The thermos: the world's most underrated invention?

Why is it a social faux pas to bring a half-eaten cheese to a dinner party? Food waste is one of the most irrational and soluble problems of the modern world, but tackling it is not simply about logistical questions such as supermarket sell-by dates and discount policies. We must also ask fundamental questions about our food culture, and the values which make wasting food more socially acceptable than thrifty consumption.

The European Parliament sounded the alarm this week, warning that nearly 50% of edible and healthy food is wasted every year in the EU by households, supermarkets, restaurants and the distribution chain. Meanwhile 79 million citizens live beneath the poverty line and 16 million rely on food aid.

These figures are shocking but hardly surprising; it seems that everyone has a personal horror story about food profligacy. Workers at an elite London catering company were expressly forbidden from taking home the leftovers from corporate dinners, according to a friend who worked there. And anyone who has attended events in the European Parliament will be aware of the lavish buffet spreads on offer. Unfortunately most people are too busy hobnobbing, networking and lobbying to get through the mountains of options and courses, meaning that much of it goes to waste. No wonder MEPs have cottoned onto the problem.

There are some promising solutions out there for tackling waste in the retail and catering industries, e.g. using public procurement to favour companies who donate leftovers to food banks, and requiring supermarkets to heavily discount damaged or near-expired items. However, as much as 42% of EU food waste is accounted for by households. Leverage is harder to achieve when the target is 500 million citizens who have extremely diverse ways and means of wasting food.

Public awareness campaigns are the likely approach. However, if they are to make a real dent in the mountains of food waste amassed by individuals, they will have to go beyond the narrow logistical questions. The problem is essentially cultural.

Corporate culture and bourgeois etiquette

In the cities where most Europeans live – and where most of the food is wasted – a culture of plenty still prevails, and is surprisingly pervasive. While one office varies from the next, corporate culture remains, by and large, hostile to thrifty and diligent forms of consumption. Lunches packed in tupperware and coffee in a thermos flask are still a rare sight in and around Brussels’ EU quarter. What are more prevalent are discarded cappuccinos in polystyrene cups, and corporate lunching in restaurants and cafes, often involving excessive portions and ample waste, while at home the remains of last night’s dinner go bad in the fridge. Tonight’s dinner ingredients might meet the same fate, given that for many people the working day often drags on to the point where there is little time or energy left to cook – and a takeaway becomes the easiest option.

Peer pressure is hardly limited to the office. Middle class socialising involves multiple dinner parties and brunches; they may be so regular an occurence that it becomes difficult to realistically plan and get through the food you have at home. The result is a handful of half-used items which may have to be thrown out at the end of the week. Yet it is almost unthinkable to bring half a Camembert, or an open bottle of red wine, to someone else’s house. Instead we shell out for fresh nibbles or drinks, often paying a premium at whichever shops are still open, and end up wasting the semi-used items.

The resulting wastage is extremely avoidable, especially when considered that none of the people involved in the social interaction are likely to be actively hostile to economical use of one’s food. Why would they be? We are simply unused to seeing an already opened item brought to a dinner party, and the fear of the unknown makes us frown at it.

Companies can provide microwaves and eating areas for their staff, and many already do, but ultimately the amount of people who take advantage will depend on the prevailing social values. And supermarkets can make it advantageous to buy smaller, more manageable items, but the financially comfortable shopper may still choose a bigger, more expensive portion, and end up wasting much of it, because social values do not tell him/her to do otherwise. As with the broader sustainability debate, much will depend on whether peer pressure can be turned on its head; the change will happen only if it becomes as socially unacceptable to waste food as it currently is to recycle and finish old items in the company of others.

Bike renaissance – breaking the cycle

The transition must occur in society’s collective conscience – and a well-timed public intervention can help to set the tone. Public investment in city bikes has been a huge success, both practically and symbolically. People who do not own a bike have been encouraged to sign up to the schemes and cycle to work. Meanwhile, the growing legions of city bikers will have encouraged others, perceiving a bike-friendly culture, to get their own bikes out of the garage. Seeing these bike users back on the road reinforces the commitment of city bike users to uphold their choice, and so on.

The renaissance of the bicycle, essentially a regression back to a less sophisticated form of transport, shows that modern urban populations can shun the accepted paraphernalia of a modern, sophisticated life, and pick a simpler, more sustainable, and more rational option. The same can happen for food waste, providing that we are able to create a thermos-friendly, lunchbox-friendly, and leftovers-tolerant culture. To do so effectively, we must not underestimate the weight of peer pressure and unwritten social rules.

The views expressed in the article are those of the author only.

Photo by Valentina Pavarotti

Food security is on the front line of the climate change battle

What marks out the current climate talks in Durban– ‘COP17’ – from Cancun, Copenhagen and its other predecessors? A lack of media coverage is perhaps the most conspicuous factor. Type COP17 into Google News and the shortage of coverage from big-hitting newspapers is striking. Admittedly the second week – the ‘end-game’ – is only now getting under way. And politicians have been managing expectations for months, effectively extinguishing any hopes of a Kyoto II agreement. But in Cancun (2010) and Copenhagen (2009) it was the intensity of coverage – and by extension, public debate – before and throughout the meeting that rebuilt these expectations, and forced countries to genuinely engage in the end-game negotiation.

The low-key nature of COP17 has nonetheless allowed a key issue to fill the void: food security. New studies from Oxfam, the FAO and the IPCC have painted a stark picture of how climate change is already wreaking havoc on the global food supply, and how much worse this could get. Polar bears drowning because of melting ice caps is one thing. But people being pushed to the brink of starvation because of climate change-induced desertification is quite another, and is surely too shocking an eventuality to be ignored.

2010 saw drought in Russia, China and Brazil, and flooding in Pakistan and Australia, severely straining the food supply and sending world grain prices through the roof, while this year’s intense drought in the Horn of Africa has created a humanitarian disaster in an already food insecure region. These events alone are not evidence that climate change is happening. But they are a crystal clear insight into the fragility of the food system, and how little it takes to send it out of kilter – and to send millions more people into malnourishment. Therefore, as temperatures increase and extreme weather events multiply over coming decades, the impacts on food security could be huge.

