Pantry Politics

With food shortages threatening global stability, we need to reorient food policy from quantity to quality.

Somewhere in East Africa a new, virulent strain of fungus attacks the stalks of wheat plants, decimating millions of acres of farm land. Its spores carried by the winds, the fungus (or “rust”) crosses onto the Arabian Peninsula, eventually reaching Pakistan, India, and China. It wipes out three-quarters of the wheat crop in these countries, and Asian grain markets implode. Commodity prices reach record levels, and farmers respond with a planting spree. In the American Midwest, however, years of heavy fertilizer use and intensive crop production have depleted the soils so much that corn and wheat yields are falling. Rising temperatures, a product of global warming, lead to worsening insect infestations and crop damage, exacerbating short supplies. A powerful El Nino effect, another consequence of climate change, produces a succession of droughts and floods that further reduce grain production. As attempts by the United States and other food-exporting nations fail to calm global markets, rising prices and crop failures spark a humanitarian crisis. Food riots threaten to topple governments throughout the developing world. Millions of the poor from Central America migrate north to the United States. Africa is in the throes of a massive famine. East Asian economies grind to a standstill.

This is the scenario Paul Roberts describes in The End of Food, a book about a global food system on the brink of disaster. He details how our pursuit of high-output, low-cost food generates a host of pathologies and risks: third-world hunger, first-world obesity, food-borne pathogens like E. coli, soil erosion, depleted water tables, dead zones in our oceans, and global warming. Do not read this book before dinner.

Roberts joins the ranks of Michael Pollan, author of the best-selling The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Eric Schlosser, whose stomach-turning Fast Food Nation evoked Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, on the leading edge of a renewed public consciousness about what we eat. Each week, consumers hear stories about tainted spinach, recalled beef, and, of course, obesity. The pinch of rising commodity prices is being felt at the supermarket. Concern about “food miles” is growing and more restaurants are appealing to “locavores” by sourcing many of their ingredients from nearby farms. The End of Food contributes to this growing public awareness by placing our industrial food system in a global context. This means more than simply pointing out that the asparagus we buy in January comes from Chile. Rather, the book is concerned with how precarious our global food economy actually is, and how the world’s taste for meat and sweet is unhealthy and unsustainable.

All this should be familiar to anyone who reads the headlines. As World Bank President Robert Zoellick recently put it, “Thirty-three countries around the world face potential social unrest because of the acute hike in food and energy prices.” Riots have already struck countries as diverse as Egypt and Haiti; in the latter, some residents have taken to eating patties made of mud in order to fill their empty bellies. Last year, poor Mexicans took to the streets to protest the high cost of tortillas, an unintended consequence of America’s quick embrace of corn-based ethanol. We may be on the verge of a prolonged international crisis.

Like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, books such as Roberts’s have the potential to move the public to action, prompting policymakers to either take notice or run the risk of being overtaken by events and miss the chance to ride the cresting wave of policy change. At a time when concern over food safety, childhood obesity, and rising food prices around the world is mounting, The End of Food will hopefully do just that. Unfortunately, showing us that our supermarket cornucopia is teetering on the brink of a human and environmental disaster, as Roberts does, will not by itself move us toward a safe and sustainable food system. Advocates of a new food policy must also shift how the public and policymakers in Washington understand the problem, addressing the concerns of producers and consumers alike.

How did we get here? The answer, in a kernel, is cheap corn. Since World War II, synthetic fertilizers and hybrid seeds have resulted in massive increases in agricultural productivity. Over the last 60 years or so, there has been a four-fold increase in corn production and yields. At 13 billion bushels, the 2007 corn crop was the largest in U.S. history. Over the same period, the real (inflation-adjusted) price of corn has dropped by two-thirds. Even with the ethanol-fueled boom in commodities this year, the price of corn is about where it was in real terms in the mid-1990s, the last time prices spiked, and it is well below the historic highs seen during the tight commodity markets of the 1970s.

Cheap corn makes for cheap high-fructose corn syrup, an ingredient in everything from soda to bread and a likely culprit in the rising rates of obesity in this country. Cheap corn also makes cheap feed for livestock, and thus cheap meat produced on massive feedlots. These industrial feeding operations are a breeding ground for E. coli, which can spread quickly through the highly concentrated meat-processing industry. And cheap corn means narrow profit margins, prompting farmers to plant more acres, forgo crop rotation, and apply heavier applications of fertilizer and chemicals that deplete the soil of nutrients and damage our rivers and oceans. In other words, cheap corn is not really cheap at all. It is just that many of the costs of cheap corn have been externalized in the form of rising health care costs and environmental degradation.

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