Here in the United States, we grow 44 percent of the world's corn crop, and 38 percent of its soy. For the great bulk of that massive harvest, we rely on a single region: the Midwestern farm belt. And over the past couple of weeks, torrential rains have hammered that area, at a particularly sensitive time for its grand swath of corn and soybean plants.
An unusually wet spring had already pushed farmers to plant their crops late and forced them to keep some land fallow. With the recent deluge, a bad situation has turned worse. The rains have not only damaged crops, they've also washed away untold tons of fertilizer, which leach into groundwater and eventually flow through the Mississippi clear down to the Gulf of Mexico. There, the fertilizer won't feed crops; instead, in a double blow to food production, it will nourish a vast algae bloom blotting out sea life that would otherwise have contributed to a once-bountiful fishery.
As a result of this soggy situation, corn yields will plummet, the USDA reports [PDF]. And that's bad news for the billions of people who rely on the global food system for sustenance.
Back in February, a fertilizer executive was already waxing darkly about trends in food production: "If you had any major upset where you didn't have a crop in a major growing agricultural region this year, I believe you'd see famine," William Doyle, CEO of Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, told Bloomberg News.
Mulling over depleted global grain stores, ramped-up U.S. and European mandates for turning food crops into biofuel, and rising demand for grain in Asia, Doyle declared that the global food system had no margin for error. "We keep going to the cupboard without replacing, and so there is enormous pressure on agriculture to have a record crop every year," he said. "We need to have a record crop in 2008 just to stay even with this very low inventory situation."
Since that time, we've seen images of people in places like Haiti desperately scrounging in garbage dumps for food, because they could no longer afford to buy it. And now comes news that prospects for the coming harvests of corn, soy, and wheat -- the holy trifecta of our globalized food system -- are looking grim indeed.
When It Rains, It Pours
Think food prices are high? Fasten your seatbelt -- and prepare to tighten it. The bad weather combined with dubious federal policies means we're ... well, shucked.
In the past, societies stored grain precisely because agriculture has always been such a fickle food provider. A few decades ago, the U.S. began testing a new theory: sell off grain reserves and let "market forces" ensure there's enough food for everyone. Our policymakers have become so enamored of the idea that they've managed to convince many countries in the global south to do the same -- often with the help of the International Monetary Fund and its famed "structural adjustment" packages.
More recently, our leaders have combined the no-grain-storage decree with another, deeply contradictory experiment: using heavy-handed subsidies and mandates (what happened to "market forces"?) to ensure that a large and growing chunk of our farm bounty be turned into car fuel.
Combined, those policies have brought us to the present pass: As our friend the fertilizer executive reminds us, feeding the world now requires that the weather cooperate, every year. That's a tough row to hoe, given that climate change seems set to make weather patterns increasingly erratic. And as we're seeing this summer, it doesn't take much to make things come unhinged.
In response to the rains, investors have driven up corn prices to levels never seen before. By Wednesday afternoon, corn was trading above $7 per bushel -- an astonishing 75 percent rise since last June. Just three years ago, a bushel of corn fetched less than $2. The same factors have ramped up soy prices as well.
And the worst may be yet to come. Weather reports suggest that the Midwest's wet spell may last through the month. If that happens, surviving plants will have a tough time developing deep roots, making them vulnerable to a dry spell later in the summer. If a soggy June turns into a bone-dry July and August, corn and soy prices will likely spike anew.
Meanwhile, wheat prices have held relatively steady -- most of the U.S. wheat crop lies outside the area currently under water. But the same factor that pushed global wheat prices to all-time highs last year -- a persistent drought in Australia's wheat belt -- may be rearing up again. The New York Times reported recently that a new burst of dry weather in Australia could lead to another shortfall in its wheat output -- and push prices back into the stratosphere.
And that's not all. While conditions are too dry in Australia, Chinese farmers, like their U.S. counterparts, are bracing for hard rain. According to the Times, China's agriculture ministry "issued an urgent notice to wheat and rice farmers in southern China on Sunday, telling them to harvest as much of their crop as possible immediately in the face of unseasonable torrential rains expected to rake the region for the next 10 days."
