ISIS Report 21/02/06
Announcing Science in Society #29, Spring 2006
The Only Radical Science Magazine on Earth
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 From the Editor
Food and Energy Security Go Together
Most people know that food
and energy are linked; food is how the human organism gets energy to keep
alive and active. Just as “obesity” is rife in the rich industrialised countries
from the over-consumption of energy-rich foods, “energy malnutrition”, or
hunger, is worsening in the poor developing nations because people do not
get enough to eat, and the two are definitely linked as well.
But food and energy
are connected in other more intricate ways.
Closing the energy gap can widen the food gap
The end of cheap fossil
fuels and the widening energy gap between supply and demand have sent the
governments of industrialised countries scrabbling for the next big solutions.
The UK
government had issued an energy white paper in 2003 saying it was not proposing to build
any new nuclear power stations. Now, less than three years later, it is conducting
an energy review, and nuclear energy is very much back on the agenda. The
government’s trump card appears to be a “new generation” nuclear reactor that’s
so safe, we are told, it does not need expensive containment facilities, and
is hence economical to build and can be sited literally next to your back
yard to supply energy much more efficiently. The reality is that large questions
hang over the supposed safety of the reactor, which is further compromised
by the cost cutting it justifies. The intractable problem of hazardous radioactive
waste disposal remains, plus uranium is a finite, non-renewable resource.
So biofuels seems
to be the answer - ethanol from cornstarch and other plant biomass, and biodiesel
from seed oil – widely favoured as “green fuels” because they are both renewable
and carbon neutral. Burning biofuels puts back into the atmosphere the carbon
dioxide the plants took out while growing in the field. (Look out for a thorough
review of biofuels in the next issue of SiS).
The problem is, biofuels
involve energy crops that compete directly for land with food crops. Huge
subsidies are already going to big food corporations for farmers to produce
corn for ethanol in the United States.
When President George
W. Bush said in his recent State of the Union address, “We must break our
addiction to oil,” he wasn’t exhorting people to give up their cars or to
use less oil. He was offering them biofuels as substitute for oil to power
the country’s cars. Ethanol from wood chips, stalks, or switchgrass could
become “practical and competitive within six years”, to replace imports from
“unstable parts of the world” - the Middle East - by 2025. Currently
60 percent of the oil consumed in the US is imported.
The EU is similarly
promoting biofuels. The EU Biofuels Directive requires 2 percent of the energy
for transport to come from renewable sources, including biodiesel and bioethanol,
rising to 5.75 percent by the end of 2010, and 20 percent by 2020. Europe
leads the world in biodiesel production, predominantly from rapeseed oil.
Just to meet the 5.75 percent target requires more than 9 percent of the EU’s
agricultural area to grow the oilseed crops.
Political expediency in satisfying the farm lobby has perhaps clouded political
judgement. Solar panels even at 10 percent energy conversion efficiency could
supply the world’s energy needs on just over 0.1 percent of the world’s land
surface, including existing structures such as roof tops and buildings; and
they are getting better and cheaper every day.
The global food trade wastes energy and compromise food security
The environmentally conscious
consumers count food miles when buying fresh fruits and vegetables from the
supermarket. They want to buy local produce that’s genuinely fresh, with minimum
inputs of fossil-fuel intensive fertilisers and pesticides, which has not been transported
by air across the planet to the supermarket shelves. Unfortunately, local
produce is hard to find in most cities and other ‘food deserts’.
The global food trade is
concentrated in the hands of a few big transnational corporations that control
the entire food supply chain from farm gate to our dinner plate. Imports and
exports have greatly increased due to ever wider sourcing of food by supermarket
chains within the country and abroad, wherever the price is cheapest.
Food transport, especially
airfreight, uses up enormous amounts of fossil fuel energy, spewing extra
tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change.
The UK Department of the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) released
a report on food miles last July that identified globalisation of the food industry
as the major cause of the enormous increase in food transport since 1978.
It put the direct social, environmental and economic costs of food transport
at more than £9 billion each year, with congestion accounting for £5 billion.
This £9 billion externalised cost of food transport amounts to 34 percent of
the total value of UK’s food and drinks industry (SiS
28).
The
world food market is holding our food supply to ransom. Whenever there is
a surplus, food commodity prices fall to below the cost of production,
bringing family farmers to ruin; whenever there is shortage, the prices shoot
up, and the poor and the farmers and farm workers growing for export can no
longer afford to buy food.
