Chinese walker

When the first white cranes started appearing on the banks of the Rio Coco, deep in the Nicaraguan rainforest, Marciano Washington told his sons to start preparing the family’s three hectares of land for planting.

A month later, the weather-beaten Miskito elder from the town of San Carlos shades his eyes from the baking sun and surveys his cracked and barren land. His seed is rotting or has been eaten by rats. The few rice seeds that have sprouted are only inches high, yellow and discoloured.

“All my life the earth has told me when the rains are coming,” he says. “I don’t understand what is happening to our land.”

The natural signs that Washington’s father taught him to observe, such as the white cranes, flowering avocado plants, silver fish and rapid flashes of lightning, no longer herald the rains that his community so desperately needs.

Climate change is having a devastating effect on the Miskito Indians who live in wooden huts in Nicaragua’s western territories. They subsist on crops planted on a few hectares of land and on food hunted from the jungle and rivers.

Ten years ago Washington said he could harvest 60 bags of rice a hectare. Last year he managed seven. “Every year it is getting worse,” he says. “We have floods in the summer and droughts in the winter. We can’t depend on nature anymore and we don’t know when to plant our crops. I don’t know how I am going to feed my family.”

Environmental researchers are warning that the effect of climate change is likely to hit indigenous communities like the Miskito the hardest. Many of the world’s indigenous people live in isolated communities and their livelihoods depend on nature and on predicting the weather, making them vulnerable to increasingly unstable weather patterns.

In a report published on May 29, Oxfam International says that at least $50 billion (%26pound;25 billion) a year in addition to existing aid budgets is needed to help communities like the Miskito adapt to climate change.

In the report, Oxfam says that those governments with a legacy of high carbon emissions and the means to support the indigenous communities suffering the impact of climate change should foot the majority of the bill, with the US, Europeans and Japanese contributing 75% of the total.

“Western governments need to understand the scale of the threat and take preventive action,” says Kate Raworth, author of the report, Adapting to Climate Change. “Otherwise we will all face huge costs in cleaning up after the increasingly large-scale disasters that will be the inevitable consequence of the inability of developing communities to adapt to climate change.”

Scientists are painting a bleak picture for the future of Nicaragua’s indigenous communities. Temperatures across Central America are expected to rise by 1%26deg; to 3%26deg; centigrade, and rainfall will decrease by 25% by 2070. Droughts, hurricanes and unseasonal flooding are just a few of the expected consequences of such a rapidly changing climate.

Isolated from modern farming techniques and crippled by poverty after years of economic neglect and discrimination, the Miskito are on the frontline. They make up the majority of Nicaragua’s 85,000-strong indigenous population. By now they should have had almost three weeks of heavy rain, but the Miskito villages perched on the banks of the Rio Coco, the 470-mile [760-kilometre] river that snakes through Nicaragua’s indigenous territories, are baking under temperatures higher than 40%26deg; C [104%26deg; F].

After centuries defending their rainforest territories from Spanish settlers, Sandinista guerrillas and US-backed Contra forces, they lack the knowledge or resources to deal with the greatest threat to their survival yet.

“We are a proud people. Do you think we want to have to ask for help or depend on handouts from outside agencies?” says Nicanor Rizo, a community leader in Riati, the oldest Miskito community on the Rio Coco. “This is our land and we are unable to fulfil the responsibility passed down to us by our elders to protect and look after the river and the forest.”

Almost a month into the rainy season, the river should be a swirling torrent. But at many points the water is ankle-deep and dugout boats struggle to negotiate their way upstream.

In the village of Siksayari, home to 1,400 Miskito, Martine Valle, a technician from the ministry of agriculture who is volunteering in the village, explains that the people there have been without basic supplies such as salt and drinking water for more than a month. “The situation is getting desperate,” he says. “There are no roads here. Nobody expected the river to dry up and now supply boats can’t get down here. At the moment the water is too polluted and diseases like cholera and TB are rising.”

Many Miskito communities believe the massive deforestation of their territories — an estimated 50% of its rainforest has been felled in the last 50 years — is also having a detrimental effect. Last year the new government of President Daniel Ortega pushed through a speedy logging ban to halt deforestation. But with no effective policing of the ban, local non-governmental organisations say that it has pushed commercial logging operations deeper into the forest.

Around 80% of Nicaragua’s natural resources are to be found within the Miskito territories. Although the Unesco-designated Bosawas Biosphere Reserve protects 1.8 million acres of forest, the exploitation of their land continues.

Last year Nicaraguan media reported that contracts had been signed between the previous government and two multinational companies for the exploitation of oil and natural gas on indigenous lands in Bilwi, in the Puerto Cabezas municipality. Community elders in Wiwinak, a small village of 120 families, say their wells have also been contaminated by cyanide and mercury from the new gold mines along the river.

Weather monitoring stations installed by Oxfam along the banks of the Rio Coco help Nicaragua’s indigenous people deal with the impact that increasingly unpredictable weather patterns are having on their way of life. But the long-term ability of the Miskitos to adapt is looking increasingly uncertain.

