Even without taking into account the negative effects of climate change on our food supply, how is the world going to feed itself in years to come? If world population continues to grow at the rate it is we could be looking at a world population of some 12 billion by 2050.
Until quite recently few seemed to see this as a problem. Since the 1960s the Malthusian nightmare of an overpopulated starving planet had all but disappeared, to be replaced by the broad sunny uplands of agricultural surplus, miracle rice, butter mountains, wine lakes and a superabundance of wheat, corn and soy. If millions of the world’s poor still starved, and they did, that wasn’t because the world lacked food, that was because of political and logistical dysfunction. For most of us, food was not only plentiful, it was varied and cheap. But in the last two years all that seems to be changing.
Soaring Food Prices
You must have noticed how even quite ordinary and modest dietary items on your shopping list have gone up by 50% to 70% over the past 18 months. A loaf of half decent bread now costing US$4.00 say, a small bag of walnuts at $9.00 or 20 cents a blueberry? The days of cheap food appear to be over for good with no end to routine price hikes in sight. Even import substitution doesn’t bring down prices. 750 ml of locally made soymilk, for example, costs more than a tetrapak litre of an imported brand, even the disgustingly sweet and thin ASEAN imports that have replaced the usual Australian brands. How do you figure that, if not as a bad case of psychological inflation and pecuniary opportunism?
More ominous yet, scientists whom up till now had been telling us that developments in agri-sciences would keep us all fed however many of us there were, are changing their tune. If we are indeed facing serious climate change, then we’re going to need every trick in the book to keep us from starving.
Jonathan Rauch writing in Atlantic Monthly, enjoins us -
“recall that world food output will need to at least double and possibly triple over the next several decades. Even if production could be increased that much using conventional technology, which is doubtful, the required amounts of pesticide and fertilizer and other polluting chemicals would be immense. If properly developed, disseminated, and used, genetically modified crops might well be the best hope the planet has got.”
That’s a big “if”, and the latest news is not good.
King of Herbicides deeply flawed
Roundup, a glyphosate introduced by Monsanto in 1980, is probably the world’s most successful herbicide to date. It, and the genetically engineered seeds the company sells, known as Roundup Ready crops, account for half the company’s earnings. Roundup has been used to great effect by farmers growing soy, cotton, corn, canola and sugar beet with, Roundup Ready wheat and alfalfa seeds due any day. Until recently the herbicide appeared to kill a broad spectrum of weeds very successfully, obviating the need for a whole slew of nastier more toxic herbicides, it was easy and safe to work with, broke down quickly thereby eliminating plowing and the run- off of fertilizers and pesticides. Today Roundup Ready crops account for 90% of the soybeans and 70% of the corn and cotton grown in the US. It is also as extensively used in Canada, Argentina, Australia and Brazil.
But things have changed. Just as the heavy use of antibiotics led to the rise of drug-resistant superbugs, so the over-spraying of Roundup by farmers has led to the rapid evolution of tenacious new superweeds. Since 2004 the superweed known as pigweed, along with other weeds with names like hairy fleabane, mares tail and ryegrass are now widespread throughout the entire Southeastern US states, as far West as Texas and Virginia to the North. There are now 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres of soybeans, cotton and corn. And pigweed is formidable. It can grow three inches a day and reach more than seven feet high choking crops. It is so tough it can easily damage harvesting equipment.
“If we don’t whip this thing, it’s going to be like what the boll-weevil did to cotton”, says the Chairman of the Georgia Cotton Commission.
Throwing out Baby with the Bathwater
What it means is we are right back where we were 25 years ago. To combat the problem, farmers will now have to spray their fields with a cocktail of older much more toxic herbicides, pull weeds out by hand and return to the more labour-intensive methods of regular plowing. That will reduce yields, increase farm costs leading to higher food prices overall, along with all the bad environmental spin-offs from toxic herbicides we hoped had been eliminated once and for all.
Compounding the problem, Roundup came off-patent recently and the Chinese are now using and making glyphosate in huge quantities, selling it to other large agricultural producers like Australia, Argentina and Brazil. This from the folks who barely a year ago were caught selling infant formula and pet food to the world containing lethal levels of poisonous chemicals. All charges furiously denied until they could be so no longer, whereupon they shot the owner of the infant formula company. Pour encourager les autres, dare one hope.
Which rather brings us to the point.
Just as, with 7 billion of us and climate change upon us, it is not simply absurd but irresponsible for any world leader to oppose contraception, let alone call it a sin, it is both infantile and unhelpful to brand all forms of genetically modified food as Frankenfood and leave it at that, as some religious folk and eco-purists do. Throughout our agricultural history we have always modified the food we grow. It’s just a lot more complicated nowadays and we need to be more careful about it today than Turnip Townsend needed to be back in mid-18th century. If we are on the threshold of major climate change and if we are to avoid Professor Lovelock’s 90% cull we are going to have to manage to feed ourselves on whatever arable land we’ve got left.
In a Hi-tech future, who can we trust?
That said, the record is not encouraging. Our governments seem to be far too in thrall to big business and the lobbying of Big Pharma and major bio-science companies, most of whom have been caught out acting criminally in their pursuit of profit. Such organizations have shown time and time again they are not to be trusted. All we are left with is the faint hope of timely and effective government regulation on our behalf.
In the case of Monsanto and Roundup, though glyphosate itself is classified as mildly toxic but safe to use that does not apply to Roundup itself, a product which contains other chemicals and amazingly has never actually been EPA tested (in the EU it has been tested and classified as toxic). Since 1980 Monsanto has been convicted twice of false advertising and twice falsifying scientific test results on behalf of Roundup. Subsequent scientific tests have shown that these chemical additions to Roundup used in standard commercial concentrations can cause genetic damage, disrupt the endocrine reproductive system and cause DNA damage to the human liver. It also has toxic aquatic effects killing small amphibians and also kills off necessary soil bacteria.
The EU to its credit refuses to allow companies like Monsanto to sell their GM products in Europe until they can show they are safe. Nor will they allow imported US processed foods containing GM ingredients to be sold in Europe unless their manufacturers agree to labeling which shows if their products contain GM ingredients or not. They, the EU, quite rightly take the view that their citizens have the right to decide for themselves what to buy and put in their mouths, even if that decision is not scientifically based. In America, the land of the free, Americans do not have that right. It seems the US government is at one with its robber food and bio barons and along with Canada and Argentina is bringing a suit in the WTO complaining that the EU only insists on the public’s right to know what it’s eating as an opportunistic, probably French, ploy aimed at erecting trade barriers to US products. Well, if that’s true, and it very well might be, all the American food giants have to do is say on the label what it is they’re selling.
But they don’t want to do that, you see….
If they did…. why, then they might have to tell the great American public what they’re eating too. And that, as they say, may not be good for business.