At this point, given how much there already is to worry about, it's probably best not to think about the new fungal strain that, according to The Wall Street Journal, threatens to eviscerate wheat crops in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
No Piece of Cake
When fertilizer magnate Doyle predicted famine if global agriculture didn't hit on all cylinders this year, he probably wasn't talking about the industrial nations of North America and Western Europe. Despite our increasingly enfeebled economy, most Americans still command enough wealth to procure sufficient calories even if prices rise dramatically. Likely, Doyle meant the world's 850 million people who live in conditions of persistent hunger, mostly in the southern hemisphere. For them -- many of whom have been essentially evicted from productive farmland and pushed into cities over the past few decades -- spikes in food prices spell devastation.
But here in the United States, too, hard times seem imminent. No one can envy the 10.9 percent of U.S. families who already lacked sufficient access to food as of 2006. That number will surely grow as the economy weakens.
Bad weather and big ag are tossing shoppers around.
And you don't have to be poor to feel the pinch of higher grocery bills. "You know those complaints you've been hearing about high food prices? They've just begun," a commodity trader told The New York Times Thursday.
As the food crisis plays out, we're likely to hear more and more pitches from agribusiness giants who promise that if we simply play by their rules, everything will be just fine. Just last week, the biotech giant Monsanto -- which dominates the global seed markets for corn, soy, and cotton -- announced its intention to double yields for its "core crops" by 2030, all the while reducing "by one-third the amount of key resources" required to grow them.
To do so, Monsanto and its allies are stockpiling patents for so-called "climate ready" genes that will ostensibly equip plants to withstand severe weather. "In the face of climate chaos and a deepening world food crisis, the Gene Giants are gearing up for a PR offensive to re-brand themselves as climate saviors," writes the watchdog outfit ETC Group in a recent report. "The focus on so-called climate-ready genes is a golden opportunity to push genetically engineered crops as a silver bullet solution to climate change."
If the current crisis has taught us one thing, it's that food production needs to become more diversified and dispersed, not concentrated ever more tightly into fewer and fewer hands. Here's my alternative to Monsanto's vision: Let's end the biofuel mandates and subsidies -- currently eating up around $13 billion per year in taxpayer cash -- and invest the savings in grain storage and the infrastructure required to really revive local and regional food production.
Of course, Monsanto can lavish a cool $1.3 million on Washington lobbyists each quarter, and all I've got is this stinkin' column.
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Comments
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PermieWriter Posted 3:46 am
13 Jun 2008
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ecofriend27 Posted 4:28 am
13 Jun 2008
That said, Mr. Philpott has it right; we need decentralized agricultural production. We need to bring crop yield to the community level again. Cuba is a prime example of such a "reverse process" and has actually thrived with regards to crop yield and overall physical well-being. Let us learn from history and reshape how we approach our most vital resources.
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MAD MAC Posted 5:27 am
13 Jun 2008
Have you ever noticed that with environmentalists, the sky is ALWAYS falling?
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mtvyfan Posted 5:57 am
13 Jun 2008
If you really want to help your food budget, grow your own garden. Anyone can do this regardless if you have a plot of land or not. Please use organically produced seeds if you can and enjoy the fruits of your labors. Self-sufficiency really feels good!
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Pangolin Posted 3:01 pm
13 Jun 2008
This isn't going to go well.
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MAD MAC Posted 9:13 pm
13 Jun 2008
The system isn't going to come crashing down. There will be some pain, but it's not as if the world economy is suddenly going to implode. People are smarter and more creative in dealing with problems than environmentalist give them credit for.
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randino Posted 10:25 pm
13 Jun 2008
Damn! I got up on the wrong side of the bed again! Sorry, I have a rain barrel to buy. Hopefully that will put me in a better mood.
Randy Cunningham
Cleveland, OH
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zenkate Posted 8:19 am
14 Jun 2008
This is not something we can ignore, even if our own future is safe and assured.
