I've already written about this in previous posts under the 'hidden
holocaust' theme, but am prompted to re-address this issue given the way it's
been dealt with by mainstream media and associated 'experts'.
In today's Independent we see an eye-opening article revealing that amidst what
is described as a series of "global food shortages", a new "government-backed
report" shows that "the British public" annually throws away "4.4 million
apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 550,000
chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first
time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made
up of completely untouched food products - whole chickens and chocolate gateaux
that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded" -- adding up
to "a record £10b" every year.
And that's just us Brits. Imagine what the totals are for the Western world
combined: Scary and revealing stuff that makes the word "overconsumption" seem
like a gross understatement.
But despite the shock value of such important revelations, I'm increasingly
concerned at the way in which the food crisis is being portrayed. The
Independent goes on to explain the causes of the food crisis as follows: "...
millions of the world's poor face food shortages caused by rising populations,
droughts and increased demand for land for biofuels, which have sparked riots
and protests from Haiti to Mauritania, and from Yemen to the Philippines."
So the food crisis comes down to three things:
1) rising populations (presumably not us in the advanced West, but rather those
Third World crazies breeding like rabbits despite being so poor)
2) droughts (which may be exacerbated by climate change but in any case often
occur naturally and therefore we purportedly can't do much about)
3) and the drive from energy corporations for investment in biofuels.
Indeed, according to the British government's new chief scientific adviser,
Professor John Beddington speaking at a government conference two months ago:
"price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of
increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing
nations. He also said that climate change would lead to pressure on food
supplies because of decreased rainfall in many areas and crop failures related
to climate. 'The agriculture industry needs to
double its food production, using less water than today.'"
So again, population and economic growth in the 'developing nations', plus
climate change, are to blame, and can only be addressed by doubling food
production using less water (technologically impossible for all intents and
purposes, but we'll come back to that). It's Them again -- too many of Them,
wanting More.
As if to emphasise the point, we hear in the same piece that:
"Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, said at the conference that the world's
population was expected to grow from 6.2bn today to 9.5bn in less than 50 years'
time. 'How are we going to feed everybody?' he asked."
Only a rhetorical question of course. Sorry to break it t'ya folks, but 'feeding
everybody' has never really been one of the state's major concerns. That's why
"Each tonne of wheat and sugar from the UK is sold on international markets at
an average price of 40% and 60% below the cost of production respectively (ie,
it is dumped)", thus undercutting local farmers across the South, who thus lose
any semblance of agricultural-independence they may have once had (i.e. the
ability to feed their own people), thus becoming subject to the whims of the
global food market, manipulated through speculation in the interests of Northern
investors and consumers.
But the important point for now is that as far as Hilary Benn is concerned, it's
clear that the cause of the problem is "their" population growth.
Later in the article, Professor Beddington is cited pointing out that global
grain stores are currently at the lowest levels ever, just 40 days from running
out. He again emphasises the question of food production: "I am only nine weeks
into the job, so don't yet have all the answers, but it is clear that science
and research to increase the efficiency of agricultural production per unit of
land is critical."
According to Beddington, food security is the "elephant in the room" that
politicians must face up to quickly. In reality, the "elephant in the room" goes
far deeper than the surface issues scratched at lamely by the government, and
sits in the heart of global food production. Some of Beddington's observations
show that he is dimly aware of this problem. He understands that production
needs to be increased drastically. But his solution is a technological one,
"science and research" in order to maximise "efficiency" so we can produce
faster and better to meet escalating global demand. This is unlikely to happen.
Beddington knows it. Benn knows it. The supermarket chains know it.
From this conventional analysis of the food crisis, we are not left with many
solutions. We may, however, pick among the following: 1) the proliferation and
prolongation of droughts due to climate change means that we need to slow down
our CO2 emissions by introducing 'market incentives' (i.e. big taxes) targeted
largely at consumers, who are blamed for having no regard for the size of their
individual carbon footprints. transfering to alternative renewable energies is,
for some odd reason, irrelevant. 2) reducing population growth in developing
countries to decrease demand for food (nothing at all to do with NSSM 200, of
course). 3) go easy on the biofuels (but fail to propose investment in other
viable alternative energy sources). 4) pray day and night that Science will
somehow generate a technological miracle of agricultural production.
Obviously, none of these 'solutions' seems to really offer a way out for the
food crisis -- and that's because the analysis is fundamentally flawed. It's not
completely wrong, it just misses out half the picture, and so comes up with a
false diagnosis of what's actually gone wrong. The result is that the
institutions that require urgent re-structuring are being absolved. The
government, the state, and the network of giant multinational corporations that
govern global agribusiness, are excused of any culpability. The cause of the
crisis, we keep hearing is, WE, THE PEOPLE! It's the developing nations, who
just won't stop breeding, dammit. It's us Western consumers, who won't stop
eating and throwing a third of our food away. It's everyone except the
state-corporate complex that controls the food industry.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that you and I are NOT culpable. Of course we
are. We do throw away tonnes, literally, of food. We do, each of us, have large
carbon footprints that we should try to reduce in our own ways. Populations are
increasing. But the question is this: are these factors the fundamental causes
of the current global food crisis? Or are they exacerbating factors that are
accentuating and intensifying the impact of the food crisis? Following
mainstream news coverage of food shortages, one would be forgiven for believing
that rising food prices are all because of you and me, the public, the general
consumer. We have been thoroughly pathologised. And the British government, with
its eye-opening study of how much food the British consumer chucks away without
thinking, is complicit in this pathologisation.
