Trouble in the Food Chain

I stopped at Tom Thumb the other day to pick up stuff for our dinner salad. The only cucumbers they had were organic. I wasn’t about to pay $5 for one of those beasties so I went to Kroger and got a conventionally grown one for $1, still steep I thought. Now I’m not going to blame the global food crisis on organic tofu but the incident did illustrate the perils of diverting crop land to marginally productive uses. Maybe more corn for ethanol isn’t the best way to do our bit for the planet. Heaven help us if we start using organically grown ethanol. I read today that the high price of fertilizer is driving farmers in Iowa to replace commercial fertilizer with hog manure. It takes about 100 pounds of it to provide the basic nutrient of a pound of regular fertilizer. It takes tons of it to produce expected yields on an acre of corn. That’s a lot of pig poop.

Ethanol isn’t the only culprit in this or even the major one. The biggest factor seems to be an improvement in global nutrition. People are eating more and better. That’s good news isn’t it? It’s not like the typical Vietnamese child is sitting around watching television and eating fast food but his parents are a foot taller that their parents were. That’s because they had a better diet growing up. The same thing happened in Japan after WWII. The explosion in crop yields that came with the Green Revolution let us feed an expanding population, and feed it better that ever before in human history. Now it’s catching up to us with an interlocking network of bad government agricultural policy, high prices for the oil and natural gas needed to produce fertilizers and transport the crops, growing resistance to innovations in agronomy such as genetic crop modification, and of course greater prosperity allowing people to demand better food.

This could be the sleeper issue in this year’s presidential campaign. None of the candidates seem prepared for it. They are coming up with half baked ideas on how to deal with a spike in gasoline prices, and none at all for how to react to what seems likely to be a permanent rise in demand for limited supplies of food. If we begin to see spot shortages this could get serious in a hurry. If we begin to see wide spread hoarding, and we’ve already seen some, the whole thing could spiral quickly out of control. This is food we’re talking about. It was a bread riot that sparked the Russian Revolution for Pete’s sake.

There appear to be a number of long term solutions to this, but precious few of them get us through the rest of this year. Better irrigation techniques would work new miracles. The Israelis have shown us that. Much of the worlds’ arable land is still poorly managed. That’s a political problem that could be solved if we put our minds to it but it will take years to turn it around. We have hardly begun to develop the oceans’ potential for aquaculture. This old planet still has a lot to give.

It’s time we put some serious thought into this, and this spring’s early warning signs should prompt us to take some short term precautions. We might consider slowing down the diversion of food crops to non-food uses. We might want to temporarily take some land out of conservation programs and plant it this year. Conservationists, environmentalists, hunters, and everybody else with a vested interest in the current arrangements will all scream to high heaven. But we have had a few shots across our bow on this issue. It would be a lot easier to avoid a crisis than to deal with one in progress. I doubt we’ll see riots in the US but we’re seeing them around the world. Prices are up. Demand is up. Supplies are down. People have to be fed and that food has to come from somewhere. This year’s harvest is going to need a boost.