And this is exactly what the science is saying. Amid a host of more cautious findings (e.g. on cyclones and droughts), the latest IPCC report deems it ‘virtually certain’ that on a global scale abnormally hot days will become even hotter and more frequent – by a factor of 10 under high emissions scenarios. So, agricultural conditions will be threatened both by the steady upward creep of average temperatures, and by the acute heat waves and temperature volatility along the way – extreme events which can wreck harvests in a stroke. The belief that climate change will bring new land into production, to compensate for lost productivity further south, is highly optimistic. It may be possible to grow a more diverse range of crops at certain northern latitudes, but Siberia is not set to become the world’s breadbasket – as Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation would have us believe. The problem is that the climate will become more hostile to agriculture everywhere. Rainfall will be more unpredictable and temperatures more variable across the globe, pushing ecosystems to the point of failure and depriving the planet of these self-sustaining systems which make it resilient to droughts, floods and forest fires when they strike.

Food security – too compelling a case

With food security in the front line as the climate changes, it would seem natural that they be dealt with hand in hand. However, this is by no means guaranteed.

Food prices have been on a steep upward trajectory since 2008, garnering political attention and granting food security an agenda of its own. With or without climate change, food prices are likely to continue rising and exacerbating hunger in developing countries. The food security argument is so compelling that it has already created an appetite for drastic, tunnel-vision solutions. The current orthodoxy is that food production must rise by 70% by 2050, a figure which has been wheeled out so often that it has now taken on a life of its own.

There is a real risk of rushing into a second ‘green revolution’ where long-term sustainability is once again sacrificed on the altar of fertiliser and pesticide-driven short term yield increases. Natural indicators are telling us that huge swathes of our planet are already saturated; 25% of land is highly degraded and 8% moderately degraded, according to the FAO.

And as the remaining dregs of productivity are squeezed out of some areas under the stampede for 70% more food, other struggling areas would be abandoned rather than rehabilitated. Food insecure countries may be convinced by non-agricultural developers to cash in on their degraded farmland, and to rely on food imports to make up the food deficit. In doing so they would ignore the lessons of the current food crisis: that a high dependence on food imports means extra exposure to price shocks on international markets – and extra hunger risks. 

Agro-ecology must underpin the change

There is therefore a strong interest in tying the food security and climate change agendas more closely together. Ecological realism must be injected into the quest to secure our food supplies. Agro-ecological alternatives are out there (e.g. agro-forestry, integrated crop-livestock production) and hold real promise of rehabilitating struggling production zones and making them more resilient to the climate challenges to come. Meanwhile this approach would maintain a food production base – and the communities and livelihoods it supports – in all regions, rather than driving agriculture into ever more intensive production in soon-to-be-saturated breadbasket zones.

The logic is becoming clearer: climate change cannot be allowed to happen because it will make hunger even more endemic. And food production cannot simply be ramped up in a way that contributes to climate change, and further degrades land, water and ecosystems in a way that leaves harvests vulnerable to more extreme weather. So food security must be the trigger to take climate change seriously, and climate change must be the constant reminder that food security cannot be pursued in an industrial, anti-ecological way.

If Durban cements an understanding of this, and ties the two agendas inextricably together, then it will have made more than modest progress.

The opinions expressed in this blog are the personal views of the author

Image courtesy of Evgeni Dinev

Image courtesy of Freedigitalphotos.net

It has been a good few weeks for people power. Protest movements have occupied the world’s financial centres, brought European capitals to a standstill, and – with a helping hand from the West – brought down Gaddafi’s Libyan regime.

Meanwhile, in Bolivia, people power has chalked up a small victory of its own, but with major repercussions for the social conflicts the coming years may have in store. Following a two-month march from the Amazon lowlands to the capital, La Paz, protesters raised enough media coverage and popular support to force the government into a major u-turn. President Evo Morales agreed to drop plans for a highway to be built through a biodiversity-rich rainforest reserve. In doing so he agreed to ‘govern by obeying the people’ – and proved how powerful and effective social movements of this type can be.

The Amazon highway protest is local Bolivian politics, but the underlying issues are global. This is a classic case of economic interests colliding with the interests of a vulnerable people and their environment. The Bolivian government had to choose between a big job-producing scheme, and defending fragile ecosystems and the local communities who sustain – and are sustained by – this environment.

Locally, the upshot of the protest march is that the government will re-route this particular highway around the nature reserve. But the Bolivian example is important because the same underlying questions are being faced elsewhere. Many African governments are weighing up huge land acquisition bids – so-called ‘land-grabbing’ – from sovereign funds and multinationals. These investors promise to ramp up food and biofuel production on marginal, ‘under-used’ land. But this often means tearing up the traditional grazing rights of peasants, evicting them from their land, and risking further environmental degradation.

This kind of choice is nothing new, but now the stakes are higher than ever: ecosystems are visibly collapsing under the weight of ever-increasing human activity. Nature’s capacity to sustain itself, and us, is under severe threat.

And as these conflicts sharpen, land becomes the key battleground. The way land is used regionally and globally can tip the environmental balance either way. If wisely managed, it can stock carbon, retain water, host diverse species and remain fertile for food production. But if land is fatally over-exploited, its mechanisms will fail, and the emerging problems of today will become wholesale food, water, environmental and climate crises. Land use conflicts like the Bolivian one are therefore likely to become more widespread and more intense, as more regions – and the planet as a whole – nears the tipping point.

What transpired in La Paz is that big money projects can be warded off by people power. So will this example be a source of inspiration for others? The current news agenda seems to bode well – people power is clearly not in short supply. Anti-capitalist protests, anti-austerity strikes and the Arab Spring collectively represent the biggest, most diffuse and most global outpouring of anger since 1968. But this does not necessarily mean the local battles will be won.

In the West, the targets of our anger are the ‘bankers’ and the ‘European establishment’, responsible respectively for plunging the economy into a nosedive and Southern Europe into painful debt restructuring. But are these targets or scapegoats? What are the desired outcomes? To force all bankers into retirement or penitence? To make the Greek economy default? This is where the parallel with 1968 rings the most true – these are protests fuelled by burning indignation, but lacking a clear achievable target.

The coming weeks and months will define whether the protesters, strikers and freedom fighters of this autumn of discontent have achieved lasting change. What is clear is that once the global anger recedes, people will return to fighting more local battles. And as the Bolivian marchers showed, these local battles can be the most effective of all.