In Europe
and the United States, heavy subsidies are paid to big farmers and landowners at the taxpayer’s expense to
buffer them against losses, while hundreds of small farms close
down every week. Small farmers in the third world have no subsidies, and for
many the only way out of chronic indebtedness and hardship is suicide.
To make matters worse, the
big commercial farms that feed the global food trade often have feudal labour
practices left over from the colonial days that deny job security to farm
workers, especially women farm workers.
Where is the food security
of ordinary people in a globalised food system? Why should we not have self-sufficiency
in food as in energy? Self-sufficiency in food would also contribute a lot
to energy self-sufficiency in requiring much less energy for food transport.
The impending food crisis
There is another reason
why food self-sufficiency is important for food security. Water is severely
depleted in the major breadbaskets of the world, productivity has been falling
and grain reserves are at the lowest in more than thirty years. World croplands
are lost at the rate of 20 m hectares, or 1.3 percent a year, due to soil
erosion and salination from decades of unsustainable industrial farming practices.
Replacing lost croplands accounts for 60 percent of the deforestation worldwide
that’s contributing significantly to climate change. Climate change is bringing
increasingly frequent catastrophes such as hurricanes, droughts, heat spells,
and floods, impacting further on food production.
The inescapable
conclusion is that we may no longer be able to rely on imports to satisfy
our food needs.
Countries like the UK have climates favourable for growing
food, and can easily become self-sufficient, or better yet, produce enough
for other countries in need.
Much can be done
for both energy and food security through government policies that promote
national/regional food self-sufficiency; that reverse the concentration of
food supply chains in favour of local markets and cooperatives run by farmers
and consumers. These policies would minimize food imports and transport within
the country, and save a lot of fossil fuel energy.
But when asked
about UK’s food policy, a DEFRA spokesperson wrote on behalf
of the Minister for the Environment Elliot Morley:
“Supporting
greater UK
self-sufficiency in food is incompatible with the concept of the European
single market, in which different countries specialise according to comparative
advantage. In an increasingly globalised world the pursuit of self-sufficiency
for its own sake is no longer necessary nor desirable.”
Dream Farm II
So, what do we really need to feed the world, close the
energy gap, mitigate climate change, and let everyone thrive in good health
and wealth in a post fossil-fuel economy?
We have
tabled a proposal for a zero-emission zero-waste food and energy self-sufficient
farm modelled after George Chan’s integrated food and waste management system
that has been widely implemented to eradicate poverty in third world countries.
It exemplifies a new model of self-sufficiency based on reciprocity and synergistic
relationships rather than rampant competition of the dominant model. We hope
it will nucleate the sustainable food production and consumption system that
we need for a post fossil fuel economy.
A network of such
energy and food self-sufficient farms across the countryside would supply
cities with fresh nutritious food, cutting down on food miles and ecological
footprint. It would also supply local farmers’ markets, revitalise town centres,
provide employment and rebuild
the rural economy.
Contents
From the Editor
SIS Essay
Liberating Knowledge
Corporate Watch
Global Food Trade & the New Slave Labour
Sustainable World
Dream Farm II
How to Beat Climate Change & Post Fossil Fuel Economy
Technology Watch
Safe New Generation Nuclear Power? The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor
Bioelectromagnetic Weapons
Recombinant Cervical Cancer Vaccines
Deregulation of Glyphosate Tolerant Bentgrass Out of Question
Why Not Transgenic High Lysine Maize
Field-Testing a DNA Canine Melanoma Vaccine
Letters to the Editor
GM Ban
GM Ban Long Overdue. Dozens Ill & Five Deaths in the Philippines
Transgenic Pea that Made Mice Ill
GM Contamination Accelerating No Coexistence Possible
Colours of India
Poor Women Farmers’ Crops of Truth
Indian Cotton Farmers Betrayed
Return to Organic Cotton & Avoid the Bt-Cotton Trap
Renewable Energy & Resources
Redemption from the Plastics Wasteland
Waste Plastics into Oil
Solar Power for the Masses
Organic Solar Power
Quantum Dots and Ultra-Efficient Solar Cells?
Subscribe
now, or download this magazine in its entirety as a PDF document from the ISIS members area. The first few pages are viewable here.
Individual hardcopies are available from our online store.
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