“If the world is saved it will be saved because the people living in it have a new vision.” –Daniel Quinn
No one wants to admit that the food supply we depend on could ever be in jeopardy, or that food prices are not as stable as they once were.
We want to take comfort and security in the fact that our grocery store shelves and markets are always stocked with the foods we love, and that year after year, we spend only a small percent of our income on food.
A picture is beginning to emerge into mainstream consciousness that could shatter this comfort and security, however.
It can be seen in films like Food Inc., recently nominated for an Academy Award, which details the grotesque and completely unsustainable practices of our modern agriculture industry. It can be seen in television specials highlighting the same issues, like David Suzuki’s The Nature of Things two part series on “Corporate Agriculture” and “Alternative Agriculture”.
Canadian historian and international affairs writer Gwynne Dyer called it in 2008: “The current spike in food prices will ease, but the long-term problem is real, because the 200-year trend of falling food prices is probably at an end.”
Dyer attributes rising food costs to population growth, increased meat eating in rapidly industrializing countries like China and India (producing meat consumes enormous quantities of grain), global warming, and bio-fuels.
“The worst damage is being done by the rage for ‘bio-fuels’ that supposedly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and fight climate change… …Thirty percent of this year’s US grain harvest will go straight to an ethanol distillery, and the European Union is aiming to provide 10 percent of the fuel used for transport from bio-fuels by 2010. A huge amount of the world’s farmland is being diverted to feed cars, not people,” he wrote.
To top it all off, there are even more factors contributing to unstable food prices in the current system, not the least of which are rising farm input costs such as fuel, feed, fertilizer, water, and electricity.
On the surface, one could attribute this to a simple case of supply and demand issues, as the world’s demand for fossil fuels and numerous other resources critical for food production skyrocket at the same time as supply is beginning to peak and even decline.
The truth is, however, that supply and demand issues only tell part of the story. There is also an element of greed involved here, leading us to the next problem: corporate control of our food system.
A report to the House of Commons in March 2008 by the National Farmers Union (NFU) highlights this point powerfully.
“According to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, over the past two decades farm families have produced and sold more than two-thirds of a trillion dollars worth of farm goods, and the markets have rewarded them with not one penny of net income. 100% of farm families’ net incomes have come from some combination of taxpayer support programs, off-farm work, and borrowed money,” noted the report.
“But if farmers didn’t keep a penny of that two-thirds of a trillion dollars, where did it go? It went to input supply corporations. Over the past 20+ years, Monsanto, Agrium, Cargill, Deere, Royal Bank, and their like hoovered up 100% of the $689 billion originally paid to farm families. In rural Canada, there is a sucking sound.”
As the NFU then points out, over the past 20 plus years, taxpayers have contributed $68 billion in order to help keep farmers on the land via subsidies. That’s $9,000 for every family in Canada.
The report continues: “Considered from some angles, that $9,000 per taxpaying family appears to be more a subsidy to the largest agribusiness companies than a subsidy to farmers… …Fertilizer corporations are earning unprecedented profits—5 to 6 times higher than levels earlier in this decade.”
To add insult to injury, fertilizer and other farm input companies are increasing their margins at much higher rates than prices for their own inputs are going up. Information from phosphate fertilizer producer Mosaic, for example, shows that its margins on phosphate fertilizers have spiked to levels more than three times higher than levels seen in 2005.
In other words, fertilizer and other input companies are using higher prices of their own production inputs as an excuse to raise their product prices to unnecessarily high levels in order to increase profits.
So what does a secure food system look like? We know what it doesn’t look like, and that’s a system that depends on and trusts corporate interests to provide us with healthy, affordable food. It’s a system, as reported by the United Nations, that has already destroyed 40% of the world’s agricultural land due to unsustainable farming practices. And it’s a system that is completely dependent on limited oil and natural gas supplies to fertilize, produce, ship, store and stock our food.
On the other hand, what a sustainable and resilient system looks like is up to us. It’s not a matter of whether we think we can or can’t do it, and it’s not a matter of waiting for someone else to fix the problem. We must do it ourselves, and that means locally.
So where do we go from here? These are the sorts of questions we need to ask ourselves, and luckily, we have begun to ask them.
If we don’t come together and create a vision for a more resilient and sustainable food system, we’re going to get the visions of other people, with motives not necessarily directed toward our best interests. Just as importantly, after creating the vision, we must begin to make it a reality. Although this process has already started, we need many more people to become involved to create large scale change.
