What is Land For?

The Food, Fuel and Climate Change Debate

Matt Lobley, Michael Winter

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781844077205
• eBook ISBN: 9781136544392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

In recent decades agricultural commodity surpluses in the developed world have contributed to a mantra of 'land surplus' in which set-aside, extensification, alternative land uses and 'wilding' have been key terms in debates over land. Quite suddenly all this has changed as a consequence of rapidly shifting commodity markets. Prices for cereals, oil seeds and other globally traded commodities have risen sharply. A contributor to this has been the shift to bioenergy cropping, fuelled by concerns over post-peak oil and climate change. Agricultural supply chain interests have embraced the 'new environmentalism' of climate change with enthusiasm, proudly proclaiming the readiness of the industry to produce both food and energy crops, and to do so with a neo-liberal confidence in markets to determine the balance between food and non-food crops in land use.

But policy and politics have not necessarily caught up with these market and industry-led changes and some environmentalists are beginning to challenge the assumptions of the new 'productivism'. Is it necessarily the case, they ask, that agriculture's best contribution to tackling climate change is to grow bioenergy crops or invest in anaerobic-digesters or make land over for windfarms? Might not there be an equally important role in maximising the carbon sequestration or water-holding properties of biodiverse land? What is Land For? tackles these key cutting-edge issues of this new debate by setting out a baseline of evidence and ideas.

1

Introduction: Knowing the Land

Matt Lobley and Michael Winter

Introduction

Land and the use of land provide a key link between human activity and the natural environment. Our use of land is one of the principal drivers of global environmental change, and, in turn, environmental change, particularly climate change, will increasingly influence the use made of land as communities strive to adapt to, and mitigate, the effects of a changing climate. For instance, as farmers and land managers are increasingly positioned as ‘carbon stewards’ and new environmental bastions in the struggle against climate change, there is growing pressure to adapt land use and land management practices in order to minimize carbon losses, maximize carbon storage (see Smith in this volume) and provide substitutes for fossil fuels. At the same time, a series of long-term trends (such as changing global dietary patterns) and shorter-term ‘events’ (such as recent poor harvests and the ongoing drought in Australia) have led to constrained global food supply and stimulated pronounced changes in global agricultural commodity prices, putting further pressure on agriculturally productive land.

Consequently, land and food are at the forefront of the domestic policy agenda in the UK to an extent unprecedented since the 1950s. Climate change lies at the heart of the new debate and it was the climate change agenda that prompted the UK environment minister David Miliband to launch a national debate on land use in 2006. ‘Food security’, until very recently seen as the last refuge of a backward-looking agricultural fundamentalism, has reappeared in the political vocabulary. With scarcely a backward glance at the ‘old environmentalism’ of multifunctional agri-environments and its emphasis on biodiversity and landscapes, agricultural supply-chain interests have embraced the ‘new environmentalism’ of climate change with enthusiasm. They proudly proclaim the readiness of the industry to produce both food and bio-crops, and to do so with a neo-liberal confidence in markets to determine the balance between food and non-food crops in land use. For instance, in his speech to the National Farmers Union (NFU) Centenary Conference in February 2008, Gordon Brown stressed the ‘core responsibility’ of British farmers to ‘grow and produce the majority of food consumed by the British people’, alongside a ‘front line’ role adapting and reacting to the challenges and opportunities of climate change and exploiting the potential of farmers to become ‘energy exporters’. Farmers and their advisors have been quick to embrace the ‘new productivism’, with the agricultural consultants Andersons stating that the ‘PR battle is being won, and farmers, as producers of food and fuel in a dangerous world, are being valued once again.’ (Andersons, 2007).

A recent collection of essays entitled Feeding Britain, with a foreword by the government minister Hilary Benn (Bridge and Johnson, 2009), contains papers by representatives of the key sector development bodies, such as the Home Grown Cereals Authority (HGCA) and the Horticultural Development Company, and presents a bullish outlook. For example, Jonathan Cowens, Chief Executive of the HGCA, is emboldened to suggest that environmental cross-compliance measures (modest though these may be in the eyes of most environmentalists) could lead market-orientated cereal farmers to forgo the Single Farm Payment so as to avoid the restrictions. In a SWOT analysis, he identifies ‘environmental use of land’ as one of the threats to the cereal sector, alongside ‘loss of pesticides due to legislation or resistance’.

