Peak Food and Japan Part 4 - Reforming World Agriculture

A change is needed

As rice prices continue to surge, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have been calling for a summit to discuss the crisis in the world food situation.

Groups such as Canada’s National Farming Union (NFU) are commenting that it is becoming clear that the whole fabric of food production needs to change. Darrin Qualman, NFU’s research director, was interviewed by Inter Press Service (IPS):

“The food production system is designed to generate profits, not produce food or nutrition for people,” Qualman told IPS.

He says there are enormous amounts of food stored in central Canada’s farming heartland, but thousands of people there, including some farm families, are forced to rely on food banks.

Unesco, a United Nations education body, released a report last week that found the following:

Progress in agriculture has reaped very unequal benefits and has come at a high social and environmental cost.

Food producers should try using “natural processes” like crop rotation and use of organic fertilisers.

The distance between the produce and consumer should also be reduced.

In this post, I will be looking at these and other points including the recent reaction to the biofuels debacle and how some countries have dealt with a lack of cheap energy.

Trade and protectionism

There is an urgent need to reconsider allowing such an important part of our lives, food production, to be carried along in the so-called “free markets”. The free markets aim for short term profits and are seemingly oblivious to the impossibility of continuing the current methods of food production and transportation once fossil fuels are more expensive.

In his blog “Stuffed and Starved”, Raj Patel says that people such as Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, who is calling for further free trade in order to solve the food crisis, are making him sick, as it is their trade deals which have so damaged local agriculture across the developing world:

His mission was to accelerate two decades of trade liberalisation in key strategic commodities for the United States, among them agriculture. Practically, this meant the removal of developing countries’ ability to stockpile grain (food mountains interfere with the market), to create tariff barriers (ditto), and to support farmers (they ought to be able to compete on their own). This, Zoellick did often, and enthusiastically.

The French, on the other hand, are calling for further EU Protectionism under the Common Agricultural Policy as a solution, again seemingly unaware of how unpopular it is among the developing world. As Chan Akya wrote in an Asia Times article last week:

CAP ensures that vast farms producing overly expensive produce in Europe are sustained at taxpayer expense, leaving fallow the fertile lands of Africa and many parts of Asia as excess production is dumped on global markets. These countries cannot export to Europe or the United States due to the tying of agricultural trade with unrelated items, creating astounding tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade.

The world trade in food needs to be drastically realigned to a more regional system, whereby, for example, African countries do the bulk of their trading with each other.

This will need to include sustainable domestic agriculture being protected in all countries. If a country can create a surplus then this should either be stored or traded with countries who need agricultural support.

In the future some international food trade will be inevitable. However, this will be nowhere near the scale of today’s, due to the limitations that will be put on transport by the price of oil. Large sailing ships will cross small seas, but humans will no longer be so wasteful in transportation, importing goods from distant countries when local or near-local production is possible.

For example, the United Kingdom will hopefully not import wine from Australia when France is so close at hand. Australian farmers should be concentrating on produce that will benefit those countries in South East Asia.

Unfortunately a mutually beneficial system is not likely to be created. Countries have not shown the willingness to work together on these issues. As shown in Part 2, high food prices are causing food exporting countries to cut back on supply in order to protect their own population, but this is causing misery in poor importing countries across the world.

An end to food-based biofuels?

In March, John Beddington, the chief scientific advisor to the British government, warned that biofuels risk global starvation.

Since then, and since I began writing these posts, there has been a massive shift in the rhetoric coming from politicians around the world. Most are now agreeing that the ‘food as fuel’ situation needs to be reconsidered. Those who have criticized biofuels in this manner include:

Ali Al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister;

Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, the Tanzanian President;

Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister;

Antonio Guterres, the head of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR); and

The neoliberals at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

The European Environment Agency (EEA) have stated that :

The Scientific Committee recommends a new, comprehensive scientific study on the environmental risks and benefits of biofuels, and that the EU target to increase the share of biofuels used in transport to 10 % by 2020 should therefore be suspended.

Despite this, according to euobserver.com, the EU Commission have been going against the flow:

“The reasons for the price increases at the global level are very complex,” said President Jose Manuel Barroso, speaking to reporters, “but the impact of biofuels is not significant.”

Rather, argued the president, the crisis in food prices is being caused primarily by export restrictions on grains by Ukraine and Russia - two of the biggest cereal producers in the world.

