; under Bush, a paid-up industrial corn man held the post. Merrigan has pristine credentials as an organic advocate—and from the whispers I’ve heard, has been pushing that agenda within USDA.
I’m told she’s met with many prominent sustainable-ag advocates—folks who were completely frozen out by the Bush USDA. The latest: On Twitter, Michel Dimock of California’s Roots of Change recently announced he has “4 mtngs w/ USDA nxt 2 days.” That sort of access simply wasn’t available at Bush’s USDA.
Then there’s Merrigan’s brainchild, “The Know Your Farmer Know Your Food” initiative (complete with splashy new web site). It’s essentially an attempt to alert players in the sustainable food movement to possibilities of getting existing USDA funding. (I wrote briefly about its limits and promise lat week.) Again, you can call the initiative largely symbolic, but nothing remotely like it was happening under Bush.
It’s certainly energizing sustainable ag NGO chiefs. On Chews Wise blog, Sam Fromartz reports that such folks are “pumped” by the initiative. He asked several for their reactions. Words like “fantastic,” “thrilling,” and “quite encouraging” tripped off their tongues.
Meanwhile, Michelle Obama—and her food ambassador, White House assistant chef/gardener Sam Kass—continues to push sustainable ag from the East Wing. One can assume she has some influence in the Oval Office.
So what’s going on here? Whither the Obama administration on food and ag—toward a food future that seeks big, top-down, corporate-led answers, always straining to leapfrog ecological limits—and creating new sets of problems to be (lucratively) solved? Or toward one that works within ecological limits, builds resilience, and generates wealth and health within communities?
Right now, we’re getting a kind of policy whiplash. But I have a conjecture—based completely on my own observation, not on any inside info. I’ll give it here; and I urge readers to give their own conjectures below.
My conjecture is this: Obama likes cutting-edge ideas. You look at the ag landscape, and you see two distinct areas with great innovation, energy, and movement: biotech and organic/sustainable. So he’s coming out strong behind both camps, and plans to sit back and see which one develops the best ideas.
The problem is that the biotech side has a massive advantage in terms of resources; and, as I’ve shown before, has benefitted from years of government cronyism and coddling. Moreover, it utterly dominates the university research agenda, aided by the draconian intellectual rights the government has awarded it.
So if Obama is setting up a kind of contest between the two camps, the game is rigged in advance.
That’s what I think. Please write what you think below.
Ecological farms: the only real way to feed an Increasingly hungry world
No to Obama’s agrichemical industry man, yes to Bed-Stuy Farm
Comments
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Paula Crossfield Posted 2:19 pm
24 Sep 2009
The CSREES posting is deeply disturbing -- there is already not enough research being done on pesticide body burden, the potential for organics, etc. because CSREES mostly requires 50% matching funds for research -- and the matching is almost always done by the private sector, which is most interested in funding things that could potentially be a boon to their bottom line. I think that it is crucial for us to bring the point home that if we don't have proper research, we will not have any chance of wide acknowledgment that sustainable agriculture practices are the only way forward. With a Monsanto man on board, the status quo will be harder to change.
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melaniedupuis Posted 2:47 pm
24 Sep 2009
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sideshow1979 Posted 3:14 pm
24 Sep 2009
Appointments like this are always viewed as throwing a bone to one interest group or another. Merrigan is a win for sustainable agriculture; this guy Beachy is a win for conventional agriculture. The really interesting part will be seeing where the 106 million for sustainable research actually ends up. If done right, it has enormous promise to reshape large parts of of the land grant university research landscape, encouraging more researchers to look at critical sustainability concerns. Once you start getting grad students doing that research, they'll stay on that path for the next 50 years.
Keep up the good reporting.
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kenmorse Posted 4:08 pm
24 Sep 2009
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Farm Bill Girl Posted 4:51 pm
24 Sep 2009
Now the Antitrust workshops in 2010 to me ARE a serious threat to agribusiness and business as usual. It could be window dressing or represent the deep structural challenge we need to the current system. I think it's up to us to make sure it's not window dresing and something substantive comes out of it. so for now, i'll praise Obama to the moon on that front. Too bad The Nation in their food issue was too busy featuring celebrity chefs to actually cover these more structural issues and the people doing shit to address corporate control of our food system!
