A brief insight into global food trends…

……searching for food security in an insecure world

I WOULD LIKE to make five points about our food system. These five points can be encapsulated as four challenges and one example of what citizens are doing about their own food supply. They take us on a journey from the global to the local.
The four challenges are these:

1. Come 2050, how do we feed the Earth’s nine billion?
2. Come 2030, how will we have develop fair and resilient food systems that are productive in a global environment afflicted by climate change?
3. By 2020, how will our food systems have adapted to the likely onset of peak oil and the depletion of other resources?
4. By 2015, how will state and local government have acted to ensure Sydney’s food security and the continuity of the city’s viable, urban fringe farming industry and its local food supply?
5. At the present time, how are people in communities acting to take some measure of control over their food supply?

Now, let’s explore those five points.

Challenge number 1…

By 2050 — how do we feed the nine billion?

THE CHALLENGE to producing enough food for nine billion people is that we will have to produce half to twice as much food again as we do at present, on the same area of land.

The potential of genetically modified crops

Some say we will need the help of the genetic engineers in adapting crops to grow in drier climates and in poorer soils, and to resist pests and diseases. They say that traditional and organic farming is simply too unproductive to have any hope of feeding a growing world population.

While it may be true that, in some regions, population growth is exceeding the capacity of traditional farming systems to produce a sufficient quantity of nourishing food, advocates of organic agriculture contest the notion that their methods are insufficient to feed the anticipated growth of global population.

More than productivity

Organic food interests say that there is more to the organic versus chemical farming discussion than productivity.

For example, their methods — they say — restores agricultural soils rather than deplete them in the way that excessive application of agricultural chemicals can.

International development and food interests agree that a focus solely on productivity and genetic engineering is insufficient. Enough food is already produced to provide all with a nourishing and adequate diet. The problem is access to that food, and that is an argument to do with poverty, income, employment and other economic factors.

This was highlighted recently by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, which said that with 1,020 million people going hungry every day, the most recent increase in hunger is not the consequence of poor global harvests but is caused by the world economic crisis that has resulted in lower incomes and increased unemployment. This has reduced access to food by the poor.

A new Green Revolution

Some say we need a new Green Revolution, a new version of the revolution that, during the 1950s and 1960s, increased food production and fed the world’s expanding population.

It did this through the use of new, hybrid seeds, the application of agricultural chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, and farm mechanisation. All these inputs required money or credit, and so the poorer and less creditworthy farmers often missed out.

While the upside to the Green Revolution was that it allowed the global population to expand and to be fed, its downside brought soil degradation and the overexploitation of water reserves. It saw poor farmers displaced from their land onto marginal lands or into the growing urban slums.

Although genetic engineering could be a part of a new Green Revolution, it has been claimed that such a revolution could take place without genetic modification while making use of a scientific approach to farming and even incorporating organic agriculture.

While the companies producing the genetically modified (GM) crops extol their hopes for the technology, critics point out that genetic drift — the movement of plant propagation material — from the fields of GM farmers to those not using the technology contaminates non-GM crops, potentially affecting the marketing of non-GM crops and putting those farmers at risk of prosecution for cultivating GM crops when they had no idea they were doing so and did not intentionally do so. This is a matter of justice, critics say.

There is also the issue over farmers exercising their traditional right to save and replant seed for the following crop. GM seed must be purchased for every sowing and saving it is prohibited by the companies.

Does organic farming hold any promise?

Some say that organic farming can be as equally productive as Green Revolution farming… that it’s techniques and approach are safer for people and environment and that it does not depend on synthetic chemical inputs or genetically modified seed.
The pro-organic argument rests upon:

• its soil improvement techniques
• the fact that its farming inputs are less likely to affect the health of farmer and farm worker through the misapplication of synhetic chemicals
• that it leaves no synthetic chemical residue on or in its food products
• that is is less likley to contaminate waterays with synthetic chemical runoff.

Whether organic food is more nutritionally beneficial rmains the focus of claim and counter-claim.

Another path?

Other opinion says that we can adopt modern scientific farming practices and successfully combine them with traditional farming knowledge that is still useful.

This includes the LEISA model (Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture) adopted by many food security and farming NGOs working in developing countries. It incorporates organic practices but need not be fully organic… that’s up to the farmer.

Not just a question of farming

Food then, is not just an agricultural question. It is also a question of access, of social justice.

It is sometimes also a question of technology and global markets.
The global food shortages of 2006 and 2007, for instance, are attributed to the diversion of global grain stocks to the emerging biofuels industry rather than to the global food market.

A shortage of grain staples on the global market pushed up prices, including the prices of those grains not in demand as feedstock by the biofuels industry but that were substituted as foods for those that were. The result was that prices rose beyond what poorer populations could afford to pay. Hunger and food riots were the result.

Fortunately, scientists are developing second generation biofuels from waste biomass (plant matter left over after farm harvest and from other sources) and are researching third generation biofuels manufactured from algae that can be farmed.

