GMOs are N O T the Solution to the Current Global Food Crisis

In the current game of political football, as the world's leaders meet to discuss the means by which the current global food crisis might be solved, there seems to be a growing momentum building around support for a solution based on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The suggestion is that the world's industrial seed companies (e.g. Monsanto, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland) should develop new genetically modified strains of food crops able to produce higher yields in the face of shifting global climates brought about by global warming.

Haven't we been here before? Aren't GMOs a major part of the reason we have gotten to this point?

The Green Revolution of this past half century came about as a response to the last global food crisis. It was centered on the use of high-yield GMO seeds, the liberal use of soil and water polluting artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, large-tract, mechanized, industrial agriculture, high density irrigation using mechanical pumps and water drawn from both increasingly polluted surface water and and dangerously over extracted groundwater sources, an energy-intensive global food distribution system. It was based on the industrial production of food and the building of a global industrial dependence through the supplying of food to the world's poor, rather than supplying to them the ability to produce their own food. And ultimately it created the current global food crisis through allowing, even encouraging, a tripling of the world's population from a little more than two billion to the current 6.6 billion with a new U.S. (300 million people) added to the population every year.

So what's the problem? The problem is that the Green Revolution was and continues to be dependent on the constant availability of cheap energy, especially cheap oil. GMOs are a high-tech solution to a natural problem. And high-tech means high energy consumption.

A problem cannot be its own solution. We cannot solve the current global crisis caused by the Green Revolution by doing more of the same. Those high yields on which the Green Revolution was based come at the expense of tremendous loss of life-supporting topsoil through erosion and overcropping, and the irreversible destruction and drawdown of both surface water and groundwater (aquifers) sources. It has led to the unsustainable destruction of forests critical to the planet's ability to balance the climate, and critical to the planet's water cycle, atmospheric cycle and carbon cycle. To seek to solve those problems with even more industrial agriculture and even higher yields, which will undoubtedly require higher uses of petrochemicals and water and the higher loss of critical topsoil, is no solution at all.

Most importantly, the Green Revolution was, as mentioned above, dependent on abundant cheap energy. A key part of the reason the current crisis has developed as that the world's oil supplies are declining at a rate that has pushed us toward various alternative fuel sources. The most critical of those, of course, is biofuels which have directly contributed to the current, escalating global food crisis. To move forward into a future that will be even more deprived of the cheap abundant energy on which the Green Revolution depends with a strategy that will perpetuate that agricultural need of cheap, abundant energy is taking the crisis of today, pushing it out a couple of decades and transforming it from a crisis into a catastrophe.

The Green Revolution has already allowed - almost demanded - the global human population to push into serious overshoot. There is not enough global agricultural capacity to support the present global human population, let alone the additional human population that would result from a second Green Revolution. To attack the current global food crisis without also addressing the very sensitive and complex problem of human overpopulation and the need for global population control is to offer no solution at all.

The Approaching Peak Export of Everything

Over the past half century we have become a truly global society. To those responsible, and perhaps millions or even billions of others, it seemed a good idea at the time. Many others, and steadily more through the benefit of hindsight, think otherwise.

There are no nations that are wholly disconnected from the global trade system, even among the most impoverished of third world countries. The whole concept of national self-sufficiency and self-reliance seems, in fact, to temporarily have been largely abandoned, at least in the developed, industrialized nations. The collateral damage in civilian lives in even the most minor of skirmishes, when long supply lines get disrupted, increases daily.

As we approach Peak Oil, if in fact we have not already arrived there as of May 2005, this has increasingly serious implications. The ongoing state of denial in the halls of government, business and industry, aided and abetted by the institutionalized apathy and outright disinformation in corporate-controlled mainstream media, is even more serious still.

Of late, those in the Peak Oil movement have begun to realize that peak oil is not going to be the defining watershed they had anticipated. That watershed, it is now realized, will precede peak oil, if it is still in the future, by a crisis in the global reduction of oil exports, peak oil exports. Whether or not we are yet arrived at peak oil, in fact, we very much appear to have already passed peak exports.