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Farm Bill Girl Posted 4:53 pm
24 Sep 2009
Now the Antitrust workshops in 2010 to me ARE a serious threat to agribusiness and business as usual. It could be window dressing or represent the deep structural challenge we need to the current system. I think it's up to us to make sure it's not window dresing and something substantive comes out of it. so for now, i'll praise Obama to the moon on that front. Too bad The Nation was too busy featuring celebrity chefs to actually cover these more structural issues and the people doing shit to address corporate control of our food system!
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Samuel Fromartz Posted 7:10 am
25 Sep 2009
But I think it would have been unrealistic to expect Obama to have a consistent as opposed to a schitzo food policy, simply because he must deal with what exists. He might want to change things on the margin but not much else, especially coming from Illinois. I see his moves so far as incrementalism. A cynic may say he's throwing a bone to the sustainable crowd. I think it's more, but I'm not sure he really wants to or believes he should go up against agribusiness and things-as-usual. Obviously, the number 1 issue in that regard is subsidies but they won't change due to Congress. And there is no ground-swell to push that along.
That said, effective appointees can make significant changes in terms of where current money goes, what the priorities are, etc. They can tweak and refine the inner workings of the USDA to make it more receptive to sustainable ag ideas. That is essentially what Merrigan is doing with local -- altering the direction of existing programs to fund new initiatives. But that won't happen if a pesticide industry lobbyist is in the decision-making position, which is why some of these appointments - at face value -- are disappointing.
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Frances Chapman Posted 8:18 am
25 Sep 2009
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Tom Laskawy Posted 11:46 am
25 Sep 2009
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Concerned Citizen Posted 12:37 pm
25 Sep 2009
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foodprovider Posted 1:15 pm
25 Sep 2009
Washington Monthly
The Case for Big Ag
Industrial farming pollutes rivers, distorts politics, and hurts rural communities. But it might just save the rainforest.
By Michael Grunwald
Once upon a time — actually, it was just two years ago — almost everyone in the scientific and environmental communities thought of farm-grown biofuels as a green alternative to gasoline, a renewable win-win solution that would decrease global warming as well as increase agricultural incomes. Then an environmental lawyer named Tim Searchinger had an epiphany, and proved that almost everyone was wrong.
Searchinger wasn't a scientist, an economist, or an agronomist, and he was new to energy issues. But he had spent years analyzing and litigating the ecological impacts of agriculture, especially its intrusions into natural habitats, and he wasn't the kind of enviro who assumed that something was good just because it was "renewable." So he dug into the literature. A slew of studies had concluded that crop-based fuels would slash carbon emissions, mainly because the act of growing crops removes carbon from the atmosphere. But Searchinger realized the studies had completely ignored the real-world implications of devoting crops to cars instead of people. This was his epiphany: in a world with 6.7 billion mouths to feed, when you use an acre of farmland to grow fuel, somewhere an acre of something else is probably going to be converted into new farmland to grow food, and that something else is likely to be forests or wetlands that store far more carbon than farmland ever could. It certainly isn't going to be a parking lot, which was the implicit assumption of the earlier studies.
And sure enough, when Searchinger and others began incorporating these indirect land-use effects into their greenhouse gas assessments, they found that when biofuels use productive land, the emissions created by induced deforestation outweigh the carbon benefits — while increasing hunger and decreasing biodiversity, to boot.
Oops!
"The most pungent critique I've had was a scientist who just said, 'No duh!,'" says Searchinger, now a scholar at Princeton. "It all seems so obvious in retrospect."
The impact of this analytical boo-boo has been staggering. The United States and Europe have already enacted strict mandates for biofuel usage that are ravaging the planet in the name of saving it, jump-starting a $100 billion global industry in renewable fuels, forcing beleaguered automakers to manufacture counterproductive "flex-fuel" vehicles, artificially boosting demand for grain, and creating a deadly competition between the 800 million (and rising) people with cars and the 800 million (and rising) people with hunger problems. The grain it takes to fill an SUV's tank could feed an adult for a year, and the United States is now diverting one-fourth of its corn crop to ethanol, which has helped spark riots to protest rising food prices in countries like Haiti, Mexico, and Pakistan.
