The End of Food. Global age of cheap and plentiful food is coming to an end.

[intention]

Food’s a funny thing. The response time is fairly quick. Here on a third world small volcanic island, people are already planting much more cassava and taro and yams and eating less rice. Prices of these staples have already risen. So the rising price of rice is good news for the local farmers who sell in the markets (mostly women).

But it is not a signal of impending doom, here or anywhere. Farmers respond. When the price of something goes up, farmers respond by either planting more of it (in the producing nations) or planting more of the local substitute.

The shortages and the failures are generally human, not natural. The Sudan has enough rich rain-fed cropland to feed every person in Africa … hundreds of thousands of hectares sitting idle for over a decade because of unending civil/ethnic/tribal/religious war.

Large scale farm subsidies are another major culprit, and should be a source of unending shame to much of the developed world. They were designed for Jane and Joe Farmer, not Con-Agra Ultramegacorp.

Transportation and distribution were mentioned above, to which I’d add communication.

Elsewhere, problems of graft, theft, post-harvest loss, corruption, warehouses of rotting food … the list is long.

And, of course, food cropland to biofuel conversion has been a particular factor of late.

I suspect, however, that as always, we’ll muddle through. For one thing, even including all of the theft and loss, right now, the world as a whole is the best fed it has ever been, rich and poor both. (This is only because, although a man can buy a hundred houses in one day … he can’t eat a hundred dinners a day.) For another thing, post-harvest losses are often huge, and entirely preventable.

Curiously, the critical number seems to be the rate of population growth. If the population growth rate is decreasing, most societies seem to be able to feed themselves.

If, however, the population growth rate is increasing, the nutritional status of the average citizen drops in most societies.

Fortunately, for most parts of the world, population growth rates have been decreasing since the 1970’s, and the trend continues. We still have a ways to ZPG … but we’re heading in the right direction.

Is cheap and plentiful food coming to an end? Hmmm … for most families around here, food has never been either cheap or plentiful, so I assume you’re talking about the US. In the US, as in most developed nations, a major component of the cost of food is the cost of fuel. So the price of food (along with virtually everything else) will rise as fuel prices rise.

But other than that, the US is a net food exporting nation, and doesn’t even use all the available cropland to do so. I don’t see that changing soon.

w.

[BrainGlutton]

@ralph124c

Still, the food shortages are mostly the product of bad government policies. In Egypt, the government subsidizes the price of food-which keeps it cheap-the result? People waste it. In the USA, cheap food has resulted in an obesity rate which is the highest in the world. An Haiti-the local farmers stopped growing food, because they could not compete with cheap imported rice.
Screwing with the market leads to bad results. Of course, places like Bangladesh have always been on the brink of disaster.

Haiti, in that case, would be an example of the state’s failure to screw with the market (by erecting protective tariffs).

[BrainGlutton]

@Askance

Not really, no. It’s to do with price rises for food driven by the ethanol boondoggle, oil prices, reduction in crop yields due to extreme weather and climate change, higher demand (from China and India in particular) and so on. A convergence of factors.

Still, there is a problem.

[DSeid]

1. Demand is inexorably rising as China and India’s newly prosperous eat more grain demanding meats. This increase in demand is not likely to slow down.

2. Cost of production are increasing as energy cost increase and therefore the costs of fertilizers increase and the cost of getting foods to markets increase.

3. Global Climate Change threatens production in the more needy parts of the world.

Supply can be increased to meet the demand of point #1, even while also increasing biofuel production as will be required to help address points # 2 and 3, but it can’t happen instantaneously. It requires investment in infrastructures and seasons of plantings. It requires the developed world to cease artificial subsidization that prevent local developing world small farmers from competition.

