The announcement by the agricultural commissioner that she will try to get approval to suspend set-aside shows how out of touch with the reality of the world food situation they are. They have allowed European intervention stocks to fall from 14 million tonnes to 2.5 million tons – nowhere near enough if we have a disastrous harvest, which given the extreme weather we have been having is more than a possibility.
Even now, the suspension has to be agreed by EU farm ministers and so it could be early October before we know for sure. That is a disgraceful situation. Farmers need to plan their cropping now, buy seed and start cultivations.
Fischer Boel said that global closing stocks are expected to fall to their lowest in 28 years and she expects high prices to persist due to a combination of bad harvests, as well as growing demand for cereals, in particular maize, for bio-ethenol.
The suspension of set-aside is welcome, but the commission should now be doing all it can to encourage production by other means so that grain stocks reach safe levels. Most set-aside is on poor land or is growing industrial crops, and anyone driving through mainland Europe sees very little set-aside, so the extra production may not be very great.
One Response
TopVeg Says:
July 21st, 2007 at 5:58 pm
John
An interesting article. Do you think the EU farm ministers would wake up if they had a tour of the crops devasted by the floods?
TopVeg
Even though there is still some relatively small areas of underused land in parts of the old Soviet Union and elsewhere, worldwide we are losing vast areas to desertification, salination and the paving over for new housing, industry roads and other transport infrastructure.
Most unused land in the world is either too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, too steep or too rocky. With rapid urbanisation happening in most parts of the world, it’s mainly using up flat, fertile land on coastal plains or near rivers. Cities are rarely built in deserts or on mountain sides. China’s population is expected to stabilize at 1.6 billion by 2030 and by then the urban population will have increased by 350 million to 880 million. Analysts from Investec say that to house these people will need almost 50 cities the size of greater London It is hard to imagine the loss of good agricultural land this will cause, but similar urbanisation is taking place in India and the rest of the world.
Most land that has been brought in to farming recently is from rainforest. This is, of course, an ecological disaster and is being discouraged, but in any case much of the rainforest now being destroyed is going in to biofuel production, either palm oil for biodiesel or sugar cane for ethenol.
With world population expected to increase by 1.4 billion to 8 billion by 2025, and most wanting to move up the food chain by eating more meat, there will surely soon be a desperate shortage of good farmland.
It seems that the early victims of climate change will be people in places like the Pacific islands and parts of Africa who have emitted very little in the way of greenhouse gas. Cathy Marks reports in The Independent:
“Veu Lesa, a 73-year-old villager in Tuvalu, does not need scientific reports to tell him that the sea is rising. The evidence is all around him. The beaches of his childhood are vanishing. The crops that used to feed his family have been poisoned by salt water. In April, he had to leave his home when a “king tide” flooded it, showering it with rocks and debris.
“For Tuvalu, a string of nine picturesque atolls and coral islands, global warming is not an abstract danger; it is a daily reality. The tiny South Pacific nation, only four metres above sea level at its highest point, may not exist in a few decades. Its people are already in flight; more than 4,000 live in New Zealand, and many of the remaining 10,500 are planning to join the exodus. Others, though, are determined to stay and try to fight the advancing waves.
“The outlook is bleak. A tidal gauge on the main atoll, Funafuti, suggests the sea level is climbing by 5.6mm a year, twice the average global rate predicted by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“There is not enough data yet to establish a definitive trend but that figure is alarming, implying a rise of more than half a metre in the next century. Most Tuvaluans live just one to two metres above sea level.
“Funafuti’s tranquil lagoon is adorned by a necklace of cream islets, each one tufted with dense vegetation. There used to be seven. Now there are six. The other one disappeared after a series of cyclones in the late 1990s. First, the palm trees were stripped off, then the sand, then the soil beneath. All that remains is a forlorn scrap of rubble, visible at low tide. It is an ominous indicator, in miniature, of what awaits Tuvalu’s larger, populated islands.
“Of all the low-lying nations menaced by global warming, little Tuvalu has been most vocal in the international arena. It recognised the threat early on, and successive governments have lobbied hard to alert the outside world to its predicament. The country – formerly one half of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, a British protectorate – joined the UN and the Commonwealth in order to raise its profile, and sent diplomats on globe-trotting missions.
“Six or seven years on, Tuvaluans concluded that the international community – particularly the big industrialised nations puffing vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – does not care. ‘They never listened when we asked for help,’ says Enate Evi, director of the Environment Department. ‘To be honest, I think they only care about themselves, and their economic advantage. That’s how it feels, sitting here’.”
One Response
TopVeg Says:
July 24th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
Fred Pearce’s book @The Last Generation’ gives a frightening view of global warming.
Biofuel production, as it is done now, has a poor energy balance in that the amount of fossil fuel energy used to grow the crop, transport it and then turn it in to fuel can sometimes be almost as much as the energy in the biofuel.
The second question is if we should be turning food crops in to fuel when world reserve food stocks are running low just at the time when extreme weather events are causing food production problems in many areas.
Second generation biofuels are made from plant-derived waste such as straw, forestry waste or food waste. They can also use purposely grown crops or managed woodland. There are several companies working to produce enzymes cheap enough to make the process viable and the first commercial plants are now being built.
Today The Independent said:
“Short-term, the answer to the ‘food vs fuel’ debate is that the world needs to make tough choices: fossil fuel burning accounts for 75 to 85 per cent of global CO2 emissions; deforestation accounts for 15 to 25 per cent, so we can see where the imperative lies.
“The good news is that ’second generation’ and more innovative biofuels – on a 10-year timescale – pose less tough choices. Biofuels derived from straw, timber, manure, rice husks, agriwaste of any description, even sewage and methane from landfill waste – all could play a part with little detriment to food prices or rainforests. They also tend to be more fuel-efficient and cleaner; the US government claims a 91 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions. Add in hybrid technology in cars, higher agricultural productivity (Malthus was wrong, after all), and suddenly carbon neutrality seems almost achievable.
“If our mighty auto and oil industries bend themselves to that task, then the future can be bright, green and profitable”
The problem is that the timescale is too long if we want to keep CO2 levels down to acceptable levels at the same time as we put off oil and gas depletion. This really should have massive government spending to speed things along.
The extreme weather events that we are seeing in many parts of the world, are being made more frequent and more severe by global warming according to most experts. Although we have always had times of droughts, floods and hurricanes, the change brought on by around 1C of warming should make us extremely worried about the effect of a rise of the 3C or more that now seems certain unless radical steps are taken.
Over the last few years, extreme weather events bad enough to hit food production have happened in almost every part on the world though thankfully not at the same time. These problems have helped to bring world food stocks down to such a dangerous level that further severe droughts, floods or wet harvests would push us in to real food shortages.
Right now in the U.K. we are suffering from very wet conditions just as the cereal and oilseed harvest begins. Many pea crops have simply died as their roots cannot stand waterlogged conditions for very long. Potato fields are suffering from outbreaks of blight as it is so wet that farmers can’t get on the land to apply their normal fungicide programme. Up here in East Yorkshire, on the few occasions when harvesting has been possible, many combines have sunk down to their axles. We desperately need a period of dry weather now.
In contrast, Eastern Europe has had extremely high temperatures. Australia has had several years of drought followed by floods in some places. The U.S. has also had severe drought but luckily, the main grain growing areas have not been too badly hit.
The lesson that we should be learning from this is that we must keep warming down to levels where we have some chance of coping. Experts say that radical action to reduce emissions now could limit warming to about +2C. and maybe we could cope with that. In my opinion, more then that would cause such difficulties that famine would be the result.
One Response
Buy Famine in the West Printed Book £6.49 +pp
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