The Word: It's Worse Than We Think

via Simon and Schuster

Looking at the UCL-Lancet Commission on Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change report and one thing becomes clear; the future is going to be so much worse than we think.
As the project summary says:

A major report on managing the health effects of climate change, launched jointly by The Lancet and UCL, says that climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.

The commission reviewed the likely health impacts of climate change on human societies – and documented ways to reverse those impacts. It concluded that there is a need for policymakers, practitioners and the public to act urgently on the human health effects of climate change.

The report is already six years old, and the major problems identified still haven't made it into public discussion in North America. As the Lancet editorial opens:

Climate change will have its greatest impact on those who are already
the poorest in the world: it will deepen inequities and the effects of global warming will shape the future of health among all peoples. Yet this message has failed to penetrate most public discussion about climate change. And health professionals have barely begun to engage
with an issue that should be a major focal point for their research, preparedness planning, and advocacy [...].

Climate change and the projected effects of a changing climate develop quickly into a highly complex group of  inter-related problems: including disease, food, water and sanitation, shelter and settlements, extreme events, population and migration, and politics.
In the Commonwealth Health Ministers briefing on food [pdf], the study points out the following:

• Climate change will worsen any existing food insecurity--anything bad now will only get worse.
• The changes brought about by global warming will necessitate changes to agricultural practices--this is everything from what is grown, where it is grown, to how it is grown. But when it comes to the necessity of using GMOs, "the Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (also known as the World Agriculture Report), which was written by over 400 scientists, rejects that view. It sees ‘...a major role for agricultural knowledge, science and technology...to increase adaptive capacity and enhance resilience through purposeful biodiversity management’. The options set forth include ‘...irrigation management, water harvesting and conservation technologies, diversification of agriculture systems, the protection of agro-biodiversity and screening germ-plasm for tolerance to climate change."
• The globalised food and agriculture system serves the interests of large
  corporations, while neglecting the needs of the increased numbers of
  hungry people. Can't say that much clearer, can you?
• Agricultural practices and the global food system are major contributors to global warming. So, business as usual is just not an option.
• The current methods of dealing with disaster and distributing food
  aid tend not to alleviate the long-term situation, often resulting in
  dependency upon aid. And that doesn't solve any long-term problems.
• The impact of climate change on global food security, and in turn the public health risks, need to be tackled holistically. Simply put, there's no single solution. Because the problem is the system, the system must be attacked simultaneously from multiple angles in multiple ways. Which is good, because the only way the system can be taken down is to hit it hard, hit it fast, and hit it in so many ways that the corporations cannot respond effectively.

Six years on, and this still isn't in the everyday discourse. Frankly, every news report should be seen through the lens of climate change. Collapsing economy? Probably good news, as people in economic trouble burn fewer fossil fuels. In Canada, Bill C 51? A tool to prevent concerned citizens worried about climate change from interfering with the corporate right to profit while destroying the world. As Naomi Klein says, This Changes Everything.
Film: ‘Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change’

Crisis Management

You may have seen this, I don't know. But this is Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck talking about the company he leads and its vision of the world. In this clip (apparently from the "We Feed The World" documentary) Brabeck talks about water, and in so doing, defines the problem with the food system. He says, and this is an approximate quote, "There are two views on water. One is that it is a human right and that everyone should have access to it. This is an extreme view." He has since commented on this himself.
He, quite naturally, is pro-privatization. Because he has to be--this is the job of capital; to slice the world ever more thinly and sell it back to the population at a profit, and to find ever more resources that can be owned and sold. This isn't one sociopathic individual with no concern for anyone else, this is the raison d'être of capitalism. There's all kinds of writing about how this maximises use of resources and minimizes costs and suchlike, and it's all very lovely inside the economic models. It is also the "invisible worm that flies in the night"  that is destroying the life of our planet. And is at the heart of the food crisis. 
Peter Brabeck doesn't want to kill millions of people and destroy the future of human life on this planet. I'm sure he's a very nice guy who loves his wife and dandles his grandchildren on his knee and worries about their future. But he's also trapped inside a $65 billion/year machine that is busy eliminating those grandchildren's future. 
I'm not anti-business. I've both been there and done that. My wife is a freelance writer. We ran a farm that survived on selling vegetables in a competitive environment to the public. I've both introduced new products to market and developed a market for them, and seen the truth of what Adam Smith said : “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”(Seriously, we all need to read Adam Smith--modern capital has only focused on his recommendations for a free market, but he's so much more than that).
What I am saying is that capital has its own rules, its own drivers. And when left with control over necessities of life, it ends in craziness and excess. And many many dead bodies--just ask South America or check out The Shock Doctrine. Unrestrained capitalism and democracy are not partners, but antithetical. Unrestrained capital is the enemy of democracy. Unrestrained capital is a criminal enterprise dedicated to complete dominance and its linkages to government result in fascism.
Leaving capital in charge of our food is really nuts. Countries and populations are better served by numerous small businesses rather than a small number of enormous corporations. And until we take on the excesses of unrestrained capital, we will always have a food crisis, a water crisis, a global climate change crisis.

