EVENTS

Howard Memorial Lecture

Women: Shaping the Future of Food, 2 October 2006

1.         Introduction

I am truly honoured and delighted to have been asked to give one half of the 7th Howard Memorial Lectures here in Delhi tonight.   There can surely be no better way of honouring the life of Mahatma Gandhi, whose birthday we remember today, than by celebrating the connections between sustainable, local production of food, in harmony with the environment, and the traditions of peace and local self-reliance so passionately lived and promoted by Gandhi.

The title of these lectures is Women: Shaping the Future of Food, and I'd like to start by reading out a remarkable statement by a group of women in Britain, which sums up many of the changes I believe are urgently needed to the industrialised food model.  These are the women of the National Federation of Women's Institutes - the UK’s largest national voluntary organisation for women, but not one particularly known for radical thinking.  It has some 215,000 members, in 7,000 Women's Institutes across England, Wales and Scotland. It is an educational and social organisation that particularly represents the views of women in rural communities - and I think you might be surprised at how progressive their position is on the vital issue of food security:

"We must meet as much of our food and other essential needs as possible, to the highest environmental, animal welfare and labour standards, and, if necessary and possible, produce some surplus food and other goods for use by those countries that are less able to produce what they need.  If we fail to do this and reduce our self-sufficiency, we will be contributing to the more intensive use of land in other parts of the world and thus be failing in our global responsibilities.  We must not export our problems or the responsibility for solving those problems.  At the same time, however, we must avoid over-production and dumping on world markets, which would undermine sustainable production and livelihoods in other countries."

I have to say that I think that is a statement of remarkable insight from groups, not of agricultural experts, but of ordinary women across the UK, who recognise that sustainability and self-reliance should lie at the heart of our food and agriculture policies.   Sadly, however, this view is far from being shared by our government, either in Britain or in the European Union.   To the contrary, official UK and EU agriculture policies are driven by the desire for ever greater globalisation and industrialisation.

In my lecture tonight, I'm going to focus on the social and environmental costs of this model of food production, and make the case that the ever increasing trade and transport of foods is destroying both farmers' livelihoods, and the environment on which we all depend.   I'll also look at the role of industrialised agriculture in the spread of diseases like avian flu.    And I'll conclude that the way forward is through a re-localisation of our food supply, a radically different way forward based on greater self-reliance and less dependence on international food markets.

2.  The Great Food Swap

I think we have to start by acknowledging that agriculture is in crisis. In both the developed and developing worlds, farmers are losing their livelihoods, and monocultures are suffocating the rich intricacies of the rural economy, as well as causing massive soil erosion, destroying natural habitats and reducing biodiversity.

And in an era when more than enough food is produced to feed the world, millions go hungry. The World Food Programme estimates that 40 million people in Africa are currently in urgent need of food aid, and according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, half of India’s population is malnourished. Even in a prosperous country like the UK, 7 per cent of the population – four million people – live in food poverty.

The response of the world’s largest economic powers to this crisis is starkly hypocritical. The G8, particularly the US and EU, maintain massive agricultural subsidies at home, yet demand the liberalisation of agriculture abroad.

The twin forces of the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) and the structural adjustment policies of the IMF are also forcing developing countries, often against their better judgement, to gear production to the export market. Already volatile markets for cash crops have been flooded as more countries are forced to export the same range of basic commodities, and the prices farmers receive for their produce have collapsed as a result.

For example, in the mid-1990s the IMF bulldozed Haiti into liberalising its rice markets.  As a result, it was flooded with cheap US imports and local production collapsed, destroying tens of thousands of rural livelihoods. A decade ago Haiti was self-sufficient in rice; today it spends half of its export earnings importing rice from the USA.

Countries are being forced to compete to produce each other’s food as cheaply as possible and at the expense of domestic production. Local food security is being swapped for mandatory trade rules that are biased toward agribusiness, industrial production, and long-distance transport.  Not long ago, the UK Food and Farming minister, Larry Whitty, provided a blunt summary of this policy, when he said, ‘a [self sufficiency] target is not what drives policy. Being competitive drives policy.’