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MAD MAC Posted 3:08 pm
14 Jun 2008
So yes, in one way it is tragic, but in another it is inevitable. Let's say that the world weasels its way out of this current food AND oil crisis without any mass death. Those overpopulated zones are going to just keep breeding. The people living there are not going to say "Wow, that was a close one. We had better do something to get our population under control." Indeed in areas with Muslim populations they continue to breed because they are seeking superior demographics. They believe that larger population gives them more power - and they are seeking it.
So yes, given that I have friends in Somalia who are barely getting by even with my help, I just don't see how this problem can be resolved until the people who can not afford to have children stop doing so.
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Kurt Michael Friese Posted 5:30 am
16 Jun 2008
Farm land now sells over $6K an acre, and with several million acres under water, the remaining ones will likely be even MORE.
If we had a local/regional food system in place, this flood would still be a catastrophe, but it would only be a catastrophe for us, here; Not for all of you in the rest of the world who rely on corn and soy from the midwest grown using $140/barrel oil from the mideast.
Unsustainable.
Unsustainable.
Unsustainable.
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sairen42 Posted 11:37 pm
16 Jun 2008
Donate to world hunger relief charities? Lobby our congressmen (I haven't even got a lousy column!)? Ah, please won't someone just tell me what to do? :)
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jnobianchi Posted 2:14 am
18 Jun 2008
This is exactly what a colleague in Rwanda has seen: small farmers who grow without expensive petroleum based inputs (herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers) are doing well.
They're insulated in large degree from the current food and fuel crises, and they're actually finding new demand for their crops. Some are actually scaling up more production, opening fields they haven't used in awhile, to meet demand. This is putting more money in their pockets.
If there's a positive here, it's to show the wisdom in promoting, investing in, and buying local agriculture. I mean, who wants tasteless strawberries in December anyway?!
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MAD MAC Posted 11:24 pm
18 Jun 2008
Well, Rwanda disposed of much of its excess population in 1994. Might do the same again next decade too.
If you grow without herbicides or pesticides, your crop is very vulnerable to being wiped out. Don't fool yourself, nature is trying to kill you all the time.
Those same farmers you are talking about are a drought or a flood away from going hungary. You can't just "eat local" and sustain that. Eventual, the local conditions won't be sufficient. In places like Somalia, where life is always precarious because of a lack of water, a couple of bad years and it's over unless there is connections to food sources outside the region.
In my view, the issue is not how food is produced, it's overpopulation. There are too many people in parts of the world that can't sustain them.
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Jonas Posted 10:53 am
19 Jun 2008
The reality is that "global food market" is very small. There are no "billions of people" depending on it. A few hundred thousand are.
95% of all produced rice is consumed locally. 85% of all produced maize (corn) and wheat is consumed locally.
Please, common, if you are writing about this type of sensitive topics, at least get the bottom basics right. You're making yourselves look like fools here really.
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Jonas Posted 10:57 am
19 Jun 2008
75% of the 850 million people living in hunger are actually farmers and ruralites, not urbanites.
This is such basic knowledge from development economics... The fact that the author of this piece doesn't know this, says way too much.
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MAD MAC Posted 2:05 pm
19 Jun 2008
Same with rice. 5% of hundreds of millions of tons of rice produced in southeast Asia is still a lot of rice.
Percentages can sometimes be deceptive.
But you are absolutely correct in your notion that the people getting hammered by food shortages are subsistence farmers who just can't produce enough to subsist because of a shortage of land, shortage of water, etc. Subsistence farming has always been a lousy way to make a living. Most people who do it do so because they have to. Family farms that run at a real profit - those are rare things.
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Tom Philpott Posted 2:59 pm
19 Jun 2008
The US accounts for 44 percent of global corn production and 65 percent of global corn exports (see: http://www.grains.org/page.ww?section=Barley%2C+Corn+%26+ ...).
So, a shortfall in our corn crop will ripple through global grain prices -- not just for corn, but also other crops like wheat. And food-importing nations -- ie, nations that have dismantled their ag sectors -- will be hardest hit. According to FAO back in April (see: http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2008/1000826/index.ht ...