With increased oil revenues in the producing/exporting nations like those in the middle east comes an increased level of affluence for their citizens. That greater affluence means increased energy consumption at home with growing demand for automobiles and energy-consuming durable goods, but often dramatically increased with ventures like massive, year-round, 24-hour-a-day, indoor snow-ski facilities in the middle of the scorching desert.

No one in the developed countries - we are, after all, the primary importers and consumers of that oil - should begrudge those people their increased affluence, especially as it generally still does not approach the level of affluence in those western nations. But they do. That is partly, it appears, based on the sense of entitlement that has developed in western nations concerning the world's oil. We see it as ours. We are happy to buy it from the producing nations, seemingly irregardless of price, but are not willing to share it with them, even though it comes out of the ground in their country. So it is not the increased affluence that bothers people in developed nations, though it well could if that were to rival our own, but rather the increased energy consumption, particularly of oil, that goes along with it.

The wealth and affluence of western nations, we are constantly reminded through incessantly repeated phrases like good old American ingenuity, was built on the innovative use of the energy in oil to invent and develop the wondrous and complex new technologies on which the developed world is based. The energy from oil drives our technological societies, fuels that continued innovation, propels man out into space, to the depths of the oceans and to the frigid regions of the poles. The energy from oil has made western nations, in our own collective minds at least, not just rulers of the world but masters of the universe.

The expensive cars and home entertainment systems and heated indoor pools are perks, rewards for each of our roles in building that complex, technological society. They are not, as they appear to be in the developing world, their own raison d'etre. They are not the goal but simply the rewards for achieving it. The rising affluence in those oil-exporting nations is being purchased, not earned. The money with which it is being purchased derives from the same technological development of those first world nations in which the affluence is earned through innovation. In those first world nations energy from oil is being invested to build and power a society and culture. In those oil exporting nations the money paid by those first world nations for that oil is being squandered building decadent toys. So believes the populace of those oil-consuming, first-world nations.

This may not be a conscious belief or even a belief of our own choosing. It is a belief fostered largely by the corporate-controlled news media. We are constantly bombarded with images of the massive contradictions in those oil-exporting nations, the brutal suppression of women's rights, the abject poverty and virtual slavery of the lower classes, the constant violence and brutality in the streets, the wars, the terrorism, the roadside bombs, the suicide bombers, the beheadings. These are all contrasted against the indoor ski hills, the fifty storey, sail-shaped, climate-controlled hotels with helicopter pads on the roof, the private golf courses, the wealthy enclaves of new homes on land expensively reclaimed from the sea. There is no middle ground, just squalor and opulence, paupers and kings, sons of paupers and princes.

This is further contrasted against the constant images from our own society of our technology, our innovation, our ventures into space, our unending scientific achievements, our application of our innovative technology, and bolstered by the constant reminder of our reinvestment of the wealth accrued from our achievements in further research and development to assure an even better tomorrow. With our wealth we are building the future. With theirs they are building toys for their present, decadent gratification.

All of this media focus on the extreme contrasts in those oil producing/exporting countries and between those countries and our own serves two aims. It builds begrudging public sympathy for the constant whining by the corporate oil majors about the increasing number of state-owned oil companies in the still-exporting nations and how their increasing resource nationalism blocks access to those reserves by those oil majors and their claimed superior development and extraction technology. It also builds that public belief in our oil entitlement and assuages our apathy and acceptance for our governments doing whatever is necessary to ensure ongoing access to our oil.

The borderline between decadent competitor and evil enemy is kept very thin through these caricatured methods of portraying the people and leadership of these oil producing/exporting nations. It perpetuates the us and them mentality. The angst that it builds in the populace of our own nations over the constantly escalating price of gasoline and other commodities can very easily and quickly be parlayed into an acceptance of the need to wage war if our access to our oil is in any way diminished or threatened.

