UPDATE: Willis Eschenbach eviscerates Bill McKibben on the global food production issue here
Despite paid agenda driven bloviations of “Climate-driven food insecurity“, even environmental media king The Guardian sees the real reasons behind it, and it isn’t global warming aka “climate change”. Instead, blame gets squarely placed on weather, a new virulent strain of wheat rust, the U.N.’s policies related to GM regulation, shifting economies, and biofuels.
Here’s some excerpts and rebuttals:
There are several causes of rising prices. First, large-scale disasters have precipitated localised crop failures, some of which have had broad ripple effects – for example, Russia’s ban on grain exports through at least the end of this calendar year resulted from fires and drought.
We know now and for certain that was not caused by global warming, it was simply weather. NOAA’s Climate Science Investigation team came squarely to that conclusion, and found global warming blameless.
Second, deadly strains of an evolving wheat pathogen (a rust) named Ug99 are increasingly threatening yields in the major wheat-growing areas of southern and eastern Africa, the central Asian Republics, the Caucasus, the Indian subcontinent, South America, Australia and North America.
In the FAO 2008 International conference on Wheat Stem Rust UG99 – A threat to food security report (PDF), neither “global warming” or “climate change” are even mentioned in the report. So there appears to be none of the usual irrational “global warming causes everything” linkage, even within the U.N.
Third, rising incomes in emerging markets like China and India have increased the ability of an expanding middle class to shift from a grain-based diet to one that contains more meat.
A lot of this comes from environmental policy, pushing manufacturing jobs there. While the US and EU have gotten cleaner, China and India have absorbed wealth and the manufacturing pollution of the west.
And fourth, against this backdrop of lessened supply and heightened demand, private investment in R&D on innovative practices and technologies has been discouraged by arbitrary and unscientific national and international regulatory barriers – against, in particular, new varieties of plants produced with modern genetic engineering (aka recombinant DNA technology or genetic modification, or GM). Genetic engineering offers plant breeders the tools to make crops do spectacular new things. In more than two dozen countries, farmers are using genetically engineered crop varieties to produce higher yields, with lower inputs and reduced impact on the environment.
Irrational green fears of “frankenfood” cause regulation of what they fear most. That affects the poor the most, which are traditionally the ones who vote for the left and their policies.
And finally, the biofuels link:
In fact, the United States and Europe are diverting vast and increasing amounts of land and agricultural production into making ethanol. The United States is approaching the diversion of 40% of the corn harvest for fuel and the EU has a goal of 10% biofuel use by 2020. The implications are worrisome. On 9 February, the US department of agriculture reported that the ethanol industry’s projected orders for 2011 rose 8.4%, to 13.01bn bushels, leaving the United States with about 675m bushels of corn left at the end of the year. That is the lowest surplus level since 1996.
Stop burning food, stop blaming “global warming” for just about everything, and face real problems head on, and the world’s poor might get fed.
Full Guardian article here
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Michael Larkin says:
March 26, 2011 at 2:13 pm
Annei:
“You really think that developing these things by natural selection over many years equates to artificially inserting foreign genes into the DNA?”
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Michael Larkin:
You missed the point of what I was saying. I do NOT think that inserting artificially acquired genes compares in any way with ‘Natural selection’. I think it is most unnatural….and did you read my post immediately above the one you quote? I certainly do NOT want to eat GM ‘foods’…I do not trust their effect on health and the environment.
Additionally, I am not in the least bit confused by the difference between genuine natural selection and the artificial insertion of foreign gene material into the DNA of plants.
jtom says:
March 26, 2011 at 2:46 pm
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Now, I think that is ridiculous. As it happens, I use very little of the over-scented oils, potions, etc., but I am surely entitled to use what I see as being useful in my own life without being accused of being a hypocrite.