“We feel we can’t be the guardians of the land like our ancestors anymore and we don’t know what to teach our children,” says Nicanor Rizo. “The world has changed and we know that we will somehow have to change with it if we want to survive.”

At risk: Other communities on the frontline of climate change

* In the Canadian Arctic, western Inuit are having trouble reaching their traditional hunting grounds as warmer springs have brought an earlier thaw. Inuit campaigners say their human rights are being violated by human-induced climate change

* In Norway, Sami reindeer hunters have recorded severe changes in weather patterns that are affecting breeding cycles and destroying grazing areas. The Sami are having to alter their travel routes because of changes to prevailing winds previously used for navigation

* Residents of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu claim to be the first climate change refugees, as many have been forced to flee to neighbouring New Zealand to escape rising seas. The islands, only three feet (one metre) above sea level, are expected to disappear below the waves

* Indigenous communities in Puerto Rico have seen plants they gather for traditional medicines disappear, making it impossible to continue healing practices

* Severe droughts are forcing the nomadic Turkana people of north-west Kenya into towns and relief camps as entire herds of camels, cows and goats are being wiped out. Although they are accustomed to months of dry weather and resulting food shortages, droughts are becoming more intense and more frequent

In recent months, American companies have been grabbing the headlines with their announcements of major new environmental initiatives. Bank of America announced that it would invest $20 billion in environmental projects over the next decade, for example, then Citigroup said it would invest $50 billion. General Electric says revenues from its %26lsquo;ecomagination` initiative have doubled to $12 billion in just two years, with an amazing $50 billion of orders in the pipeline. And Wal-Mart, after years of facing increasingly damaging attacks from activists and the media, has launched programs in areas as diverse as renewable energy and sustainable fish. All welcome developments, true, particularly when the Bush administration seems committed to stalling progress on critical issues like climate change, but there is a risk that this increasingly competitive green-flag-waving in the United States will divert attention from equally interesting changes taking place elsewhere.

Take France. The country, which has just elected a new President, Nicolas Sarkozy, is not known for its environmentalism. One of the most striking examples of the French way was the sinking by the French secret service of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in 1985, resulting in the death of a Greenpeace photographer. It also invested heavily in nuclear power at a time when much of the rest of Europe was turning its back on this energy source, though as climate change grows in perceived importance this may prove to have been a particularly strategic move. In summary, however, even though they may be famous for the quality of their food and wine, the French have not been noted for their appetite for sustainable development.

But things may be changing, with companies like Danone, Lafarge and Suez moving strongly into this space. Suez has publicly embraced sustainability in its pursuit of market opportunities related to energy, water and other infrastructure projects around the world, while Lafarge led the cement manufacturing sector in reporting its greenhouse gas emissions. But more interesting still is Groupe Danone, known for its Evian brand bottled water and Danone yogurt. Not only has Danone bought a leading US organic food company, Stonyfield Farm, but it has also now formed an innovative social partnership with the Grameen Group in Bangladesh%26mdash;and is talking about launching a very unusual fund to support microfinance around the world.

Danone Chairman and CEO Franck Riboud explains that these initiatives are all part of his company`s efforts to spur “positive globalization.” This approach sets Riboud apart from many of his countrymen, who tend to be deeply uncomfortable with the way in which globalization is developing. He believes that new business models can both help multinational companies to adapt to the new market pressures globalization brings, and begin to meet the needs of those who are so far largely outside the market system. Like US-based professors C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart, both of whom have spotlighted the money to be made in %26lsquo;base-of-the-pyramid` markets, Riboud believes that companies like Danone can rise to the challenge. “There are 3 billion people living on %26euro;2 a day,” he has noted. “So why not create a business model that can work with this very low but huge income group? Not for charity but with the idea of profit sharing.”

In 2006, Riboud formed a joint venture in Bangladesh with the Grameen Group, founded and led by Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize the same year. Yunus is famous for his efforts in the field of microfinance, involving lending to the very poor. The new joint venture with Grameen has completed the first of 50 planned yoghurt factories in Bangladesh. The first plant cost %26euro;700,000, but the expectation is that the second factory will cost 30 per cent less, allowing local villagers to become shareholders in the project. The products are designed to help malnourished children return to health.

Such initiatives have deep roots at Danone. The business was founded in 1966, initially as a packaging company but later morphing into the leading food group in France. When Franck Riboud took over from his father Antoine ten years ago, he decided to expand Danone internationally%26mdash;based on a strategy of “affordability,” which has involved developing and offering new ranges of products that poorer consumers could afford. The venture will not be profitable, by design, but Frack Riboud argues that the joint venture with Grameen is providing a laboratory for Danone that in turn could help the company develop innovative products for rich-world markets.