It has also ratcheted up deforestation rates through a chain reaction that Searchinger and I witnessed on a visit to the Amazon last year: as U.S. soybean farmers switch to corn to take advantage of the ethanol boom, Brazilian soybean farmers expand into cattle pastures, so cattlemen move to the rainforest. The effect is not instantaneous, but when grain prices go up, the forest comes down. Meanwhile, Indonesia has bulldozed so many of its forests and peatlands into palm oil plantations for the European biodiesel market that it has surged from twenty-first to third among the world's leading carbon emitters. Malaysia has converted almost all its uncultivated land into fuel. Biofuels have made deforestation more attractive than ever. Searchinger's epiphany has a clear implication for public policy: biofuels that do not reduce emissions over their life cycle should not receive lavish government support. This has been echoed by the World Bank, the National Academies of Science, and even the British agency created to promote biofuels.
Unfortunately, the agricultural industrial complex that makes billions of dollars from crop-based biofuels dominates government farm policies in the United States and Europe. For example, just months before Searchinger published his revelations in Science, Congress passed a bipartisan energy law mandating a stunning thirty-six billion gallons of biofuels by 2022. While lawmakers later added a life-cycle test of sorts, they also included an exemption for corn ethanol, once it (inevitably) fails that test. Recent studies suggest that first-generation agro-fuels like corn-based ethanol would never pass a legitimate test. Even speculative second-generation fuels like cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass would increase overall emissions if they were produced on arable land, though there are some interesting experiments under way using fuel sources such as algae that could get around this problem (see Mark Rice-Oxley, "Algae Soup"). But Big Agriculture and its water carriers in Congress have made it clear they will defend biofuels against any technical challenge; House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson furiously vowed to scuttle the unrelated climate change bill after the Environmental Protection Agency tried to include land-use calculations in its life-cycle tests — even though Congress had directed the EPA to do so with Peterson's support, even though the tests were still predictably biofuel friendly, and even though the climate change legislation (outrageously) exempts agricultural emissions. "I want this message sent down the street!" Peterson seethed — in case anyone in the Obama administration was unaware that Big Ag was untouchable.
But Searchinger has had another epiphany — really, an epiphany about his first epiphany. It's no great shock that farm-grown fuels are an aggie boondoggle; U.S. agricultural policy teems with price supports, disaster aid, direct payments, insurance subsidies, tax breaks, and countless other policies with the common goal of shoveling dollars to industrial farmers. And it's no surprise to see Big Ag pushing policies that would ravage the rainforest; Searchinger has spent much of his legal career defending the earth against agricultural assaults. But the more he's thought about his analytical and mathematical scoop, the more he's realized it has a hidden pro–Big Ag message.
The message is that land is an incredibly precious commodity — so precious that we're better off burning gasoline on a warming planet than using land as a substitute. It turns out that land is really great at growing the food we need to feed us, and really great at storing the carbon we need to save us, but not so great at growing the fuel we need to transport us; converting the entire U.S. grain harvest to ethanol would supply less than one-fifth of our automotive fuel. The key point is that for each acre of potential cropland that isn't used for food production, either an acre of nature is going to be converted into new cropland — an acre of nature that has probably been storing up carbon for years — or the planet is going to get a bit less food. And the planet is going to need a lot more food. There could be nine billion mouths to feed by 2050, many of whom will (one hopes) be able to afford more resource-intensive foods like meat. But crop yields are no longer increasing as much as they once were, and ecologists believe that water shortages, soil erosion, and climate change could actually shrink future yields; every degree Celsius of global warming is expected to reduce global yields by about 10 percent. Even if modern technology helps boost yields in Africa, and farm-grown biofuels are somehow strangled in their cradle by an outbreak of global sanity, there's going to be intense pressure for more farmland and more deforestation.
But deforestation already accounts for 20 percent of all carbon emissions, and scientists believe the world needs to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050 to avert an unthinkable catastrophe. So unless we can eliminate all emissions from all other sources — from cars to light bulbs to burping cows — we need to limit the expansion of agriculture.