Let us be clear what it is that is being demonized as resource nationalism. It is somewhat akin to someone of middle age becoming suddenly conscious of their own mortality and deciding to take a little better care of their health. The government and leadership of those oil producing/exporting nations are becoming aware of their own nation's mortality, or at lease that of their goose that lays the golden eggs. They are suddenly becoming conscious of the finiteness and approaching decline of their only tradeable resource. And they are becoming increasingly aware of their country's own future needs for that same resource. More importantly, the general populace of those nations is becoming increasingly aware of their future need of that resource. The affluence they are now becoming accustomed to, they realize, is dependent on not the sale but the consumption of that resource.

That realization by the people increases the tenuousness of the control the leadership has over their people. Ultimately control through government is only workable when the people are prepared to accept that control. The more aware they become of their collective power the more they expect/demand in return for accepting that control.

This all amasses as a delicate quandary for the leadership of those oil-producing/ exporting nations. Do they continue to supply oil to the developed nations as fast as they ask, in return for further increasing their own personal wealth, and risk losing control of their own people? Or do they ensure the ongoing support of their people and their submission to authority and control by withholding enough of that resource from the market to continue to build the affluence of their own people for the foreseeable future, thus risking the ire of the importing nations? I believe the answer has been selected. They fear their own people more than the rich western nations, especially since they have control of the energy that powers the technology that makes those nations powerful.

What is happening in the oil industry and the geopolitics that swirl around it almost certainly will not be going unnoticed in other critical industries built around globally traded resources and commodities like food, mineral resources, and others. Any resource or commodity moved about on the conveyor belt of global trade that is important or critical to the future survivability of the source nation must, in the wake of what is happening with oil, be looked at by those nations in the same critical light. The same basic quandary will exist for all. What is more important; the short term building of elitist wealth and affluence that cannot be sustained or the long term survivability of the nation and its people? The closer any resource gets to depletion the more critical that issue becomes.

It has become increasingly difficult in our modern world for even the most dictatorial and authoritarian leadership to withhold and hide information from its nation's determined citizenry. The internet has been an astoundingly important tool in bringing that situation about. In those nations where the leadership tries to maintain even the veneer of social freedoms keeping the people from that information is impossible.

As we have proven throughout our history, it does not require that the whole population be rocket scientists for the rocket to be invented. It likewise does not require that everyone understand the concept of finiteness or the geology of oil fields or the molecular biology and nutrient-absorption of plants for there to develop an understanding of the limits to our growth, a stark realization that infinite growth is not possible. That is the power of ideas and knowledge. Once they have sprung into being as a meme from the mind of even a single individual they are accessible by all, shareable by all, and can potentially be propagated through the entire human population. That is the power of the human intellect. Biological evolution, the dispersal of a new gene through even the local population of one species happens slowly over geological time. The dispersal of a new meme through the entire human population can happen very quickly, even instantaneously through mass, global communications.

Through the ongoing focus on and debate over a single resource in the peak oil dialogue more and more people throughout the world are becoming intensely aware of resource finiteness, of resource depletion, and of the implications for the users of that resource as depletion and exhaustion of that resource nears. Oil is critical to the structure and functioning of our modern society. As such, the potential of its depletion, the implications to that modern society of it eventually running out, the impact on our global, perpetual-growth economy of even a developing and growing insufficiency of it to meet our societal needs, is becoming increasingly worrisome and even frightening.

But that focus on oil's finiteness is causing more and more people to consider the finiteness of other resources and the impact that their depletion, individually or collectively, will have on our society as well. In addition, and perhaps far more importantly, the widespread use of oil, the awareness of the thousands of products derived from it, the critical importance of it in our modern agriculture and our ability to produce the food needed by our 6.6 billion population, has caused people to become increasingly conscious of the depth and breadth to which a resource is used, the applications of it, the depth of our society's dependence on it.

I have written several articles for the blog (Peak Oil is not About Running Out of Oil!!!! , Post-Peak Agricultural Capacity, Plant stomachs and animal stomachs: the differences and similarities, Plants with stomachs - Peak oil implications, Ethanol/bio-diesel vs food and Soil fertility and carrying capacity) discussing the implications of oil depletion on our ability to produce the food required by our massive and excessive human population. The crux of the problem is that our ability to feed ourselves, at our current population, has become critically dependent on oil and its close cousin, natural gas.