Last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16% (see chart 1). These were some of the sharpest rises in food prices ever. But this year the speed of change has accelerated. Since January, rice prices have soared 141%; the price of one variety of wheat shot up 25% in a day. …

The prices mainly reflect changes in demand—not problems of supply, such as harvest failure. …

Such shifts have not been matched by comparable changes on the farm. This is partly because they cannot be: farmers always take a while to respond. It is also because governments have softened the impact of price rises on domestic markets, muffling the signals that would otherwise have encouraged farmers to grow more food. Of 58 countries whose reactions are tracked by the World Bank, 48 have imposed price controls, consumer subsidies, export restrictions or lower tariffs. …

In the short run, humanitarian aid, social-protection programmes and trade policies will determine how well the world copes with these problems. But in the medium term the question is different: where does the world get more food from? …
Ideally, a big part of the supply response would come from the world’s 450m smallholders in developing countries, people who farm just a few acres. … And it should be efficient: in terms of returns on investment, it would be easier to boost grain yields in Africa from two tonnes per hectare to four than it would be to raise yields in Europe from eight tonnes to ten. The opportunities are greater and the law of diminishing returns has not set in.

Unfortunately, no smallholder bonanza is yet happening. In parts of east Africa, farmers are cutting back on the area planted, mostly because they cannot afford fertilisers (driven by oil, fertiliser prices have soared, too). …

Yields cannot be switched on and off like a tap. Spreading extra fertiliser or buying new machinery helps. But higher yields also need better irrigation and fancier seeds.

Cheap food is over. How bad it gets depends on how we respond. Feed the hungry today. Invest in the infrastructure to increase yields in the developing world. Decrease subsidies to farmers in the developed world. And intelligently promote biomass as a means of decreasing the magnitude of Global Climate Change and its likely devasting effects of food production capacity in the world’s most needy areas and the costs of food production at the same time.

[intention]

DSeid, thank you for an interesting analysis. I was with you up until the last sentence, where you said:

@DSeid

And intelligently promote biomass as a means of decreasing the magnitude of Global Climate Change and its likely devasting effects of food production capacity in the world’s most needy areas and the costs of food production at the same time.

I’m not clear how this can happen. How can biomass not affect food production? It already is affecting food production. What am I missing here?

Also, your concern about warming affecting “food production capacity in the world’s most needy areas” seems misplaced. The world’s most needy areas are by and large in the tropics, and the tropics has warmed very little, and is predicted to warm very little.

Finally, the idea that the rise in wheat prices is driven by the Chinese demand for meat would require a scientific citation, not a “Lester Brown” citation. Most analyses of this type go something like “Chinese meat demand increased by X metric tonnes, and it takes 5 (or 7 or whatever) kg of wheat to make a kg of meat, therefore, the meat is driving the wheat consumption up by 7X” …

This type of analysis ignores a number of things:

1. Chinese eat more types of meat (including dog, monkey, and rat) than anywhere else I know of.

2. The number of pounds of grain per pound of dog meat is rather small … and the same is true for goats, and pigs, and chickens, and a host of other Chinese meat sources.

3. Most beef on the planet doesn’t see much grain at all.

4. Even those cattle which are fed grain are not fed grain solely, or for their entire lives. The grain is a supplement in (mainly) Western World feedlots, where cattle are fattened up immediately prior to going to the market. Most of their nutrition over their lifetime comes from the pasture. The “5kg grain=1kg meat” is true, but not for anything like the total weight of meat from the animal.

5. Grain fed to animals is of the lowest quality, often unfit for human consumption.

One huge misunderstanding in all of this is that the feeding of grain to animals forms a very valuable buffer. How this buffered system works is simple. In times when grain is short, humans skim the best grain, and feed the rest to the animals. And in times when grain is abundant, humans skim the best grain, and the rest is fed to the animals. Bozo, but it works.

This means that there’s all this marvelous slack in the system. The key is that animals do not have to be fed grain. In addition to grazing in the pastures, they can eat many kinds of fodder, from alfalfa and silage to agricultural and industrial “waste” products. Because animals can consume a wide variety of foodstuffs, when grain is scarce and grain prices rise, animals are fed less grain and more of other food.

So a woman in China using her Rumpelstiltskin chickens to spin grain into eggs only does so with excess grain – and for the majority of their diet, the chickens eat bugs and grass and kitchen scraps.

In the same way, a woman in Australia using her Rumpelstiltskin cattle to spin grain into meat only does so with excess grain – and for the majority of their diet, the cattle graze pastures and are fed other forage.

In addition, animals are used as a form of storage for grain energy. In many ways, they are a better way to store grain energy than as grain itself. Some of the reasons for this are:

::	Animals don't get eaten by rats.