It has been suggested that the Commission does not want to undermine the other parts of a climate change package that was agreed last year, despite putting it into disagreement with “its multilateral brethren, the IMF, World Bank and United Nations”.

However, according to The Guardian on Saturday, even the EU Commission seem to be changing their tune, admitting that they are now rethinking their 10% target:

“This is all very sensitive and fast-moving,” said a third commission official. “There is now a lot of new evidence on biofuels and the commission has become a prisoner of this process.”

So far there have been no comparative statements from the Japanese government, who, as I mentioned in Part 1, are ramping up their plans for biofuel production.

Food production has damaged the land

Biofuels were supposed to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to slow down man-made global warming and its consequences such as rising sea levels and desertification. However, the effects of human behaviour on the world’s ecosystem are far more widespread. The planet’s decreasing ability to support us with food is an even more pressing situation.

As oil and food prices rise, so does the price of both chemical and natural fertilisers. China have been willing to pay three times as much as a year ago for potash, a natural potassium based fertiliser.

By using gas and oil so voluminously to maximise the once-natural process of producing food, we have been pushing the ecosystem beyond its capabilities. Industrially produced fertilisers have damaged the natural ability of the soil to support crops. When these fertilisers become unaffordable due to the rising costs of energy needed to create them, the yields of the land will drop dramatically.

Because of this, it is vitally important to wean agriculture off artificial fertilisers and restore the use of natural ones such as manure and nitrogen-fixing plants, recreating the natural cycles that have kept the soil fertile for thousands of years.

Human waste as fertiliser

As mentioned in Part 3 - Japan’s Current Situation, a very common nutrient-rich fertiliser is currently being washed into the oceans where it is causing irreparable damage. That fertiliser is human waste.

Preparing this waste for use as safe fertiliser yields another useful resource, that of methane or ‘biogas’. If the waste is broken down anaerobically, then the gas produced can be trapped and used as cooking fuel. When the methane is burned for cooking, it produces the less harmful carbon dioxide. This process is already increasingly common in rural areas of China, India and other Asian countries. Various companies, such as India’s Sintex, are developing personal family-sized biogas digesters:

If farmers continue to use artificial fertilisers, then the price of food will inevitably continue to rise out of the poor’s reach. Moving to methods such as the utilisation of human waste will become increasingly important; we will require these and other solutions to heal the damage that has been done to the soil. Unfortunately, this process will take time, something that the starving millions do not have.

Cuba’s lesson in surviving the peak

Whilst debating food solutions for a world in which oil is no longer cheaply available, many people are looking to Cuba. Following the breakdown of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s, the country suddenly found itself with a 73% reduction in imports, and a 50% drop in oil.

Cuba imported 50% of its food up until 1990. When the trade plummeted, calorific intake dropped suddenly among the whole population. To get back to their previous levels of consumption, they needed to double their agricultural output with half of the previously available oil.

Cuba’s food production underwent a major shift towards permacultural methods, part of which included using all available space in their cities for growing food, often in schemes such as community gardens.

They were helped in this task by permaculture experts from Australia. Roberto Perez, Havana resident and permaculture and environmental educator, told thedaily.com.au how his city now produces 60% of all its fruit and vegetables within its urban and peri-urban areas:

“I was always looking at ways to do something with nature to improve the lives of people,” he said.

“When the Australians started talking to us about food chains and the knowledge from nature to human settlements I was interested,” he said.

He attributes Cuba’s ability to achieve food security to the introduction of permaculture by these experts and its transition to an “urban agriculture” where people living in the cities transformed “car parks into areas to grow their produce”.

Cuba have been named as the only country with “sustainable development” by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). “the Power of Community - How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” is a documentary film made about the situation in Cuba. Its website describes the country as “an example of options and hope.”

It is tempting to look to Cuba’s use of permaculture and community gardens for guidance in how an urbanised country such as Japan could survive peak oil.

However, it would be optimistic in the extreme to suggest that this process could meet with the same success everywhere. Cuba still managed to retain half of their oil supplies and their economy was still being funded partly by tourism and remittances. In a post-peak oil world, the scope for large-scale tourism will be seriously reduced, and remittances are not guaranteed if all countries are facing a crisis at the same time.

Also, there has been a turnaround in terms of Cuba’s sustainability, shown in the recent relaxation of rules allowing access to more electrical consumer goods in the new post-Castro era.

