[Trusties] Food Crisis article

Sun Jun 8 19:24:23 EST 2008

I’m forwarding this posting from Michael Lardelli’s BOSA listserve because I
think that change is starting to accelerate, especially with the food
situation, and that it is important to stay informed and to get a sense of
the speed at which things are moving.

Tim

Nine meals from anarchy - how Britain is facing a very real food crisis 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1024833/Nine-meals-anarchy--Britain-

facing-real-food-crisis.html

Or

http://tinyurl.com/6ae5xy

By Rosie Boycott

Last updated at 1:41 AM on 07th June 2008

The phrase 'nine meals from anarchy' sounds more like the title of a bad

Hollywood movie than any genuine threat.

But that was the expression coined by Lord Cameron of Dillington, a farmer

who was the first head of the Countryside Agency  -  the quango set up by

Tony Blair in the days when he pretended to care about the countryside  -

to describe just how perilous Britain's food supply actually is. 

Crisis: Britain's food supply is in peril 

Long before many others, Cameron saw the potential of a real food crisis

striking not just the poor of the Third World, but us, here in Britain, in

the 21st Century. 

The scenario goes like this. Imagine a sudden shutdown of oil supplies; a

sudden collapse in the petrol that streams steadily through the pumps and so

into the engines of the lorries which deliver our food around the country,

stocking up the supermarket shelves as soon as any item runs out. 

If the trucks stopped moving, we'd start to worry and we'd head out to the

shops, cking up our larders. By the end of Day One, if there was still no

petrol, the shelves would be looking pretty thin. Imagine, then, Day Two:

your fourth, fifth and sixth meal. We'd be in a panic. Day three: still no

petrol. 

What then? With hunger pangs kicking in, and no notion of how long it might

take for the supermarkets to restock, how long before those who hadn't

stocked up began stealing from their neighbours? Or looting what they could

get their hands on? 

There might be 11 million gardeners in Britain, but your delicious summer

peas won't go far when your kids are hungry and the baked beans have run

out. 

It was Lord Cameron's estimation that it would take just nine meals  -

three full days without food on supermarket shelves  -  before law and order

started to break down, and British streets descended into chaos. 

A far-fetched warning for a First World nation like Britain? Hardly. Because

that's exactly what happened in the U.S. in the aftermath of Hurricane

Katrina. People looted in order to feed themselves and their families. 

If a similar tragedy was to befall Britain, we are fooling ourselves if we

imagine we would not witness similar scenes of crime and disorder. 

Well, today Britain is facing a very real crisis. Granted, it is not the

threat of a sudden, terrifying phenomenon such as the hurricane that struck

New Orleans. But in its capacity to cause widespread hardship and

deprivation nationwide, it is every bit as daunting. 

Oil prices are spiralling  -  $120 a barrel this week, up 23 per cent since

the start of the year  -  and the cost is being felt not only by drivers but

by each and every one of us who has seen our food bills soaring. 

This week, the British Retail Consortium revealed that food price inflation

had risen to 6 per cent  -  the highest figure since comparable records

began  -  and up from 4.7 per cent in April and 4.1 per cent in March. 

At its most basic, the reasons for this food inflation are twofold:

increasing demand (particularly in the emerging economies of India and

China) and spiralling production costs. 

The former had been predicted for years, but the latter is more unexpected. 

Conventional wisdom had it that in an age of mechanisation, the cost of

producing the food that we eat would decrease as technology found new ways

of improving yields and minimising labour costs. But there was a problem

that hadn't been factored in. Production methods are now such that 95 per

cent of all the food we eat in the world today is oil-dependent.

The 'black gold' is embedded in our complex global food systems, in its

fertilisers, the mechanisation necessary for its production, its

transportation and its packaging. 

For example, to farm a single cow and deliver it to market requires the

equivalent of six barrels of oil  -  enough to drive a car from New York to

LA. 

Unbelievable? One analysis of the fodder pellets which are fed to the vast

majority of beef cows to supplement their grazing found that they were made

up of ingredients that had originated in six different countries. Think of

the fuel required to transport that lot around the world. 

Now factor in the the diesel used by the farm vehicles, the carbon footprint

of chemical fertilisers used by most nonorganic beef farms and the energy

required to transport a cow to the abattoir and process it. The total oil

requirement soon adds up. 

And so as oil prices have risen, so too has the cost of food  -  and I'm

afraid it's only set to get worse. The age of cheap food is at an end  -

and it will impact not only on our supermarket bills, but on the whole

economy.

Fifty years ago, food represented around 30 per cent of the average

household budget, whereas nowadays it is nearer to 9 per cent. 

In other words, cheap food has not only helped keep inflation down, it also

allowed the postwar consumer boom to flourish. 

With our most basic and necessary commodity  -  the food on our plates  -

costing proportionally less every decade, we had plenty of free capital to

spend on luxuries: flat-screen TVs; the holidays abroad; the home

improvements and extensions that so many of us have acquired. 

That's all set to change in a major way. A new era of austerity is

approaching, and we are illpreparedfor its scale and effect. As a farmer

myself, who runs a smallholding in Somerset, I was one of the first to

detect the winds of change, as the prices for my animal feed rose. 

This time last year, it cost me around &pound;7.50 a month to feed one of my

pigs. Today, as wheat prices nudge upwards towards &pound;180 a ton, that

figure is closer to £15 a month. 

Over the past year, wheat prices have doubled, leading not only to increases

in the price of bread, but also to demonstrations by pig farmers like me who

are going out of business just as fast as you can fry your bacon. 