::	Animals don't mildew.

::	Animals are not bothered by weevils.

::	Animals are immensely weather resistant.

::	Animals don't get stale.

::	Animals can walk to water.

    ::	If grains go bad, animals can still eat the grains.

    ::	If animals die, humans can still eat the animals.

::	With what animals can't digest of the grain, they fertilize the fields.

::	You don't have to build a warehouse to store animals.

In addition to protecting us from swings in supply and serving as an energy store, there is a final bonus – a transformation of the calories of grain energy into more useful things. One of these transformations is of calories into edible protein, whether in the form of meat, milk, or eggs. This is of great benefit to humans, since protein is much scarcer in vegetables than in meat.

The grain calories are also transformed into other very useful inedible proteins such as leather, horn, hair, and wool.

And that’s why people feed grain to animals – because all in all, the buffered human - grain - animal system of energy production, storage, and transformation is of such immense value to people that it is practiced all over the world. Lester Brown and western vegetarians can rant all they want to about the huge advantage of just eating the grain and leaving the animals out of the system … it just proves that they’re not farmers and they have not considered all aspects of the animal-grain-human interaction. The world’s farmers are not idiots, as Lester and his ilk assume.

w.

[XT]

Man…is anyone else getting a craving for a nice steak? I know what’s for dinner tonight (hope there is a good steak house in Roswell…)

-XT

[mswas]

@xtisme

Man…is anyone else getting a craving for a nice steak? I know what’s for dinner tonight (hope there is a good steak house in Roswell…)

-XT

Roswell is cattle country, I’d be shocked if there wasn’t. The closest one I know of is just outside of El Paso.

[Chimera]

@intention

::	You don't have to build a warehouse to store animals.

<snip>

The grain calories are also transformed into other very useful inedible proteins such as leather, horn, hair, and wool.

Sure, you don’t have to sometimes, but if you do, and you kinda sorta under many circumstances, it would be what is called a Barn.

For the second one, modern people forget that animals have many purposes and uses beyond Animal = Meat. Animals provided large amounts of clothing and tools to make our lives better. Even today, the majority of the non-meat portion of those animals is still used in some form or fashion.

[NajaNivea]

@intention

… it just proves that they’re not farmers and they have not considered all aspects of the animal-grain-human interaction. The world’s farmers are not idiots, as Lester and his ilk assume.

w.

I think it demonstrates largely that they’re only looking at a very narrow picture of Western industrial animal production in terms of feeding schemes. As you described, on small-scale farms, your animals occupy several steps in the chain of food production, from consumption of garden waste to grazing and fertilizing fallow fields. Goats and pigs are even useful for clearing land to begin production; left to their own devices in an unused corner, they’ll debrush, remove small trees, pull out roots and begin tilling and fertilizing the soil–and get fat doing it.
When you’re talking about industrial production of, say, pork, you’re not talking about animals that are getting fat off the waste of the farm such as garden clippings and whey. Foster Farms chickens aren’t scratching around the orchard for dropped fruit and bugs. I think it might be true that industrial animal production is wasteful and inefficient, but I’m biased against it for a good number of reasons.

[intention]

My thanks to all who responded.

Chimera, you are certainly correct that animals sometimes live in a barn … but my point was, they generally don’t require a barn. You can leave an animal out in the rain for a week, but try doing that with a bag of grain …

NajaNivea, I agree that they are looking at the Western model of animals, and actually only a small subset of that (feedlot beef).

Also, I think there might be a typo in your final statement, viz:

@NajaNivea

I think it might be true that industrial animal production is wasteful and inefficient, but I’m biased against it for a good number of reasons.

Did you mean that industrial animal production might be efficient, but you are against it for other reasons? Or am I misunderstanding you?

Best to all,

w.

[NajaNivea]

Sorry, I think the whole tone of my post was sort of awkwardly phrased.
I’m agreeing with you, I enjoyed your post greatly.

That last thought, rephrased: I can easily believe it’s true that industrial meat production is horribly inefficient and wasteful as claimed*, but I’m biased against it for so many other reasons (as well) that my readiness to believe it’s a wasteful practice may be tinged by the other biases.

