Food in a Changing Climate

Alana Mann

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839827242
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Our diets are going to change dramatically as global warming affects growing seasons and the availability of different foods around the world. Meanwhile, our foodways are among the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. To address these challenges Food in a Changing Climate demands we look beyond our plates to the roots of inequity in our food systems. It presents an unashamedly political agenda for 'deep adaptation', focused on the rejuvenation and strengthening of local and regional food systems that have been steadily eroded in the name of economic efficiency. The colonial origins of fossil-fuel based food production and trade persist in the marginalisation of farmers, food workers, and fishers in a corporatized food system that promotes the exploitation of the environment, excess production, and hyper-consumerism. These factors contribute to climate change, poverty, and health inequities on a global scale. Drawing on case studies from around the world, this book illustrates how the commodification of food has made us particularly vulnerable to climate change, extreme weather events, and pandemics such as COVID19. These shocks reveal the danger of our reliance on increasingly complex supply chains - dominated by a decreasing number of mega-companies - for our food security.The unsustainability of the way we produce and eat food is clear. It has been for a long time. Food in a Changing Climate explores how we can cultivate resilient communities through the just application of new technologies, the recovery of traditional knowledges, and by building diversity to protect the livelihoods of food producers everywhere.

1

We didn't Start the Fire

An Uneasy Story

Every year hundreds of gestores de encomiendas or ‘parcel managers’ transport millions of US dollars in cash and goods between El Salvador and the United States. This exchange, between those who fled El Salvador's 12 year civil war (1979–1992) and those who remain behind, fuels a ‘reflective nostalgia’ in which certain foods play a central role-pupusas (stuffed tortillas), maíz blanco (white corn), frijoles de seda (silk beans), miel de caña (sugarcane honey) and traditional unsalted queso fresco, a fresh farmers' cheese. One courier says ‘what flourishes most, or what is above all else, is that feeling, those desires to want to eat and feel Salvadoran flavour, Salvadoran food’ (cited in Anastario, 2019, p. 57).

These longings demonstrate how eating, one of our earliest and most instinctual behaviours, evokes memory and emotion, especially a sense of belonging.

Food is fellowship. Food is also nostalgia; our earliest meals can seed a sweet tooth, spoil an appetite, or instil a craving later in life. The barrier between taste and memory is paper thin.

(Giggs, 2020, p. 215)

For the expatriate Salvadorans, familiar foods connect soil, crops, livestock and labour in an extension of local agricultural and social practices. Traditional healing teas and other plant-based remedies recall everyday care-taking behaviours and are essential to those without access to health care.

Food is central to the processes of dispossession, migration, transplantation and consumption that have literally transformed bodies, cultures and environments throughout the world, throughout history. Its countless stories are propelled by endless appetites. For coffee, tomatoes, chillies, pineapples, bananas, sugar and maize, only some of the foods that have created empires and triggered revolutions. The ‘Columbian exchange’ (Crosby, 2003) entirely transformed parts of Africa, Asia and Europe, driving industrialisation and expansion. King Sugar and other monocrops brought incredible wealth to a few, and misery to many, in a process Eduardo Galeano describes as the ‘pumping of blood from one set of veins to another; the development of the development of some, the underdevelopment of others’ (1971, p. 83). The reliance on singular staples created famines from Ireland to India, leading to a Green Revolution based on genetically modified seeds, agri-chemicals and fossil fuels which are now directly responsible for climate change. In response, the colonial project continues in a land and resource grab justified by a sustainable development paradigm that now includes ‘green’ biofuels in its agenda for expansion. Under the racialised double-standard of development, the appropriation of resources and embodied labour from the Global South to high-income nations continues; in 2015, a net total of over 10 billion tonnes of materials and 370 billion hours of human labour (Hickel, 2020). This is the blood that continues to flow from the open veins of the Global South where ‘resource rebels’ (Martínez-Alier, 2003) who rely on and steward the environment for their livelihoods not only fight for their own survival but also that of the planet against ‘a fossil fuelled imperialist drive for control and power over resources’ (Wedge cited in Hayman, 2018, p. 82).