And while wheat farmers might be having a brief moment of glory in the

sunshine of rising prices as the world competes for rapidly decreasing

supplies, the crisis is hitting home in ways that I certainly never expected

to see in my lifetime. 

In a report published on Thursday, 18 charities found that many disabled

people and poorer pensioners are having to go short of food in order to pay

for home care or simple things such as transport to their local day care

centre. 

Sue Bott, director of the National Centre for Independent Living, said: 'The

shocking reality is that people are being forced to choose between eating

properly and using vital care services.' So much for our civilised society. 

It's not just a matter of cost, either, but of real shortages. In the U.S.,

supplies of rice are so low that retail giant WalMart has been rationing the

amount any one customer can buy. 

Is that a prospect that now lies ahead of us  -  a life of rationing similar

to the one my parents lived in the years immediately following the war, when

we eked out tiny rations of orange juice, and a banana was an almost unheard

of treat? 

If so, how will a nation that has grown accustomed to having what it wants,

when it wants, cope? We are no more used to real deprivation than we are to

the pandemic diseases that claimed so many British lives a century or so

ago. 

Yet the truly shocking fact is that the Government has made no plans at all

to prepare for this possibility. Indeed, it has utterly failed to address

the vital issues surrounding our food supplies and security. 

For years, experts who warned that the combined impact of climate change and

oil depletion would converge and plunge food supplies into crisis have been

ignored. 

John Krebs, former chair of the Food Standards Authority (FSA), told me

recently that not only was the issue not even considered, it was laughed at

when anyone dared suggest that a country so apparently bountiful as ours

could one day find itself facing a food shortage. But Britain, as an island

nation, is particularly vulnerable. We have not been self-sufficient in food

since the late 18th century, but the situation is rapidly worsening. 

In 1995, 27 per cent of UK food was imported. By 2006 it was 37 per cent.

The situation is obviously more critical in cities: London imports more than

80 per cent and a food shortage would hit the capital the hardest. 

The situation is worsened, of course, by the fact that we are having to

compete for supplies on the global market with many more nations than ever

before. 

For centuries, the typical Chinese diet consisted of rice and vegetables,

but as the Chinese pour into the newly emerging cities, so their diets are

changing. In 1962, the average Chinese ate just 4kg of meat per year: by

2005 that figure was 60kg and rising. 

The result has placed huge pressure not only on prices, but on natural

resources required to cope with this increased demand. 

It is not simply that we do not have enough land to grow the grain to feed

the animals which in turn feed us. In the past two decades, pressure on our

natural resources has increased to a level which many experts fear has

become unsustainable. 

For example, in the U.S., the use of hydrocarbon pesticides has increased 33

times as farmers sought to increase production and yet, as soil structures

weaken due to over-use and mono-crop cultivation, more crops are being lost

to pests every year. 

The world has a finite supply of fresh water too, yet 70 per cent of all

freshwater is used for agriculture, often horribly wastefully. 

For example, it takes four litres of water to grow a single Kenyan green

bean stem which we in Britain import by the ton  -  and this is from an

officially ' water-stressed' country. And that's before we factor in climate

change, which many believe will render great swathes of land infertile. 

Certainly, intensive farming methods are only adding to the problem:

according to the UN, animal farming now accounts for a fifth of global

greenhouse gas emissions, due to forest clearances and the methane emitted

by cattle. 

The net result is a looming crisis of which soaring oil prices could simply

be the starting gun. 

In this regard, the dominance of the supermarkets in British food retailing

contributes massively to our vulnerability. Rising energy prices have an

immediate impact on many of the food giants' common practices. 

Their reliance on diesel trucks for 'Just in time delivery' and '

warehousing on wheels'; their endless plastic packaging and their

transportation of processed foods and raw materials around the world means

that our supermarkets have been hit doubly hard by the high oil price. 

(How much longer, I wonder, will the seafood business Young's of Scotland

find it economic to fly prawns to Thailand to be cleaned and de-shelled,

before flying them back to Scotland for packaging)? 

During the fuel protests of September 2000, we caught a glimpse of how even

the supply of basic foodstuffs are dependent on oil: Justin King, the CEO of

Sainsbury, warned Blair that we would be 'out of food' within 'days not

weeks' if the protests continued. 

Today, we stand on the brink of a longer-term problem. In the words of Tim

Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, London: 'We are

sleep-walking into a crisis.' 

Yet even now, the Government has not woken up to the immediacy of the

problem. Indeed, it doesn't even have a coherent means of taking control of

the situation. Food, and its related issues, currently straddles no fewer

than 19 different ministries. 

When I questioned Joan Ruddock about whether the Government would change its

policy about allowing pig farmers to feed their animals swill made from

left-over food scraps (a practice banned after the food-and-mouth outbreak)

she replied that she couldn't answer the question because it fell under the

jurisdiction of a different department. 

This is madness. Food, along with shelter and safety, is one of our most

basic needs. Professor Lang believes that nothing short of a radical change

in our diets  -  away from meat and towards vegetables and grains  -  will

solve the problem long term. 

But in the meantime, alarm bells should be going off all over Westminster

about the scale and impact of the impending food crisis. 

Suddenly, that warning of being 'nine meals from anarchy' no longer seems

such a distant or improbable threat. 

Michael Lardelli

Zebrafish Genetics Laboratory

School of Molecular and Biomedical Science

The University of Adelaide, AUSTRALIA 5005

Ph    : +61 8 8303 3212

Fax   : +61 8 8303 4362

e-mail: michael.lardelli at adelaide.edu.au

CRICOS Provider Number 00123M

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