But policy (and politics), characterized by incrementalism, has not necessarily caught up with these market- and industry-led changes, nor the changing risks associated with new circumstances (see Dunlop in this volume). Agri-environment schemes, organic farming and sensitive river-catchment planning all continue to figure highly within European rural policy. Non-governmental organizations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) initiate schemes to take land out of production to recreate wildlife-rich reserves. Local and slow food movements challenge the logic and ethics of global markets. Moreover, the far-sightedness of the old environmentalists is beginning to challenge some of the assumptions of the new proponents of food security, particularly their inherent ‘productivism’. Is it axiomatic, they ask, that agriculture’s best contribution to tackling climate change is to grow bio-crops, or invest in anaerobic digesters, or make land over for wind farms? Might not there be an equally important role in maximizing the carbon sequestration or water-holding properties of biodiverse land? Some have even suggested that biodiverse-rich ecosystems allow for maximum carbon sequestration.

This book does not set out to provide definitive answers to these questions. It is too soon to do that and much of the science is too immature. Rather we seek to establish and to explore the contours of the new debate. In no small measure the book emerges from a strong commitment from both of us to interdisciplinarity which has been strengthened and nurtured by the Rural Economy and Land Use (Relu) programme of the UK research councils. Each of us is involved in Relu projects and several of the contributors to this volume are Relu project leaders too. Relu helped to fund a workshop exploring the themes of the book in which most of the contributors participated. We are also committed to policy relevance and application. The Commission for Rural Communities, an advisor to the UK government, co-funded the workshop as part of its climate change work, in which it is seeking to establish both the implications of climate change for rural communities and the ‘rural offer’ in dealing with climate change.

This chapter, indeed the whole of this book, has three premises. The first premise is that food and energy security issues now occupy centre stage in policy thinking about land use and this is likely to remain the case for some time to come. The second is that this new emphasis on food and energy security will not mean an abandonment of a continued public policy emphasis on multi-functionality and ecosystem services. Indeed this emphasis is likely to continue to grow. The third premise is that there will be ‘local’ trends that may on occasions seem counterintuitive in a global context.

These three premises need to inform decisions that society makes on how to pose the right questions, determine the right research priorities, collect the right data and conduct the right analysis. These will require normative judgements and will be subject to contestation. We hope that the chapters in this book will collectively help to make the case for putting food and energy security, ecosystem services and localism centre stage not only in the land debate but in the climate change debate too. But first what is our justification for attributing such importance to these three issues?

Food and energy security

For three decades agricultural commodity surpluses in Europe and the developed world contributed to a dominant discourse of ‘land surplus’ in which set-aside, extensification, alternative land uses, even managed land-abandonment and ‘wilding’ were totemic terms in debates over land. Quite suddenly all this changed as a consequence of rapidly shifting commodity markets. The era of land abundance and commodity surpluses that dominated policy thinking, at least in terms of the European Common Agricultural Policy, for most of the 1980s and 1990s, is well and truly over. Some would argue that the land surplus debate was, in any case, an artificial construct, emerging out of the peculiarities of European agricultural politics. Indeed, there is a curious mismatch between the Euro-centric policy concerns of the 1980s and 1990s and the concerns of various international agencies and pressure groups over poverty and development. Much of the academic discussion on global food and land issues in the 1990s, although cautiously optimistic, was certainly not so sanguine as to assume that land abundance was in any way a global problem. Leading writers such as Gordon Conway (1997) and Tim Dyson (1996) were critical of neo-Malthusianism on the basis that it underestimated the capacity of the human species to adapt and innovate in response to new challenges. But both Conway and Dyson were acutely aware of the challenges of, for example, seasonal weather fluctuations, so that a poor harvest in one part of the world affects markets many thousands of miles away. For example, poor harvests in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in 1972 led to a massive undercover operation to purchase cereals on the international grain markets, an action which, during the Cold War, had major geo-political consequences. The 1974 World Food Conference in Rome was held in an atmosphere of Malthusian gloom about future prospects for world food supplies. Yet just three years later burgeoning production led to world wheat prices lower, in real terms, than at any time since 1945 (Goodman and Watts, 1997). This was not so much an outcome of better weather conditions across the world but a direct result of farmers and nation states responding to market conditions resulting from the cereal shortages in the context of an increasingly international economy. Dyson pins his optimism on this demand and supply response being a recurring pattern. He acknowledges that research, development and investment will be needed and that these cannot necessarily be guaranteed, especially, perhaps, in those parts of the world where they are most urgently required. However, his analysis underplays two trends – first, the impact of climate change itself, both in terms of direct impacts on food production and the potential implications of adaptation and mitigation; and secondly the dependence of agriculture on a finite energy source, oil. It is these concerns that have led to such a powerful re-emergence of food security in the policy arena.