Yet I would argue that it is precisely this policy which is responsible for the destruction of our countryside and biodiversity; which pollutes and degrades waters and soils; which wrecks rural economies; and - crucially - which fails to secure the livelihoods of the farmers and farm-workers who work hardest to produce our food.

Unsurprisingly, this is a policy which has also led to a dramatic increase in the international trade in food. Over the last 30 years for example, exports of a variety of food products from EU member states increased by between 160 per cent and 1300 per cent.  But it's not as if the EU has achieved self-sufficiency and is exporting its surplus – it remains one of the world’s largest food importers. Because over exactly the same period food imports into the EU increased, in some cases by nearly 300 per cent.

This pattern is repeated at the global level. Between 1968 and 1998 world food production increased by 84 per cent, yet over the same period international trade in food products almost trebled, with trade flows doubling for almost every food category.

Moreover, closer inspection of the figures reveals that a large part of this growth in international trade in food is accounted for by simultaneous imports and exports of the same products between exactly the same countries!

I wrote a report a few years back, called "The Great Food Swap", which documented the absurdity of this phenomenon.   The UK and EU provide telling case studies. In one year, Britain imported 61,400 tonnes of poultry meat from the Netherlands and in precisely the same year, it exported 33,100 tonnes of poultry meat to the Netherlands.

In the same year it imported 240,000 tonnes of pork and 125,000 tonnes of lamb, while it exported 195,000 tonnes of pork and 102,000 tonnes of lamb.  The UK imported 126 million litres of milk and exported 270 million litres of milk. In the same year 23,000 tonnes of milk powder were imported into the UK and 153,000 tonnes were exported.

In 1999, the EU imported 44,000 tonnes of meat from Argentina, 11,000 tonnes from Botswana, 40,000 tonnes from Poland and over 70,000 tonnes from Brazil. In the same year the meat exports from the EU to the rest of the world totalled 874,211 tonnes.

Increasingly, agriculture is held in thrall to the overwhelming and hugely mistaken imperative of international competitiveness. Producers are being locked into an absurd and wasteful global food swap, and everyone, save a few agribusiness giants, is paying the price.

3.   Food security, hunger and development

In the developed world, the erosion of localised patterns of production and consumption has a serious impact on the environment and the health of rural economies, but in much of the developing world the loss of local food security is also a matter of life or death.

That was tragically brought home to me personally at the WTO Ministerial Meeting in Cancun in September 2003, when South Korean farmer Lee Kyoung-Hae committed suicide during a farmer's march in protest at WTO policies.   An insight into what drove Lee to take his own life can be found in an article he wrote the month before for the Korean Agrofood magazine:

"Soon after the Uruguay Round of the GATT (now the WTO) was signed in 1992 (opening Korean markets to rich countries and allowing the dumping of rice and other foods) we farmers realised that our destinies were out of our hands.  We could do nothing but watch our lovely rural communities being destroyed. ...It is a fact that since the WTO agreement, we have never been paid our production costs.  Sometimes prices dropped to a quarter of what they used to be....Once I ran to a house where a farmer abandoned his life by drinking a toxic chemical because of his uncontrollable debts.  I could do nothing but listen to the howling of his wife."

And he concludes:

My warning goes to all citizens that  uncontrolled multinational corporations and a small number of big WTO members' officials are leading to an undesirable globalisation of inhumane, environment-distorting, farmer-killing and undemocratic (policies).  It should be stopped immediately, otherwise the false logic of neo-liberalism will perish the diversity of global agriculture and bring disaster to all."

The policies of the G8, whether through the WTO, World Bank or IMF, are working in the wrong direction. They are enslaving developing countries to volatile international markets for monoculture cash crops, and destroying their ability to provide for local need.

So let me say very clearly: increased international trade is not the answer to food poverty. Where hunger exists, what is often lacking is not food, but access either to the money to buy it or the land on which to grow it.  In some poorer countries where millions are landless and hungry, this situation is compounded by the large-scale cultivation of cattle feed for export.

It's estimated, for example, that for every acre farmed in the UK, two more are farmed overseas in order to meet the feed requirements of our intensively farmed livestock. Imported feed, such as cassava, soya beans and soya cake, makes up about 30 per cent of all European animal feed. An estimated 5.6 million acres in Brazil and around 1.2 million acres in Argentina are devoted to soya bean production for export – land that would be better used by local people to grow food for local need.

