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Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Healthy Food or Healthy Profits?

Feeding the world is big business. Multinational food companies and retailers are heavily involved in food production. Corporations such as Kraft, Cargill, and PepsiCo dominate global food distribution. Companies like Monsanto, the biggest maker of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) seeds, promote their high tech products as a way to increase food production.

And those companies are seeing benefits. Global food prices increased by four percent between January and April of this year, according to the World Bank, stopping a decline in food prices starting in August 2012. While those figures may please company shareholders, that kind of consolidation and profit puts too much control over food supplies into too few places, according to critics.

Beyond the perceived threats from the business world, global food supplies, one analyst argued, are at the mercy of some nations seeking to feed their own populations at the expense of others. “China is the largest purchaser of farmable land in the world,” said Usha Haley, a professor of business management at West Virginia University. “They’re doing it to acquire resources as they have a huge gap between what they produce and what they use… I think the next world wars could be fought over resources like food and water,” she said.

Also, there’s the increasing creation of inedible products — such as fuel — from crops that normally get put on the kitchen table. “What concerns us is biofuel expansion,” said Kristin Sundell, director of policy and campaigns for ActionAid, an international group that focuses on ending poverty. “We’ve seen a 50 percent expansion in recent years in using crops like sugar, corn and soy to create fuels for gas tanks, and that’s taking away food crops from people and making what there is more expensive,” Sundell said, adding that the large-scale investment by private agriculture businesses to buy up more farm land in poor countries is forcing local growers out of business.

Farmers who do have land in areas like East Africa often face a Faustian bargain, said Scott Ickes, a professor of public health and nutrition at the College of William & Mary. “Farmers have to choose between growing specialty cash crops like cocoa, tea and coffee — or food staples to make a living,” Ickes said. “They usually pick the cash crops as it’s a challenge for them to make ends meet.”

Another aspect of industrialised farming is the environmental impact. Between 44% and 57% of all Green House Gas emissions come from the global food system. It is generally acknowledged that farming itself contributes 11-15% of all greenhouse gasses produced globally. Most of these emissions result from the use of industrial inputs, such as chemical fertilisers and petrol to run tractors and irrigation machinery, as well as the excess manure generated by intensive livestock keeping.

The FAO says the expansion of the agricultural frontier accounts for 70-90% of global deforestation, at least half of that for the production of a few agricultural commodities for export. Agriculture's contribution to deforestation thus accounts for 15-18% of global GHG emissions.
The industrial food system acts like a global travel agency. Crops for animal feed may be grown in Argentina and fed to chickens in Chile that are exported to China for processing and eventually eaten in a McDonald's in the US. Much of our food, grown under industrial conditions in faraway places, travels thousands of kilometres before it reaches our plates. We can conservatively estimate that the transportation of food accounts for a quarter of global GHG emissions linked to transportation, or 5-6% of all global GHG emissions.
Processing is the next, highly profitable, step in the industrial food chain. The transformation of foods into ready-made meals, snacks and beverages requires an enormous amount of energy, mostly in the form of carbon. So does the packaging and canning of these foods. Processing and packaging enables the food industry to stack the shelves of supermarkets and convenience stores with hundreds of different formats and brands, but it also generates a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions – some 8 to 10% of the global total.
Refrigeration is the lynchpin of the modern supermarket and fast food chains' vast global procurement systems. Wherever the industrial food system goes, so do cold chains. Considering that cooling is responsible for 15 percent of all electricity consumption worldwide, and that leaks of chemical refrigerants are a major source of GHGs, we can safely say that the refrigeration of foods accounts for some 1-2% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. The retailing of foods accounts for another 1-2%.
The industrial food system discards up to half of all the food that it produces, thrown out on the long journey from farms to traders, to food processors, and eventually to retailers and restaurants. A lot of this waste rots on garbage heaps and landfills, producing substantial amounts of GHGs. Between 3.5-4.5% of global GHG emissions come from waste, and over 90% of these are produced by materials originating within the food system.

Despite the glaring flaws in our food system there has been almost zero political will to challenge the dominant model of industrial food production and distribution. Instead, governments and corporations are proposing a number of false solutions while environmentalists offer up various well-meaning but in the end economically ineffectual reforms. None of these "solutions" can work because they all work against the only effective solution: a shift from a globalised, industrial food system governed by corporations in search of profits to one that is determined democratically and based upon production for people’s needs rather than the market.

From here

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