Even more ambitious is Danone`s plan to launch a new fund, %26lsquo;danone.communities,` which will aim for the maximization of social objectives, not of profit. Danone hopes to raise an initial $135 million, promising it will return a guaranteed rate comparable to a money-market account%26mdash;about 3 percent to 4 percent annually. The fund is to be managed by bankers Cr%26eacute;dit Agricole, and will be open to the French public as well as institutional investors. The social impact of projects on local communities will be assessed on the basis of indicators that include their contributions to public health, the reduction of malnutrition, and the alleviation of poverty, with an eye to any environmental and social impacts. Interested Danone shareholders will be able to reinvest all or part of their dividends in the fund in the form of “social dividends.” For Danone, the returns come in the form of the company`s reputation, its license to operate and its ability to attract and retain talent.

We knew shareholders were meant to vote on the proposed fund recently and were surprised not to read the result in the week after the vote was due to have taken place. Indeed, we began to worry that the vote had gone the wrong way. But when we contacted Danone we found that the vote had gone the Danone Way, with an extraordinary 99.8 percent of shareholders voting in favour. In a different world, that would have been a big news story.

The destruction of south China`s wildlife habitats started about 1,000 years ago, and still continues today. This led to many animal extinctions and severe reductions in wildlife populations, and has been compounded by the use of wildlife for food and for ingredients in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

One might imagine that the pressure on wildlife would have decreased as levels of education and urban incomes have risen in the region. But the greatest reduction in wildlife consumption was actually in 2003, and came as a result of public fears about the risks of catching Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) from wild animals. In late 2004, the demand for civet cats decreased so much due to the fear of SARS that 141 farms released 4,000 of the animals into the wild.

Bird flu later added to this concern.

My article “The truth about dead chickens”, published by chinadialogue on June 14, attracted widespread attention in the Chinese press. A report and an interview with me appeared in the newspaper Southern Weekend on July 19, and aroused further public debate on food safety. Thousand of articles commenting on the matter have been published, with Google finding 355,000 related articles. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao recently held a special meeting of the State Council to discuss these product quality and food safety issues.

Dead chickens continue to enter the food chain, thanks firstly to farming methods that go against biological principles, and also due to an unreasonable system of retail pricing. Ensuring food safety requires guaranteeing the environmental security. Only a clean environment can produce quality food, and only when the products in question can command a decent price can sustainability be guaranteed. This will mean that the price differential between various products needs to be greatly increased, reflecting vastly different levels of consumption across the country. Using the money in the pockets of China’s rich urbanites to promote environmental protection can lead directly to safer and healthier food for the country.

The total assets of high-income families in Beijing currently stand at 23.56 billion yuan (US$3.1 billion), with fixed assets accounting for two-thirds of this figure and financial assets accounting for the other third. There are between 150,000 and 200,000 yuan-millionaires in the capital. They are the people that Deng Xiaoping said would “get rich first”, and the vast majority of them live in China’s largest cities; in the end we must accept their existence, regardless of any doubts we may have about how they acquired their wealth.

But look at some other figures, and you will notice that China still has 200 million people living in poverty, a figure second only to India. The population of China that does not have adequate food and shelter numbers 23.65 million. The poor tend to live in agricultural areas; while the villas of the urban rich might remind you of Europe, China’s remote villages are more like Africa. However, the worst environmental problems are suffered by the cities, and the poverty-stricken actually enjoy China’s best environment. How can we balance this strange inequality?

Money, as they say, cannot buy you everything. China’s rich may have cars, houses, exercise equipment, pets and purified water, but they cannot buy clean air and safe food. Supermarket shelves may carry green or organic produce, but the environmental limitations of the places they are produced %26mdash; and the products’ lacklustre supply %26mdash; dashes any hopes of products of superior quality or flavour

The poor economic performance of rural areas is due to low levels of industry. This also means a lack of pollution, and less of the waste generated by high levels of consumption. The sky stays blue, the water crystal clear and the air clean; food produced in these areas is bound to be safe. Economically undeveloped areas are to be found mainly in China’s west, where the air, water and soil are the envy of the east. Sustainable economic, social and environmental development should not allow us to build factories in these areas; if we do, we will not find anywhere to produce uncontaminated food. And if we use market forces, so that the consumption of the rich actually benefits the poor, we can not only protect the environment but also realise social harmony.

The rich have ever higher demands for food safety; they want food free of genetic modification, fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. Even if fertiliser-free harvests are half the size, they can command prices 10 times higher than normal, ensuring a good profit for both farmers and merchants. And the rich can have genuinely organic food.

The sheep and cows of Inner Mongolia eat natural grass, and taste far better than their straw-eating counterparts in Shandong province or Hebei province. However, market limitations and an inadequate information mean that city-dwellers do not get to eat the real thing; livestock from Shandong province is often moved to Inner Mongolia and passed off as local produce. With the cost of livestock from both regions being the same, herders desperately try to increase the number of animals they keep. In the end, the environment suffers greater damage, and more investment in grassland management is needed. This is because better products do not obtain better prices; dairy firms know that most of their cows eat straw rather than grass, but still claim their milk comes from “grassland cows”.