Smokey says:
March 26, 2011 at 8:59 am
Actually most of those he cited have lasting effects on food production. Soil depletion, reliance on artificial fertilizers, and overuse of aquifers are quite real and quite serious. The only thing Pepper got wrong was global warming. That’s a boon to agriculture. Plants grow bigger and faster using less water as atmospheric CO2 rises and the warming part of global warming isn’t global in either time or space. Greenhouse warming from CO2 is concentrated in the higher latitudes, in the winter, and at night which is exactly what the doctor ordered as this extends growing seasons where longer growing seasons are most needed. Fossil fuels are a long term concern because they won’t last forever and get increasingly expensive to recover as more and more of the low hanging fruit is harvested. We don’t need to stop using fossil fuels, per se, for quite some time. What we need is a less expensive alternative to them because the cost of energy is reflected in just about everything we use and consume from basic survival needs right up through luxury goods. Economic growth tracks energy consumption. Less expensive energy is like the tide that lifts all boats equally, or alternatively, lowers them. So far all the alternative energy sources are more expensive. As the price of fossil fuels rises these alternatives will become less costly in comparison but that’s just like choosing the lesser of two evils. What need is a choice between good and better. I have every confidence that synthetic biology is the answer to less expensive energy and it’ll be here real soon now. There are already pilot plants being built able to produce diesel oil and ethanol at a projected cost equivalent to $30/bbl light sweet crude oil using nothing but municipal waste water (high in nutrients and saves in treatment costs), non-arable land, sunlight, water, CO2, and genetically engineered cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) that have been modified to produce hydrocarbon fuels as metabolic byproducts in high weight per dry volume ratio. Naturally occuring organisms are marginal at best for production of biofuels as the biofuels are metabolic byproducts that don’t aid in survival in the wild so production is minimal in naturally ocurring organisms. Organisms grown in artificial environments don’t have to compete with wild organisms as the environment and their ability to tolerate it can be manipulated such that it is not conducive to wild types. One pilot plant being constructed near me using a patented GM algae is supposed to produce 20,000 gallons of diesel per acre with essentially nothing more complicated to extract the fuel than squeezing them like grapes, filtering out residual solids, and separating the fuel from the water. The remainder after the fuel extraction is a nutritious livestock feed. You can’t beat that and it’s only going to get better, faster, and cheaper as time goes on.
Most of the developed countries are producing materials,which effects global warming.
Dave Springer,
I agree with your post above. It’s the global warming scare that is being hyped and reinforced by self-serving grant applicants and politicians that I object to. As you make clear, the free market always provides solutions if left alone. Bad governments can’t resist the urge to meddle, and that is what reults in starvation.
For the first time, I disagree with what is on this website because a portion of this article discusses the “irrational fear” of GM food. There are many studies, most of them buried because of the powerful corporations involved about the allergic reactions to GM food. The studies that have been done on rats and mice who have been fed GM soy that we are currently eating are disturbing. We in the US have been living in an experiment without our consent and we are getting sicker and sicker than the rest of the world. And you wonder why when Wikileaks had several parts documented the threats the US government gave to European countries about GM when they wouldn’t accept the US’s science experiment. They actually looked at the studies and saw how untested and possibly dangerous they could be and said no way.
Also, the whole idea that GM varieties can increase crop yields etc., take a look again. Many of the yields with GM varieties were smaller and oh yah, farmers were saddled with pesticide costs that were much more than they had before. But of course all of these are “irrational” right? No thanks, I will stay away from Corn, Soy, Cotton and Canola unless I can guarantee it is organic.
Not warming – cooling (and drying, which at the global level, goes with cooling).
Jerome,
The issue is not the total amount of water integrated over a year, but the distribution of the water flow over the year. What is important in many of those downstream areas is to have the water available during the relatively hot and dry summer months.
Dave Springer: “I have every confidence that synthetic biology is the answer to less expensive energy and it’ll be here real soon now.”
I have no such confidence. All biological systems are highly inefficient in their use of energy. The energy available for useful work is always much, much less than that input into the system.