4.  The globalisation of food, and climate change

Our globalised food system isn't only bad for small producers and for food security, however - it's also devastating our environment.  Nowhere is this clearer than in the contribution it makes to climate change.   Industrialised agriculture is hugely dependent on cheap oil   As food undergoes more processing and travels farther, the food system consumes ever more energy each year - and generates ever more greenhouse gas emissions.  

Trade-related transportation is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Although most food is distributed by road and ship, the airfreight of foodstuffs is increasing. For example, UK imports of fish products and fruit and vegetables by plane between 1980 and 1990 increased by 240% and 90%, respectively. UK air freight (imports and exports) grew by about 7 per cent a year in the 1990's and is expected to increase at a rate of 7.5 per cent a year to 2010.

The figures for food miles in Britain are indicative of a growing trend across the EU.  Food accounts for around 30% of UK freight mileage, and in the past 20 years, food-related tonne-kilometres have doubled. 

But it is the rapid growth in the volume of food transported by air which is of most concern, since air travel is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.   In the EU, around 13% of air-freighted produce is food – making it the largest air-freighted sector.  This is extraordinarily inefficiency in energy terms, since we put far more energy in (in the form of non-renewable fossil fuels) than we get out (in the form of food calories).  For every calorie of iceberg lettuce, flown in from Los Angeles, for example, we use 127 calories of fuel.

This has a major impact on climate change.  According to a landmark EU-funded study published last year, what we eat has a greater impact on climate than any other products we consume – accounting for 31% of global warming potential of all products consumed within the EU.
The extraordinary dependence of industrialised food systems on fossil fuels is shocking enough in terms of its impact on climate change.  But when that dependence is considered in the context of declining supplies of cheap oil and gas, the implications are truly devastating.

Peak oil is described as the point where oil production stops rising, and begins its inevitable long-term decline.  In the face of fast-growing demand, this means rising oil prices.    Let me quote the words of the Chief Executive of Royal Dutch Shell, Jeroen van der Veer, in the Financial Times earlier this year: 

"On top of concerns about high oil prices comes the fear that we have reached 'peak oil'  and that global oil output will start to decline....if oil has peaked, do we face a future of growing energy shortages, rising prices and international conflict for supplies?  No one should underestimate the energy challenge...My view is that 'easy' oil has probably passed its peak."

The facts speak for themselves. 

• The biggest oil fields in the world were discovered more than half a century ago. 
• The peak of oil discovery was as long ago as 1965.
• The last year in which we discovered more oil than we consumed was a quarter of a century ago.  Since then, we have been burning progressively more, and finding progressively less.

I am currently doing some research on the impact of peak oil on our food supplies - and transport is only half the story.  Consider fossil-fuel intensive fertiliser.  On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year's worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land.  Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, or more like 10.  Processing food multiplies the energy costs.  Processed breakfast cereals, for example, use about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.   A two pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half gallon of gasoline in its making.  All together the food-processing industry in the US uses about 10 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces, not including transportation costs to market.

The days of industrialised food and exports of cash crops are numbered - which makes it even more urgent that we swiftly rediscover and rapidly increase food self sufficiency, together with organic production  methods.

5. Industrialised agriculture and disease

A further charge to be levelled against intensive, industrialised agriculture is its role in spreading disease.   Take avian flu as an example. An increasing number of analysts are now making the case that the virus is spread not just by the movement of wild birds, but also by the systematic air miles notched up by live poultry and poultry products.

The official view, that H5N1 has evolved through the interaction of outdoor free-range and backyard flocks with wild birds, which then act as a vector for the strain by spreading it as they migrate, is being seriously challenged.

For a start, bird flu is endemic in wild birds in much of the world - and always has been - without leaping the species barrier and causing people any harm. Highly pathogenic strains are very rare in wild birds.  One (H5N3) was first detected in South Africa more than 40 years ago, but it wasn't until 1997 that the current highly pathogenic strain of H5N1, capable of infecting people, emerged.