In June 2007, US wheat prices were at their highest for a decade, and in the UK the price of milling wheat doubled during that year. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Food Price Index for 2007 averaged 157, a 34 per cent increase from 2005, and by May 2008 the index stood at 209, the highest recorded monthly average since the current index started in 1990. Four main drivers of the rapid escalation in food prices have been identified (Nellemann, 2009):

• cyclical factors such as poor harvests due to extreme weather conditions leading to very low global commodity stocks;

• a rapid increase in the share of non-food crops, particularly biofuels;

• high oil prices affecting agricultural input costs, food distribution costs and, ultimately, food prices;

• speculation in food commodity markets.

These drivers have added to the impact of more deep-seated, structural change such as the increased demand for food crops and livestock products from developing and emerging economies. Commentators have debated the relative contribution of the different drivers and, although it is hard to disentangle the impact of new crops compared with other causes of market price increases, what is clear is the emergence of new pressures on land from Amazonian Brazil, where there are reports of a rapid escalation of deforestation, to the European Union (EU), where set-aside was reduced to 0 per cent in 2007/2008, hence its elimination for the first time since its introduction as a voluntary scheme in 1988. Even though agricultural incomes will remain subject to volatility, in their 2008 Agricultural Outlook the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and FAO predicted that the conjoined temporary and structural factors identified above may keep prices above historic equilibrium levels over the next ten years and that this will kindle continuing debate on the ‘food versus fuel’ issue.

Of course, the global recession has to some extent slowed or even reversed this trend. By the beginning of 2009 the FAO Food Price Index stood at a level similar to that in 2006–07, but this was still above the 2004 index (FAO, 2009). As the director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute, Joachim von Braun, has written in Nature:

the worldwide credit crunch has let some air out of the commodity price bubble, providing a little relief ... But recession also threatens to cut the income and employment of the most vulnerable and undermine investment in agricultural production. The economic bailout and suggested market regulations now being discussed will not protect food prices from future spikes. The world’s food worries are by no means over. (von Braun, 2009; see also FAO, 2008a).

In particular, von Braun argues that the economic downturn could have adverse consequences for investment in agricultural research and development (R&D), thereby eventually increasing global food prices beyond the level they would have been without the recession. Moreover, there are some parts of the world, notably China and India, where the recession may have limited impact on long-term structural changes and the rapid pace of economic transformation with its impact on diet. The longer-term population trends are challenging, with world population projected to grow from six to nine billion by 2050. As John Bridge (Bridge and Johnson, 2009) has recently suggested, this growth and, critically, the expected associated changing patterns of demand will require world food production to double. In the context of such predictions, the renewed scholarly and policy focus on food security issues is hardly surprising (see also Ambler-Edwards et al, 2009).

A multifunctional countryside

If we were facing only shortages of food and energy, then a modern-day equivalent of the war-time ‘dig for victory’ would be the order of the day, and in some quarters, as we have seen already, there is a palpable sense of ‘back to business’ within the agro-food lobby. However, there are reasons why that is not, nor should be, the case. Politically and culturally, as the chapters in this volume by Dunlop, Lowe et al, Potter, and Ravenscroft and Taylor all demonstrate in different ways, the arguments for seeing the countryside as much more than a site for food production remain powerful. They are deeply embedded in decades of public interest and intervention. A multifunctional countryside in this context encompasses, in particular, recreational, nature conservation and landscape interests. In a society such as Britain – characterized by a high population, a large middle class, a low relative contribution of agriculture to gross value added (GVA), and a deep and well-established tradition of counterurbanization – these interests will not just disappear with increased food and energy demands. They are embedded in public policies and in various expressions of public interest, including pressure group membership. Thus, when speaking to the 2009 Oxford Farming Conference, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Hilary Benn stated that ‘I want British agriculture to produce as much food as possible’ (Benn, 2009) but went on to say that this must be consistent with systems of production that both sustain the environment and safeguard the landscape, as well as producing the type of food that consumers want. If this generalized public interest were not enough, the importance of multifunctionality is massively reinforced by the emerging policy and scientific consensus in the debate on the importance of land management practices for the matter of mitigating and adapting to climate change (even if the precise cause-and-effect relationships have yet to be fully understood).

Although the focus on climate change and land use has so far attracted most popular attention in terms of the potential competition between food and energy cropping (see Karp et al in this volume), there are a number of other potentially significant land use implications of moves to tackle climate change and also to cope with declining availability of oil for fuel and other products once peak oil production is reached. The use of land for flood alleviation is tackled by Morris and colleagues, and Hubacek and colleagues consider the range of ecosystem services provided by upland areas in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Knowing the Land
• Part 1: New Uses of Land: Technologies, Policies, Tools and Capacities
• Part 2: Emerging Issues and New Perspectives
• Index