Motherhood, Apple Pie and Some Food for Thought

I listened to the Chairman of Fine Gael which, as the largest party in the Irish Parliament, is the senior partner in the governing coalition, talking to Will Faulkner on Midlands Today this morning (18th May 2012). (The programme is re-broadcast at midnight BST tonight, that's 17:00 PDT). Charlie Flanagan also happens to be one of my local TDs (Members of Parliament; in the Irish electoral system each constituency has more than one representative). “Growth is like motherhood and apple pie,” he said, “everyone thinks it is a good thing.”

And I suppose he is not far wrong. Most people do think that growth is a good thing. But, as I argued in my previous post, there are many who disagree. I ended that piece with a promise to explore some of the ways in which it could be possible to provide for all our needs without destroying the planet in the process. But first I want to add some more food for thought for those, like Deputy Flanagan, who still need to be convinced.

I was thinking about the idea that water might be the next big source of conflict in certain parts of the world and it occurred to me that we in Northern Europe import significant quantities of fruit and other agricultural produce from such areas, notably the Mediterranean region. That produce is made up principally of water. So, whilst it is true that fruit juices are concentrated before being transported thousands of miles, it is also the case that a lot of fuel is used transferring water from a part of the world that can ill afford to lose it to one where it is relatively abundant.

Population decline is inevitable

I tried to find statistics for the quantities involved and was unable to do so. The closest I came to it was in a study carried out a few years ago by the UK conservation charity WWF. This looked into the whole question of the effect of British food imports on the planet’s most vulnerable environments. What is clear from my reading of this report is that the issue is far more complex than I had supposed. And, for me, the most startling fact to emerge was this: there is a vital resource that we all take for granted, far more so than we do water, that is disappearing at an alarming rate. That resource is soil!

Allow me to quote: world-wide, soils under agricultural management are eroding 10 to 100 times faster than they are being formed meaning that agriculture is unsustainable over relatively short historical time frames – 100 to 1,000 years. This simple constraint on the lifespan of agricultural soils explains reasonably well the pattern of the rise and decline of historical civilisations. … [worldwide we are losing] 5-10 million ha of arable land each year. Much of this soil is removed from agricultural land and ‘entombed’ in deposits that cannot be used for productive purposes. For the UK food economy, erosion of soils in the Mediterranean used for fruit and vegetable production is particularly significant.

Our diet is destroying the environment

The report also has a lot to say about the original question of water usage, generally confirming my suspicions. Here are some more quotations:

The Mediterranean Basin comprising the land draining into the Mediterranean Sea … includes some of the most intensively farmed land in the world such as the Rhone valley in France, the valley of the River Po in Italy, and the Nile Valley that supplies vegetables to the UK. It includes much of the Spanish fruit and vegetable production areas, and the Middle East, including Israel. The UK is a major and growing consumer of the relevant crops – vegetables, fruit, wine and olives.

Water is the key constraint to production ... Water demand in the Mediterranean countries doubled between 1950 and 2000, and irrigated agriculture accounts for 65% of water consumed (Nostrum 2006). The irrigated area doubled between 1960 and 2000 … with the biggest increases in absolute terms in Spain and Turkey. The food exporters to the UK are Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey. Morocco is in more recent years the focus of significant investment in intensive agricultural production, including for the UK market. This has caused extensive and irreversible environmental degradation.

There is much more but the above should be enough to illustrate the problem. Although the report focuses on the UK’s food economy, Ireland’s pattern of consumption of similar produce is comparable to that of the UK’s, only lacking in significance by virtue of its relatively small size. In simple terms, we cannot carry on like this without further irreparable damage to the planet, notwithstanding the over-arching issue of climate change.

If Growth is the Answer ...

... you are probably asking the wrong question.

The political debate in Ireland, in the UK and, indeed, throughout the world is polarised between those who argue for so called austerity now - in order to stabilise budgets and support growth later - and those, mostly on the left, who argue that austerity is making things worse and we need growth now. No-one from the mainstream is prepared to face up to the possibility that growth has reached its limits; that maybe growth is the problem, not the solution.

There is however a growing number of people who argue not only that there are limits to growth but that we have reached them and that we need to find new definitions of prosperity that involve measuring the quality of life rather than material possessions. The idea has been around since at least the early 1970's. Those old enough will be able to remember the crisis in oil supply that occurred at that time. In Britain in 1973 and '74 the government introduced measures that included phased power cuts and businesses forced to operate for only three days each week. Some people began to wonder what would happen when the oil ran out altogether.

But new sources of supply were discovered and developed and the world fell back into its normal state of complacency. Governments continued to pursue growth as the means of ensuring ever increasing standards of living for their electors. Soon the developing nations began a game of catch-up which meant that their annual rate of growth was 2-3 times that of developed countries. In one of the books referred to in Tom Schueneman's piece, to which I provided a link above, its author points out that the price of crude oil peaked shortly before the economic crash of 2008. He suggests that the crash was as much a consequence of that spike in oil price as of the excessive borrowing that had accompanied it.

Four years on and growth is beginning to return in some of the advanced nations. And the oil price is once again increasing rapidly, the most visible evidence of this being the prices at the filling stations here in Ireland and in the UK. Meanwhile oil producers are developing increasingly costly and difficult ways of reclaiming the precious liquid from deep beneath the oceans, from shale and by fracking. Oil may be a long way still from running out but its price makes it economically viable to, as it were, scrape the bottom of the planet's barrel.

Oil is not the only problem

And it is not just the supply of oil that is reaching its limit. Demand for other important raw materials is, again as in the 1970s, ensuring that their prices too are increasing and new and more difficult sources of supply are being exploited, sometimes with potentially disastrous environmental consequences.

Perhaps the most worrying of all these pressures on resources is that on water supplies. We are fortunate here in Ireland to be blessed with an abundance of water. Some of it is arguably in the wrong place. There is anger in some quarters at plans to extract water from the Shannon and store it in a new reservoir in the Midlands to ensure security of supply for Dublin and its environs. That is a tiny scheme when considered alongside several gigantic water management schemes being undertaken in China.

There are those that believe that the wars that have plagued the Middle East throughout the half century of my adult life are bound to intensify in the future driven, not by a desire to control the oil supply so much as the need for access to the waters of the Jordan, Nile and Euphrates.

You will notice that, in identifying these dangers attaching to the continued pursuit of economic growth I have not mentioned climate change. The burning of fossil fuels that accompanies all our economic activity is changing our climate in ways the consequences of which are unpredictable. Droughts, storms and floods are part of it, so is the possibility of crop failure in parts of the world where food production is already on a knife edge.

Is there room for hope?

I argued in my second post of this series that austerity as experienced in Europe today would be viewed as luxury living by those who experienced the economic conditions that followed World War 2. Europe came out of that period with a programme of reconstruction that ensured two decades of near full employment.

Since the 1970s there have been varying levels of unemployment throughout the continent. It fell during the boom years, roughly 1997 to 2007, but even through that exceptional decade there remained a core of families for whom unemployment was the norm. Since 2008 unemployment has increased dramatically, at its worst in those places like Greece, Spain and Ireland, where the greatest debts accrued during those years. The fundamental question that needs to be faced is how to provide work for those millions without generating economic growth.

If all this sounds doom laden - and it is - I remain optimistic about the future, believing that humankind has the intelligence and the sense to adapt and respond to these unprecedented challenges. Sure, it will be painful for some, life is like that. But there are reasons to hope and I shall look at some of them in future posts.