Fresh fruit and veg come high in nutrients, but at a high cost

I was recently having a discussion with a friend who does not work in agriculture, and asked her the following question: If you could ask one thing of the EU’s upcoming reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), what would it be? She replied: “They should make berries cheaper”.

My initial response was to reason that politicians are not there to micro-manage the prices of food products. Then I realised that they can, and they do. The problem is that it is not blueberries or blackberries whose prices are being manipulated downwards, or anything else in the fresh groceries aisle.

Here are some prices sampled from a medium-sized Delhaize supermarket in Brussels: 100g of fresh blackberries at €3.69; 280g of frozen chicken nuggets at €2.25; 100g of pine nuts at €5.49; 200g of coated snack nuts at €1.05. So the chicken nuggets cost 4.5 times less per gram than the blackberries, and the snack nuts 10 times less than the single-ingredient pine nuts. This despite the fact that the two processed items contained a long list of ingredients sourced from far and wide: salt, sugar, corn-based sweeteners, vegetable oils, flavourings, preservatives and so on.

Of course, anything is cheaper if it can be produced and sold in bulk. But not that much cheaper. Perhaps there is nothing we can do, ultimately, to prevent people from making the choice to eat unhealthy food. But there is something we can not do, and that is to not skew agri-food policies in a way that makes junk food artificially cheap, increasing what is already a strong temptation for shoppers.

Obesity epidemic spreading to emerging countries

The poor nutritional profile of highly processed foods, and their impact on health and well-being, are proven and well-documented. But that has not stopped us sleepwalking into an obesity epidemic, and with it a proliferation of potentially avoidable cases of heart disease, cancer and type II diabetes. Obesity rates have tripled in some parts of Europe since the 1980s, starting to rival America’s well-known weight problems. But the real worry now is big emerging countries, where eating habits – along with incomes – are starting to converge with the West. 60% of South African women, and 70% of all Mexicans, are overweight or obese, a problem which runs parallel to continuing malnutrition among other population groups.

This week the UN General Assembly makes a rare foray into the public health domain at a summit aimed at combating these lifestyle-induced diseases. What are the chances for a global commitment to crack down on junk food advertising aimed at children or to tax unhealthy food? Unfortunately, very little.

Given the gravity of the health crisis, a few countries may start to pioneer individual measures; France has recently proposed a soda tax, while the South African government has unveiled plans to limit salt content in processed breads and snacks. But huge financial interests, and a huge lobbying operation, swing into action when the spectre of food regulation creeps onto the horizon. Last year’s attempt to introduce ‘traffic light’ nutritional labelling in the EU, and 2009 plans for a federal soda tax in the US, were abandoned following big industry campaigns.

Realistically, agri-food companies can live with a few labelling requirements and none-too-punitive levies, such as the token sales taxes currently applied to sugary drinks in around 30 US states. But what they really don’t want is a wholesale questioning of why junk food is so cheap and abundant in the first place. This goes back to farm subsidies, and the question of what policies such as the CAP can, can’t, should and shouldn’t do.

The real beneficiary of farm subsidies

In a model applying with notable variations in both Europe and America: most agricultural subsidies make their way into the hands of big farm holdings with a history of high production volumes. By definition, these are mostly farms producing cereal crops and oilseeds. The subsidies provide farmers with an incentive to produce lots of the commodities in question, providing food processors with a convenient glut of their key raw ingredients, which they buy up at prices sometimes barely covering the cost of production. It is the subsidies which allow farmers to stay in business, despite the low prices they accept for their output.

And accept they must: the crucial middlemen in the food supply chain – the processors, distributors and retailers who link farmers to consumers – are few and far-between. One firm, Tyson, accounts for nearly 30% of all US meat and poultry sales. This type of market share may sound normal for the dominant player in other sectors, such as petrol extraction, where massive up-front capital and infrastructural operations are needed to yield the first drop of crude. But this should not be the case for a fresh product, chicken, which can be produced and sold in the same area – in any area – without the need for an industrial-scale operation.

The food supply chain faces an unrivalled David and Goliath effect: the producers are individual farms, and the processors/distributors are huge multinational companies. The farms that survive and prosper are often those which come to mirror the size and scope of the middlemen, aka factory farms, and what they produce and how they produce it becomes a function of what their buyer wants (for more on this see the excellent documentary Food Inc). The buyer not only benefits from the economy of scale of the factory farming operation, but also from the farm subsidies which continue to pour into these farms, allowing them to sell on their produce at low rates. A subsidy to a farmer is an indirect subsidy to a buyer.

The magical combination of cheap, abundant ingredients and long-life trans fats allows processed foods to be mass-produced, distributed and exported at low cost, and sold on cheaply enough that consumers will not think twice about buying them – even, or especially, where incomes are lower in the developing world.

Changing the status quo

Our subsidy schemes are the first building block in a system which churns out a disproportionate amount of unhealthy food at disproportionately low prices. Why this subsidy system was developed in the first place is one matter; why it has been allowed to remain is because it is in someone’s interests. Not farmers, the majority of whom would much rather receive a decent price for their produce than depend on subsidies. Not consumers, for whom the physical and financial burden of lifelong health complications more than cancels out the savings they make at the supermarket checkout. The real beneficiary is the industry that shepherds the passage of food from producer to consumer, an industry which is able to speak with a powerful and unified voice when defending the status quo.

So should junk food be made more expensive, or fresh fruit and veg made cheaper? Shouldn’t supply and demand decide? Perhaps, but only if we remove the distortions on the demand side that derive from subsidy-skewed price signals.

Reforming multi-billion euro agricultural policies is a complex exercise; a whole array of tools can be used to support different products and different production systems. But, whatever the ways and means, a narrowing of the price gap between blackberries and chicken nuggets should be the first symptom of a successful reform!

The opinions expressed in this blog are the personal views of the author

Photo by Valentina Pavarotti

Nutritional failures could hamper progress on other development goals

Just four years shy of 2015, the date by which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will have been met or missed, the world is preparing to celebrate a major success: the 2011 progress report shows that the world is on track to reach the headline target of MDG1 – to halve the global poverty rate, defined as those living on less than $1 a day.

The proportion had already been brought down from 46% in 1990 to 27% in 2005 and – despite the economic downturn – is likely to resume the downward trend and fall to below 15% by 2015, exceeding the original targets.

