1. according to the UN, biofuels contribute only 10% to the price rise in food; it is the least important of all the factors (oil, speculation, increased demand from the East, etc...); biofuel profits are not spectacular; they don't drive this crisis in any particular way. Biofuels play a marginal role.

   2. why did anyone ever even get the initial idea that there would be the slightest reason to think there would be a physical shortage of food? This is the most ludicrous idea ever. The world has been producing food for 12 billion people for several years now, and there is huge capacity left.

So both starting points for the article are flawed, but nonetheless resulted in an interesting text.

-There are no food shortages.
-There is capacity to feed billions more.
-There is capacity to produce 1500 Exajoules of bioenergy by 2050 without impacts on meeting food needs and in a strict no-deforestation scenario (that is: about 4 times as much energy as all the energy currently consumed on the planet from all sources: oil, gas, coal, nuclear).
-IEA: biofuels are 'critical' to global energy security.

In short, there is no problem other than that of the resilience of net food importing countries. They must be helped to design coping strategies with which to deal with volatile prices.

One of the smarter ways to do so is to stimulate investments in agriculture, so as to tackle the problem at the root. (But this sounds like a loonie idea, given that the UN, the World Bank, the IMF and the "international community" have systematically destroyed agriculture in developing countries, by not spending a dime on it during the past 25 years.)

It is a criminal situation, to know that a country like the DRC can produce food for 3 billion people, while it currently is a food importing country in which 70% of the population is chronically undernourished. It is really obscene, this situation.

Reason must rule.

So what about rationing?  If each person on Earth was guaranteed the right to 2000 calories per day (or whatever the reasonable amount is, sorry if I underestimated), then each country would be alloted a certain amount of grains, according to their tastes.   Here's another idea: each country would receive all the international aid needed to build an agricultural system that could sustainably grow the required amount of grain or other food.

Rationing is not such a terrible idea, and has been proposed for carbon as well.  Of course, local sustainable production is still the best solution.

I forget the name of the small African nation but the US and UN aid along the NGOs sent massive amounts of free food to the nation, which was living in virtual starvation. They became hooked on the handouts. But the handouts were not the kinds of food they liked or good digest easily.

So one nation (gosh was it Mali, I forget) said NO MORE FOOD DELIVERIES and got a bunch of cash for subsidizing seed, fertilizer, fuel, water pumps, catchment basin ponds, and tractors and with some great advice started growing the food themselves. Guess what? It worked!

The US was pissed, like these poor scalliwags are supposed to be on the dole for our price-supported rice, corn, and wheat, as well as other sundry products. Now even Cuba, which was a beneficiary of many a shipload of US ag products lately, started developing its own production instead of small, socialized plots. That's how I'd fix Haiti by the way, a massive food crop system that didn't remove vegetation from the mountains.

It soon became apparent that US food aid was THE ROOT CAUSE of some food shortages.  

Yes, food price has been a problem, such as getting bismati rice in the Orient or masa-grade corn in South America ("NAFTA corn" apparently sucks for tortilla masa). I think the word is still out on the food economics of rent, seed, fertilizers, tractor fuel, water pumping, and so forth, although the fight over GMO foods has mysteriously died off.

Let's take a peach, one of my favorite fruits (and yes I BBQ them sometimes). Like a barrel of oil, that peach has absolutely no value. It's free if you find a wild tree! But what you pay for is the plant, the land, the labor, the water, the taxes, and so many things now that a peach can be nearly a buck a pop. Cost-margin analysis is cool stuff.
-sammie

Onward through the fog

starvation gets blamed on "global warming do-gooders,"

I think I can safely say that whoever said that was an idiot. Biofuel policy has been (and still is) a very bipartisan affair. Corn ethanol has never been considered to be much of an answer to global warming. Many enviro types as well as conservatives have also been critical of it from the get go. It is typically touted as the answer to energy security and a way to save "family" farms.

We have excess food production capacity, and some of it could go into meat or into biofuels.