The fertilizers that sustain the artificial fertility and productivity in over-cropped, nutrient-depleted, organically-dead soils is produced from natural gas. The pesticides that have to be employed in ever-greater volumes to fight off the increasingly pesticide-resistant insects and pests that prey on our crops and the herbicides used in ever-increasing amounts to fight off the encroachment of adaptive, herbicide-resistant weeds are both derived from oil. The more we use pesticides and herbicides the more resistant the rapidly-evolving organisms become that we use them against. The species that are most seriously impacted over the long-term, in fact, are the slowly evolving species, such as ourselves and other mammals. We are creating an increasingly toxic world with our constant release of our agrochemicals into an environment that has not evolved to break them down and recycle them. Our chemicals simply continue to accumulate in the soil, in the water, in the atmosphere, and in the tissue of living creatures, including ourselves. The higher up the food chain a species is the more saturated their cells become with our toxic chemicals.

The energy to build the increasingly colossal farm machinery and irrigation systems and the fuel to run those machines is derived from oil. And the fuel that drives the global food distribution system - the food on your table travels an estimated average of 1,500 miles to get there - that powers the refrigeration critical to long-distance shipping and long-term storage is derived from oil. The energy that drives the food processing industry, that keeps the food fresh at 24-hour, air-conditioned supermarkets, is all driven by fossil fuels. It is reasonably estimated that ten calories of fossil fuel energy are consumed in the production, preparation and distribution of every single calorie of food.

But the consumption of fossil fuel energy in feeding the human population is not the issue, nor the point of this article. It is estimated that as much as fifty percent of the food consumed globally originates in a country other than that in which it is being consumed. Put another way, fifty percent of the food being produced in countries around the world is leaving the country where it is produced to feed other people. Even that food consumed within the country of origin may have traveled a considerable distance before being consumed, often exiting the country and subsequently returning after a circuitous trip through the global distribution system.

As the global population continues to rise, and the population within nations, the demand for resources by a nation's growing population increases. If there is an increase in affluence in the nation, such as is happening in oil-exporting countries, resource demands grow even faster. If it is a natural human tendency to share one's bounty with others less fortunate, others in need - and I do not accept, at least in the modern industrialized world, that it is - any desire to share diminishes drastically when that to be shared is critical to one's personal survival and is in short supply.

That sentiment also manifests at the national level. It is what is being observed in the so-called resource nationalism that is the current cause of concern in the energy field. Most nations are quite prepared to sell their resources and commodities, even donate some of them to nations and people in need. When that country does not have enough of that resource to satisfy its internal needs, however, that willingness to sell or share diminishes or, as will increasingly be the case, disappears. As the prospect rises of the potential depletion of that resource, and particular as that point nears, the future needs of the nation and its people becomes the focus as much as current needs.

There is no resource more critical to the survival of a nation or its people than food. But food is more than just..... food. It is the land on which it is grown, the water for irrigation, the labour/energy to plant, manage, harvest, and process the food, the seeds from which the crop is grown, the distribution system to get the product to market, the weather and climatic conditions needed for growing the crop, any equipment needed at whatever level of technology to produce the crop, and more. The sufficiency of all of these resources must be factored into any consideration of a nation's future ability to feed its own people.

When a person or a nation reaches that critical point of consciousness of the needs for a resource tomorrow as well as today the result can be a dramatic shift in the attitude of the sale or trading of that resource. It can also be a point of major confusion, as former recipients/purchasers of that commodity wonder at the cause of the change in attitude, especially so if their focus is strictly on today. It can also, whether on a local, personal level, or an international level when it involves nations and the global trade system, be the source of considerable conflict, even wars.

As is obvious by the concerns in the energy field over resource nationalism by certain nations, all people and nations are not going to reach this critical juncture with regard to all resources at the same time. They should. What applies to one resource for one nation applies to all resources for all nations. It is far more likely, however, that the development of these flashpoints will be piecemeal. One nation at a time will become conscious of its own future needs for a particular resource, nationalize it and cut back on the sale and export of that resource/ commodity.

