Saw this blog comment published in today's FT. Author Paul Collier, professor of Economics at Oxford. Makes you think?

Paul Collier: The sharp increase in the world price of staple foods is an inconvenience for consumers in the rich world, but for consumers in the poorest countries, especially in Africa, it is a catastrophe. Despite the predominance of peasant agriculture, most African countries are net food importers and food accounts for over half of the budget of low-income households. This is the result of decades of agricultural stagnation combined with growing populations. Although many of the net purchasers are rural, evidently the problem is at its most intense in the urban slums. These slums are political powder kegs and so rising food prices have already triggered riots. Indeed, they sow the seeds of an ugly and destructive populist politics.

Why have food prices rocketed? Paradoxically, this squeeze on the poorest has come about as a result of the success of globalization in reducing world poverty. As China develops, helped by its massive exports to our markets, millions of Chinese households have started to eat better. Better means not just more food but more meat, the new luxury. But to produce a kilo of meat takes six kilos of grain. Livestock reared for meat to be consumed in Asia are now eating the grain that would previously have been eaten by the African poor. So what is the remedy?

The best solution to a problem is often not closely related to its cause (a proposition that that might be recognized in the climate change debate). China’s long march to prosperity is something to celebrate. The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market. To give one remarkable example, the time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, in effect the downtime for land, has been reduced an astounding thirty minutes. There are still many areas of the world that have good land which could be used far more productively if it was properly managed by large companies. For example, almost 90% of Mozambique’s land, an enormous area, is idle.

Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited to innovation and investment: the result has been that African agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model. Indeed, during the present phase of high prices the FAO is worried that African peasants are likely to reduce their production because they cannot finance the increased cost of fertilizer inputs. While there are partial solutions to this problem through subsidies and credit schemes, large scale commercial agriculture simply does not face this problem: if output prices rise by more than input prices, production will be expanded because credit lines are well-established.

Our longstanding agricultural romanticism has been compounded by our new-found environmental romanticism. In the United States fears of climate change have been manipulated by shrewd interests to produce grotesquely inefficient subsidies for bio-fuel. Around a third of American grain production has rapidly been diverted into energy production. This switch demonstrates both the superb responsiveness of the market to price signals, and the shameful power of subsidy-hunting lobby groups. Given the depth of anti-Americanism in Europe it is, of course, fashionable to criticize the American folly with bio-fuels. But Europe has its equivalent follies.

First, the European Commission is now imitating the American bio-fuels policy. At present the programme is small enough to be unimportant, but we need to pull it back before it does real damage. We have surely learnt enough about European agriculture to realize how important it is to kill this incipient scam before we are engulfed by it. But the true European equivalent of America’s folly with bio-fuels is the ban on GM. Europe’s distinctive and deep-seated fears of science have been manipulated by the agricultural lobby into yet another form of protectionism. The ban on both the production and import of genetically modified crops has obviously retarded productivity growth in European agriculture: again, the best that can be said of it is that we are rich enough to afford such folly. But Europe is a major agricultural producer, so the cumulative consequence of this reduction in the growth of productivity has most surely rebounded onto world food markets. Further, and most cruelly, as an unintended side-effect the ban has terrified African governments into themselves banning genetic modification in case by growing modified crops they would permanently be shut out of selling to European markets. Africa definitely cannot afford this self-denial. It needs all the help it can possibly get from genetic modification. Not only is Africa currently being hit by rising food prices, over the longer term it will face climatic deterioration in the context of a rapidly growing population.

While the policies needed for the long term have been befuddled by romanticism, the short term global response has been pure beggar-thy-neighbour. It is easier for urban slum dwellers to riot than for farmers: riots need streets, not fields. And so, in the internal tussles between the interests of poor consumers and poor producers, the interests of consumers have prevailed. Governments in grain-exporting countries have swung prices in favour of their consumers and against their farmers by banning exports. These responses further politicize and fragment an already confused global food market. They increase the risks of investing in commercial-scale food production and drive up prices further in the food-importing countries. Unfortunately, trade in agriculture has been the main economic activity to have resisted being subject to global rules. We need stronger and fairer globalization, not less of it.

GM could change that ratio

Could GM crops change that ratio James?

How do they make GM seed and can it be harvested or does it need to be manufactured?
I've been having a look but haven't found anything yet.

I guess the answer to the post is, possibly.
But it beats living in denial.