*Though as you point out, this doesn’t necessarily relate to the production of meat in China or a connection to food shortages.

[DSeid]

intention,

How can biomass not affect food production?

(Note that I actually said “[s]upply can be increased to meet the demand … even while also increasing biofuel production”). How? In many ways. The most obvious is that supply can catch up to demand, it just can’t respond as quickly. Allow demand to increase more gradually while building the infrastructure and having farmers feel confident of the market requirements. Cellulosic ethanol can use waste products and dedicated cellulosic crops can be grown on poorly arable land with little irrigation that would be poorly suitable for food crops. Those same dedicated crops can be used as biomass for electricity generation. Algae can be grown in bioreactors at plant flue locations and used to produce biofuels or later dried out and used to cofire in the plant. And so on. All are works in progress. The problem is that mandating X amount of ethanol use in a fairly short time frame independent of its cost or consequences is not the intelligent approach. (IMHO.)

…your concern about warming affecting “food production capacity in the world’s most needy areas” seems misplaced

Not according to the experts.

Climate change is likely to undermine food production in the developing world … at lower latitudes, especially in the seasonally dry tropics, crop yield potential is likely to decline for even small global temperature rises … Greater frequency of droughts and floods would affect local production negatively, especially in subsistence sectors at low latitudes

Climate change is an “unprecedented” threat to food security … Arid or semi-arid areas in northern, western, eastern and parts of southern Africa are becoming drier, while equatorial Africa and other parts of southern Africa are getting wetter … They are going to be caught between the devil of drought and the deep blue seas of floods

Changes in agricultural productivity and cropping patterns. These effects are likely to be seriously unfavorable to developing countries, with the most severe negative impact occurring in tropical regions of Africa, Latin America and India [5] – home to the vast majority of the world’s poor. According to the IPCC, “in the Sahelian region of Africa, warmer and drier conditions have led to a reduced length of growing season with detrimental effects on crops.” [6] The current violence in Darfur is at least partly the result of climate-induced resource scarcity. [7]

While some variety of meats are eaten in China (and I had some wonderful snake there in an amazing chili sauce - yum!) the myth of cat and dog being eaten commonly is untrue. Such was rare in China except in the Southeast (Canton), was not commonplace there, and is now somewhat socially unacceptable there as well. The main meat in China is pig.

Pork is the major meat product in China in terms of both production and consumption. In 2005, production of pigmeat, estimated at 50.1 million tonnes, accounted for some 65 percent of total meat output. Consumption data for the same year indicate that pigmeat represents three-quarters of all meat consumption.

That cite also informs us that

Pork prices in China rose significantly during the third quarter of 2007 compared to the same period in 2006, with increases of up to 98 percent in Liaoning province, 81 percent in Sichuan province, and 62 percent in Guangdong province (Figure i). This reflects a substantial reduction in China’s 2007 pig numbers due to an outbreak of the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) disease, also known as Blue Ear Disease in China. Over 1 million pigs have reportedly been lost as a result of PRRS. … The pork shortage in China is also expected to strongly impact world meat and feed markets since China produces and consumes about half of the world’s pork.

As for evidence that the increased Chinese appetite for meat is a driver of grain prices:

China’s meat consumption since 1995 has increased by 112 percent to 53 kilograms per person per year … the U.S. increased corn production by 157 million tonnes of corn since 1995. 31 million net tonnes of grain went to support U.S. ethanol production, and 27 million tonnes supported a 15 percent increase in U.S. population during the period. By contrast, the study projected that livestock grain demand to supply Chinese meat consumption increased by 199 million tonnes between 1995 and 2007.

The Chinese People’s Daily saw it coming back in 2004.

China’s grain supply pressure in future doesn’t come from grain for human but from grain for livestock … The demand-supply relation of grain in today’s China is walking away from tradition … The reason why fodder need becomes a threat of food security lies in the long-term negligence of grass-eating livestock and over attention to the pig. China is the world largest pig raiser (460 million in number) and their fodder accounts for 35 percent of whole-year grain production, or the capacity of 37.33 million hectares of farming land.

The increase in meat consumption has ripple effects.

