It’s Getting Hot In Here

This is the first in a series of articles on agriculture and climate change. With increased climatic variability and all of the associated environmental shifts, the future of farming is uncertain. This bi-monthly column digs deep to give you the dirt on contemporary issues facing farmers and food processors. In this series, I showcase practical examples how communities are forwarding local food security. I also discuss national and international struggles pertaining to food sovereignty, and existing and emerging policy initiatives. All of these issues will be explored through a dual lens: a farmer lens and a climate change lens.

Questions, comments and ideas for new stories are welcome.

It’s Getting Hot In Here hones in on global efforts aimed at stopping, or at least slowing down, global warming. Given the focus of this column, it is appropriate to begin by answering the inevitable question: What’s agriculture got to do with it?

What’s Agriculture Got To Do With It?

Agriculture contributes significantly to global climate change and it is also significantly affected by climatic shifts. But agriculture can, and must, be part of the solutions. In this, the first article in a series, I am going to focus primarily on “Agriculture as Culprit” and “Agriculture as Victim.”

Agriculture: Guilty as Charged

Agriculture is a net contributor to climate change through the emission of greenhouse gases.

• According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency “[i]n 2005, the agricultural sector was responsible… 7 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.”
• In Canada, agriculture contributes 10% of the country’s greenhouse gases.
• According to the IPCC’s latest report, between 1970 and 1990, direct greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture grew by 27%.

But this isn’t even half of the problem.

• The processing, packaging and distribution of food consumes four times more energy than goes into growing the food.

The numbers I have listed above do not even include energy used on these stages of the food chain. Consider this: if you live in North America, it is estimated that the ingredients on your plate, at any given meal, have traveled over 2,500 km. For every kilogram of food imported, it is estimated that 1.3 kg of greenhouse gases are emitted. This is a major reason why food activists are moving away from promoting “organic” produce and encouraging people to purchase regionally-grown foods instead.

Efficient? I think not

Industrial farming is often touted as being the most “efficient form” of agriculture, but perhaps we should consider the following:

• Between 1910 and 1983, the energy consumption of the agricultural sector grew by 810%.
• A head of lettuce grown in California shipped back east uses 36 times as many calories of fossil energy as the lettuce actually contains.
• 75% of the apples for sale in New York city come from the West Coast or from overseas. But, New York State produces 10 times as many apples as the residents of NYC consume.

What’s more, in the latest USDA Census of Agriculture it was found that smaller farms produce farm more food per acre, whether you measure in tons, calories or dollars! Jules Pretty, an English agronomist recently studied two hundred sustainable agriculture projects in fifty two countries. He found that sustainable agriculture led to an average 93% increase in per hectare food production. What we do know is that industrial food production provides us with cheap food. The small farms grow more food per acre because they are more dependent on labour. Not only is sustainable agriculture more productive and more energy efficient than industrial agriculture, but it also provides healthy employment opportunities.

In his book “Deep Economy” Bill McKibben writes:

“The deepest problem that local-food efforts face… is that we’ve grown used to paying so little for food. It may be expensive in terms of how much oil it requires, and how much greenhouse gas it pours into the atmosphere, and how much tax subsidy it receives, and how much damage it does to local communities, and how many migrant workers it maims, and how much sewage it piles up, and how many miles of highway it requires –but boy, when you pull your cart up to the register, it’s pretty cheap.”

McKibben is right; we pay far too little for our food. The reality is that local food is expensive and that many people cannot afford it. That being said, in Canada and the US we spend less on our food than any other country (less than 10% of our income).

Why is this important?