From this point forward, however, we should begin to see an increasing pattern of such shifts in trade policy, an increased incidence of export curbs to protect a nation's future access to an important domestic resource/commodity. As we are approaching near-simultaneous peaks in so many widely used resources (most mineral resources, water, wood and other non-food agricultural products, etc.) the frequency of these events should definitely be on the increase over these next several years as we pass the peak of global oil and fossil fuel production and head down the downslope. We have built our modern world, and the global trade system, on the back of cheap and plentiful fossil fuels. We will all ride the downslope together.

Growing Global Export Crisis not restricted to Oil

It is only recently that people have started to wake up to the realization that peak oil - the point where global oil production reaches a peak and goes into a terminal decline - will be preceded by a global oil export peak. Until recently those in the developed nations of the first world had blithely assumed that all oil production in producing countries outside their own borders was available for export and available on the market for their import and purchase.

This, of course, failed to take into account the domestic needs for that oil in those producing/exporting countries. Domestic oil demand and consumption in those producing countries, such as those in OPEC - largely a function of increased affluence because of those very oil revenues - is growing faster than the growth in the rate of production. This means that not only will their exports decline as a result of peak oil, when they reach it, but also as a result of their rapidly increasing domestic consumption.

Internal demand, needless to say, will not diminish with declining production. Not only has the level of affluence in those producing/exporting nations risen but so has the population as citizens feel more confident about their children's futures as the level of affluence and job security rise. In many of those producing/exporting nations over 50 percent of the population is now under twenty years of age. This sets those nations up for a serious demand crunch just at the time their oil production and exports begin to diminish.

The steepness of the oil supply downslope on the other side of peak-oil/peak-exports will, in fact, be significantly greater than previously considered - as many presenters at the recent ASPO-USA conference in Houston stressed - and greater than the rate built into the majority of the oil depletion models. The rate of decline of oil availability will be a combination of the rate of production decline plus the rate of increased consumption in exporting countries. In the end, of course, it means that oil could cease to be available for purchase by major oil consuming nations long before the eventual point of oil depletion. The potential for wars to ensure a greater proportion of the remaining oil for importing nations increases markedly with this scenario.

But oil is not the only resource traded on the global market that will, in the near-term, experience an export crisis and serve as a potential source of conflict and wars. We live in an increasingly globalized society where there is a growing geographical separation between producer and consumer. Every tradeable commodity is ceaselessly moved around the globe, millions of tons of goods on the high seas and in the air and moving over land by rail and road transport every day. Sooner rather than later, as the global transportation/distribution system begins to break down for lack of fuel, that globalized movement of goods will run into serious problems. Demand will cease to be the driver of trade. Nor will it be driven by the rate at which production can be managed. Trade will be limited by the ability to get goods from producer to consumer, a limitation that will grow as fossil fuel supplies, particularly oil, go into decline and highly-indebted global shipping companies begin to collapse under the burden of fuel costs and shortages of fuel.

Relatively speaking, how big a problem is Peak Oil? Minor really, when you consider the implications of global Peak Food. Of the 194 food producing countries on the planet all but about fifteen are past or at Peak Food. Over 95-percent of all food producing countries are now net importers of food. In reality there is not one among the 194 nations on the planet that internally produces all of the food that its citizens consume. The citizens of net food importing nations are dependent for much of their primary nutritional needs on the dwindling agricultural excesses of that minuscule handful of fifteen net food exporters. This is particularly the case with global grain production and reserves. Grain and seeds are, after all, the most nutritionally-concentrated form of food that we eat.

Over the past several years the global emergency food grain reserves - established as part of the Green Revolution in the last century - have shrunk from a marginal 120-day supply to a critically low level of just 57 days. This level of reserve is deficient for offsetting any significant and widespread grain crop loss in areas such as Africa, South Asia, Eastern Europe and South America. All of these areas are not only the location of the largest proportion of food importing countries but also the areas where the earliest and most extreme impact of global warming will occur. Their risk of widespread local crop losses is extreme and getting moreso with each passing year. It is also not sufficient to cover any surge in demand from natural or man-made disasters during the Northern Hemisphere dormant season, the Northern Hemisphere being the source of the bulk of the world's food grains.