The global recession of 2009 has dampened the demand for grain among biofuel producers just as it reduced the food-buying power of poorer people. The diversion of grains from field to fuel tank has slowed significantly.

The incident, however, indicates that technological development (biofuels, in this instance) and the operation of the global economy, which follows its own logic and diverts resources to those that can pay most for them, can profoundly influence the distribution of the global food supply.

Challenge number 2…

By 2030 — how do we develop food security in an era of climate change?

LET’S NOW LOOK at what we’ll need in the not-too-distant future —food systems that can cope with climate change.
Climate change, those that study it say, will produce very different impacts in different regions. The CSIRO says that some areas, like NSW west of the Great Dividing Range, will become drier. Other places will become wetter and experience more frequent flooding.

The eastern coastal plain is expected to remain relatively moist, making it of potentially greater significance in feeding Australia. It is imperative that national, state and local government policy recognise this potential in planning and other landuse legislation.

Equitorial drying

Many countries closer to the equator are expected to become drier, and this will affect their ability to feed themselves.

The fact that some Middle Eastern states, as well as China, are buying up huge areas of land in better-watered countries indicates that worries about their ability to feed their people in future are real. They plan to farm these newly-acquired lands, less to sell the food to people within the countries where it will be grown, and more for export to feed their own people. In their own way, they are preparing for a less food-secure-future in their own lands.

Northern latitudes the future grain basket?

Who could be the winners if climate change brings sweeping environmental changes before the end of the Twenty First Century?

As equatorial regions dry up and drought becomes more widespread in some lands — this assumes that scenarios developed by those who study climate change turn out as predicted — the northern latitudes are expected to become warmer. Such regions will experience longer frost-free periods and warmer soils in the growing season, making grain and other agriculture increasingly feasible. This will open up new regions to farming in places like Russia and Canada, places that may become the major grain exporters of the later decades of the new century.
Climate change, assuming it turns out as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other analysts say it will, is likely to be a major challenge to global food security.

A food crisis, some say, will be an early and a lasting impact of our changing climate. The pertinent question for us here today is… how is Australia preparing for this challenging future?

Challenge number 3…

By 2020 — how do we adapt to resource shortfall?

TRENDS in resource extraction and availability suggest that our food systems will have to adapt to potential shortfalls in the availability of certain, critical resources.
It’s not just climate change that could come to challenge our food systems. Other resources are expected to decline as we move into the Twenty First Century:

1. oil
2. phosphates presently mined to make agricultural fertilisers such as superphosphate
3. and that most critical of all farming resources — fresh water.

Peak oil

Peak oil is a term that describes the time at which the extraction of oil reaches its peak.

After that, there’s a steady decline in oil availability at the same time as there is rising demand. The outcome will be higher prices for everything that uses oil products in their production and transportation.

This does not imply that there would be a rapid decline in the availability of oil such as would produce an immediate crisis. The possibility of peak oil does imply, however, that government takes it seriously in its policy and planning.

A CSIRO research paper on the future of transportation fuels in Australia, published in 2007, raised serious questions about how we will cope as the rate of discovery of significant oil reserves slows further and petroleum fuels become more expensive.

The increasing expense of food

Food is one of those products likely to be affected by a rise in the price of petroleum fuels and their progressive shortfall of supply.

Agriculture is an intensive user of oil — for the production of synthetic agricultural chemicals, for farm machinery, for transporting food around the world to its markets. Then there is the manufacture and global transportation of food packaging, another supply chain that is deeply oil reliant. With the onset of peak oil, we can anticipate a progressive increase in the price of food.

And what of phosphate?

The phosphate supply is expected to start showing signs of decline within 50 to 130 years, with low-cost extraction peaking sooner rather than later. After that, its price will rise, pushing up the price of food… and the search for a replacement will be on in full.

Phosphate is used in the manufacture of fertilisers such as superphosphate, a product that has been important in Australian agriculture in its making available nutrients often lacking in our soils.

Water — the limiting resource on agricultural productivity

Of all the resource depletion possibilities we face, however, it is water that is the most critical. And, already, there are signs that we are reaching the limits of supply, not only in Australia but across the world, including parts of the USA whose excess production supplies much of the world grain market.

The Australian drought of 1997, which is still running in parts of the inland, brought home to us the true value of this resource. As flows in the Murray and Darling rivers started to decline, the then-prime minister warned the Australian people that food prices may rise as Australia was forceed to import more and more of its food supply. Only late rains saved the Murray Valley farmers, however there was a shortfall in wheat production and Australia’s wet rice production suffered severely.

Agriculture is either rainfed — reliant upon rainfall for irrigation — or is irrigated from rivers, lakes or the water stored in underground aquifers.

Australia’s farming experience has highlighted the direct influence of drought on agriculture and although there exists significant reserves of underground water, this must be used carefully so that demand does not exceed its replenishment by rain.