More worryingly for Japan, is that Havana has a relatively low population density and population compared to Tokyo. Whilst Havana has 3,007 people per square kilometre and a population of 2,168,225, Tokyo’s figures are 5,796 and 12,790,000 respectively.

This includes the more rural areas of the city. If just the figures for the twenty-three special wards of central Tokyo are considered, there is a population density of 13,800 per square kilometre and a population of 8,483,140.

So, with over 4 times as many people per square kilometre as Havana, is it at all possible that central Tokyo can survive the shock of peak oil using the same methods?

Warnings from North Korea

While Havana might have been able to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is also useful to see how North Korea coped with the removal of their mutual benefactor. As mentioned in Part 2, the country is suffering disastrous food shortages, which are rapidly becoming even more severe. A famine in the 1990s is believed to have killed one million people.

Unlike Cuba, North Korea has not always been as welcoming to external help. The World Food Program was asked to leave the country in late 2005 as it was claimed that emergency aid was no longer required.

As Tony Boys says, in “Food and Energy in Japan“, North Korea’s policies for food production were very different to Cuba’s. The mass clearing of forest in order to prepare land for planting has resulted in common floods and mudslides. The country has also attempted to continue their industrial methods of agricultural production which were based on techniques pioneered in the “green revolution“; methods reliant on chemical fertilisers and oil-driven machines:

The fertility of the soil is artificially bolstered by annual inputs of chemical fertilizers, but if these are withheld, for whatever reason, land productivity is likely to plummet to between a half and a third of previous levels, depending on the state of the soil. This is exactly what happened in North Korea, where inability to import oil and natural gas resulted in large declines in chemical fertilizer applications as well as a substantial loss of motive power.

Boys has written a whole paper on this topic: The Limits of Energy-Based Agricultural Systems and the “North Korean Food Crisis”. This paper was written to highlight “the fragility of modern industrial (chemical- and fossil fuel-based) agricultural systems”, including Japan’s. The paper concludes with the warning that:

The end of cheap and abundant oil and other fossil resources, symbolized by the peak in conventional oil extraction, probably to occur during the first decade of the 21st century, means the end of our current methods of food production and thus it possibly spells the end of advanced industrial society as we know it.

(North Korea) is an exceptional case only in the sense that, due to political miscalculation and mismanagement of its economy, it has manifested these symptoms before fossil resource shortage becomes a serious concern for most of the world.

Which direction will Japan take?

As can be seen, the choices in agricultural methods in a post-peak oil world will mean the difference between sustainable living and mass starvation.

Agricultural production throughout the world needs to be reorganised with a shift towards permanently improving soil quality through sustainable farming methods. Some areas will require a long investment of time to become fully productive, due to the damage caused by chemical fertilisers and other pollution.

If only a few farms are using permaculture or other sustainable methods when oil becomes less obtainable, then a country’s food demands will not be met. The mass changes need to occur now.

The developing world will find these changes easier, as long as they heed the advice of the UN and reject the industrialised agriculture model that is championed by organisations such as the World Bank.

However, as Douglas Barnes writes in his blog “Permaculture Reflections”, it not at all apparent that the developed world is ready for the paradigm shift required in making these changes:

For the Third World, there are few illusions regarding their future. They know they are in trouble and the trouble will only increase without serious changes being made regarding the capture and storage of energy and resources. The Third World not only comes from poverty, they remain in poverty. The First World, however, has come out of poverty into a spurt of opulence. Once one acquires a taste of opulence, though, it is like a drug - hard to let go. And any suggestion that living high is no longer possible is met with lashing out similar to the confronted junkie.

In Japan, this problem could be extreme. It is likely that the country will not change until it is forced into a crisis like Cuba’s. Unfortunately, it does not look as if it will be so successful at coping with the probable difficulties. The country faces a huge challenge in completely overhauling their agricultural processes and reforming their densely packed cities to take advantage of resources such as human waste fertiliser. Attempting to follow the Cuba model in Tokyo will be insufficient; there is no space for community gardens for all of the millions of Tokyo residents.

It is likely that there will be a mass exodus to the countryside, where local infrastructure and communities, which have been steadily winding down, will suddenly be overwhelmed. There will also be a battle from big businesses wanting to carry on with the current consumerist society at whatever cost. Cuba was at least ostensibly socialist during their crisis, a benefit that post-peak oil Japan will not have.

In Part 5 I will again look more closely at Japan and how it might deal with the coming changes.