The problem with that statement is that you have put meat in the same category as biofuel, when meat is just another food, like are eggs, cheese, and milk. Some foods simply take more resources to process than others. Billions of poor depend on their livestock for part of their nutrition. Goats, pigs, and chickens can turn just about anything on the ground into a high protein source of food. Think of them as food processors. This isn't just a first world luxury. The FAO report called "Livestock's Long Shadow" makes that pretty clear.

What to do about discouraging carbon use is less clear to me. The recent events regarding food versus biofuels has me thinking that, unfortunately, putting a price on carbon is not going to work out very well without some other, more complex and more difficult measures to discourage excessive consumption by the relatively wealthy individuals and societies.

This is analogous to what people were thinking about population issues back in the seventies--how to discourage excessive births? But out of the blue birth rates began dropping. I think people may begin to respond. New contraceptive technology helped us change lifestyles then and new technology can help us do it again.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

Instead of having to make up crises like peak oil or the "energy crisis" to raise prices, the commodities brokers have been handed the Keys to the Kingdom by Greens in the form of Global Warming.

Not only can their raise prices because of "Global Warming" but they will get bonus points for do-goodism from all the Crunchies worldwide!

Thanks, guys, for making my paycheck go even less further.


Texeme.Construct(function(x)=Participation(x))

Admittedly, what we're seeing now is a consequence of some distorted subsidies...

Most of the land in production in the U.S. goes to produce animal feed, which produces a small fraction as many calories in a luxury crop (meat) as the same land would in producing directly for human consumption.

biodiversivist: starvation gets blamed on "global warming do-gooders"

I think I can safely say that whoever said that was an idiot.

There's plenty of spin on either side of the aisle, with "the two factions of the one business elite party" (Noam Chomsky). My critical thinking alarm immediately goes off when I hear people talking about "biofuels" and following up w/ data on only corn ethanol!

Some assumptions above that concern me:

Wealth is not a pizza. If you get two slices, it does not mean there are fewer for me. Wealth is created by introducing value to the market, and has for practical purpose and boundary that no one can define.

This idea that we're all hungry savages increasingly fighting over a smaller heap of goods is iron age (at best) philosophy. There are essentially two philosophies of wealth. Roaming hordes of nomads believed that the only way to gain wealth was to take it from someone else. This belief still exists in the middle east, in the Q'ran, and in freshman dorms, Democratic campaign headquarters, and Marxists who live in their parents garage.

The other view is that wealth is created by humans, who are also the consumers. If you believe this (which I do) it should come as no surprise that over the course of history, [relatively] free trade has allowed innovation and competitive advantage to stretch the availability of food to more people while also using fewer resources.

At one time, almost every person in the US was a farmer, in reality about 96%. As recent as 1900, about 40% of the US was dedicated to farming. Now, approximately 2% of the US farms. The food is also safer, more nutritious, and lasts longer. The work is easier, safer, and takes less time.

There is certainly more then enough food to go around, and with the incentive, we could certainly increase the bounty to meet demand at market.

The next problem I see in the info above is this artificial construct of me at Ruth's Chris and a starving Haitian watching me eat. How dare I eat a steak. It is not readily apparent to me how the Haitian starving is directly attributable to me having a steak. He doesn't "not have it" because I do have it.

I don't have a Porshe, but it's not because the guy living down the road has "mine". The guy down the road is a doctor, or lawyer, or professional poker player. His production value is much higher than mine. There are many reasons for this, some individual and some infrastructural. Within a few years, I could overcome the individual and probably get my own Porshe. I am able to do so because of the infrastructural abilities.

The Haitian has many people much closer to him that are responsible for his infrastructural ability to increase his production value. I can assure you, if he could bring sufficient value to market, he could get his hands on some rice. Or steak. Or Boca Burgers, whatever he likes.

The inability to get rice to this guy has nothing to do with whether I eat cow.

Rice, like oil, is a heavily regulated market. Increased freedom in trade would find the lowest possible market price for rice. That's one end of the problem. Trade, and infrastructural changes would also allow that Haitian to exponentially increase his production value. As a consequence, he would have more disposable income, and the man could get him some rice.

The arguments above sound a lot like my mother at the dinner table when I was in elementary school, when she told me to finish my plate because there were starving children in China. I think they have as much validity. Neither I at the table in years past, or at the restaurant today can "PUSH" food up the consumer supply chain to someone else.  