Why is that the government-backed report discussed in today's Independent, says
nothing about the institutions who are primarily responsible for food wastage,
the supermarkets, the multinational food chains? If the government is genuinely
concerned about food wastage in this country, why won't they do something about
the fact reported by the same newspaper in February, that:
"Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year... An influential
watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), will condemn targets set
by the Government's waste-reduction programme as 'unambitious and lacking
urgency'. It will also say multi-buy promotions are helping to fuel waste and
obesity in Britain. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday ahead of the report's
publication on Saturday, Tim Lang, SDC commissioner, said it was 'ludicrous'
that the Government had not pressured retailers into setting tougher targets to
cut waste.
Three years ago, the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme
(Wrap) left it up to supermarkets to find voluntary 'solutions to food waste' in
an agreement dubbed the Courtauld Commitment. 'The Government is frankly not
using its leverage adequately. It really should toughen up on Courtauld, which
must be enforced because this is ludicrous,' said Mr Lang, who is also professor
of food policy at City University, London.
The 18-month study, which found that 'too many supermarket practices are still
unhealthy, unjust and unsustainable', said Wrap should adopt a 'more
aspirational approach to reducing waste in food retail by setting longer-term
targets and [supporting] a culture of zero waste'...
A separate study by Imperial College for the Department for Environment, Food
and Rural Affairs, found that supermarkets preferred to throw away food that was
approaching its sell-by date rather than mark it down in price."
So three months after being hit over the head by the Sustainable Development
Commission, the government's waste reduction programme completely ignores the
warnings that supermarket profit-maximisation policies are not only directly
generating billions of pounds of waste by dumping good food, they are
encouraging consumers through excessive advertising, multi-buy offers, and
refusal to slash prices on older foods, to also buy excess food they don't need,
a third of which they dump in turn. Instead, the government simply blames
consumers. Period.
Don't penalise Profit, nor Power. Pathologise People.
The corporate-biased law doesn't help either, because: "The scale of the wastage
from supermarkets, food processors, wholesalers and restaurants is not known,
because many companies refuse to make their data public, citing commercial
confidentiality." In other words, we don't even know the real scale of corporate
food wastage. Worse, the government regularly does the same thing -- here's an
example: "In the past 10 months, the government's food intervention board dumped
almost 30,000 tonnes of fresh vegetables and fruit which had been withdrawn from
the market to guarantee farm prices."
So the problem is far more complex, rooted in a consumerist culture that is tied
to a political economy being deliberately sustained by those institutions with
the most to gain from this entrenched structure. The government has no interest
in transforming that political economy. So the result is an insistence on
inspecting only half the picture, ignoring the role of the global corporate food
industry.
Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and
long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an
international food production system that is, basically, dying.
Most of the Earth's fertile land is already now being used for food production.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 reported that "there
is now little room for further agricultural expansion." One of the scientists,
Dr Navin Ramankutty, points out: "The real question is, how can we continue to
produce food from the land while preventing negative environmental consequences
such as deforestation, water pollution and soil erosion?" Or, more bluntly, how
are we going to keep producing food if our production-system continues to
destroy the very means to produce food?
It's not that the Earth can't produce the food. Its that corporate agribusiness
can't produce the food. In fact, as I've warned previously, it has been failing
to produce the food since the 1990s, during which grain production has
increasingly slowed. The frenzied application of fertilisers and other modern
agricultural practices served to temporarily escalate production, but
simultaneously have intensified soil erosion, destroying in years essential
nutrients for crop-growth that take centuries to replace. The imminent peak of
world oil production, oil being the chief underpinning for industrial
agricultural methods, which is either just round the corner in 2010-ish (or
worse, passed in 2005) means that the global corporate food production system is
up against its own physical limits.
For us to keep eating, it's true, we have to put an end to our insane
overconsumption and wastefulness. But there are real limits to what the consumer
can do within the existing global corporate food system. So we need to turn our
attention to that system, and demand that it changes fundamentally, which means,
of course, a wholesale transformation of our political economies in ways which
rely on renewable energy resources and localised less-intensive but no less
successful traditional agricultural practices. We need some kind of grassroots
action, which makes our voices impossible to ignore. It will take time to
develop, to become strong, to gather momentum. But it needs to be done, and now.
Because at current rates of declining food production and rising prices, fuelled
by unscrupulous market speculation, many, many people are likely to die, not
just in the South, but here too. And while this death escalates, a few at the
helm of the global corporate food industry will reap unprecedented windfall
profits from their deaths. That's why real solutions aren't being put on the
table. Death is regrettable, but when it comes wrapped in £££$$$, it's not so
bad...
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent
Inquiry (Overlook, 2006) and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the
Anatomy of Terrorism (Olive Branch, 2005), among other books. He teaches
international relations at the University of Sussex, and directs the Institute
for Policy Research & Development in London. Read other
blog entries by Nafeez,
or visit Nafeez's
website.
Comments posted are the sole opinion of the author and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of AIM. |