Its my understanding that agriculture is the manufacturing of comodities such as grain, oil , meat etc.
if GM increases yeald then it would be more effiecent on energy use

whether I'd be happy eating it is another thing
I just had a luvy plate of purple sprouting broccily I pick from the allotment an hour ago, with some rice that apparantly came from italy
and a pork chop from god knows where
but being a spoilt westerner I've got that choice ,
for the moment

I think the point is that too many western people are rather like upper class Victorian ladies who undertook embroidery in their leisure, or Marie Antoinette playing at milkmaids in her dairy at Versailles: virtually an insult to those living in the grinding poverty in those real occupations, whose rise into prosperity would come about solely through industrialisation and machinery.

Posted By: ecoworrierOn average it takes 10 Barrels of oil per person, per year to produce food.
As we reach peak oil, where is the energy going to come from to produce food
using large-scale commercial agriculture to supply the world?

A rock and a hard place - small scale agriculture may be 'sustainable', but it cannot sustain our population and it appears can risk long term stability of the farming system if I understand that article correctly. Large scale commercial agriculture can sustain our population but is dependant on oil which is finite.

However - where did you get that wonderful statistic from, ecowarrior? It sounds a little bit made up, and is very non-specific. Does it mean to feed the average wasteful American, including transporting food across continents, and from the supermarket to the home in a big SUV? If so there are clearly ways to drastically improve the efficiency. It's in the interest of the big commercial farms to improve their efficiency and maintain the fertility of the land they rely on, so perhaps the view of 'romantic greens' that big = bad is a little biased towards the idea of a pretty little victorian cottage garden? In the wake of massive increases in oil prices, I would be very suprised if the efficiency of the food chain didn't improve.

In some ways the hardest hit will be the mid scale farms (my family have run one such farm for generations) - these are the ones that cannot simply abandon 'industrial' farming techniques required for economic production of food for the western market, but cannot benefit from the advances in technology and infrastructure available to the large scale commercial farms.

Large commercial farms have made mistakes - after all, it's only in the last century that we've started to use chemical fertilisers - but are those mistakes inherent in such businesses, or can they be engineered out of the system as we understand our relationship with the environment better? Should the green movement be working with the likes of Tesco and large commercial farms to improve their practises, rather than treating them exclusively as the enemy that must be defeated?

As for GM crops, the vision of frankenstein foods has undoubtedly clouded the views of the public, when selective breeding has been used for centuries to produce plants and animals that are a million miles from their wild ancestors. Understanding of what exactly GM crops are is severely lacking in our 'educated' western society.

One other thought - the occasional references to population reduction (through disease, famine, war) are in incredibly bad taste as they tend to come from comfortable western white collar workers who can be confident that they'll be the last to be affected by such disasters. Such smugness is not appropriate, nor does it do anything to address the realities of the world we live in today.

OH GOD< SO MANY MEN advocating war and disease and famine. . . . . . For crying out loud!! and as for the veggies, blaming it all on the meat eaters. . . . . Its always everyone elses fault. . . . I am so angry. Sterilisation is not the answer, neither is disease war etc.

Its all down to EDUCATION AND THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN. . . . . Women don't want to have loads of babies because their religion says they can't use contraceptives, or they have to put up with rape. Women don't want their babies to die of starvation or disease. Women want access to good health care and enough food to feed the 1 or 2 kids they would have - if they could be sure of them reaching maturity - . The UK has a falling birthrate overall, and so do many other so called advanced societies. We give a woman a goal - other than having children - and she will take it - we give her children a chance to reach adulthood, and she won't keep having to get pregnant, we give her birth control, we protect her from rape and arranged marriages and all the other things that women have to put up with. Give us birth control and an education and we can do so much more than just be baby machines. Why don't we spend more time concentrating on the QUALITY of the human beings we produce, rather than the QUANTITY?

I wasn't going to comment on this tread, but it had been playing on my mind since last night and I just wanted to have my say.

Hi

Someone once said its a lot easier to save money than to earn it - so along these lines, cutting out wasteful behaviour is a good start.

I agree that even if we can change the behaviour of billions its still a tall order.

At the end of the day our populations are simply too large.

If you have more than two kids - perhaps three say - then you are replacing your two cars with three in twenty years time and so on with other energy consuming habits and consumables. Its all very well being a Green but if you have four kids then they are going to have to work twice as hard as you did to maintain the same footprint. I am not trying to make anyone feel bad but the relationships here are linear its hard really to escape some very simple truths.

