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Food and Drink

Of bubbles and flooding and food The bite of the world food crisis

Seventy percent of Queensland devastated by floods, an area about the size of B.C. Mighty Queensland brought to its knees. A state where about 85 percent of the land supports agricultural activities - everything from raising cows and other livestock to growing apples, citrus crops, legumes, nuts, berries, cereal grains and many, many vegetables, including the great Queensland blue squash we learned much about last year, thanks to Pemberton's Sarah MacMillan at Rootdown Organics.

In Pakistan, flooding that started last July and continues today has impacted more than 20 million people and destroyed about 17 million acres of farmland, which constitutes 30 percent of the country's productive land, an area the size of England. Affected crops include animal fodder, rice and pulses (or legumes) such as lentils. Experts say it will take years - seven, 10, 12 years, who knows how long - for the land to recover and become productive again.

All this in a nation where, according to the U.N., the prices of essential staples have skyrocketed, increasing about 40 per cent over the last five years. A land where about 77 million Pakistanis, or more than half the people, didn't have enough to eat on an ongoing basis before the current disaster began.

This week China is reporting that the country's main wheat-growing area in the north has not seen rain in three months. The second most important wheat-growing area, Shandong province, is facing its worst drought in  - take your pick - a century or 60 years. The dry weather is expected to continue for some time but people in some Shandong cities are already relying on fire trucks to deliver drinking water.

Closer to home, in Manitoba, where winter has brought record snowfalls and spring melt hasn't begun, soil moisture levels are currently double what's normal and higher than those in 1997 when the province faced the "flood of a century."

Some experts are predicting the entire province could be subjected to flooding this spring. According to Statistics Canada, or what remains of it, Manitoba contains about one-quarter of Canada's farmland and cropland combined and normally is the source of about 15 per cent of the nation's wheat, 26 per cent of our oats, and about 10 per cent of all the cows and calves raised in this great land of ours.

 

Many of these weather-related disasters can be laid at the feet of this year's La Niña effect, part of the El Niño Southern Oscillation phenomenon. La Niña sees ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific cool down and change weather patterns. La Niña isn't new. What is remarkable, however, is how strong the effect is this year - and it's expected to last a few more months.

Compounding the extreme weather that's devastating food supplies and the 200,000+ new mouths to feed every day due to world population growth, prehistoric policy-makers, including many in Ottawa, are still advocating the use of agricultural land to create false gods in the alternative fuel pantheon, such as corn-based ethanol.

And so it is that the world food crisis making the news these days isn't some idle trifle, some passing dark fantasy conjured up by doom-mongers, sensational headline writers or food retailers who want to scare you into paying more.

Lester Brown has been thinking and writing about world population and resources for years. Back in 1974, Brown founded the Worldwatch Institute, the first research institute devoted to the analysis of global environmental issues. Ten years ago he created the Washington, D.C.-based Earth Policy Institute to "provide a vision and a road map for achieving an environmentally sustainable economy."

Never mind his arm-long list of honourary degrees and his impeccable credentials (he was once described by the Washington Post as "one of the world's most influential thinkers" and people have suggested he should have been a third co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize). It's Brown's background as a farmer, his degree in agricultural science and his experience gained while living in rural India that make me really sit up and take notice.

His latest book, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, is unfortunately not available in North America, at least not yet. But its release is the nub for a lecture Brown will deliver at the Oxford Environmental Change Institute this week. I would give my eating arm to attend.

"Our early 21st century civilization is in trouble," Brown notes in some pre-lecture publicity. "We need not go beyond the world food economy to see this. Over the last few decades we have created a global bubble economy - one based on environmental trends that cannot be sustained, including over-pumping aquifers, over-plowing land, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.

"The question is not whether the food bubble will burst but when."

 

Herb Barbolet, who has been around Vancouver forever working on one kind of sustainability or food security issue or another - including farming, helping to start the Granville Island classic co-operative restaurant, Isadora's, and, more recently, developing the Vancouver Food System Assessment report - noted at a lecture, which I could attend at Emily Carr University, that all people are food insecure, not just the homeless.

Here on our southern wet coast, says Barbolet, we have only about a three-day supply of fresh food in supermarkets because most of it is trucked or flown in from California and beyond.

The irony is that decades ago southern B.C. used to have a lot of local food processing capacity, such as fish canning factories in Steveston and fruit packing houses in the Gulf Islands. Most of that is gone, including in the Okanagan Valley where wine now rules.

Even my mom knows that as resources are depleted and energy costs and populations rise, food security will increasingly become an issue and food prices will soar. She says she's glad she won't be around much longer.

Then there are the food security issues that get translated into disaffection, even terrorism and war. Writing in Al Jazeera , Larbi Sadiki, a senior lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, lays out what he calls "bread intifadas" as one of the roots of the "bin Laden of marginalization."

Remember, more than half of Pakistanis weren't getting enough to eat even before the recent floods.

In the developing world, people spend about 75 percent of their disposable income on food. In Europe, that figure is about 20 percent.

Canadians are lucky. We spend less than 10 percent of our disposable income on food. Expect that to change soon, and don't take it out on the farmers.

 

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who's been turning the soil in her garden.