It is naïve to deny awareness that a food system built on extraction and exploitation was bound to fail; after all history shows us ‘colonists might come to conquer but in the end they struggle with the inevitable impact their environment and situation will have on them’ (Behrendt, 2016, p. 193). The evolution of global foodways is not an easy story. We know that ‘stories are powerful tools and can be even more powerful weapons in the hands of malignant narcissists’ (Yunakporta, 2019, p. 129). Told straight, the story of food in a changing climate challenges the ‘inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity's strategic relations of power and production’ (Moore, 2015, p. 170) – the same forces naturalised in the popular Anthropocene narrative.

Breadbaskets and Basketcases

As I write, the world is reeling. The no longer so novel pathogen COVID-19 defies containment across cities and continents. Global food supply chain vulnerabilities are foregrounded as farmers and processors grapple to understand ‘who needs what, who has what’ to avoid farm closures and prevent food waste. Fresh milk is flowing down drains, thousands of animals are being culled and fruits and vegetables are rotting in fields and shipping containers (Cagle, 2020). Our newly crowned ‘essential’ food and farmworkers, many already engaged in campaigns for decent wages, fair working conditions and basic safety, are now challenged to socially distance with a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) if they can work at all (Arantini, 2020; IPES-Food, 2020). People are panic-buying in even the most affluent cities around the world, where rising unemployment is driving a demand for food banks which have never remedied endemic food insecurity (Power, Black, & Brady, 2020). Even more dire is the impact of the pandemic on nations already experiencing acute food insecurity because of a lethal combination of conflict, macroeconomic crisis, weather-related shocks and pest invasions. These include Afghanistan, Pakistan, Northern Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and much of East Africa where the worst locust invasion in 70 years is decimating crops and livestock feed (Smith & Kayama, 2020). Yemen, the most food insecure nation in the world with 53% or 15.9 million citizens in crisis, is at Catastrophe (Phase 5) level after three years of civil war. We lack data for many other countries, such as Iran and the Philippines (Ghosh, 2020), where the virus is used as an opportunity for regimes to crackdown on personal freedoms.

Rising food prices can be directly attributed to the impacts of movement restrictions and illness on local markets and the unavailability of agricultural labour, but the roots of the problem extend much deeper. The pandemic has exposed the fragility of a food system built to rely on interconnected and complex global supply chains that facilitate trade between nations. Based on the logics of comparative advantage, the ‘free’ trade regime dictates that countries can import all the food they need if that is cheaper than growing it at home. For example, if Egypt can't grow wheat as cheaply as they do around the Black Sea, it should import a large amount of wheat from Russia to supplement its own small harvest in feeding its population. That works well when harvests are high and conditions for transport are optimal but not so well when extended droughts in Russia lead to higher prices, financial speculation on harvests and stockpiling of grain by competing nations. Russia has a history of imposing restrictions and taxes on wheat, and following destructive droughts in 2010 completely banned trade, contributing to the Arab Spring uprisings. Climate change was a decisive spanner in the works of the global food trade well before the pandemic hit.

A glaringly obvious impact of food dependency, highlighted by the pandemic, is that when supply chains fail, people starve. If local farmers stop growing, their families don't eat, and without jobs they cannot buy food. Put simply, for all the advantages of specialisation in growing, processing and distributing specific foods, the efficiencies gained come at the expense of social goals including food security, the need to preserve livelihoods and the protection of the environment (Clapp, 2020). Our obsession with efficiency has decimated local and diverse food economies in many parts of the world by closing down small farms, regional abattoirs and farmers markets, eroding local resilience. Now, without adequate inventories and regional self-sufficiency, our cities are ‘nine meals from anarchy’ when crisis strikes (Fraser, 2020).

To maximise profits and keep costs low, food corporations have applied the principles of ‘just enough, just in time’, balancing supply and demand. Disruptions like closed borders, trade and visa restrictions, and limited distribution channels expose the precarious nature of this just-in-time (JIT) model. In policy terms, our food system is ‘locked in’ to the point where ‘social forces and decisions can reinforce a lack of change or compound failure’. As such, rather than sustaining us as we grapple with COVID-19 ‘how the food system operates is a significant threat to the ecosystem's future and humanity's within that’ (Lang, 2020, p. 197).