However, the sub-target of halving the proportion of hungry people is veering well off course. Food poverty fell from 20% of the global population in 1990 to 16% in 2000-2002 – but subsequently stagnated, remaining at that rate as late as 2007. This unhappy picture is only half the story, given that food prices have subsequently ballooned, putting basic foodstuffs out of reach for many developing country households. The most recent price spirals, rising through 2010 and peaking in early 2011, have left an extra 44m people hungry, according to the World Bank.

Lifted out of poverty – just

But what is worrying is the lack of progress on hunger even when food prices were stable and economic growth was raising incomes. The figures suggest that people are being lifted out of extreme poverty – but only marginally, and not far enough to allow them to obtain the quality and quantity of food necessary to lead a healthy life.

If the hunger target is missed, this means that the poverty target will, for all intents and purposes, also have been missed, despite what the numbers say. Beyond the arbitrary dollar a day figure, this will mean that the most basic input for a human being – food – has not been brought into reach in the quantity and quality needed. What use alleviating poverty in relation to an income threshold, when crossing the threshold does not overcome the most basic hallmark of poverty – not being able to nourish oneself sufficiently?

The UN has acknowledged that the disconnect between the two figures merits a major rethink of hunger strategies in the remaining time before 2015.

Knock-on effects of under-nourishment

Come 2015, the hunger failings could not only undermine the poverty reduction claims, but could also unravel the apparent progress on other health and education-related MDGs.

According to the 2011 progress report, primary school enrolment has risen from 82% (1990) to 89% (2009), the under-five mortality rate has been reduced by one third since 1990, access to reproductive health has shot up from 64% to 81% in the developing world, and HIV incidence and malaria deaths have been brought down by 25% and 20% over the last decade alone. These advances may not be enough to make the ambitious 2015 targets, but they are still saving millions of lives and improving countless others.

But failing to combat hunger – and the related scourge of under-nourishment – could undermine all of this. UN officials indicated this week that the combined figure of hungry and under-nourished people is as high as 2.5 billion.

1,000 days

Worryingly, the MDG progress report shows that – despite some progress over the past two decades – nearly a quarter of under-fives in the developing world remain undernourished. Failure to secure adequate nutrition in the critical ‘1,000 days’ – stretching from pregnancy through to age two – is known to lead to irreversible stunting of physical and intellectual development.

New schools and hospitals are crucial, but how much of a difference can they make if the infants arriving for their lessons and check-ups have already been consigned to debilitating physical and mental limitations by early life nutritional deficiencies?

The missing progress on hunger and nutrition highlights the need to see the MDGs as a single, interconnected undertaking. Targeted actions in the health and education fields are clearly paying off (e.g. the removal of school enrolment fees, TB immunisation programmes) and should not let up. But a failure to deliver parallel investments on the food/nutrition side could jeopardize it all, with huge human and financial costs in the long run.

Extra development cash must bolster food and agriculture

There is therefore a very strong argument for additional development support to be channeled to tackling food security and nutrition. G8 countries pledged to raise development aid to 0.7% of GNI but are only on 0.32% at present. Should they come through with the funding – as is necessary to make meaningful and sustainable progress on the MDGs – then the current trend, whereby nutrition schemes focused on breastfeeding awareness, maternal health/education, and the provision of micronutrients are gradually growing in coverage, should continue.

But support for nutritional programmes should not displace agricultural development aid, which has finally been restored as a priority area after decades of neglect. It is after all the global imbalance of food production, and the failure of the market to make food available at affordable prices, which imposes the basic limits on developing world diets, causing both hunger and deficiencies in key nutrients.

Perversely, some 75% of the world’s hungry live in subsistence farming households. Malfunctioning price signals and voracious food commodity speculators were much discussed at last month’s G20 agriculture summit. But success in combating the global food system’s failings should not be measured in terms of volumes of derivatives trade or the ratio of food supply to demand. It should instead be traced back to the MDGs, and measured in the ability of subsistence farmers to make a basic living from their trade and to feed themselves.

Otherwise, when the wealthy world toasts its successes in poverty reduction in 2015, it will be toasting little more than the headline economic growth figures in China and India, themselves riddled with discrepancies between regions and population groups.

In the big emerging countries and elsewhere, the world will have failed to make any durable, systemic change. It will have empowered millions more people with schooling, vaccines and drinking water, but will have failed, cripplingly, to address the food system that still fails to provide them with adequate quantities of food with the right nutritional values at the right price, while consigning generation after generation of rural poor to toiling in order to produce that food – and receiving only economic hardship in return.

There is scepticism about what will happen post-2013, with a new set of numerical development targets unlikely in the current climate. All of this makes it even more crucial to make the current MDGs count, and to secure progress that genuinely resonates beyond 2015, rather than pushing the requisite number of people temporarily above the poverty line.

Photo by Valentina Pavarotti

Small creatures play a big role

One quarter of animal species are at risk of extinction, fish are getting smaller and fewer in number, pollinators are disappearing, and naturally water-purifying ecosystems are falling apart. Faced with this genuine ecological crisis, it is no wonder that Brussels is re-launching its biodiversity strategy. The EU tried and failed to halt species loss by 2010. Now the deadline is 2020, and the stakes are even higher. Science is converging on biodiversity as it did on climate change – to tell us that we must pay now, or pay even dearer later. Insect pollination alone is worth a massive €15 billion per year to the EU.

Society will need to be co-opted in the biodiversity battle. Currently only 35% of people know what the term means. After all, we have only just got our heads around climate change, with its sense of looming disaster and weight of responsibility in our everyday actions. The two issues are inextricably linked, but biodiversity is the part of the narrative which got left behind. The prospect of butterfly varieties petering out is less threatening than the spectre of rising sea levels, floods and droughts. Convincing the public to build species/habitats loss into the doomsday narrative will be a slow and pain-staking job, but at least the story is simple and cyclical: As our climate changes more of its species/ecosystems perish, and when they perish the world is less able to manage the impacts of a changing climate.

Economic activity = biodiversity loss?

Understanding biodiversity means understanding the huge impacts of changing the way land is used. Each fragment of economic activity implies a change in land use. Wheat to maize. Mixed crop cultivation to monoculture. Rainforest to palm oil plantation. Palm oil plantation to housing development.  Housing development to factory. Population growth has exacerbated trends, but even without it, land use change – in the shape of new, expanding economic activities – is the very essence of progress and is unavoidable.