The cereal import bill of the world's poorest countries is forecast to rise by 56 percent in 2007/2008. This comes after a significant increase of 37 percent in 2006/2007, FAO said today.
For low-income food-deficit countries in Africa, the cereal bill is projected to increase by 74 percent, according to the UN agency's latest Crop Prospects and Food Situation report. The increase is due to the sharp rise in international cereal prices, freight rates and oil prices.
And then this:
Should the expected growth in 2008 production materialize, the current tight global cereal supply situation could ease in the new 2008/09 season," the report said.
But much will depend on the weather, FAO cautioned, recalling that at this time last year prospects for cereal production in 2007 were far better than the eventual outcome. Unfavourable climatic conditions devastated crops in Australia and reduced harvests in many other countries, particularly in Europe.
Well, now we know that weather has let us down: floods in the US midwest, and drought in Australia.
As for the bit about the urban poor -- been to a city in the global south recently? -- I direct you to the UN's landmark study on cities that emerged in 2003. I can't find it free online, but here's how the Guardian summarized it ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/oct/04/population.jo ...):
One in every three people in the world will live in slums within 30 years unless governments control unprecedented urban growth, according to a UN report. The largest study ever made of global urban conditions has found that 940 million people - almost one-sixth of the world's population - already live in squalid, unhealthy areas, mostly without water, sanitation, public services or legal security.
The report, from the UN human settlements programme, UN-habitat, based in Nairobi, found that urban slums were growing faster than expected, and that the balance of global poverty was shifting rapidly from the countryside to cities.
Africa now has 20% of the world's slum dwellers and Latin America 14%, but the worst urban conditions are in Asia, where more than 550 million people live in what the UN calls unacceptable conditions.
The world's 30 richest countries are home to just 2% of slum dwellers; in contrast, 80% of the urban population of the world's 30 least developed countries live in slums. Although the report emphasised that not all slum dwellers are poor, the UN warned that unplanned, unsanitary settlements threaten political stability and are creating the climate for an explosion of social problems.
Evils
"There is a vacuum developing, because local authorities have no access to the many slums," said Anna Tibaijuka, the director of UN-habitat.
"Extreme inequality and idleness lead people to anti-social behaviour. Slums are the places where all the evils come together, where peace and security is elusive and where young people cannot be protected."
Ms Tibaijuka called on governments to urgently address a deteriorating situation which potentially threatened security and would increase pressures on immigration to rich countries. The report found that some slums were now as large as cities. The Kibera district in Nairobi, classed as the largest slum in the world, has as many as 600,000 people. The Dharavi area of Mumbai and the Orangi district of Karachi have only slightly fewer people, while the Ashaiman slum is now larger than the city of Tema in Ghana, around which it grew.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 7:31 pm
19 Jun 2008
Um, citing numbers on the percentage of food consumed in the country of production without recognizing that what matters is the effects of changes in supply and demand on international prices looks pretty foolish to me. Yes, the transmission of prices from the world market to local markets is not perfect, especially in countries that have imposed export restrictions or are trying to keep down domestic prices through subsidies. But the global economy is becoming more and more integrated, and developments that affect commodities in one country do eventually affect prices and supplies elsewhere in the world.
Your persistent remarks on the alleged ignorance of the contributors here is poorly targeted. Moreover, you yourself have been caught out expressing personal views that you have tried to pass off as hard facts, or that are at least debatable.
Tom did not say "the majority of the 850 million people most at risk of hunger" lived in cities, he said "many of whom have been essentially evicted from productive farmland and pushed into cities over the past few decades." Many does not necessarily mean most. But he is right also about the general trend of rural-urban migration, and the wretched conditions facing the millions of people now living in urban slums.
Take the high road, Jonas, and cut the gratuitous personal attacks.
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MAD MAC Posted 9:33 pm
19 Jun 2008
There are plenty of urban poor in Africa - there are MORE rural poor. A lot more. Go live and check it out. I found it most enlightening.
Food production techniques are NOT - NOT the problem. The green revolution ensured ample food. the problem is there are too many people. Third world people continue to breed in excess of what they can support. It's that simple.
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