This book was always going to be about the need to adapt our food behaviours in response to societal collapse driven by climate change. The coronavirus has added a new urgency to this narrative. Climate change interacts with and exacerbates existing inequities including those in our health systems. Through the pandemic lens, we witness how the most vulnerable are those most affected by the virus and its profound economic impacts – the elderly, people of colour, the jobless, the refugees of failed states on which we have little or no data regarding infections and deaths. In 2014, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned that the most significant health risks and impacts of climate change would not be experienced equally among nations, regions or groups of people within metropolitan areas (WHO, 2014). The cracks are showing as countries with poorly resourced health systems, and those with the highest rates of inequality, are crippled by the pandemic. Societal collapse has arrived. And with it a renewed focus on not just our food systems but the way we live.

Facing the Dragon

I started writing this book in the midst of a more local, but as personally devastating, national tragedy – the worst bushfire season in living memory. As a child in mid-70s rural Australia, my class was set the book February Dragon. Author Colin Thiele perfectly captured the terror of a community faced with an uncontrollable bushfire. In 2019, the dragon came early, invited by climatic changes including extended drought and the positive Indian Ocean Dipole which is contributing to acute food insecurity across East Africa (Marsham, 2020). Between October and January, more than 150 bushfires burned across Australia. Firefighters were unable to contain 64 of these, in some cases for months. Only heavy downpours were able to tame the flames. More than 18 million hectares burned, including 1.3 million of agricultural land and 1% of all vineyards. Over one billion animals and 34 people were killed, and thousands of properties razed. A further 445 deaths were attributable to smoke from the bushfires (Wahlquist, 2020). While the flames may have ceased the grief has not; as a nation, we are still in mourning.

The Australian bushfire season of 2019/2020 is a lesson in political paralysis and policy failure for a rapidly warming world. It incinerated much of but, astonishingly, not all of the doubt, apathy and indifference about climate change retained by policymakers and the powerful elite in Australia and around the world. Coupled with the devastating impacts of the pandemic, it feels like collapse has begun, and the time to embrace what Jem Bendell (2018) calls ‘deep adaptation’ has arrived.

In 2018, when this concept went viral with his paper Deep adaptation: A map for navigating climate tragedy, it exposed the ultimate inconvenient truth – societal collapse, defined as the end of familiar modes of sustenance, security, pleasure, identity, meaning and hope, is inevitable. Arguably, Bendell's view is supported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declaration of a climate emergency in which we have perhaps 10 years to stall a tipping point or ‘precipice’ (Ord, 2020) that leads to catastrophe, and possibly human extinction.

According to the latest climate science, global warming is more rapid and severe than previously anticipated. Particularly at threat is worldwide food security, and with it well-being and social stability. Climate change is predicted to lead to a decrease in food production. Tropical zones will move from optimal growing conditions for cereal crops like rice and corn into extreme and prolonged summer temperatures. This will cause drops in productivity in areas where the bulk of malnourished people already live. Growing seasons will likely get longer in temperate zones as climate warms but any gains will be offset by extreme weather events like Australia's bushfires, which followed the longest drought in living memory.