But does the expansion of one species – the human race – have to entail the eradication of others? Science tells us that we are reaching a tipping point beyond which this correlation cannot hold up. At a given point, scything through forests, replanting land and draining aquifers no longer delivers economic progress, but curtails it – given that ecosystems no longer perform the web of services which facilitate human life and prosperity. 

Unfortunately it is difficult to tell the EU’s 500m citizens and hundreds of thousands of companies to rethink their disparate economic activities in order to stop eradicating species. Their answer would be: we’re not responsible. And they would be right. Their activity alone would not eradicate any particular species, providing it could find suitable habitats elsewhere. It is the collective impact of the mix of activities in a given coastal strip, urban agglomeration or river basin which degrades an ecosystem as a whole, robbing a species of its habitats and sending it elsewhere – or gradually towards extinction.  

Regulation – part of the solution

So how then can the EU or anyone else govern trends occurring across millions of acres of land fragmented into small, privately owned parcels (even the Natura 2000 network of protected zones includes privately-owned land)?

When the effects on humans are direct enough, rules and regulations can be put in place to ban the most harmful practices, e.g. toxic substances from pesticides can be banned to prevent them ending up in the food and water that nourishes us, with positive knock-on effects (a sort of collateral un-damage) – for other species which also depend on those resources.

But these piecemeal solutions do not address the (eco-)systemic problems which are driving species into extinction. For this reason the EU strategy looks to put some land out of bounds for economic activity – 15% of degraded ecosystems must be restored by 2020, and the current protected nature zones (Natura 2000) which cover 18% of EU land must be better managed to become genuine hosts to biodiversity. These figures meet the requirements of the politically ambitious Nagoya international agreement on biodiversity; that is not to say that they are sufficient to safeguard endangered species and ecosystems.

Farmers in the hot seat

So what about the rest of the EU’s land? Is there scope for managing land use patterns beyond nature zones? It transpires that the EU does in fact have one trump card to play. Farmers. 72% of land in the EU is used for farming and forestry. And with EU farm subsidies making up around one third of farm income, the EU effectively owns them – or at least possesses a major ready-made source of leverage.

Much of the Commission’s biodiversity strategy reads like a prelude to reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), describing and in a way pre-empting its likely shape.

It calls for all farm subsidies to be tied to the provision of “environmental public goods” through obligatory practices such as crop rotation and ecological set-aside, while insisting that the reformed CAP drastically scale up the percentage of EU farmland subject to biodiversity protection schemes. In doing so, it may help to enshrine expectations from CAP reform and to prevent backtracking. When agriculture ministers balk at the extra requirements on farmers, EU agriculture chief Dacian Ciolos can wave the biodiversity strategy at them and ask whether they really wish to jeopardise attempts to prevent species loss…

Of course farmers will need to be co-opted with the right combination of carrot and stick in order for this to work.  Remonstration will be vocal, but when their EU subsidies are at stake, they have little room for manoeuvre.

And besides, the modern farmer is fast becoming accustomed to the accumulating public expectations in regard to his private land. Farmers have been well apprised of the fact that they are sitting on the lion’s share of our natural capital. It is on farmland – from fallow prairies to arable monocultures – that the battle against climate change, biodiversity loss and soil and water degradation will be won and lost. So whether they like it or not, farmers are now in the political hot seat.

Do people care enough?

But this leads us back to society’s position. For farmers to care, people must care enough. The survey on biodiversity awareness reveals that once the concept is explained, more than 90% of the public believes that action must be taken to curb species loss. But what if the question were to be phrased more honestly, e.g. For the sake of protecting biodiversity, would you countenance a wholesale rethink in the way land is managed, with the potential to curtail economic expansion in certain regions/sectors, and to push up food prices in the short/medium term by constraining production?

What people are actually meant to do on a personal level is –like for climate change – by no means clear-cut. The Commission’s initial advice effectively amounts to buying non-endangered fish and using ‘green infrastructure’, i.e. going to the park. Hopefully Disney’s imminent tour de force on the value of nature (‘Pollen’) will help to kick off the debate in the way that An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change (the trailer suggests a more visually impressive spectacle than Al Gore running through graphs in a lecture hall).

The biodiversity challenge boils down to the same core questions which underpin the debate on climate change and more generally on the way we use natural resources. Can we stop and repair the damage for long enough to allow our natural capital to be replenished? Can we hold back – or even roll back – progress sufficiently to allow a transition to a world where progress can resume from a different basis? It is short-termism v long-termism. The financial crisis makes it harder to front-up the cash to fund the transition process, but at least it has cemented the necessary logic: painful restructuring measures are needed to avoid default.

Photo by Valentina Pavarotti

The fight against global warming is an economically beneficial one, the Roadmap says

‘Roadmaps’ are often disappointing in politics. George Bush had a roadmap for peace in the Middle East, until the election of Hamas in Gaza and other off-piste developments consigned it to failure. This week the European Commission produced a different sort of roadmap. Its aspirations are equally bold, namely the effective decarbonisation of the European economy by mid-century.

Here the road is long and straight: the EU can and should reduce its domestic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 25% by 2020, 40% by 2030, 60% by 2040, and finally 80% by 2050. This is the scale of contribution seen as necessary by the EU and other developed countries in order to limit global warming to 2° C.

The reduction percentages are big, round numbers, and the benchmark years are far enough away to feel futuristic. Nonetheless, the Roadmap breaks the target down into bite-size digestible targets – and suddenly it feels more attainable. The pathway to the 2050 target would require an annual reduction in emissions (compared to 1990) of 1% in the decade up to 2020, 1.5% up to 2030 and 2% thereafter. This will cost an extra 1.5% of EU GDP per annum than was invested in the low carbon transition pre-crisis, and the outlays are likely to be more than recouped by savings on fossil fuel imports.

The challenge for Brussels is to show member states that this is an attainable pathway, but not a self-evident one. The Roadmap does well to dispel any complacency about GHG reductions of this magnitude occurring of their own accord, on the back of miracle technologies or super fuels. Nor does it play into the hands of those who warn against climate change action plans as a smokescreen for draconian policies impinging on lifestyle freedoms, e.g. the freedom to eat meat and to travel extensively. The Commission is adamant that radical lifestyle changes – while potentially helpful – need not occur.

What would 80% emission cuts look like?

Instead, Brussels paints a detailed and necessarily prosaic picture of what 80% plus GHG emission cuts would look like. The resulting image is of a world where the systems of the present are meticulously adapted with the pick of emerging (but largely existing) technologies. The EU would produce more energy from renewables and progressively cut oil and gas imports, feed the new energy sources into more flexible ‘smart’ grids, remove the slack from emissions trading schemes to force up the virtual carbon price, deploy carbon capture and storage where heavy industries can’t decarbonise, electrify transport where possible and run other vehicles on biofuels, whittle down heat and light inefficiencies in buildings by applying existing technologies, and cut agricultural methane and nitrous oxide emissions (and to a lesser extent CO2) by applying state-of-the-art precision farming techniques. In short the EU must – in a broader, sustained and more focused manner – do what it is currently doing embryonically and in fits and starts.

In 2008 the EU scored a major victory for its climate credibility when it wrote 20% emission cuts by 2020 into law. The Roadmap shows that the Commission, largely thanks to its indefatigable climate chief Connie Hedegaard, is not resting on its laurels, and is convinced that the EU can and must go further, regardless of what the international community is doing.

The Roadmap is intended to be the starting pistol for a whirlwind of GHG-cutting initiatives. Brussels wants each member state and each sector to draw up its own roadmap for energy efficiency and GHG reductions. Putting sectors in healthy competition with one another could be a fruitful avenue; all sectors of the economy want investment (not least in r&d) to spur their future competitiveness, and they know that they will rise up the pecking order for public funding if they can add a strong sectoral GHG reduction performance (at the 2020 or 2030 benchmarks) to their CVs.

Targets: arbitrary but necessary

But if the roadmap has a weakness, it is the EU’s refusal to lay down the law. The current document merely maps out what scale of emission reductions can be achieved in which sectors and by which year, and relies on the goodwill of member states to rise to the challenge. Here the Commission should not be averse to a touch of dirigisme. Should short-termism prevent member states from grasping the economic/environmental win-win it has put on the table – and a long-term win-win can often be a short term lose-lose for popularity – Brussels should not be afraid to make the roadmap’s projections into binding targets.

Targets are arbitrary, approximate and unscientific, but this is the unavoidable face of any coherent international response to climate change. Emissions trading schemes are based on the allocation of an arbitrarily capped number of emission licenses. The Kyoto emission targets were arbitrary, and so are the EU’s 2020 targets. But these appear to be working: member states had already cut emissions by 16% by 2009. Targets have helped to drag them – kicking and screaming – in the right direction. Big round numbers are necessary, even if they incur the wrath of sneering do-nothings.

When it comes to the scale of change required to fight climate change, governments will need to sponsor particular industries, tax others prohibitively, mobilise huge fluxes of public and private money to particular causes, and send strong price signals. In short the very tenets of a planned economy. With this in mind, it is no surprise that many are tipping China to move to a low carbon economy with unparalleled pace and efficiency, once Beijing decides to definitively pursue that goal. When it comes to energy security, the US also shifts into planned economy mode – how else would America have managed to shift nearly 40% of its domestic maize production into fuel ethanol over the space of a decade? European politicians may be more sensitive to the environmental cause, but their failure to see the other side of the win-win – the economic gains – may mean that the EU stalls while others move ahead.

EU leaders have already signed up to a 30% GHG reduction scenario by 2020 on the condition that other wealthy countries follow suit; in the absence of any such agreement the commitment seems rather virtual. In the meantime the EU should do what makes economic sense domestically: according to the Commission’s modelling exercise, this means decarbonising ASAP. When other countries see the EU importing substantially less of their fossil fuels, and producing new jobs of its own through green investment, the most compelling case will have been made for them to follow suit in moving full throttle towards a low carbon economy.

Photo by Valentina Pavarotti

Only six months ago, the world appeared to have put the destabilising food price spikes of 2008 behind it. Wealthy countries had clubbed together to deliver new seeds and fertiliser to African farmers, global harvests proved bountiful in 2009, and food stockpiles – which everyone had been surprised to find empty in 2008 – were gradually built up again.

But this week the world was jolted into submission when food riots erupted in Algeria, reminiscent of the violent unrest of 2008 in Cameroon, Egypt, Somalia, Haiti and elsewhere across the developing world. Six months ago food prices once more entered a steep upward trajectory, and by December 2010 they had breached even the June 2008 levels, setting alarm bells ringing at the UN.

Algeria first, where next?

Will the crisis be contained to Algeria? There are reasons to fear that it is only the tip of the iceberg. Food price increases are always more sharply felt in lower income countries, where food consumption takes up a higher percentage of household spending. Worryingly, Algeria is not even particularly poor by global standards. However, its reliance on food imports is matched only by Senegal, Yemen, Eritrea, Haiti and North Korea. When major suppliers into the world market suffer harvest failures and prices surge on international markets, major importers feel the pinch.

According to a 2008 World Bank report, only a handful of developing countries are at genuine risk of being destabilised by a repeat of global price spikes. Most agricultural trade deficits have been whittled down over recent decades, and for the remaining sub-Saharan food importers, “small changes in their agricultural production mix will generate enough food for their citizens and can turn most of them into net raw food exporters.” However, this sounds complacent when it is considered that in many cases a major deficit in core cereal crops remains, covered by a surplus in cash crops such as nuts or strawberries – a structural imbalance which cannot be remedied overnight.

With this in mind, it is not only the major net food importers like Algeria who are at risk; there are in fact a host of countries with the lethal combination of low, food-dominated incomes, and reliance on imports of key foodstuffs such as wheat, maize and sugar; with the prices of these commodities doubling from one year to the next, and producing a knock-on effect on meat and dairy prices, even small trade deficits can translate into destabilising price hikes.

Bad weather – nothing new

The trigger has once again been bad harvests: Russian and Argentine droughts have combined with Australian floods to depress global yields below expectations.

But bad weather is nothing new – even if climate change is making a structural problem structurally worse. What is new is the capacity for bad harvests to spark seismic price movements on global commodity exchanges, and for social unrest to erupt in poor countries as the price hikes filter through into day-to-day products.

As the second food crisis in two years comes into view, it is fair to question whether efforts to counter this huge emerging problem have been given the necessary urgency.

Speculators, stocks and silver linings

Many said that speculators were to blame last time round, and a series of reports and reviews were rolled out to shed light on shady practices in agricultural derivatives markets. However, if Nicolas Sarkozy’s rhetoric is anything to go by, these moves have gone nowhere near far enough. The French President has made the fight against commodity price volatility and market speculators one of the top priorities of this year’s French presidency of the G8 and G20.

What about food stocks? In the heady days of 2008, the idea of building up ‘global’ food stocks under integrated management gained momentum. But the idea was riddled by practical pitfalls, and soon petered out. In the meantime countries did start to build their individual stocks back up, but the next supply crisis appears to have hit too soon; the EU has spent much of the autumn whittling down its modest stocks of barley, wheat, butter and milk powder in a bid to keep domestic price increases in check.

Is oil to blame? Higher crude prices drive up the cost of agricultural inputs such as fertiliser, with knock-on effects on food. EU and global experts have identified clear correlations here. But can anything be done as crude climbs structurally higher? Biofuels, another scapegoat of 2008, could continue their current expansion and eventually take on a major share of the transport fuel blend. However, diverting extra hectares of sugar, rapeseed and palm oil to agrifuels could, perversely, drive food prices up even as oil comes back down.

Investing in less contentious forms of renewable energy looks like a simple win-win for food security in the long term: fighting climate change and its unpredictable impacts on harvests with one hand, and bringing down the price of oil (and its repercussions on food prices) with the other.

However, the 2008 food crisis failed to spark effective short term strategies to rein in price volatility, and it also failed to inject the urgency into the climate change debate which is desperately needed for the longer term.

Should a second fully-fledged food crisis materialise, it could at least provide further intelligence on the core problems, and how to go about resolving them. Evidently, supply and demand are not meeting each other, or the signals are not being transmitted well enough. Either way, the precedent is worrying, given that the demand side will soon swell to 9 billion. Producing the right amount of food and having it reach people at the right prices is proving a big enough challenge with current production capacity.

Could currency concerns poison WTO progress?

World leaders have set themselves yet another deadline for completing the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Round. The trade talks, launched in 2001 and tipped for completion in 2005, 2008 and then 2010, should now be wrapped up in 2011, according to last week’s G20 declaration.

Doha is fast becoming the global economy’s answer to Waiting for Godot. Like Beckett’s absent hero, a Doha deal is constantly talked about but never comes around. And as with Godot, you begin to wonder whether those who talk about Doha really know what it will look like when it finally arrives.

On the surface the signs are now good. The G20 – comprising all of the key players at the Doha table – identified 2011 as a window for completing the talks. Presumably the prospect of US elections in 2012 is enough to convince leaders that America’s wavering commitment to Doha must be tapped before pre-election posturing snuffs it out.

Leaders also voiced a willingness to pick up where they left off in 2008, the last serious round of talks between trade ministers. At that point, a fortnight of negotiations in Geneva yielded a complex web of trade-offs which all parties were willing to work from. The gist of it was big domestic subsidy and tariff reductions for the EU and the US, and significant slashing of industrial duties in the developing world (a term taken to include the likes of China and India in WTO parlance). For the world’s very poorest there would be only minimal tariff reductions, in order to ensure that Doha remains the development round it was initially branded as.

While the Seoul G20 meeting sent the political signal, the technical groundwork is thought to be moving ahead in Geneva, allowing officials to tidy up the edges of the 2008 compromise and work out how to agree the outstanding issues.

Exiting crisis is key incentive

So will the G20 countries be as good as their word when they sit down with other WTO members at the Doha negotiating table? Will they be willing to hammer out the necessary end-game compromises in order to get a wide-reaching, multilateral trade deal through? On one hand the world’s current economic woes in the wake of the financial crisis appear to be working in favour of Doha. Developed countries have tried a host of remedies since the crisis, but American unemployment remains high, European government debts are still undermining confidence, and Japan’s fledgling growth is predicted to grind to a halt as a strong yen curtails its exports. Governments across the world are insisting that once their stimulus packages subside and domestic spending incentives disappear, the real recovery must be export-led. With little prospect for raising domestic demand in the advanced economies, the prospect of multilateral tariff reduction, and fresh access to a host of foreign markets, should be mouthwatering.

And striking a world trade deal is not impossible. It was done in 1994 between the 123 members of the WTO (the organisation has subsequently expanded to 153 members). The current climate may not seem conducive to multilateralism, but that did not stop some 190 countries signing up to landmark biodiversity and genetic resource sharing deals in Nagoya last month.

Clash over currencies

So what would stop the big economies following through on their pledge to wrap up Doha next year? The reasons are in fact manifold. While penning last week’s commitment to finish Doha, G20 leaders were in fact busy haggling over competitive currency devaluations. The issue holds major potential to sour the trade climate. China stands accused of keeping the renminbi artificially low in order to boost its exports, while the US – principal prosecutor of China – is now in the firing line after the Fed’s decision to inject some $600 billion into the US economy, a move which could further weaken the dollar.

With this level of distrust circling around exchange rates, countries will be loathe to agree to tariff cuts and state aid reductions which would could pit their own producers against foreign competitors who are suspected of receiving the biggest export subsidy of all: a permanently undervalued currency. The logic was exposed recently when French agricultural think tank Momagri claimed that undervaluation of the dollar and advantageous central bank rates handed American farmers the equivalent of a €25 billion subsidy over their eurozone counterparts from 2008-2009. French farmers net some €10 billion of EU support annually; when criticism of trade distorting farm subsidies emerges from Paris, it is clear that something is up.

Currency fears destroy the vision of a level playing field once border duties are whittled away; in doing so they devalue Doha’s biggest prize: tariff cuts.

EU priorities diverging from Doha

Exchange rate fluctuations are by no means the only non-tariff issue which could hold back WTO progress. The EU has been one of the biggest proponents of a Doha deal, but even Brussels now appears to be turning its attention elsewhere. A new Commission ideas paper entitled Trade, Growth and World Affairs states: “Cutting tariffs on industrial and agricultural goods is still important, but the brunt of the challenge lies elsewhere. What will make a bigger difference is market access for services and investment, opening public procurement, better agreements on and enforcement of protection of IPR (intellectual property rights), unrestricted supply of raw materials and energy, and, not in the least, overcoming regulator barriers including via the promotion of international standards.”

Achieving any of these things is difficult at the WTO. Most of all IPR. The EU prides itself on its regional food specialties such as Parma Ham and Roquefort cheese, and uses a system of geographical indications (GIs) to reserve each term for foodstufs meeting defined production conditions in the region in question. Gaining international recognition of GIs is near the top of the EU’s Doha wish-list, but remained one of the major unresolved issues in 2008, coming up against resistance from the US, Australia and a host of other countries who are keen to prevent what they see as generic food terms being put out of bounds for their own producers.

Bilateral benefits

Making progress on this type of issue is more likely in the remit of a bilateral trade deal, where the EU can offer its own specific concessions as a quid pro quo for GI recognition. Country to country, or region to region agreements, not least the current attempts to strike a deal between the EU and Mercosur (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay), appear to offer more scope for tackling the non-tariff issues which specifically bother each side. In the EU/Mercosur case, it may help the negotiating mood that the competitive devaluation charge has not been seriously levelled at the euro, the pound, the real or the Argentine peso.

Bilateral trade deals do not make a global accord more complicated, but only less urgent; they cannot deliver the same aggregate market openings as Doha, but are nonetheless seen as capable of delivering a key economic boost, and are far easier to complete in a period of diversifying trade concerns and general distrust over currency manipulation. For these reasons the G20′s latest WTO deadline may be simply another act in the Waiting For Doha saga.

Unprecedented food price volatility has reshaped the CAP debate

The stage is set for reform of the EU’s ever-contentious Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The public has been consulted. Stakeholders have defended their stakes. MEPs have put their two cents in. And member states have laid down their red lines. In the coming weeks EU Farm Commissioner Dacian Ciolos will try to synthesise the conflicting views into concrete ideas for reforming EU farm policy.

But what type of CAP reform is the stage set for? Designing EU farm policy is always a delicate balancing act, given that countries at either extreme of the debate want almost diametrically opposed things. The pro-intervention bloc (France, Ireland and other CAP stalwarts) believes inherently in doing whatever it takes with public money to keep farmers in business. Meanwhile, the liberal-leaning bloc (principally the UK and the Scandinavians) is fundamentally opposed to ‘distorting’ the market by deploying public money to keep farmers in business.

This time the balancing act may be even tougher to manage. The economic crisis has raised the stakes in the debate over public intervention and the role of the state; when that ‘state’ is the EU and the public intervention is in the farm sector, divisions are even more crystallised. It appears harder than ever to reconcile those who envisage the state as the necessary overseer of stability with those who see it as the root of harmful dependencies and taxpayer burden. In many cases the fault lines are likely to run between agriculture and finance ministries within the same member states.

Stalking the speculators

On the one hand, the EU is rallying around efforts to bring stability to the economy, a trend which favours strong, interventionist policy.

Speculative financial activities are now in the spotlight. The EU’s internal markets chief, Michel Barnier, has launched plans to force transparency on secretive derivatives trading, in a bid to allow speculation to reveal itself – and to burst its own bubble – before the underlying assets are forced out of kilter.

Much of this speculation comes in the form of bets on interest rates, exchange rates and sovereign debt defaults. However, commodity-based derivatives – where buyers effectively bet on price movements for wheat, copper and other raw materials – is a growing source of financial activity, and is also coming under Barnier’s microscope.

Food prices are naturally subject to fluctuations: unpredictable climate factors and changeable trade conditions mean that the food supply can grow and shrink significantly over short periods of time – and prices can move accordingly.  But the real trouble is seen to occur when speculators pile into agricultural markets, buying up the commodity – or a derivative of it – and exacerbating price spikes. The topsy-turvy price curves of the last three years have confirmed some of the wildest fears about the involvement of new players on agricultural commodity markets.

Farms – too fundamental to fail?

With the issue now dominating EU and G20 agendas, the ground is fertile for tackling the volatility-speculation issue on all fronts. Right on script, agriculture ministers from France and its pro-CAP allies are talking up the risks of price volatility to farm livelihoods, and are driving the agricultural reform agenda in the direction of stability. In CAP language, this means strong income support payments to farmers and market management tools which kick in when prices plummet, i.e. two of the three tenets of current EU farm policy (the other being the recent addition of ‘rural development’). The status quo plus camp would also like to see EU-subsidised insurance schemes added to the toolkit to provide another layer of protection for farmers.

The liberal dissidents are trying to fight the tide. In their eyes, farmers should not hide behind subsidies, but should bank the high prices and ride out the low ones, plugging themselves into the markets and using hedging opportunities to their advantage. But their tough love message is being drowned out by the calls for fresh intervention, tied to compelling scenarios of what will happen if nothing is done and farmers are left at the mercy of unpredictable price cycles. Many – including EU Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Ciolos – are arguing that farms cannot be allowed to fail. The knock-on effects would be social upheaval, environmental damage, and a loss of ‘food sovereignty’, as rural regions have the agricultural heart ripped out of them. A whole tradition and way of life would be lost to posterity.

The political climate is highly receptive to this message. Banks were not allowed to fail – the ensuing upheaval would have been too great. Farm ministers are hoping that the logic will hold for European agriculture. And the EU is hardly alone in protecting its ‘strategic’ interests. Look at Brazil, French Farm Minister Bruno Le Maire fumed this week, pointing to Lula’s recent moves to restrict foreign ownership of farmland. Why can’t the EU protect its own farmers from the frightening forces of investors, speculators and market mayhem? The taboo about public intervention has been swept aside, and nothing will work more in favour of retaining a well-budgeted and strong-armed EU farm policy.

Is CAP next victim of the ‘war on waste’?

But from another angle, the climate is absolutely opposed to public intervention – at least when it is broken down into facts and figures. The idea of irresponsible traders betting on food commodities and sending bread prices skyward chimes perfectly with popular outrage at the economic crisis. But CAP largesse, to the tune of nearly €60bn per year, is also a natural target for popular outrage, at a time of burgeoning public deficits and wars on waste. This exposes the CAP to the same cost-cutting zeal which is currently taking aim at the welfare state in a host of EU countries. For the ‘small state’ lobby, scrapping EU farm subsidies is the holy grail.

And this is where the internal fault lines may fall.  For finance ministers, bringing stability to the EU economy can conceivably mean fighting for derivatives transparency – but may not extend to propping up farmers indefinitely through unconditional paychecks. The public and the political establish are currently highly averse to both economic volatility and to big public outlays. For the future of the CAP, much will depend on which of the currents subsides first.

Photo courtesy of Simon Howden at Freedigitalphotos.net