Hmm. We're going to need more food. And we're going to need our food growers to use less land. It sounds like we're going to need — industrial agriculture.
In the future, for the same reason we won't want to sacrifice valuable cropland for biofuels, we won't want to sacrifice it for low-yield organic kale either. As much as we love Michael Pollan's delicious prose, as much as we feel we ought to love locally grown, pesticide-free, genetically unmodified, naturally fertilized, antibiotic-free, multigrain whatever, we're going to need the world's farmland to produce as much sustenance as possible on as little ground as possible, so that we can leave the Amazon alone. Just as we'll have to increase people-per-acre urban densities to rein in exurban sprawl, we'll have to increase calorie-per-acre farm production to rein in agricultural sprawl. Michelle Obama's little garden is a lovely gesture, but it's not going to feed a world where food demand is rising much faster than food supply, where overpumping is lowering water tables and imperiling agriculture in China and India, and where grain reserves dwindled to an all-time low last year. To feed that world, we'll need Big Ag to do what it does best.
This will require a jolting paradigm shift. Industrial farmers have a well-earned reputation in policy circles as obesity-promoting, pesticide-spewing, water-wasting, energy-hogging, illegal-alien-hiring, politician-buying corporate welfare queens who wax hypocritical about family farmers and the "heartland" while driving small farms out of business and hollowing out rural towns. Their subsidies help deplete aquifers, destroy rivers, intensify Third World poverty, and scuttle free trade deals that would boost the nonagricultural sectors of the U.S. economy. But now that their high yields look like the best way to limit agriculture to a sustainable footprint that would leave enough trees and marshes to avoid a planetary emergency, it might be time for good-government types, environmentalists, anti-hunger activists, free trade supporters, health advocates, and other perennial Big Ag bashers to start thinking about how to work with them. Those taxpayer-supported amber waves of grain have environmental benefits as well as costs.
That doesn't mean we have to support agro-fuels — although we should support efforts to convert crop waste into energy as long as it doesn't remove land from production. We don't have to support egregious subsidies for multimillionaire farmers, either — although given the hopeless politics of the issue it might make sense to agree to support them if they're tied to soil, water, and energy conservation requirements. But we ought to recognize and encourage the potential of genetically modified crops to produce high-yield, drought-resistant crops that require fewer petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides. And we ought to acknowledge that agricultural consolidation, while painful for family farmers and rural communities, is not only inevitable but in many ways desirable. Big Ag can use the advantages of bigness not only to boost production (by buying the best seeds and inputs and tractors) but to reduce waste (with precision GPS gadgets that adjust spraying and watering according to the topography of the field). We might even rethink our opposition to those icky confined-feeding operations, especially when they're clumping together (more greenhouse-friendly) chickens rather than cows. In exchange, maybe those feedlots could stop destroying the Chesapeake Bay.
That would be Big Ag's end of the bargain: Eliminate its most egregious and least sustainable practices. Stop farming to the edge of the river, and stop draining wetlands. Keep the cows out of the stream, and more runoff on the farm. Stop spreading petroleum-based fertilizer when and where it isn't needed. Stop creating a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The industry made strides dealing with its erosion problems in response to federal incentives; perhaps it could clean up the rest of its act with proper inducements.
Big Ag has been so politically successful for so long that it might resist any compromise, but the farm lobby knows its cue-the-violins baloney about humble tillers of the heartland soil might not justify redistribution from taxpayers to agro-industrialists forever. And one positive by-product of the trend toward corporate farming is that corporations tend to worry about their images. If agriculture keeps producing more than 30 percent of the world's emissions, including the deforestation effect, it's going to get stuck with the mother of all image problems.
Brazil is an interesting example. Its larger producers make our Big Ag look like Jeffersonian yeomen, and they've become international pariahs to the save-the-rainforest crowd. But they're much lighter on the land than the slash-and-burn subsistence farmers on the Amazon frontier.