In a similar fashion, hens are often raised in dark and confined spaces, where they consume fodder contaminated with additives and pesticides. A single hen can lay up to 250 eggs a year, when free-range hens can lay no more than 50. However, since these free-range eggs can be taken to the city and sold for 10 times the price of battery-farmed eggs, herders can profitably give up their cattle and produce free-range chickens and eggs. This will mean the herders can resume their nomadic lifestyles; they can also relieve some of the ecological pressure on the grasslands, which are faced with growing desertification, and Beijing will suffer fewer sandstorms.

Ultimately, the wealthy should curb their pursuit of further riches; after all, money is nothing more than a set of numbers after a certain point. The lower levels of demand from poorer areas are actually helping to protect the environment. If China’s poor all drove cars and built factories, polluted the air and contributed to global warming, how long would our planet have left?

But are people really willing to pay 10 times the price for environmentally friendly products? In fact, the wealthy will work it out for themselves: do they want to pay for safer food, or medicines when unsafe food makes them ill? Moreover, what percentage of their annual income will it actually cost? Even if a single egg costs two yuan (US$0.26), it only comes to a few thousand yuan a year for a family of three – insignificant when your income is measured in the millions. And buying free-range eggs will help protect the country’s environment; the rich will realise they can look after the environment and still make a living.

So, how can we guarantee “green” food really comes from environmentally sound areas? It will require the help of far-sighted entrepreneurs, who can cooperate with scientists and locals to build trust in their customer base. Consumer confidence is the lifeblood of any company, and when you can ensure that, the returns will be enormous.

Jiang Gaoming is a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences` Institute of Botany. He is also vice secretary-general of the UNESCO China-MAB (Man and the Biosphere) Committee and a member of the UNESCO MAB Urban Group.

Also about food safety on chinadialogue:

China’s food fears

Facing up to “invisible pollution”

Homepage photo by Alex Vinter

There is no need to recount the litany of China`s environmental disasters; catastrophes such as the blue-green algae that choked Taihu Lake appear daily on our TV screens and in our newspapers. Protecting our environment may today be the biggest challenge that faces humanity.

Many will turn to science for a solution. But reality demonstrates that relying on science alone will not lead to success. Unless we change our lifestyles, scientific advances will only accelerate damage to the environment.

It would take a day to fell a large tree in the past, and it would be months or even years before that tree was turned into processed wood and used to construct buildings in a far-off city. But now the lumber industry can flatten entire forests in very little time, and have the wood converted into floors and furniture in a matter of days. We do not have the respect and awe for nature that, in other times, held what little industrial capacity there was in check. The loss of this “superstition”, combined with the driving force of capitalism, has meant nothing now restrains us from using our technology to squeeze every last drop of profit from nature.

The fire under the open stove crackles as Catalina Mendez prepares dozens of the handmade corn tortillas she sells every day. Her tiny business has barely broken even, she says, since the recent US demand for ethanol biofuel made from corn – what we call maize — began pushing up the price of the local corn.

“Not that I would stop now, even if I was making nothing,” the 69-year-old says, slipping in and out of Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs. “Making tortillas is in my blood.”

A symbol of national unity, corn is king in Mexico. But for how long?

The first shudders came at the beginning of the year, when president George W Bush told America he wanted to produce 35 billion gallons (over 130 billion litres) of renewable fuels by 2017. As the price of corn futures on the Chicago stock exchange went up sharply, so did the price of tortillas at the hole-in-the-wall shops in barrios across Mexico.

The shock of paying 50% more overnight for Mexico`s staple food sent thousands of people on to the capital`s streets. The government hesitated, but by February had negotiated a price freeze that is still in force today. An aura of vulnerability has hung over corn in Mexico ever since.

At a recent press conference, the upbeat minister of agriculture, Alberto C%26aacute;rdenas , attempted to dispel the disquiet. Mexican agribusinesses had responded by growing one million more hectares of corn, and C%26aacute;rdenas waved statistics indicating a 12% increase in the all-important summer harvest in the northern state of Sinaloa, where three quarters of national production is concentrated. “Supply is guaranteed,” the minister declared. “This country has more corn today and that will happen every year until the end of this government.”

But questions remain. The additional one million hectares growing corn means one million fewer hectares available to produce other crops. Because fewer beans — the second most important staple in the Mexican diet — have been planted, their price has gone up, too. In addition, the price of meat, poultry and dairy products, which are fed on corn imported from the United States, is increasing.

The stickiest issue is perhaps the impact on Mexico’s two million small-scale corn producers who are the backbone of what is left of its rural economy — already in such decline that many keep afloat only with money sent home by relatives working in the US. Theoretically, the corn price rise should have been a welcome boost to farmers in these areas. In practice, it has not happened that way. “We didn’t get paid any more for our corn this year,” explains farmer Orlando Ram%26iacute;rez.

Dearth of infrastructure, lack of machinery, inadequate information, and weak motivation are just some of the reasons behind the uncompetitive Mexican small farmer. Ram%26iacute;rez says he expects to harvest two tonnes of corn from the hectare he planted this year — less than a sixth of the yields expected by the agribusinesses in Sinaloa. The corn ethanol bandwagon is passing by farmers like him.