There is, however, an additional complication for the bulk of these food importing countries. Many, perhaps most of them, are net agricultural exporters. This may seem like a paradox but is not. The primary use of agricultural land in most of these countries is for the production of non-food cash crops. The land those nations need to produce their own food is tied up - usually by wealthy multi-national corporations, either directly or indirectly - producing cash crops like cotton, coffee, tea, rubber, cocoa, sugar, etc., or for the support of food animals for the production of export meat and dairy products. Much of the food agriculture in those nations is also committed for export (e.g. rice, nuts, dates, figs, wheat, corn and other grains, etc.), often under the control of or under contract to those same multinational food companies. Many of those nations are simultaneously agriculture rich and food poor. Despite a large base of agricultural land they cannot and do not produce enough food to feed their own people.

There is, of course, a strong an unbreakable link between peak oil, peak natural gas and peak food. And they will all occur at the same time. The artificial fertilizers that have allowed us to push our food production towards a peak, that we started climbing with the Green Revolution, is produced from natural gas. The herbicides and pesticides that have allowed us to protect our food crops from weeds, insect pests, and other plant diseases, are produced from oil. And the whole global food production and distribution system that transfers those food crop surpluses from the fifteen net food exporters to the 180 net food importers is critically dependent on the fuels produced from oil.

Many people take comfort in the belief and expectation that when things begin to deteriorate the government's first priority will focus on feeding it's citizens. That comfort may be misplaced as it does not bear out in the historical record. The majority of the worst famines of the twentieth century in which many millions of people have died, including current and recent ones such as that in Darfur, have been as much or more a function of government policy and geopolitics as they have been a matter of food shortages and crop losses. Food, unfortunately, is one of the first and preferred weapons of war, particularly internal and civil wars. Far more likely than a focus on ensuring food supplies, in fact, is that a government's first priority in hard times is security, particularly its own security and that of its elite and business leaders.

The fact that many of the agriculture exporting nations of the third and developing world have large proportions of their land under cultivation for exportable cash crops is, of course, a double edge sword. On the surface that would seem to suggest that those nations have large tracts of land that, when the global food distribution system begins to break down, can be turned to the production of food for the citizens of those nations. But those land holdings are in the hands of multinational companies or wealthy land owners. Without a focused program of nationalization and redistribution of those lands there is little likelihood that it will be voluntarily converted to local food production. But that land has generally been raped of its natural soil fertility by being bombarded with an annual systematic application of toxic agrochemicals and through consistent overproduction, and been subjected to a build up of soil salts through over irrigation. Turning it into productive food-producing soil will be a long-term process, too long to respond to a food emergency exacerbated by poor planning. In addition, the seeds and root stocks from which to produce the needed food will probably not be locally available and difficult to obtain externally with a faltering global distribution system.

If governments continue to bury their heads in the sand about peak oil and the implications for global transport and distribution the greatest crisis on our near term horizon will, in my opinion, be the reduction in the export of food and the inability to move food from producer to a growing mass of starving and malnourished people throughout the world. This is not and will not be a problem restricted to the third world. In developed nations like ours the grocery and food distribution system is built on just-in-time (JIT) principles. Our food travels an average of over 1500 miles from producer to consumer. Any serious disruption of the food distribution system could see our well-stocked supermarket shelves bare within a matter of days. We are, at the same time, in no better position than third world countries to gear up localized food production in response to a global food distribution emergency. We are, in general, even less skilled in producing food than those in third world nations and will, in fact, have a longer ramp up time than they will.

Politicians do not like publicly talking about problems unless they can offer solutions, especially problems that may not arise in the current election cycle. But the time and effort that will be needed to respond to a global food production and distribution crisis doesn't fit nicely into an election cycle. Our politicians, if they are to be of any use at all, must be prepared and have the courage to take a longer view, must be prepared to head off future crises rather than wait until they happen and respond to them. Unfortunately they see far more votes from fixing a problem than preventing it.