It's probably too late for another green revolution; we're bumping up against the limits of photosynthesis, and global yield increases have dwindled to about 1 percent per year. And there would be social costs to a large-scale expansion of industrial agriculture in Africa and the rest of the low-yield Third World, as well as political costs; it's no coincidence that the world's biggest soybean farmer is also the governor of a large Brazilian province on the Amazon frontier. But agricultural consolidation is going to continue no matter what; economies of scale create huge efficiencies, and they give large producers at least some counterweight against the vastly consolidated processing, shipping, and retailing industries. Searchinger's epiphanies remind us that if it's going to happen eventually, it might as well happen now, while there's still a rainforest to save.
World hunger and global warming are two of the great challenges of this century, and they are inextricably linked through agriculture and the land. About five million children already die of nutrition-related causes every year, and about fifteen million acres of carbon-rich forests already get converted into farms every year. As the world population rises, both of those figures are likely to explode unless agricultural productivity can explode as well. So by all means, we should ask industrial farmers to clean up their act. But first, we might want to beg them to save the planet and feed the world.
END
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Albionwood Posted 3:17 pm
29 Sep 2009
First, this assertion is false: "almost everyone in the scientific and environmental communities thought of farm-grown biofuels as a green alternative to gasoline..." Maybe it looked that way in DC as the stampede to biofuels was under way, but to those who think things through (admittedly a small percentage), it was clear at the time that there were major environmental and economic problems with large-scale biofuels production. Corn ethanol in particular was immediately identifiable as a scam; it's not even clear that it results in a net energy gain. And the consequences of diverting arable land to energy production rather than food were identified very early on. But those who raised these concerns were ignored because powerful interests stood to gain from the massive subsidy programs. BAU.
Second, the author doesn't seem to understand that there is no such thing as "sustainable" with a continuously increasing population. We're barely able to feed the world's population right now; so as the population grows, those rainforests will come down anyway, Big Ag notwithstanding.
"World hunger and global warming are two of the great challenges of this century, and they are inextricably linked through agriculture and the land. About five million children already die of nutrition-related causes every year, and about fifteen million acres of carbon-rich forests already get converted into farms every year. As the world population rises, both of those figures are likely to explode unless agricultural productivity can explode as well."
Those numbers are going to explode whether or not ag productivity increases. Hunger and deforestation have been with us all through the decades of explosive productivity increases; they will simply get even worse as productivity levels off. How is it possible to believe otherwise?
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Christine Heinrichs Posted 2:22 pm
25 Sep 2009
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mtvyfan Posted 3:15 pm
25 Sep 2009
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foodprovider Posted 6:11 am
26 Sep 2009
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Albionwood Posted 3:57 pm
29 Sep 2009
Whether it's at concentrations high enough to cause problems is a different question. But there's no questioning the fact that glyphosate is routinely found in surface waters - when you look for it. It's rarer in groundwater, but not unknown; the most widely reported case is in Denmark.
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Sammy Slade Posted 2:05 pm
26 Sep 2009
The contest between the two camps (especially when one side is only getting the symbolic scraps that are dropped and trailing from the money to be followed) is rigged in advanced.
Your drunk-driven tractor analogy is reminiscent of Michael Shuman in his book 'The Small-Mart Revolution':
"Contrasting the balanced rhetoric of economic developers with their singular focus on TINA ('There is no Alternative') is like trying to walk straight in a hall of fun-house mirrors. Their even-handedness with respect to the large and the small business can be compared to the even-handedness of cooks baking a proverbial elephant-mouse casserole. Add one elephant and one mouse, mix vigorously, then savor the diverse flavors. Not. Just as elephant-mouse casserole tastes pretty much like pure elephant, TINA-LOIS (LOIS= local ownership and import substitution) economic development looks pretty much like pure TINA."
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wolfger Posted 4:45 am
27 Sep 2009
"As the world population rises, both of those figures are likely to explode unless agricultural productivity can explode as well. So by all means, we should ask industrial farmers to clean up their act. But first, we might want to beg them to save the planet and feed the world."
which again takes an increase in human population to 9+ billion by 2050 as inevitable. It isn't inevitable and reducing the unwanted pregnancies through family planning education and direct birth control aid is the greenest act we can take with the most immediate impact. The human population is a multiplier to all of the environmental problems. http://www.optimumpopulation.org/reducingemissions.pdf
CONTRACEPTION IS “GREENEST” TECHNOLOGY
Family planning cheapest way to combat climate change
Contraception is almost five times cheaper than conventional green technologies as a means of combating climate change, according to research published today (Wednesday, September 9).