Worries over corn shortages in the US are not unfounded. The scale of the American ethanol rush is staggering. There are 121 ethanol biorefineries in the US, according to the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA), producing nearly 6.3 billion gallons a year. A further 76 refineries are under construction, which together with expansions in existing facilities should double that capacity. And that is still only just over a third of Bush’s 2017 target.

V%26iacute;ctor Su%26aacute;rez, spokesman for Mexico-based ANEC, an activist group of corn farmers, imagines two opposed nightmare scenarios. In the first, he says, American corn farmers will not be able to keep up with the corn demand and the big Sinaloa producers will step in to the fill the void, leaving Mexicans without tortillas. In the second, the ethanol craze burns itself out, prompting US corn producers to dump their harvests on the Mexican market, devastating the small producers.

“In a country like Mexico, the government’s assumption that the market will sort everything out is irresponsible and absurd,” Su%26aacute;rez says. “It leads to a policy void and a very uncertain situation in which food security is in danger.”

Su%26aacute;rez argues that the only answer is for the government to inject large amounts of cash and effort into modernising the rural economy with the smallholder at the centre of the plan. That and renegotiating the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) to keep tariffs protecting local produce intact. The tariffs affecting corn, beans and sugar are due to be lifted in January 2008.

A campaign called Sin Ma%26iacute;z No Hay Pa%26iacute;s (No Corn, No Country), trying to bring together all the fears and complaints, was launched in August 2007. Meanwhile, Mexico’s politicians look as though they are feeling the pressure to jump on the biofuel bandwagon and join the US and Brazil, the world’s leader in producing sugar cane-based ethanol. Nagged by the knowledge that the country’s oil reserves are dwindling, Mexico’s parliament passed a law several months ago to encourage a home biofuel industry to start. But the bill is expected to be amended with a ban on using corn as a fuel source.

This should please Do%26ntilde;a Catalina, furiously flipping her tortillas every day just a few miles from where the earliest evidence of domestication of corn in the world was found. “Poor corn,” she says. “It isn’t meant to go in cars. It is meant to feed our children and our grandchildren. And their grandchildren, too.”

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/

The mile upon mile of tall maize waving to the horizon around the small Nebraskan town of Carleton looks perfect to farmers such as Mark Jagels. He and his father farm 2,500 acres (just over 1,000 hectares), the price of maize — what the Americans call corn — has never been higher, and the future has seldom seemed rosier. Carleton (town motto: “The center of it all”) is booming, with $200 million of Californian money put up for a new biofuel factory and, after years in the doldrums, there is new full-time, well-paid work for 50 people.

But there is a catch. The same fields that surround Jagels’ house on the great plains of the United States may be bringing new money to rural America, but they also are helping to push up the price of bread in Manchester, England, tortillas in Mexico City and beer in Madrid. As a direct result of what is happening in places like Nebraska, Kansas, Indiana and Oklahoma, food aid for the poorest people in southern Africa, pork in China and beef in Britain are all more expensive.

Challenged by president George W. Bush to produce 35 billion gallons (over 130 billion litres) of non-fossil transport fuels by 2017 to reduce US dependency on imported oil, the Jagels family and thousands of farmers like them are patriotically turning the corn belt of America from the bread basket of the world into an enormous fuel tank. Only a year ago, their maize mostly went to cattle feed or was exported as food aid. Come harvest time in September, almost all will end up at the new plant at Carleton, where it will be fermented to make ethanol, a clear, colourless alcohol consumed, not by people, but by cars.

The era of “agrofuels” has arrived, and the scale of the changes it is already forcing on farming and markets around the world is immense. In Nebraska alone, an extra million acres of maize have been planted this year, and the state boasts it will produce 1 billion gallons of ethanol. Across the US, 20% of the whole maize crop went to ethanol last year. How much is that? Just 2% of US automobile use.

“Probably hasn`t looked any better than it looks right now,” Jerry Stahr, another Nebraskan farmer, told his local newspaper recently.

Jagels and Stahr are part of a global green rush, one of the greatest shifts that world agriculture has seen in decades. As the US, Europe nations, China, Japan and other countries commit themselves to using 10% or more alternative automobile fuels, farmers everywhere are rushing to grow maize, sugar cane, palm oil and oil seed rape, all of which can be turned into ethanol or other biofuels for automobiles. But that means getting out of other crops.

The scale of the change is boggling. The Indian government says it wants to plant 35 million acres (140,000 square kilometres) of biofuel crops, Brazil as much as 300 million acres (1.2 million square kilometres). Southern Africa is being touted as the future Middle East of biofuels, with as much as 1 billion acres (4 million square kilometers) of land ready to be converted to crops such as Jatropha curcas (physic nut), a tough shrub that can be grown on poor land. Indonesia has said it intends to overtake Malaysia and increase its palm oil production from 16 million acres (64,000 square kilometres) now to 65 million acres (260,000 square kilometres) in 2025.

While this may be marginally better for carbon emissions and energy security, it is proving horrendous for food prices and anyone who stands in the way of a rampant new industry. A year or two ago, almost all the land where maize is now being grown to make ethanol in the US was being farmed for human or animal food. And because America exports most of the world`s maize, its price has doubled in 10 months, and wheat has risen about 50%.

