The Impending Food Fight
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 15:22:22 -0000
The Impending Food Fight
By Victor Davis Hanson
While we worry about gas prices, the costs of milk, meat and fresh
produce silently skyrockets. So like the end of cheap energy, is the
era of cheap food also finally over?
Since the farm depression of the early 1980s - remember the first Farm
Aid concert in 1985 - farmers have gone broke in droves from cheap
commodity prices. The public shrugged, happy enough to get inexpensive
food. Globalization saw increased world acreage planted and farmed
under Western methods of efficient production. And that brought into
the United States even more plentiful imported food.
Continued leaps in agricultural technology ensured more production per
acre. The result was likewise predictable: the same old food surpluses
and low prices. My late parents, who owned the farm I now live on in
central California, used to sigh that the planet was reaching 6
billion mouths and so things someday "would have to turn around for
farmers."
Now they apparently have. Food prices are climbing at rates
approaching 10 percent per year. But why the sudden change?
There have been a number of relatively recent radical changes in the
United States and the world that, taken together, provide the answer:
Modern high-tech farming is energy intensive. So recent huge price
increases in diesel fuel and petroleum-based fertilizers and chemicals
have been passed on to the consumer.
The pubic furor over illegal immigration has, despite all the
government inaction, still translated into some increased border
security. And with more vigilance, fewer illegal aliens are crossing
the border to work in labor-intensive crops like fresh fruits and
vegetables.
The U.S. population still increases while suburbanization continues.
The sprawl of housing tracts, edge cities and shopping centers
insidiously gobbles up prime farmland at the rate of hundreds of
thousands of acres per year.
In turn, in the West periodic droughts and competition from growing
suburbs have made water for farming scarcer, more expensive - and
sometimes unavailable.
On the world scene, 2 billion Indians and Chinese are enjoying the
greatest material improvement in their nations' histories - and their
improved diets mean more food consumed than ever before.
The result is that global food supplies are also tightening up, both
at home and abroad. America has become a net food importer. We seem to
have developed a new refined taste for foreign wines, cheeses and
fresh winter fruits even as we are consuming more of our corn, wheat,
soybeans and dairy products at home.
Now comes the biofuels movement. For a variety of reasons, ranging
from an attempt to become less dependent on foreign oil to a desire
for cleaner fuels, millions of acres of farmland are being redirected
to corn-based ethanol.
If hundreds of planned new ethanol refineries are built, the U.S.
could very shortly be producing around 30 billion gallons of corn-
based fuel per year, using one of every four acres planted to corn for
fuel. This dilemma of food or fuel is also appearing elsewhere in the
world as Europeans and South Americans begin redirecting food acreages
to corn-, soy-, or sugar- based biofuels.
Corn prices in America have spiked. And since corn is also a prime
ingredient for animal feeds and sweeteners, prices likewise are rising
for poultry, beef and everything from soft drinks to candy.
There is currently more corn acreage - about 90 million acres are
predicted this year - than at any time in the nation's last half-
century. But today's total farm acreage is either static or shrinking;
land for biofuels is usually taken from wheat, soybeans or cotton,
ensuring those supplies grow tight as well.
In the past, the genius of our farmers and the mind-boggling
innovation of American agribusiness meant that farm production
periodically doubled. Indeed, today we are producing far more food on
far fewer acres than ever before.
But we are nearing the limits of further efficiency - especially when
such past amazing leaps in production relied on once-cheap petro-
chemicals, fuels and fertilizers.
As in the case of oil, we've gone through these sudden farm price
spikes before. My grandfather once told me that in some 70 years of
boom-and-bust farming he only made money during World Wars I and II,
and the late 1960s.
But this latest round of high food prices seems coupled to energy
shortages, and so won't go away anytime soon. That raises questions
critical to the very security of this nation, which may have to import
as many agricultural commodities as it does energy - and find a way to
pay for both.
The American consumer lifestyle took off thanks to low-cost fuel and
food. Once families could drive and eat cheaply, they had plenty of
disposable income for housing and consumer goods.
But if they can't do either anymore, how angry will they get as they
buy less and pay more for the very staples of life?
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War
Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian
War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.
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