Highly pathogenic viruses evolve in domestic poultry, and industrialised indoor poultry farms provide the perfect conditions: they are warm, crowded, nutrient-rich environments, heavy with "viral load".  And significantly, the spread of H5N1 has followed human trade routes, not migratory bird routes, according to a growing number of experts. The respected medical journal The Lancet, for example, reports that "the geographic spread of the disease does not correlate with migratory routes and seasons. The pattern of outbreaks follows major road and rail routes, not flyways."

ems increasingly likely that we are unwittingly facilitating the spread of H5N1 around the world by creating a perfect vector: the international trade in live poultry products.

We certainly trade a lot of poultry products, both live birds and their "waste" - the fecal matter and feathers processed and sold on as fish farm fertiliser or animal feed, both within and beyond the EU. Much of this trade takes the form of yet another bizarre great food swap, with millions of live birds passing each other as countries trade back and forth between themselves.

Britain exports almost 10 million kg of poultry and eggs to Ireland every year, for example - and in the same year we import some 6.5 million. We "swap" 1.1 million kg of live birds for 1.9 million kg from France. And we don't confine the bizarre trade to EU countries: until a recent ban was imposed in response to the latest human deaths from bird flu, EU imports of poultry products from Brazil and Thailand were significant and rising.

And though the relatively small number of cases and lack of information mean that no links have been established in the EU (yet), the evidence from Cambodia, Nigeria and China is that new outbreaks of bird flu have coincided with the import of live poultry products, rather than the arrival of wild birds.
Of course wild birds play a role in spreading the virus: as they come into contact with poultry, some species pass on the milder, endemic form, of the virus - and after it has mutated into its highly pathogenic form they catch it back and spread it to other nearby flocks. But, as the NGO Bird Life International put it, wild birds are primarily victims rather then vectors of H5N1.

Clearly we need more research in order to understand better what role the trade in industrially produced poultry has in the spread of the virus. But in the meantime we must adopt a precautionary approach based on relocalising the poultry sector, stopping the great poultry swap and introducing transitional measures to make sure that farmers and those in the developing world don't suffer as a result.

And right now, it is precisely small producers in poorer countries who are suffering from a completely misguided response to outbreaks of avian flu.  International agencies like the FAO must stop supporting an export-oriented corporate model of poultry production that threatens to ruin small farmers across the developing world.  Their approach is summed up by Louise Fresco, Assistant Director-General of the FAO, who recently said "the backyard chicken is the big problem and the fight against bird flu must be waged in the backyard of the world's poor."

An increasing body of research suggests that this analysis could not be more wrong, nor more damaging for small-scale producers.

As Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN, an NGO working to protect biological diversity explains:
"Backyard farming is not an idle pastime for landowners.  It is the crux of food security and farming income for hundreds of millions of rural poor in Asia and elsewhere, providing a third of the protein intake for the average rural household.  Nearly all rural households in Asia keep at least a few chickens for meat, eggs and even fertiliser, and they are often the only livestock that poor farmers can afford.  The birds are thus critical to their diversified farming methods, just as the genetic diversity of poultry on small farms is critical to the long-term survival of poultry farming in general."

In other words, instead of putting the blame for the spread of avian flu on backyard poultry-keepers and migratory birds, international agencies should urgently recognise that diverse small-scale poultry farming is part of the solution, not the problem. 

In the short term, the priority must be to prevent the disease spreading to poultry farms by culling any domestic flocks that become infected and vaccinating those nearby. But in the longer term, we must seek to close the international trade in wild birds and re-localise our poultry industry - a move that would admittedly require a fundamental revision of the WTO and EU rules - but that's exactly where I think all of this analysis is leading.

6. Towards a relocalisation of our food systems

In summary, then, I believe it is only through the relocalisation of our food systems that we can hope to take back control of our food from industrialists and financiers, and have a chance, at least, of feeding a growing population in a way that is both equitable sustainable.