The effect on agriculture in the United Kingdom is price increases all round. “The world price [of maize] has doubled,” says Mark Hill, food partner at the business advisory firm Deloitte. “In June, wheat prices across the US and Europe hit their highest levels in more than a decade. These price hikes are likely to trigger inflation in food prices, as processors are forced to pay increased costs for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat.”

UK flour millers, for example, need 5.5 million tonnes of wheat annually to produce the 12 million loaves of bread sold each day in the country. The majority of this wheat is grown in the UK, and in the last year milling wheat prices moved from around %26pound;100 ($200) a tonne to %26pound;200 ($400) a tonne. The Hovis brand raised the price of a standard loaf from 93 pence ($1.86) to 99 pence ($1.98) in February and has said more increases are on the way. In France, consumers have also been warned that their beloved baguette will become more expensive.

The era of cheap food is over, says Hill. World commodity prices of sugar, milk and cocoa have all surged, prompting the biggest increase in retail food prices in three decades in some countries. “Meat, too, will cost more because chicken and pigs are fed largely on grain,” says Hill. “And while anyone growing grains will be better off, dairy and livestock producers may well struggle in this environment.”

But the surge in demand for agrofuels such as ethanol is hitting the poor and the environment the hardest. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which feeds about 90 million people mostly with US maize, reckons that 850 million people around the world are undernourished already. There soon will be more because the price of food aid has increased 20% in just a year. Meanwhile, Indian food prices have risen 11% in a year, while the price in Mexico of the staple tortilla quadrupled in February and crowds of 75,000 people came on to the streets in protest. South Africa has seen food-price rises of nearly 17%, and China was forced to halt all new planting of corn for ethanol after staple foods such as pork soared by 42% last year.

In the US, where nearly 40 million people are below the official poverty line, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently predicted a 10% rise in the price of chicken. The prices of bread, beef, eggs and milk rose 7.5 % in July, the highest monthly rise in 25 years.

“The competition for grain between the world`s 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its two billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue,” says Lester Brown, president of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute think-tank, and author of the book Who Will Feed China?

It is not going to get any better, says Brown. The UN`s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) predicts that demand for biofuels will grow by 170% in the next three years. A separate report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the club of the world`s 30 richest countries, suggested food-price rises of between 20% and 50% over the next decade, and the head of Nestl%26eacute;, the world`s largest food processor, said prices would remain high as far as anyone could see ahead.

A “perfect storm” of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering force, threatening vast numbers of people with food shortages and price rises. Even as the world`s big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals, the global population is rising by 87 million people a year; developing countries such as China and India are switching to meat-based diets that need more land; and climate change is starting to hit food producers hard. Recent reports in the journals Science and Nature suggest that one-third of ocean fisheries are in collapse, two-thirds will be in collapse by 2025, and all major ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. “Global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record this year. Outside of wartime, they have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer,” says the US Department of Agriculture.

In seven of the past eight years the world has actually grown less grain than it consumed, says Worldwatch`s Brown. World stocks of grain — that is, the food held in reserve for times of emergency — are now sufficient for just over 50 days. According to experts, we are in “the post-food-surplus era”.

The food crisis, Brown warns, is only just beginning. What worries him as much as the new competition between food and fuel is that the booming Chinese and Indian populations — the two largest nations in the world, with nearly 40% of the world`s population between them — are giving up their traditional vegetable-rich diets to adopt typical “American” diets that contain more meat and dairy products. Meat demand in China has quadrupled in 30 years, and in India, milk and egg products are increasingly popular.

In itself, this is no problem, say Brown and others, except that it means an accelerated demand for water to grow more food. It takes 7 kilograms of grain to produce 1 kilogram of beef, and increased demand will require huge amounts of grain-growing land. Much of this, of course, will need to be irrigated. “Water tables are now falling in countries that contain over half the world`s people,” Brown points out. “While numerous analysts and policymakers are concerned about a future of water shortages, few have connected the dots to see that a future of water shortages means a future of food shortages.”

New figures from the World Bank, he says, show that 15% of the world`s present food supplies, on which 160 million people depend, are being grown with water drawn from rapidly depleting underground sources or from rivers that are drying up. In large areas of China and India, the water table has fallen catastrophically.

Scientists are becoming increasingly alarmed. Earlier this year, water specialists from hundreds of institutes around the world published the biggest ever assessment of water and food. Their conclusions were chilling. With the earth`s water, land and human resources, it would be possible to produce enough food for the future, they said. “But it is probable that today`s food production and environmental trends will lead to crises in many parts of the world,” said David Molden, deputy director general of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).

Climate change, meanwhile, is leading to more intense rains, unpredictable storms, longer-lasting droughts, and interrupted seasons. In Britain, the recent floods will result in a shortage of vegetables such as potatoes and peas, and cereals such as wheat. This comes on top of a 4.9% rise in food prices in the year to May — well over consumer price inflation — and a 9.6% hike in vegetable prices.