Australia's rice production was curtailed by drought and production is contingent on weather.  California's rice production is contingent on the Delta Smelt. There has been some fungus on the rise in Africa and a crop in Bangladesh was wiped out by a typhoon.  And the rice eating population has ben growing. Each of these is a minor issue.  However, the sum of these points is that there is very little rice in the bottom of the global rice barrel.

Food prices went up because we could see the bottom of the grain bins. There is food in the markets because it is too expensive for many people to eat.  It is being saved for the rich.

Until recently, rice has been plentiful and very cheap.  In China, a good deal of rice paddy land has been developed for industrial purposes. The transaction cost of returning this land to rice would be very high. If we want more rice to support a larger rice eating population, the logical source is to improve the productivity of India. However, we have been working on that since the Green Revolution, and  on a per acre basis, India's production is only ~60% of China's or 50% of the US.  However, China and the US use a good deal more oil in their rice production than India does. As the price of oil rises, the price of Chinese and US rice will rise faster than the cost of Indian rice.  That may not be a model that we want.

Recently, the global wheat carryover was minimal due to extended crop failures in Australia as a result of drought. With a month of rain they have declared the drought over and predict bumper crops.  I think it is a bit early to be guessing about crops that have not been planted yet. Given http://www.drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html, I would not even want to guess On the North American 2008 wheat crop.  China is growing wheat with irrigation from deep wells.  Given the current trend in the price of oil, what do you think the price of that wheat is going to be?

My points are that we have taken a good deal of land out of agricultural production, and the transaction costs of growing food on that land will be higher than non-farmers understand.

The cost of irrigation water and oil is going up. The cost of agricultural inputs including fertilizer, and pesticides go up as an exponential factor of the price of oil.  We have been eating cheap oil as cheap food. Our measures of agricultural capacity date from the days of cheap oil. Farming is a gamble. With expensive oil, the farmer's "anti" goes up.  In which case the farmer may withdraw the resources from production.  The "capacity" may still be there, but not be in service. As we learned in China and California, agricultural resources not in service tend to be developed for other industrial use, and are unlikely to come back into agricultural service.

As always, weather and climate can fool the best of farmers.  With global warming, weather and climate are just harder to predict.  If you get the wrong weather, it does not matter what your agricultural capacity is, you are not going to get a crop.  With global warming, it is likely that more crops will be lost to weather. This is a loss in agricultural capacity.

There is a difference between theoretical capacity and actual production. There is a difference between resources that can produce food that is price competitive in the current market and resources that can produce a profitable product at a much higher price.  The latter are not really part of current capacity.


Aaron Lewis

This used to be approximately true and it isn't any more.

Wealth is more like a pizza the more it's resource constrained rather than labor or intellect constrained. Which is more or less what is happening now. That is the big change. Peak oil, climate change, these are just pieces of the puzzle.

In the old days we were so far from resource constraints that ignoring them was a useful model. This is no longer true.

Oil you burn is oil somebody else doesn't.

mt

The concentration of wealth makes most of the grain get diverted for luxury uses.

I am not saying that there will not be trouble maintaining these yields. I suspect there will be eventually, possibly even soon. I am only saying that the current trouble is obviously being misunderstood on all sides. I would like people to face up to the real problem before the ones they are imagining really come home to roost, because otherwise the one we actually already have will only make matters worse.

mt

As far as what Michael was talking about there are many acres of N. Ca. cropland that used to be corn or sunflower that are being converted to walnut orchards. Walnuts use a lot less water and the allotments sold south finance the conversion. Input prices are cheaper and profits are better but too damn bad if people need the grains or seeds that used to grow on those lands.

At the farmers market the local grower sold out every bag of organic brown rice by 10 am. Those are 20 lb bags at $25; think about that for a minute. That's five times the commodity price at least for white Calrose rice and still cheaper than potatoes. We really don't understand what food scarcity means in most of america as we still give out canned goods to poor people.