Processed feed production soared from merely 2 million tonnes in 1980 to over 107 million tonnes in 2005. Many livestock producers, 10
including those in the traditional sector, have changed their feeding methods towards 11
using industrial feed and have become accustomed to it. The robust development of 12
the industrial feed sector has been the decisive factor for the increase in intensive 13
livestock systems, especially for the poultry and swine sectors (Ke 1997). This has 14
significantly altered the grain market. Over the past two decades China has gone 15
from being a soybean exporter to being the world’s largest importer of whole 16
soybeans and a large importer of soymeal, with one-third of the national soymeal 17
consumption supplied by imports 18

I have no desire to debate the utility of meat, but China at least is switching away from that somewhat nostalgic view of the small farmer growing their own pigs and chickens letting them graze in the field, eat their scraps, and feeding them the left-over grain of poor quality. The Chinese increasingly are urbanized and their meat is increasingly produced in industrialized farms increasingly fed grain grown for that purpose. Land is used to grow grain for fodder instead of grain for human consumption or export, and as cited above, in the case of some grains is now switched to becoming a net importer.

[MrDibble]

Man, I’m glad I’m a locavore. The only things I consume that aren’t sourced in my home region are Guinness, Nutella, bananas, chocolate & coffee. And with the latter two I always get Fair Trade, which is many things, but “cheap” and “plentiful” aren’t in it.

[Liberal]

@Phlosphr

100 million people here, 100 million people there all being pushed to the brink of starvation. I think I have said it before in another thread - there is a new paradigm shift happening and I think it’s going on right now. Sustainable Living is going to have to be a global cooperative, the size of the human population on this planet is so large [6,515,000,000 last I checked and counting] - what happens to one population center effects another over and over, ad infinitum.

Let’s build a rocket ship that’ll take 6 people to Mars!

[intention]

DSeid, thank you for a most detailed and informative post. Consider my ignorance of the latest developments in China well fought.

My regards to you,

w.

[Phlosphr]

intention - I am very happy this post has brought out people who really want to discuss the topic. In my limited knowledge of the industry - I am but a fledgling to actually working in the industry - but everyone has a start. It’s been under 5 years that I have been working in the industry but a veritable lifetime that I have been advocating for the cause. This SDMB is a repository of fine thinkers and I really enjoy it when people come into a thread like this after having done their homework and really taking on a subject. Thank you to you and everyone who has contributed. Hopefully this thread will be the first in a series on Green Practices.

[DSeid]

@intention

DSeid, thank you for a most detailed and informative post. Consider my ignorance of the latest developments in China well fought.

My regards to you,

w.

You’re welcome and thank you too.

[ralph124c]

Question: does the USA and the EU still have vast stocks of unwanted foods? All the stuff that governments but to stabilize prices? There used to be wine lakes, and vast warehouses full of corn-do these stocks still exist?

[DSeid]

The sort answer is no, they do not.

In America Bill Clinton signed the “Freedom to Farm Act” in 1996 which eliminated US reserves other than a smallish supply set aside for humanitarian uses. The concept was to stop providing price supports to farmers, weaning them off of supports and making them more sensitive to global market signals. Of course prices dropped and political pandering ensued: farmers instead just got more direct subsidies keeping American grain artificially cheap. The EU also has no strategic grain reserve and also subsidizes. At least the grain reserve approach, buying grain up to create demand when prices went lower than was desired, didn’t result in flooding the world markets with cheap food and driving local producers out of the business.

Global “free” markets in which the developed world competes by subsidizing their farmers in ways that keep their prices low are not a good combination. Of course this isn’t really what you asked, but it is intimately associated with it.

One view is that the villian is the globalization itself. More government intervention and protectionism is the answer in that view: reverse the globalization. Another is that markets need to stop the artificial distortions caused by such actions as subsidization. According to this view government intervention in agriculture should be limited to helping build the infrastructure needed to increase yields in the developing world but that otherwise governments need to stay out of the way.

The latter seems the wiser course to me.

[intention]

DSeid, I agree. The problem is not free trade (which is of course regulated). The problem is the subsidies. We are paying farmers not to farm, or to farm fuel rather than food. Foolish, and very destructive, especially to farmers in developing countries.

w.