BAD: Hunger and Climate Change
Here is my whole, unedited post for Blog Action Day 2009 which originally posted at the Give Life Meaning blog. This version includes a line about shooting oneself, an important discussion about nitrogen and this handsome chart about the nitrogen life-cycle.
It’s Blog Action Day 2009, a day when the bloggers unite online for a cause. It’s sort of like USA for Africa’s “We are the World,” except with 50% less singing, 100% more typing and 23% more Hall and Oates (at least in my case). This year, the cause is climate change, which makes this year’s Blog Action Day sort of like “blogosphere for the atmosphere.”
The topic got me thinking to 2003 when the Pentagon was asked what they thought was the biggest threat to national security. The Pentagon didn’t say terrorism. They didn’t say banking, national health care or reality shows.
They said climate change.
That’s right. The Pentagon, still recovering after 9/11, in a time when the correct answer to any question was global terrorism, said the greatest risk to U.S. national security was climate change.
Not because we would get a little hot, or that Al Gore would win the Nobel Peace Prize, but because climate change would lead to world-wide hunger, food insecurity and famine, which would foment political instability and war.
In the end, it all comes back to food. The report here is pretty unsettling.
Climatically, the gradual change view of the future assumes that agriculture will continue to thrive and growing seasons will lengthen…Overall, global food production under many typical climate scenarios increases. This view of climate change may be a dangerous act of self-deception, as increasingly we are facing weather related disasters – more hurricanes, monsoons, floods, and dry-spells – in regions around the world. [Emphasis mine]
This reminds me of the halcyon days before 2008, when all signs pointed to an economy would continue to expand, unabated. There were a few people who sagely saw the meltdown coming but 99.9% of us ignored the warning signs that our economy was deeply troubled. We know how that ended. Now try, if you can, to imagine the banking collapse of 2008 translated to The Climate, a system that no government can bail out or nationalize.
Weather-related events have an enormous impact on society, as they influence food supply, conditions in cities and communities, as well as access to clean water and energy. For example, a recent report by the Climate Action Network of Australia projects that climate change is likely to reduce rainfall in the rangelands, which could lead to a 15 per cent drop in grass productivity. This, in turn, could lead to reductions in the average weight of cattle by 12 per cent, significantly reducing beef supply. Under such conditions, dairy cows are projected to produce 30% less milk, and new pests are likely to spread in fruit-growing areas. Additionally, such conditions are projected to lead to 10% less water for drinking. Based on model projections of coming change conditions such as these could occur in several food producing regions around the world at the same time within the next 15-30years, challenging the notion that society’s ability to adapt will make climate change manageable.
That’s only the introduction. The rest of the report makes you want to shoot yourself.
As the climate has been slowly changing, we have begun to see more water tension, more soil erosion and therefore less fertility and harsher growing conditions. Steven Chu, a Nobel Laureate and President Obama’s Secretary of Energy, said, “I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen. We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”
Growing food is a delicate interaction between seed, soil and water to harvest the energy of the sun. The seed’s journey to food can only take place in nutrient rich soil and temperate climates. California did not become the nation’s largest agricultural producer because of chance. It had an ideal climate and the Haber process had found a way to quickly fix nitrogen to make inorganic fertilizer.
Natural methods of fertilization like spreading manure, composting waste and growing cover crops takes time. The use of synthetic fertilizer increased our food production by leaps and bounds and in the era of industrialization, this practice was unbelievably productive and we thrived. A full 40% of the world’s population is alive today because of our ability to synthetically fix nitrogen.
However, in an unfortunate Catch-22, fixing nitrogen – and therefore modern agriculture itself – is fatally dependent on fossil fuels, the burning of which is a key contributor to climate change. On average, 10 calories of fossil fuel energy must be burned in order to produce 1 calorie of food energy. The largest portion of fossil fuel usage (40%) goes into the creation of the synthetic, nutrient-rich fertilizers (and pesticides) on which industrial agriculture depends.
This is why when the price of oil went through the roof last summer, food prices went right along with them. Gas had become too expensive but farmers adapted by running their machinery less. They couldn’t, however, buy less fertilizer, which had skyrocketed in price. Once you introduce large amounts of synthetic fertilizer to soil, as we have over the last sixty years, it needs more and more to maintain its level of productivity; in this way, synthetic fertilizer is soil’s methamphetamine.
The spike in food prices had a terrible effect on hunger nationwide. As food prices rose, wages stagnated. Here locally, many Angelenos fell off the edge of getting by and became food insecure. Unfortunately, since food prices are sticky, once they go up, they aren’t quick to come down because the their prices are set by companies (the prices for commodities are set daily on an open market). As unemployment has ripped through Los Angeles County, more and more people are out of work and having to deal with high food prices, driving a record number of people to food pantries.
Conventional agriculture, though abundantly productive, is in an existential bind. It is at once intrinsically tied to nature and dependent on a temperate climate, yet its very practice, if continued in its current fashion, furthers the very changes in climate that will bring about its – and our – demise.
On the other hand, sustainable agriculture, which develops and fosters natural, holistic relationships between the environment and food production, still has many very serious questions to answer about whether it can feed and sustain a worldwide population that is expected to jump to 9 billion by 2050.
Thankfully, very smart and committed people are beginning to talk about this stuff. Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson and Fred Kirschenmann, three of the most thoughtful men on this subject, advocate a 50-year farm bill. Michael R. Dimock’s Roots of Change is rolling out an awareness and education campaign on the nitrogen challenge that we face. MacArthur fellow Will Allen and his Growing Power organization will revolutionize urban agriculture.
Agriculture and the climate are so closely tied that you can’t fix one system without fixing the other. We must examine our food system in order to create improved systems of production and distribution to end hunger, take control of rising health care costs and slow climate change. Here are some things you can do to fight hunger and climate change:
- Help green L.A. by planting a food garden in your home or in a community garden
- Donate your harvest to food banks and food pantries
- Learn about sustainable agriculture practices