Add the possibility of drier conditions coming through climate change, and the periodic drying brought by El Nino events, and you start to see how the availability of fresh water influences the amount of food we can produce.

Water availability sets the upper limit to what can be grown where, and how much can be grown.

Imagination — the critical resource

Imagination is the critical resource needed to cope with the winding down of oil, phosphate and water supplies. There are adaptions that can be made to farming and food distribution systems, but they will require initiative and political support.

Better that support is deployed starting now, rather than acting too late.

Challenge number 4…

By 2015 — how will government have secured a reliable food supply for Sydney?

LET’S MOVE A LITTLE CLOSER to home now, to Sydney, and think briefly about the food security of the city and its people.

Sydney produces much if its perishable foodson small, efficient and mostly family-owned farms on the city fringe. Many of these farms are operated by immigrant peoples for whom they serve as an introduction to Australian working life and culture. These farms are a great boost to the city’s food security — and to its employment. They sit at the base of an urban food production and distribution system employing, in total, around 12,000 people.

It is estimated that agriculture in the Sydney region is worth $1 billion a year to farmers, with a multiplier effect through related food processing, distribution and marketing industries bringing the economic value of the industry as a whole to over $4.5 billion annually (Gillespie, Mason 2003).

When it comes to the fresh, perishable foods that form the nutritional basis of our diets, it’s clear that the city’s urban fringe farmers really are the fresh food people, to borrow the phrase from one of our supermarket duopoly, and that their productivity contributes significantly to Sydney’s food security.

Food security — what’s that?

Food security — how can we define that? This way, perhaps: food security is the year-round availability of a sufficient quantity of nourishing food to support an active life.
Foods security, though, is more than diet. It is also the availability of a food supply that is resilient under pressure of:

• climate change
• disruption to the food supply chain (Sydney has an estimated one week of food on the shelves of shops, assuming mo panic buying; the UK has two to three days)
• drought
• terrorist assault on critical infrastructure or the food production/distribution system.

If we are to produce as much of our food as is practical close to the city, it is only common sense to retain these productive agricultural lands for farming rather than allow their submergence below a layer of paving, industrial and urban development. Yet, signs are not good, with around 50 percent of productive city fringe farmland under threat of urban development, according to a University of Western Sydney source.

A wise government, one that could see beyond its term of office, would be acting now to ensure that our city fringe farmlands remain as such into the future.

Needed: assessment of city fringe farmland

Perhaps a way to start would be for government to conduct a land capability assessment of the urban fringe farmlands.
The aim of this would be to identify:

• those prime agricultural lands that would be set aside, by legislation and planning instruments, for a farming future.
• marginal land, that which is less productive, that could go to urban development.

A community solution

The present time — communities take action on food

People are applying the principle of CREATE > SHARE > COLLABORATE to create food systems that provide the type of food they want that is produced in ways that they approve of.
Food co-operatives, the rapidly growing number of community food gardens, community supported agriculture, home grown food sharing schemes, community food buying groups… these are just a few of the innovative ideas for obtaining a family or individual’s food supply via the do-it-yourself approch. These types of systems are growing in number in Australia’s cities as citizens mobilise to take control over even some small aspects of what they eat.

Through collaboration and self-organisation, people have set up community enterprises such as:

• the long-running Alfalfa House Food Coop in inner-urban Enmore
• Manly Food Coop
• The Green Tucker Store, a food co-op in Forestville
• Rhubarb Food Coop in the Eastern Suburbs
• informal food buying groups made up of friends or neighbours that work out their fresh food needs for the week, obtain usually organic foods from the Sydney markets, then divide their purchases into what participants have ordered
• food swaps, such as the Urban Orchard swap at Alfalfa House Food Co-op, where people swap the excess produce from their home gardens, fruit trees or community garden allotment (similar schemes operate in Melbourne, Adelaide and Wollongong)
• a growing number of community food gardens, where people share food production on an area of land owned by local government, churches, schools and, for those that live in them, public housing estates
• something new — Sydney Food Connect, an adaptation of the CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, model that is based on the large, successful and award winning Food Connect enterprise in Brisbane.

These are all examples of people acting cooperatively, creating something new, sharing it and collaborating to make it successful. It is these factors — create > share > collaborate — that are at the basis of the emerging community food systems.

Community-based food systems are growing in number and in diversity and are likely to become more prominent as global issues over food rise in prominence, and as citizens decide in even greater numbers to act locally on global challenges.

Our food, our future

It is clear that our world faces significant challenges in feeding its people, but these are challenges that we can deal with if we cooperate and collaborate.

We can’t leave it all up to governments because they are likely to do too little, too late. Just as a car needs petrol, government needs the fuel of public pressure to make it act. Apply that pressure, and you will see the more imaginative politicians kick-start their bureaucracies into action.
Our global food challenges — and our local ones too — affect people of all nations, all cultures, all religions. Only by acting together can this cultural and spiritual diversity create a secure food future for humankind.