Britain can get by, but elsewhere climate change is proving disastrous. “I met leaders from Madagascar reeling from seven cyclones in the first six months of the year,” Josette Sheeran, the new director of the World Food Programme, told colleagues in Rome recently. “I asked them when the season ends and was told that such questions are becoming more difficult to answer. Farmers know that predictable patterns in weather are becoming a thing of the past. How does the global food supply system deal with such changing risk?”

The answer is: with ever greater difficulty. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that rain-dependent agriculture could be cut in half by 2020 as a result of climate change. “Anything even close to a 50% reduction in yields would obviously pose huge problems,” said Sheeran. Within a week, Lesotho had declared a food emergency after the worst drought in 30 years and greatly reduced harvests in neighbouring South Africa pushed prices well beyond the reach of most of the population.

All this is far too gloomy, say other analysts and politicians. Earlier this year, Brazil`s president, Luiz In%26aacute;cio Lula da Silva, told the Guardian that there was no need for world food shortages, or any destruction of forests to grow more food at all. “Brazil has 320 million hectares [3.2 million square kilometres] of arable land, only a fifth of which is cultivated. Of this, less than 4% is used for ethanol production … This is not a choice between food and energy.”

Others say that the food price rises now being seen are temporary and will fall back within a year as the market responds. Technologists pin their faith on genetically modified (GM) crops, or drought-resistant crops, or trust that biofuel producers will develop technologies that require less raw material or use non-edible parts of food. The immediate best bet is that countries such as Argentina, Poland, Ukraine and Kazakhstan will grow more food for export as US output declines.

Back on the American great plains, meanwhile, ethanol fever is running high. This time last year, there were fewer than 100 ethanol plants in the whole United States, with a combined production capacity of 5 billion gallons (nearly 19 billion litres). There are now at least 50 more new plants being built and over 300 more are planned. If even half of them are finished, they will help to rewrite the politics of global food.

Homepage photo by nchenga

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/

Copyright Guardian News %26amp; Media Ltd 2007

Another article on biofuel by Jonh Vidal on chinadialogue:

Biofuel’s winners and losers

“Each year, the signs of an unraveling global environment become a little clearer.” So observes Erik Assadourian, project director of the Worldwatch Institute`s Vital Signs 2007-2008, the latest edition of Worldwatch`s annual report on the environmental trends shaping the planet`s future.

When the United Nations met in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to deliberate on and sign the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, it seemed to delegates that what was being discussed then was relevant only in the dim and the distant future. Climate change was then seen as an environmental concern with which people perceived to be overly serious like vice president Al Gore need bother with. If only they knew what has just occurred in Mexico, and earlier on in Africa, from west to east.

Well, now the stark consequences of excessive carbon dioxide emissions, the result of mankind`s reckless disregard for the atmosphere and the environment, are only just beginning to tell. The ice is finally melting in the Arctic Circle. Uncontrollable drought one season in Africa, floods from the whole of Africa — from Ghana to Uganda — the next. It is now time for serious work on the environment. And we cannot afford to tarry.

The Kyoto Protocol has indeed come into force. But now how do we enforce it? Those who have contributed the most to global warming seem not to want to take responsibility. Other newly industrialised countries are unwilling to have their phenomenal and impressive development achievement held back. Global negotiations are again under way for a new and more enforceable framework by the end of 2009. The emerging economies, such as China, India and Brazil, are being impressed upon to make the necessary cuts. But we cannot deny the fact that only 20 countries account for more than 80% of global carbon emissions. This is symptomatic of the world economic imbalance.

The global negotiations for the new agreement to follow the Kyoto Protocol are under way, and we look forward to a global framework for action by the end of 2009.

It is pathetic that very little attention is paid to countries such as those in Africa, which have had little or no responsibility for greenhouse-gas emissions but now suffer the consequences. These effects take various forms – from direct impact, such as the droughts and floods of recent months — to the indirect, such as the unintended consequences of action being taken to cut emissions. These include the food-miles issue, as well as pressure to develop biofuels, with the potential loss of agricultural land, as well as possibilities for economic benefits. These are complex issues, with social and economic ramifications. They require long-range policies and detailed planning. And above all, it requires statesmanship and altruism of the highest order.

In the recent floods in east and west Africa, many hundreds of thousands of people were affected. In 12 countries — including Sudan and Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Ghana — some of the world`s poorest people lost their homes and livelihoods.

The policy of determined self-help was a significant change from the past. Ghana`s National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) estimates that the floods have affected over 275,000 people in the Upper East, Upper West and Northern regions of the country, submerging major food-producing areas. Most of the affected people are displaced, although some are still remaining in what is left of their homes.

As usual, the positive benefits of effective local disaster preparations went unnoticed internationally. It was not recognised that Ghana, among other countries, was able to lead by its own efforts, without waiting for international help. What was put out was the desperation, which the floods occasioned.