Climate-related droughts across the globe this decade alone have caused drops in wheat production of 33% in Russia, 19% in the Ukraine, 14% in Canada and 9% in Australia (Vidal, 2013). The disruption of immense ocean currents is already impacting on fisheries which are increasingly exploited for the protein needs and shifting tastes of a global population expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050. To feed this population sustainably, the World Resources Institute claims we need to close three gaps: a 56% food gap in ‘crop calories’; a 593 million hectare ‘land gap’ (an area twice the size of India); and an 11 gigaton greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation gap between anticipated agricultural emissions in 2050 and the target level we need to hold global warming below two degrees Celsius and avoid catastrophic climate impacts (Ranganathan, Waite, Searchinger, & Hanson, 2018). With half the Earth's surface already under production for food and even more for fuel crops, we are running out of land – a problem exacerbated by rising seas. A one-foot rise in sea level is sufficient to consume Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Maldives in the Pacific, Kivalina in the Arctic and coastlines around the world from Miami to Mumbai. By 2100, seas are expected to rise three feet (Mann & Toles, 2016). Storm surge is a major risk to health and food supply in urban areas, particularly where critical infrastructure is situated on the coast. Hurricane Sandy proved the vulnerability of low-lying coastal areas in New York, pouring 1.6 billion gallons of untreated sewage into local waterways. The peninsula Hunt's Point, the poorest congressional district in the United States and the source of half of the city's meat and fish and 60% of its produce, was only spared in Sandy through a ‘happy accident of the tides’; next time the city may not be so lucky (Glickman, 2020).

Climate inequality will generate waves of migrants and refugees on a scale we have never seen. While migration and climate have always been connected, ‘the impacts of man-made crisis are likely to extensively change the patterns of human settlement’ (UN, 2019). In 2018, 17.2 million people were displaced through climate-related disasters (IDMC, 2019). Before the pandemic, the World Bank projected internal climate migration in the order of 143 million people by 2050 in just three regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America (Rigaud et al., 2018). These areas, the most vulnerable to slow-onset climate impacts like water stress, crop failure and sea level rise, will host local ‘hotspots’ of climate in- and out-migration as people move from coastal and rural places to urban and peri-urban centres, placing increasing pressure on housing and transport infrastructure, social services and employment opportunities.

Compounding these challenges, the way we produce food is a significant contributor to global warming. The IPCC reports agricultural production is complicit in increasing emissions, reducing biodiversity and polluting environments. The entire food production system, including transportation and packaging, is responsible for as much as 37% of total GHG emissions (IPCC, 2019). At the food-energy-water nexus, agriculture is already in competition for water with extractive activities like coal mining and the hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ of non-traditional fossil fuels like shale and coal seam gas as we exhaust more accessible hydrocarbon resources (Wright & Nyberg, 2015). One third of the food we produce globally is wasted – a ‘double waste’ of energy in terms of non-consumed food energy and the inputs required for production, transport and distribution (Vittuari, De Menna, & Pagani, 2016). This ‘hidden burden’ is compounded with COVID-19 as restrictions on movement, road and port closures, and limited access to markets reduce the quantity and quality of food, especially perishables (FAO, 2020a; FIAN International, 2020a).

The IPCC applies sustainability criteria in its analysis of the impacts of food production and consumption on the planet. It recommends that

…balanced diets featuring plant-based foods such as those based on coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds and animal-sourced food produced in resilient, sustainable and low-GHG emission systems present major opportunities for adaptation and mitigation while generating significant co-benefits in terms of human health.

(IPCC, 2019, p. 27)

These particulars are a luxury for citizens of ‘food bank nations’ reliant on welfare or low wages that are insufficient to put food on the table, also for Indigenous communities dispossessed of their traditional lands and foodways (Riches, 2018). Emissions reduction is also secondary to survival for the 800 million chronically hungry who do little to contribute to global warming in the first place. In the same year as the release of Bendell's paper, more than 113 million people across 53 countries experienced ‘acute hunger requiring urgent food, nutrition and livelihoods assistance’ (FSIN, 2019). The World Food Programme (WFP) warns that another 265 million may be driven into acute food insecurity by COVID-19 (Beaumont, 2020).

This is more than another food crisis. The language of crisis offers us a ‘deceptive optimism’ by leading us to feel that ‘we are simply faced with a perilous turning-point with an imminent outcome, or even an opportunity’ (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2017, p. 21). More significantly, it shares with discourse about anthropogenic climate change a focus on ‘the novelty of crisis rather than being attentive to the historical continuity of dispossession and disaster caused by empire’ (DeLoughrey, 2019, p. 2). Without this backstory, any analysis of food in a changing climate ‘misses the globe’ and those at the forefront of climate change.

While we quibble over language, stored carbon in the atmosphere will continue to contribute to global wa...