And that process of relocalisation won’t happen by wishful thinking.  It needs serious political support and significant policy changes.  The bottom line is that the politics of food production are at least as important to the future of the world as the politics of war or the politics of business – and that we ignore that at our peril

Some of the changes we need are already very clear:

• Internalising the environmental costs of our current food system, ensuring - in the words of Lester Brown – that “prices tell the ecological truth”.  Nowhere is this more important than internalising the environmental costs of transport, since it is artificially cheap fuel which enables so much unnecessary international trade in food (I’m reminded of World Bank economist turned ecologist Herman Daly, who was commenting on vast exchanges of precisely the same food products between the same countries – biscuits and cookies – and commented - wouldn’t it be easier simply to exchange recipes)
• New competition laws to restrict the concentration and market power of the major food corporations and retailers, and to guarantee fair prices to farmers
• An end to export subsidies which leads to dumping cheap food in developing country markets
• An immediate ban on the export of live animals
• We need to rebuild the infrastructure necessary for local food systems, including in Europe for example a review of EU regulations on abattoirs, to ensure that they don’t have the perverse effect of driving smaller, more local abattoirs out of business
• A complete ban on GM crops, in order to protect and preserve conventional non-GM and organic agriculture
• A commitment to make healthy food accessible for all.  If we are saying that people on low incomes cannot afford healthy food, the answer is not that food needs to be cheaper, but that political action is necessary to ensure they can afford it – not least - again in Europe - through changes to the minimum wage, and the benefits system.
• Changes to the rules of the Common Agricultural Policy, the EU’s Single Market, and to the World Trade Organisation, so that governments can make increased self-reliance – rather than free-market reliance – a central aim of national and local food economies
• And, more than anything else, we must challenge the most dangerous and damaging myth which is that international competitiveness should be the over-riding policy goal.

And so my vision for the future of agriculture is one of food sovereignty – in other words, of all regions and nations being able to make their own decisions about the kind of food economies they want, and about what they want to import or export.   This is very different from the situation today where, to take just one example, on GMOs, the WTO is attempting to strike down the preference expressed in over 30 regions of the EU to remain GM-free. 

For Europe, it’s a vision where far more of Europe’s food is produced within Europe.  In the Great Food Swap, we demonstrated that there is great potential for import substitution for many food categories in many member states.

But crucially, this isn’t a fortress Europe approach.  It recognises that all regions around the world have the right to food sovereignty, and that many developing countries currently depend on access to our markets in order to earn the foreign exchange needed to pay off debts, which themselves should be cancelled or renegotiated.  But over the medium term, we need a new strategy, involving more aid and development co-operation, which will support the rebuilding of stronger national and regional economies in the South, rather than skewing their economic priorities to provide ever more exports to the North – increasingly in cut-throat competition with each other.  

It’s a vision of healthier citizens, where everyone has access to a good diet, of thriving local farmers, reinvigorated rural economies and communities, a cleaner, safer environment, and a reconnection between urban areas and their rural hinterlands. 

It’s also a vision of people growing far more food within cities themselves.  Urban food growing has a long history - people have cultivated their cities for thousands of years, often with strong social as well as economic benefits - and considerations about food supply and distribution need to be built into new urban planning policies. 

And indeed we need to recognise that the current process of urbanisation is itself both socially and environmentally unsustainable, and that – if we want to avoid yet more millions of unemployed people living in urban slums - we’d better put some energy pretty quickly into finding ways of making agrarian economies viable again. 

As writer Colin Tudge has passionately and eloquently put it,

“If humanity were really interested in the long-term future, and if we really gave a damn about justice in the short-term, then we would be making all possible effort to create agrarian economies worldwide.”

Conclusion

The challenges are certainly great.  If I think of my own country, Britain, relocalising food there at a time when the top 5 retailers in the UK account for over two thirds of food sales, and when half the country’s food is now sold through just 1000 giant stores, is admittedly ambitious.  And it will require a revolution in supply chains, distribution and retail networks, and in agricultural and trade policy.

Women are increasingly at the heart of this process of relocalisation, both North and South - recognising that greater sustainability and self-reliance are central to real food security.

And as we celebrate Gandhi's birthday today, I think he would have been happy to know that his philosophy of "swadeshi" - local self-sufficiency - is more relevant than ever today, and continues to gain support.

As the evidence of the unsustainability of our current food system grows, the benefits of local food become ever clearer.  With a lot more political commitment to tackle the policy obstacles that still remain, we have a real chance to create sustainable food economies across the world. 

It’s vital that we grasp it.

Caroline Lucas MEP
2 October 2006