Agriculture as Victim
Fundamentally, I am talking about access to food. Food is the intimate commodity. What I mean is that unlike sneakers, t-shirt, iPods and most other consumer goods, food enters our bodies and becomes a part of us. Furthermore, we depend on food to live. In an article titled “Climate Change and Food Security” P.J. Gregory and colleagues explain that[c]limate change may affect food systems in several ways ranging from direct effects on crop production (e.g. changes in rainfall leading to drought or flooding, or warmer or cooler temperatures leading to changes in the length of growing season), to changes in markets, food prices and supply chain infrastructure.The UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) suggests that as climatic variability increases, we can expect the following:

• The overall predictability of weather and climate will decrease, making planning of farm operations more difficult.
• Climate variability might increase, putting additional stress on fragile farming systems.
• Climate extremes - which are almost impossible to plan for - might become more frequent.
• The sea-level will rise, threatening valuable coastal agricultural land, particularly in low-lying small islands.
• Biological diversity will be reduced in some of the world’s most fragile environments, such as mangroves and tropical forests.
• Climatic and agro-ecological zones will shift, forcing farmers to adapt, as well as threatening indigenous vegetation and fauna.
• The current imbalance of food production between cool and temperate regions and tropical and subtropical regions will worsen.
• Distribution and quantities of fish and seafoods will change dramatically.
• Pests and vector-borne diseases will spread into areas where they were previously unknown.

Food security exists when all people, at all times, have access to sufficient, safe, culturally appropriate and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Climate change is and will continue to impact food production and will thus undoubtedly threaten food security, especially for the world’s most vulnerable people. Concern over achieving food security around the world has increased with the rapid climate change coupled with other global environmental changes such as water availability, land cover and altered nitrogen availability. P.J. Gregory and colleagues explain that “[b]ecause of the multiple socio-economic and bio-physical factors affecting food systems and hence food security, the capacity to adapt food systems to reduce their vulnerability to climate change is not uniform.” Indeed, approaching global climate change from a food systems or agriculture perspective leaves little doubt that climate change is fundamentally a social justice issue.

The Good News… Not so Fast

Now some of you may have heard that climate change will actually increase yields, at least in the North. There is some truth to this, but agriculture is not just weather dependent. Growing food requires quality soil and water, both of which are increasingly limited. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood this fact, proclaiming “[t]he nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” More recently, Alice Friedemann has written recently on the idea of “peak soil.”

• Referencing many peer-reviewed studies, she explains that for example over the past century, Iowa’s has lost almost half of its soil, from an average depth of 18 to 10 inches.
• “Productivity” she explains “drops off sharply when topsoil reaches 6 inches or less, the average crop root zone depth.”
• “Crop productivity continually declines as topsoil is lost and residues are removed.”
• Quoting Lal (2004), Freidemann write “[s]oils contain 3.3 times the amount of carbon found in the atmosphere, and 4.5 times more carbon than is stored in all the Earth’s vegetation.”
• Highlighting O’Neal’s (2005) findings, Friedemann explains “[i]f we want to reduce global warming, storing carbon in the soil will be essential. But that will be hard to pull off, because climate change could increase soil loss by 33% to 274%, depending on the region.”

And then there is the issue of water.

• 70% of global human water use is directed to irrigating crops.

The future of farming (and consequently the future of eating) looks bleak indeed, but this is arguably not even the worst of it. Most farmers I have talked to suggest that the biggest threat to farming is increased uncertainty. Farming involves a great deal of planning and has traditionally relied on generations of experience and local knowledge (think Farmers’ Almanac). However, with climate change we know that we will be less able to determine weather patterns making planning very difficult.

Finally

The outlook is not all that bright, but I do not believe that it is all doom and gloom. I began by stating that agriculture contributes significantly to global climate change and that agriculture will be significantly impacted by climate change. However, I also suggested that agriculture has a role to play in solutions to climate change. In future articles I will be addressing some of these solutions as well as positive food-focused initiatives that are working to combat climate change.

Stay tuned for the next article – due out July 1^st – that will explore the 2007 US Farm Bill and its connection to climate change.

References? Please contact me (jessica(a)itsgettinghotinhere.org) if you want the citation for, or information on, any of the references I have used above.