If people in the rest of the world want food security they had better not bet on California agriculture to feed them. Until a year ago we were busy paving our best agricultural lands at a breakneck pace and we still have a lot of empty orchards with cul-de-sacs dropped into the middle but no houses.

Get a hoe, read about permaculture and biochar and feed yourselves. Waiting for the great american farmer to feed you is just another cargo cult and it will yield about the same results. Look at the sky with an empty belly; we're paving farmland here.

Put the Carbon Back

icu814me wrote: I don't have a Porshe, but it's not because the guy living down the road has "mine". The guy down the road is a doctor, or lawyer, or professional poker player. His production value is much higher than mine. There are many reasons for this, some individual and some infrastructural.

But we increase energy efficiency all the time. And we're nowhere near "peak oil". That whole discussion only revolves around light, sweet crude that is easily extractable. (Low sulfer content)

There are vast amounts of light sweet crude that can't be extracted at todays cost/price points. When the price of gas reaches the point that difficult extraction pays off, new supplies of oil will hit the market.

Sour crude is available in mind boggling amounts. It can be converted to usable petro-products, just not cost effectively (compared to light sweet crude). When the cost of light sweet crude reaches the cost of converting sour crude, we will have a whole new source of fuel hit the market.

And... while all this is going on, we're developing lighter, safer materials to make lighter autos. We're building more efficient engines. We'll develop ways of capturing braking energy, we'll have an increase in natural gas vehicles on the road, we'll reduce our driving, we'll ship more by train or boat, we'll telecommute, we'll build nuclear plants...

You can only claim a limited resource pie if you zoom in to one narrow focus, take snapshot, and treat it like an aquarium. Paul Erlich made a bet based on this theory and he lost big time.

I have a team of approximately 3 billion inventors and problem solvers on my side.  

So, I assume then that we agree we are both in favor of no subsidies, no taxation, no tariffs, and no trade restrictions?  I'm all for that. The price of rice would drop immediately.

All thats fine, but it didn't really have anything to do with my points by example, which to reiterate are: (1) Wealth is not a pie, or zero sum game. And (2) The reason others do not have rice are related to their wealth, and artificial modification to the market incentive to produce. (3) It has nothing to do with whatever uses I decide are appropriate for the rice I buy- including feeding it to a delicious cow, or simply burning it, or making a mattress out of it.

When's the last time one of your friends died of polio? When's the last time a woman you know (and the baby) died in childbirth?

Do you have soot on your ceiling from the lampoil? Do you work a 16 hour day 7 days a week? Who do you know that takes a bath once a year? Who do you know that isn't the beneficiary of soap, sanitation?

Would you prefer not being able to call millions of people around the world instantly for pennies? Would you prefer the levels of poverty and hunger that 5000 years ago? How about 50 years ago?

If I had a time machine and were going to thrust you back to 1958 anywhere in the world, how much would you like that? No CTI scanners, no MRI, no black or female representation in politics, higher rates of cancer deaths, diseases that we now have cures for, miserable recognition of civil rights, lower life expectancy... this list could go on forever.

No internet.

There is no ideal garden of eden time in the past in which I would rather live. I think if you introduced any generation of your ancestors to the world today and suggested to them that life sucks for us, they would slap your face.

didn't really have anything to do with my points by example

What is a fan of "sweet crude" doing in here? Makes one wonder....

Everyone is welcome here. Let's keep it respectful and focused on issues.

grist.org

You use taxes, subsidies, and tariffs to attack my argument, but then back away from advocating their abolishment. Please be clear. Do you in fact believe that these policies contribute to problems in the price of grains and the limited availability of the same?

If you do, say you do. If you don't, be clear there.

I'm putting my cards on the table, not simply looking for cracks in peoples arguments or analogies. If you have a serious disagreement with my point, make a better alternate argument. Pointing out "you missed a spot" is not landscaping.

So all I know now is you don't want to agree on anything. That's unfortunate. My target is metaphysical reality, and I welcome anyone from any other perspective who has some agreement with me on any of those points. Michael and I have at least found some common ground already on his own site.

Would you prefer this simply remains a club of like minded people patting each other on the back?