This is not a "delicate" subject, its just plain obvious we need to start having fewer kids otherwise we create future demand on the environment, quite how you go about this is a whole other tin of worms of course.

Regards

Jon

Chris Wardle quote: " There is nothing humane or compassionate about standing by and watching billions more children be born into a world which is not capable of supporting them for the period of their natural lifespan."' '

I'm not advocating standing by. I am suggesting EDUCATION. This is not necessarily 'the subjects we learn in school', it is the values we encourage, aspire to and emulate.

I don't class myself as a feminist and I don't suggest forcing people to only have one child. I am just saying that if you can provide children with opportunities and personal autonomy, they are less likely to see the solution to their problems as producing more children. They might start to take responsibility for their own destinies. They might prefer to live their own life, rather than trying to live it vicariously through their offspring.

Its about showing people alternatives to their present life - the good and the bad, and then allowing them the freedom to make their own way. Our governments/councils should be making it EASIER to do good things and HARDER to do bad.

one small example and maybe more relevant to GREEN BUILDING practices than the present thread - but only slightly!

Our local council used to have a local tip/recycling centre. You took your stuff and they processed it. Organic stuff was composted, steel recycled etc. . . . . and in the middle of the tip was a space for people to put stuff they no longer wanted, but still had life - furniture, bathrooms, bikes, general stuff. I furnished my first house entirely from stuff I got from that tip. You paid the organisers a few pounds and got something you could customise and feel virtuous about. . . . . . THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA.

Then they sold the tip to a private company, who still processes the waste, but takes all the stuff that used to be reused, puts it in a container and transports it to SKIPTON (miles away) to sell it in the auction houses. . . . . .

This is an example of local government encouraging bad habits.

On a personal note, I try and encourage/champion participation in activities I consider to be worthwhile such as the green building ideas I get from this website, belonging to the freecycle network and finding ways of recycling the things I consume. I am trying to show by example. . . . in the hopes that others will feel supported and encouraged enough to follow.

Sory I forgot, Dyson vacuum cleaners dumped at the tip, every time I go there I always see 3-6 of them. The Mk1 (?) I had also stopped sucking. The central tube blocks up with muck that escapes the outer see-through container, 1/2 Hr ratling a garden cane in it and getting a bucketful of gunge out of it, it all worked again. I complained to Dysons and they gave me a new container. Only time will tell if its a cure. Yeh I know I can't help trying to fix things.
Frank

It is not so much the "greens" I have a beef with, provided they have the courage of their convictions and live by the tenets they preach, it is the people who "go Green" because it is the cool thing to do. These people will go to the supermarket and buy the organic food at inflated prices, drive their Toyota Prius during the week and look smugly at everyone who does not. They will also preach at me to become vegeterian as green stuff is cheaper and more environmentally friendly to produce. They will however sit and watch their widescreen telly in the evening, leave it on stand by all the time, drive the chelsea tractor to far off places at the weekend, fly off to go skiing twice a year etc. as well as maintaining a stable full of ponies for Henrietta to ride once a week. Fine, that is their choice and I will not argue with them as they have a perfect right to do this. However, they do not have the right to pontificate at me just because I may not be able to afford to do some of the more "visible" green things. I do what I can to look after the environment in my way. They do not have the right to treat me like dirt because I go out in an evening and shoot rabbits or pigeons for a local farmer, and clean and gut them and eat them or give them to others to eat. The meat I eat in that instance has cost the environment less than the lentils and mung beans which have been farmed and flown in for them to eat. The time I spend out in the fields, I do not have heating, telly and other consumer items on. Who is more "green" then? I also object to being forced to pay more for everything by a government whose only wish is to be seen to be going green, rather than introducing policies which might actually make a difference.

Ok, rant over! Sorry to go on.

Well, well, well, typical western approach - it's not MY fault it's EVERYBODY elses but if you'd done it MY WAY it wouldn't have happened!

Rubbish! but go your own way there's to much Utter Garbage spoken on here that it's difficult to know where to start, so I'll save my breath and won't bother! Your not listening anyway!! Frank VAT IS Purchase Tax!! Ludite get away from the worn out rheotic and you'll be close - for a woman () Joey your comments on the state of Africa, if they were not so serious would be downright hilarious!! Enjoy people

Walrus, VAT is not purchase tax, its a tax put on by the EEC to finance lazy French farmers, build roads in Poland etc. Purchase Tax was a tax put on luxury goods by a Goverment trying to deter foreign imports while trying to rebuild an infrastrucure wrecked by WW2.
Frank