Each $7 (£4) spent on basic family planning over the next four decades would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than a tonne. To achieve the same result with low-carbon technologies would cost a minimum of $32 (£19). The UN estimates that 40 per cent of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended.
The report, Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost, commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust from the London School of Economics*, concludes that “considered purely as a method of reducing future CO2 emissions”, family planning is more cost-effective than leading low-carbon technologies. It says family planning should be seen as one of the primary methods of emissions reduction.
Meeting basic family planning needs along the lines suggested would save 34 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of CO2 between now and 2050 – equivalent to nearly six times the annual emissions of the US and almost 60 times the UK’s annual total.
Roger Martin, chair of OPT, said the findings vindicated OPT’s stance that population growth must be included in the climate change debate. “It’s always been obvious that total emissions depend on the number of emitters as well as their individual emissions – the carbon tonnage can’t shoot down, as we want, while the population keeps shooting up. The taboo on mentioning this fact has made the whole climate change debate so far somewhat unreal. Stabilising population levels has always been essential ecologically, and this study shows it’s economically sensible too.
“The population issue must now be added into the negotiations for the Copenhagen climate change summit in December.** This part of the solution is so easy, and so cheap, and would bring so many other social and economic benefits, from health and education to the empowerment of women. It would also ease all the other environmental problems we face – the rapid shrinkage of soil, fresh water, forests, fisheries, wildlife and oil reserves and the looming food crisis.
“All of these would be easier to solve with fewer people, and ultimately impossible to solve with ever more. Meanwhile each additional person, especially each rich person in the OECD countries, reduces everyone’s share of the planet’s dwindling resources even faster. Non-coercive population policies are urgently needed in all countries. The taboo on discussing this is no longer defensible.”
The study, based on the principle that “fewer people will emit fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide”, models the consequences of meeting all “unmet need” for family planning, defined as the number of women who wish to delay or terminate childbearing but who are not using contraception.*** One recent estimate put this figure at 200 million. UN data suggest that meeting unmet need for family planning would reduce unintended births by 72 per cent, reducing projected world population in 2050 by half a billion to 8.64 billion. Between 2010 and 2050 12 billion fewer “people-years” would be lived – 326 billion against 338 billion under current projections.
The 34 gigatonnes of CO2 saved in this way would cost $220 billion – roughly $7 a tonne. However, the same CO2 saving would cost over $1trillion if low-carbon technologies were used.
The $7 cost of abating a tonne of CO2 using family planning compares with $24 (£15) for wind power, $51 (£31) for solar, $57-83 (£35-51) for coal plants with carbon capture and storage, $92 (£56) for plug-in hybrid vehicles and $131 (£80) for electric vehicles.
However, the study may understate the CO2 savings available because the estimates of unmet need are based on married women alone, yet some studies suggest up to 40 per cent of young unmarried women have had unwanted pregnancies.
Mr Martin added: “The potential for tackling climate change by addressing population growth through better family planning, alongside the conventional approach, is clearly enormous and we shall be urging all those involved in the Copenhagen process to take it fully on board.”
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Albionwood Posted 2:54 pm
29 Sep 2009
Thanks for the link; it's nice to have a quantitative analysis of the potential benefits from just one aspect of lowering the birth rate.
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ecti Posted 12:02 pm
28 Sep 2009
*Thou shalt inherit the Holy Earth as a faithful steward, conserving its resources and productivity from generation to generation.
*Thou shalt safeguard thy fields from chemical pollutants,soil erosion and genetically engineered crops; thy living waters from drying up or being poisoned by chemicals; thy forests from cut and burn desolation, and protect thy hills from unsound mining practices and overgrazing by thy herds, that thy descendants may have abundance forever.
*If any shall fail in this stewardship of the Land, thy fruitful fields shall become sterile stony ground and wasting gullies, thy waters will become unfit for life and thy descendants shall decrease and live in poverty or perish from off the face of the earth.
http://www.youtube.com/user/MicrobeClean
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