The problem is to view the entire global ecosystem as a whole, and in the long-run.  So if your agricultural practices yield great profits and output, but the soil destruction will lead to collapse later on, then in the long-run, the system as a whole is not efficient.  Same with fossil fuels,etc.

Now, I agree (I think) that we can live comfortable lives, in an indefinitely sustainable global economy, and I've written quite a few posts trying to figure out how that would happen.  However, that society will not be able to use up resources; they will have to be renewable or recyclable.  That is emininently doable, although it will require government regulation.  

But growth will not be bigger cars and bigger houses; it will be better computer programs and better semiconductors and more art and sports, etc.  And it will require a sustainable global agricultural system, which is doable (and growth within that would involve better food, etc.), but requires replacing the current system.

icu814me: You use taxes, subsidies, and tariffs to attack my argument, but then back away from advocating their abolishment. Please be clear.

Would you prefer this simply remains a club of like minded people patting each other on the back?

"There are vast amounts of light sweet crude that can't be extracted at todays cost/price points. When the price of gas reaches the point that difficult extraction pays off, new supplies of oil will hit the market."

I believed that until recently, actually. On current evidence the peak oil alarmists seem more right than wrong on this one.

Yesterday's NY Times:

http://tinyurl.com/47k3th

mt

We can all just retreat to what we believe in.
Enjoy grist.

In a labor constrained market, anyone can trade their services for goods, and so any healthy adult can make do, with enough of a surplus to take care of others nearby. It appears on present evidence that this is no longer true in a resource constrained environment, where inequities seem to be built into the system.

If you assume that the unconstrained economic optimum is always the social optimum, you will find yourself arguing that a rich person with a tank of gas or a slab of steak and ten starving poor people has more utility than the other way around.

The only alternative I can see is to find some way to constrain the rich person from bidding on the steak or the tank of gas until all the poor people are fed. This means that the free market fails to find the optimum.

Again, it seems to me that this sort of thing is inevitable when labor is in surplus and resources are in undersupply. Which means now, and for practical purposes, from now on.

It's not news to most of us that the market is suboptimal in maximizing utility. Only a few people, alas very influential ones, take that seriously. The events of the past few months, though, indicate a bit more than that. The market is increasingly suboptimal in optimizing for human welfare the more it moves from being labor-limited to being resource-limited, and thus from being income driven to being amassed wealth driven.

This seems like a pretty strong conclusion to me.


mt

I don't think the forum here really wants to entertain alternate opinions or points of view.

We're building more efficient engines. We'll develop ways of capturing braking energy, we'll have an increase in natural gas vehicles on the road, we'll reduce our driving, we'll ship more by train or boat, we'll telecommute, we'll build nuclear plants...

The only alternative I can see is to find some way to constrain the rich person from bidding on the steak or the tank of gas until all the poor people are fed. This means that the free market fails to find the optimum.

John Rawls' posed the "original position" and the "veil of ignorance" thought experiment in his "Theory of Justice." I find it extremely helpful in these situations. One could certainly have an academic discussion that our Bill of Rights provides for the inviolability of the individual and equal opportunity (within certain political borders), but if you've ever been to the deep South, or even heard of NAFTA, you know a practical debate is much tougher.

Yes, free-market control over food prices is a crime against humanity, and exacerbates all the above problems. However, this neo-liberal fantasy that poverty and starvation is merely a problem in distribution must be laid to rest. The planet is at least 200% beyond its carrying capacity in human population, and no amount of redistribution is going to overcome that basic ecological fact.

While agrofuel production (a bad idea in and of itself) contributes to rising food prices, the real culprit here is commodity speculation, and as Michael correctly points out, the failures of market fundamentalism become glaringly obvious.


Peace _on_ Earth requires peace _with_ Earth.

neo-liberal fantasy that poverty and starvation is merely a problem in distribution must be laid to rest

Wow, 200% beyond carrying capacity...that sounds pretty concrete. Exactly what standard of living (cultural carrying capacity) does that entail for everyone? Those debates are endless and often ludicrous.

dp87, you make no mention of any sort of proactive way to counter the problem you cite!?! If you will think it through, you will find such distribution is a key, pivotal factor in the ability of countries to deal w/ said issues.