Writing on the Wall

The IPCC has come out with some fairly mixed messages about food security. The headline finding is that up to 3 degrees of warming, global food production will increase. Policy makers have so much else to worry about even as we approach 1.5 or 2 degrees, meaning that food security slips down the agenda.

But as I read the fourth assessment several things made me stop and think. For instance, the IPPC admits that its predictions do not take into account extreme weather events. This is very worrying: ask any farmer and they will tell you that it is not the 364 days of normal weather that scares them, but the one day of flash flooding.

Take the 2003 summer heat-wave in Europe, it reduced agricultural yields in affected countries by between 10 to 40% of the harvests for that year. This is exactly the kind of thing which is set to become much more frequent.

There is another warning within the IPCC’s prediction. Above 1 degrees, even ignoring extreme weather, food production in the tropics will decline. Up to 3 degrees this is supposed to be offset by increases in temperate regions, hence the misleading headline. But even if you accept this, it means that the poor tropics will become more dependent on the global food trade. In other words the survival of the poor will become even more tied to the production and consumption patterns of the rich.

This is part of a wider trend in market forces that are putting the poor in peril of starvation. Bio-fuels are a prime example. Here there is a there is a stark choice between using land to feed people, or to grow fuel for cars. People who have cars are generally richer than those that might starve. They generally have more purchasing power, so left to the market people starve in order to run vehicles.

Another market force is the rise in oil prices: Oil is a major input into agriculture. For every calorie of food produced via industrial agriculture, 10 calories of oil are burnt. This means that as oil production falls behind demand social choices need to be made, via the market, about how to use that oil. Now again, since the poor and hungry have less purchasing power than the rich and mobile, it would seem that we will most likely drive them to starvation.

Bio-fuel production, oil prices and the tropical food deficit are all set to increase in the long run. All three stack the pleasures of the few against food on the plate for the majority. All that stands between the purchasing power of the poor and global markets are food and agriculture subsidy regimes. Disturbingly, as developing countries become more dependent on the global food trade, they are likely to face ever increasing demands to dismantle these protective regimes in the name of liberalisation. It seems that there is a disaster on the menu.

India’s position

India stands at a staggering number 94 in the world hunger index. I was particularly shocked by this figure when I found out that Ethiopia, the country that means ‘famine” in the global imaginary, squeezes in one place higher at 93. With it’s 1 billion odd people, this makes India host to the largest mass of hunger on earth. Indian’s are also some of the wealthiest people on the planet. Indeed, the day I saw the hunger figure reported in the Hindu, I also read about an Indian overtaking Bill Gates as the world’s richest man. India is quite simply the most unequal and hungry place on this planet.

It is also a country with huge emerging agriculture and water problems, even before you begin to worry about climate change and energy markets. The south of the country is pretty much dependent on water that it is mined from the ground. This is a one-shot supply that will not recharge within the foreseeable future. In the plains of Tamil Nadu bore wells are stretching down to depths of 300 meters or more, many of them finding bedrock, which spells the end for ground-water irrigation.

Another issue is the ever-growing cost of agricultural inputs, and the pressure this puts on farmers. This is partly due to Genetically Modified seeds, which farmers are forced to purchase each year. One result of this increasing financial pressure is a rocketing in farmer suicides, with 150,000 reported between 1997 and 2005. The ongoing oil price increases are likely to make matters worse, as they translate into the cost of inputs. When you consider that the Indian government already has to subsidise these massively, and that using these inputs reduces both soil productivity and rural employment, it becomes clear how crazy this approach is.

The subsidy regime will be hit hard by climate change. The pressure of bio-fuels on food prices through competition for land, as well as the rising cost of inputs due to the more general upward pressures on energy prices, is likely to make the current system unsustainable. The costs of direct subsidy on food, of subsidy on chemical inputs, as well as liabilities for guaranteeing subsistence wages, will all go up. In fact the subsidy on chemical inputs in itself increases the need for subsistence employment guarantees, since chemical agriculture is less labour intensive than the alternatives.

And this points the way to domestic solutions for this coming food and water crunch. Developing countries are relatively people rich and capital poor. They also need to provide more employment to help people adapt to climate change. Why not have a subsidy regime that encourages a shift away from the rising cost of chemical inputs towards the employment provision of low-input techniques? This kind of approach seems set to save developing government money on two fronts, by avoiding chemical inputs as well as boosting employment. Reports from the FAO as well as trials by Tamil Nadu Agricultural University establish that low input techniques give enough yield to feed India, or indeed the world at large, if they are rolled out at scale with full extension support.

There is a similar issue and solution with water. The government is responding to the water shortages by proposing a huge scheme to link the rivers of the North to the Rivers of the South. But climate change completely confounds this. The rivers of North India are heavily dependent on melt from the Himalayan glaciers to maintain their dry-season flow. With warming climate the Himalayas are losing their glaciers. The projections are for a 40-60% reduction in flow for many of North India’s rivers, which makes the linking project a waste of time.

There is also a general problem that undermines current capital intensive approaches to water management. As temperatures rise their are two opposing dynamics in play in terms of water supply. Increased rainfall is pitted against increased evaporation. In most cases the evaporation wins, with an overall decrease in river flow forecast for most of India, even in areas not affected by glacial loss. Large scale dam systems, with their huge open surfaces and long transport distances, are massively prone to evaporation. Indeed, according to the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi, they are several times less efficient in terms of conserving inflow than smaller-scale water harvesting approaches. This inefficiency only increases as temperatures rise.

Taking all this into account, it seems that the main thing which capital intensive methods have has in their favour is that they are far more suitable as a basis for corruption. This dubious qualification keeps them popular with politicians and business leaders, despite the technical and economic advantages that lie along the low-input, people intensive paths. Water harvesting, like low-input agriculture, is far more likely to generate ongoing local economic activity than big dam projects, so in terms of adapting to climate change, activities at these smaller scales make far more sense. If this sounds like sending people back into poverty, then consider this: If many die of starvation and this brings on political instability, then we really face a return to the dark ages.

But even with a transition to low input farming and water harvesting at a national scale, there would still be risks of food deficit to face in India, due to the risks at a global scale. This means that this Indian case needs to be considered within the global context of how food markets operate. Clearly, as food and energy markets converge, there needs to be a mechanism for stabilising food supply that does not rely on the poor being priced out.

This mechanism needs to be global, since the developing countries cannot bear the rising costs of protecting their poor from these global dynamics. Nor should they be expected to do so, since it is not they who have created the problem. Rather global markets should be re-engineered to guarantee the supply of crucial staples to the poor, in order to address the danger of energy markets driving the poor to starvation. An approach to this kind of global protection is outlined in my article “Food and Carbon Trading.” I think the India case illustrates that we need a green revolution that reaches all the way from the field to the global financial architecture.