Feeding The World Cheaply

How about using the food we already grow? Reports out of Canada, the EU, and the US indicate that close to half of the food planted never makes it to the fork.
From Science Daily:

The world's population is an estimated seven billion people. An additional one billion can be fed from our current resources, if the food losses could be halved. This can be achieved if the lowest loss percentage achieved in any region could be reached globally.
"There isn't enough clean water everywhere on Earth. Significantly more agricultural land cannot be cleared as well as certain raw material minerals for fertilizers are running low. At the same time, a quarter of the amount of calories in produced food is lost or wasted at different stages of food production chain, which results in unnecessary resources loss," says Matti Kummu, post-doctoral researcher at Aalto University.
The new study is the first to evaluate the impact of food losses and its relationship to resources on a global scale. Annually 27 m3 of clean water, 0.031 hectares of agricultural land and 4.3 kilos of fertilizers per every inhabitant in the world is wasted in food losses.
"Agriculture uses over 90 percent of the fresh water consumed by humans and most of the raw materials used in fertilizers. More efficient food production and the reduction of food losses are very important matters for the environment as well as future food security," Kummu adds.

Cuba, Sí

It's amazing how good I feel today. Seriously. Because one of the big clouds has been lifted.

What happens if it all goes wrong? What if estimates of Middle East oil reserves turn out to have been fabricated out of whole cloth for the last thirty years? (A real possibility, much like the way the same Soviet ICBMs became more and more accurate with each budget appropriation cycle in the US during the late 70s and early 80s.) What happens if global climate change doesn't follow the nice timetable laid out by the IPCC, but instead beats us like Buddy Rich doing a solo? If food miles turns out to actually be a real problem? If industrial food collapses like a house of cards? What if the nightmare scenarios actually come to pass?

Well, after reading an article in The Journal of Peasant Studies, I feel a bit more relaxed when I think about the nightmare scenarios. Because Cuba has already been there, done that, and can see light on the other side.

Cuba, post-revolution, invested in extensive agrarian reform, but a combination of circumstances (the US blockade, and joining the international socialist division of labour for two), led Cuba to strengthen their sugar-producing sector; a sector that dominated 30% of the available farmland and generated 75% of export revenues by 1989. At the same time, Cuba was importing some 57% of its food.

Cuba embraced the Green Revolution wholeheartedly, with the most tractors per person and per unit of area, importing 48% of its fertilizers (which doesn't tell the whole story: of the fertilizer produced domestically, there was a 94% import coefficient), and importing 82% of its pesticides. Cuba was a poster child for Green revolution industrial agriculture. With the second-highest average grain yields of Latin America, Cuba achieved a high level of food security for its population. But what they discovered they did not have was food sovereignty. The 1980s brought increasing pest problems and the yields of some key crops began to decline due to soil degradation and pests (this is actually typical of Green Revolution lead areas around the world; long-term yield levelling or decline seem to be part of the model). 

Food Crisis Part II

Al Jazeera is one of the few media outlets talking about the impact of the US drought on the rest of the world. The 2008 price spike brought down governments in the Middle East, and sparked uprisings in Africa and Latin America.  With so much of the corn crop decimated, there's really no telling what to expect over the next 18 months. Oh, and when you look at the list of the the top three food-secure nations? Notice Canada doesn't make it. The Harper government may well pay for years of neglecting a national food strategy.


THE IMPACT OF THE US DROUGHT:

• About 60 per cent of continental US is experiencing drought conditions
• The US is the world's largest corn producer, and provides up to 60 per cent of the world's food aid
• The price of corn has increased by 34 per cent in the last month
• The US government says nearly 40 per cent of the corn crop is in poor condition
• Most US farmers have crop insurance in case of losses

FOOD SECURE NATIONS:

• The US is ranked as the most food-secure nation in the world, with an average of 14 per cent of household expenditure being spent on food. Second is Denmark, followed by Norway
• The most food-secure nations benefit from ample resources, high incomes and subsidies for farmers
• The least food-secure nations are in sub-Saharan Africa, with the DR Congo scoring most poorly with 70 per cent of household income there spent on food despite the country's huge agricultural potential
• Chad and Burundi suffer from similar circumstances