All of these [events] make it imperative that the post-Kyoto agreement must advance cogent proposals to promote adaptation to climate change, with an acceptable regime for implementation. This is an issue not only of global justice but of survival. The damage has been done by some of the world`s most powerful countries, but the worst effects are felt by many of the world`s most vulnerable countries.

In Ghana, much of the work towards a comprehensive Environmental Protection Law is still work in progress. Our National Environmental Policy and National Environment Action Plan seek:

%26bull; to maintain ecosystems and ecological processes essential for the functioning of the biosphere;

%26bull; to ensure sound management of natural resources and the environment;

%26bull; to protect human, animal and plant life with respect to biodiversity conservation;

%26bull; to minimise pollution and public nuisance arising out of development activities.

The food-miles issue, which has arisen over the last few months, is a case in point, where the British are rightly concerned about the amounts of carbon they emit. British emissions per head are well above the global average and many times those of an average Ghanaian. What is the solution proposed? Reduce sales of air-freighted goods from Africa, thereby shaving a thin slice off UK carbon emissions.

The [UK] Soil Association has even proposed a new policy to remove its stamp certifying organic production from air-freighted fruit and vegetables. The British public, government and press have demonstrated their great sympathy for Africa, but the Soil Association and leading retailers can do much damage with their power to ban imports. Are they well intentioned or simply protecting subsidised British farmers?

This approach, we feel, is grossly unfair and will affect Ghana`s farming communities badly. The emissions saved are miniscule – less than 0.1% of the UK`s emissions relate to this kind of air freight — and there are many other ways for the British shoppers to reduce their carbon footprint, without damaging the livelihoods of thousands of poor African farming families.

A recent Financial Times article showed that the carbon emissions associated with air-freighted food represent less than 1% of emissions associated with food transport in the UK – far, far more carbon is emitted by supermarket lorries [trucks] using the motorway, and from driving our cars to the supermarket.

We do understand, of course, that our friends here are anxious to make a difference. However, the figures simply don`t add up. At what cost to global justice do we shut the door on the economic prospects of small farmers in Africa by refusing to buy their produce? Ghana has been developing a trade in export of our organic and fair-trade produce to Britain and elsewhere. This has grown considerably and is providing incomes and jobs for many people.

Reducing greenhouse-gas emissions must be done in a fair, scientific and rational way -making cuts at the expense of the world`s poorest is not only unjust, it`s a bad basis for building the international consensus needed for a global deal on climate change. We are all extremely worried about the consequences of climate change today, and in the future. The longer we take to reach an effective set of targets, the more damage will be caused.

In addition to the challenges, there are also the increasing opportunities for trade in carbon services. Our forestry experts and scientists point to significant potential, under the Kyoto Protocol, for the sub-Saharan Africa forest industry effectively to manage its natural resources and reduce poverty.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is one of three mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol that allows industrialised countries to meet greenhouse-gas reduction obligations by investing in emission-reducing projects in developing countries. Under this plan, countries like Ghana could implement projects to “sink” carbon as an alternative to more costly emission reductions in countries like the UK. To date, however, few sub-Saharan African countries have had access to the CDM due to the highly complex and bureaucratic procedures involved.

In this year of our golden jubilee, Ghana is determined to continue to develop government thinking on this issue and a major aid-effectiveness conference is being planned to take place in Accra in September 2008. These are occasions when African voices can be heard, giving strong leadership and championing excellence in the interests of the world`s poor.

Meetings like this symposium are very important — bringing together, as they have, the best of international thinkers, at home and in the diaspora. Africans must use the abundant talent which we have — in the arts, architecture, science and technology — to lead by example and prepare international strategies to tackle climate change.

Annan Cato is Ghana`s high commissioner to the United Kingdom and Ireland. He delivered this address at the Royal African Society`s symposium “Melting the Ice: African Perspectives on Climate Change” on November 7, 2007. The event brought together a cross-disciplinary group of musicians, artists, scientists, architects, planners and politicians to discuss the impact of climate change on Africa.

Homepage photo by Abby Chicken

The future of food is one of competing visions, says British food-policy expert Tim Lang. One view – the dominant one — is that, in general, “great advances are being made in the long struggle to feed people adequately”. The other holds that “these advances have come at a cost, are faltering in their own terms (notably malnutrition) and that a fundamental redirection of food supply” is needed.

As a warming planet with an increasing population, the earth faces a difficult debate about its food supply. “Issues such as climate change, oil dependency, looming mass water stress, obesity alongside hunger, are structural, not peripheral issues,” contends Lang, who delivered the 2007 Rachel Carson Memorial Lecture in London on December 6. (Carson`s books — particularly 1962`s Silent Spring, which documented detrimental effects of pesticides on the natural environment – helped to spark the environmental movement in the west.)

Lang noted that the lecture`s sponsor, the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) UK, and other specialist NGOs all “need to ensure that their voices are heard” as the food-supply debate grows louder. But, he says, “single-issue campaigning will not be enough” and work needs to be cross-checked – verified from a variety of sources and points of view. In confronting the host of issues involved, amid the challenging quest for safe, justly produced and sustainable food for all, Lang proposed four principles that “might unite us”.

They are: