Page 2 of 2 Are we all North Koreans now?
By John Feffer
campaign to disseminate modern, industrial agricultural techniques that began
in the 1960s did increase food production, rural poverty in the developing
world remained endemic (which is why the current food crisis is so devastating
to subsistence farmers). Today, a repetition of that revolution's combo of
hybrid seeds, intensive irrigation and the heavy application of petroleum-based
fertilizers holds little promise.
Water is scarcer. Oil (and thus fertilizer) is considerably more expensive. The
promised next stage of the Green Revolution, the application of biotech
advances through genetically modified organisms to produce new, high-yield,
insect-resistant crops, generally hasn't lived up to its hype in the developing
world.
Yet Western seed companies are taking advantage of the crisis to
tout this particular high-tech solution. Oddly enough, all this is depressingly
reminiscent of the North Korean leadership's fascination with quick fixes in
the 1990s. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, for instance, touted potatoes as a
miracle crop, but the True Potato Seed project sponsored by the US government
never panned out. Giant rabbits produced by a German breeder as a newfangled
North Korean livestock were a dead-end, probably because the animals themselves
consumed as much food as they ultimately yielded. A variety of high-yield
"supercorn" hasn't yet revolutionized North Korean agriculture. Neither in
North Korea nor in the world at large has anyone yet figured out a technical
shortcut to permanent cornucopia.
Markets to the rescue?
Perhaps the most conventional approach to the crisis has been to rely on market
mechanisms. Consider the International Food Policy Research Institute, a
product of the Green Revolution and its leading booster, and its eight-point
plan for solving the crisis.
Several of the steps are eminently sensible, such as expanding humanitarian
assistance to food-challenged countries, reversing biofuel policies and
investing in social programs such as school feeding programs and health care.
In the mix, however, are more of the same old market mantras. IFPRI recommends,
for instance, the elimination of the export bans which 40 countries, including
India and Indonesia, recently implemented to keep food from flowing out of the
country through trade. And it has tried to revive a dead horse by urging
further World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations to reduce barriers to
global trade in agricultural products.
Pundits and policymakers addressing food problems have called for the
elimination of government regulations and tariffs ever since England repealed
its Corn Laws in the 1840s. In the last quarter century, the removal of trade
restrictions of every sort facilitated greater agricultural production
globally. Free trade helped large producers grow more and sell it cheaper
abroad. But free trade hasn't helped the rural poor - or poor countries.
Quite the opposite. The increased concentration of corporate farming and the
dismantling of state programs that sustained the agricultural sector have
driven small farmers out of business all over the planet, while making many of
those who remain ever more dependent on expensive chemical pesticides,
fertilizer and seeds.
For instance, as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico
lost 1.3 million agricultural jobs, forcing many desperate small farmers to
cross into the United States as migrant workers. Even more strikingly, the
continent of Africa went from a net exporter of food in the late 1960s to a net
importer today - thanks to the World Bank and the WTO riding roughshod through
the continent in the same cavalry unit as the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
The bank's "structural adjustment programs" and the WTO's "tariff reductions"
don't quite have the ring of war, pestilence, famine and death, but they have
been just as devastating.
The quest for perfect markets usually conceals a global shell game in which
wealth is redistributed from the many to the few. To even the playing field
that markets constantly tilt in favor of the powerful, and to direct funds
toward environmental sustainability, governments need to intervene in the
economy.
After all, private enterprise is not going to invest in the large-scale
improvement of rural infrastructure - the capital costs are high and profit
margins far too low. More controversially, developing countries may need to
maintain, or even reestablish, tariffs and subsidies to protect local
producers. Since it is both sold and consumed, food should be considered a
strategic resource, a matter of national security. It should be left out of
trade negotiations in the same way that the "national security exception"
allows governments to subsidize and protect their military industries as they
please.
On being canaries
Any response that doesn't address all three converging trends - rising energy
costs, stagnant per-capita agricultural production and climate change - will
ultimately fail, just as it did in North Korea in the early 1990s.
Land, energy and the biosphere are limited resources. And it's not only a peak
in oil that we may be approaching. The depletion of oil resources and the
urgent need to reduce carbon emissions from their current levels have at least
entered mainstream discussion. Less well known, however, are the problems of
peak land and peak water.
The last time food prices shot up, in the 1970s, the US response was to put
more land into agricultural production. This was the infamous
"fencerow-to-fencerow" policy of secretary of agriculture Earl Butz that
Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, has linked to the glut
of corn - and corn syrup - that has so profoundly affected global diets. But
re-Butzing American agriculture is no longer an option. "For the first time in
our history, we're pushing up against the edge in terms of quality land," says
Otto Doering, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University.
"We're in a somewhat fixed box."
The same applies to the world at large. Although rainforests are still being
transformed into farming plots and pasture - only increasing carbon emissions
into the atmosphere - humanity is reaching the limits of arable land. Chalk it
up to urbanization, climate change-caused drought, and a loss of soil fertility
through the application of too much fertilizer. Whether forest or farmland, we
are losing productive land at a rate of one hectare every 7.67 seconds. Sure,
there's some wiggle room in Africa and Latin America, but bringing this
additional land into cultivation will buy us only a little time - at the
expense of the overall environment.
The water situation is even more precarious. The world is facing a declining
reserve of fresh water with the depletion of underground reserves in India,
China, Africa, and even the US. (Say goodbye to the Midwest's mighty Ogallala
aquifer, which nourishes America's breadbasket). Aside from the 1.1 billion
people who already lack safe drinking water, according to the UN, this crisis
threatens farming, which monopolizes 70% of all fresh water.
Global temperature increases will only aggravate the situation. Rising oceans
will inflict death-by-salt on increasing amounts of low-lying farmland, while
drought dries up once fertile farming regions. Any intensification of the Green
Revolution, dependent as it is on chemical fertilizer and irrigation, is only
likely to add to the problem. And don't count on the oceans to offset the food
that will no longer be grown on land. The catch of wild fish has remained
pretty much the same since the mid-1980s, and fish farming, too, requires land,
water, and energy.
In the long run, the only realistic response is a comprehensive program to
address, in tandem, the triple crises of energy, climate and land and water
resource exhaustion. If policymakers take into consideration only one, or even
two, of the components of this trinity, they may well end up doing more harm
than good. The making of biofuels from corn, for instance, was an attempt to
address the problems of the cost of energy and the dangers of climate change,
but it neglected to consider the effect on agricultural production - hence, the
disastrously soaring price of corn. Calls for the next phase of a Green
Revolution, which address agricultural production, are guaranteed to play havoc
with the energy and water crises.
Such partial approaches don't work largely because they assume unlimited
resources. The original sin of unrestrained growth can be found in the economic
theologies of both communism and capitalism. In these systems, neither the
state nor the market has ever operated according to ecological principles. Now,
we must quickly explore ways of boosting agricultural production in
fundamentally sustainable ways without, somehow, expanding our carbon
footprint.
Certainly organic farming will play a role here. Although Green Revolution guru
Norman Borlaug has dismissed organic agriculture as incapable of feeding the
world, an important new study published by Cambridge University Press shows
that organic systems in developing countries can produce 80% more than
conventional farms.
Integrated farming systems that rely on sustainable energy - solar, wind, tidal
- will also be critical. No-till agriculture can cut down on energy use and
soil erosion.
While properly wary of snake-oil salesmen, neither can we afford to be
Luddites. New technologies will play a role as well, as long as they reduce
fertilizer and pesticide use, don't shackle debt-ridden farmers to major seed
companies, and meet strict consumer safety requirements.
Even if global food prices stabilize this year and projections of a record
grain harvest hold, the underlying problems will remain.
So it was with North Korea. With emergency assistance, the country pulled back
from the brink by 2000. In 2008, however, it is again in a serious food crisis,
thanks to high energy prices, flooding and a shortfall in last year's grain
harvest. Once again, North Korea is the world's canary. As we sit in the dark
in the deep hole that we've dug for ourselves, will we finally heed its
warning?
John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign
Policy In Focusat the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author of
numerous articles on food policy and on North Korea.
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