The Earth We Eat

”The Earth We Eat is about the most pressing question of humanity: how can we transform the most important human occupation to contribute to global sustainability and human welfare on a planet under increasing stress,” – Johan Rockström, Executive Director, Stockholm Resilience Centre.

In December 2012, Jorden vi äter was published by the Swedish Society of Nature Conservation (SSNC). In three months it sold 16,000 copies. We can now offer it in an English version – tentatively called “The Earth We Eat”.

Never before in history have we produced so much food in the world, and so cheaply. And yet, almost one billion people go hungry to bed at night.

The authors visited villages in India that are threatened by soil erosion, participated in the gambling at the Chicago Board of Trade, followed the expansion of beef and soy in the Amazonas and travelled across the dying countryside in Illinois. From maize farmers in Zambia with their muscles as the only source of power to intensive greenhouses in the Netherlands, from posh restaurants in Mumbai to the authors’ own refrigerators, the story of how our food is produced has been woven.

The Earth We Eat tells how farming shapes our world and the food we eat and how farming has been shaped by fossil fuel, mechanization and ever increasing global competition. While a supermarket stocks some 50,000 different products and we seem to have endless choices, the reality is that our food is increasingly monotonous—derived from just a handful of crops that are grown in an industrial way.

Agriculture is becoming more and more like any other industry, where different components are produced in different locations, often in different countries, and where the components are put together in huge assembly plants, chicken factories or giant pizza bakeries. But agriculture is not like any other industry, it is the foundation of our health and the health of the planet.

People and images talk to the reader through reports from visits to farms, stock exchanges, nature reserves, research institutes and restaurants in five continents. Linked to each story are facts and an easy flowing narrative. The Earth We Eat has a clear angle without being simplistic or demagogic.

The nine chapters and their main content are:

I            Introduction

The introduction sets the stage for the book by, on the one hand, discussing the changing content of our refrigerators, and on the other hand, giving some basic data about the state of global agriculture. What we eat and how we farm influence each other. The enormous diversity in supermarket shelves is contrasted with monocultures in the fields; hunger with obesity; fossil fuel driven farming with hand-hoeing; and green revolution with organic.

The structure of the book is briefly explained and the case studies introduced.

II           Travel through roundup ready land

Food and agriculture are being increasingly managed like assembly industries. The United States is a very good showcase for this.

We visit the Chicago Board of Trade to show the enormous influence market conditions have on farms. Contracts worth ten times the global production of maize is bought and sold here every year. We interview a trade developer and a trader and we also engage ourselves in speculation to demonstrate how it works.

Bob Stewart in Illinois grows GM crops, maize and soybeans only, uses fertilizers and pesticides, and sells his crop in bulk for industry, ethanol and feed. His story is the basis for discussion about soil erosion, fertilizer use, GM crops, pesticides and markets. A farmer who has chosen a very different path is Jack Erisman. He has farmed organically for the last 20 years and has a very diverse system of production as well as a diverse marketing strategy.

For a long time, agriculture in the US expanded, but this is now reversed; some lands are taken out of production because of erosion and some are taken out of production to restore nature. In the American Prairie Reserve in Montana, 10,000 bison shall co-habit over a vast area with 490,000 cows in an effort to restore the prairie. We discuss the conflict between nature and farming and also the conflicts arising around this initiative.

III          Among cows, sweat and soy

Its main discussion is about the expansion of agriculture in Brazil at the expense of the Amazon rainforest; how we convert big common goods of the rainforest into small private gains for farmers and landowners.

We visit the large ranch Sao Marcello, certified by the Rainforest Alliance, and the settlers Maria and Luis Viera who have an incredibly diverse agroforestry plantation with 86 species. The Wolf’s farm seeks to integrate livestock and crops and trees on a larger scale.

The process of change is still rapid in Brazilian agriculture, and research by the governmental Embrapa institute plays a big role in this transformation. The effect of GM crops and the production of GM free soybeans is discussed with farmers and Embrapa. Weeds are becoming increasingly resistant to herbicides and instead of reducing use, GM crops has led to an increase in their use.

IV          To harvest maize or poverty

The main limitation for the production of food in Africa is poverty and lack of markets rather than lack of modern technology.

Susan Mkandawire is a very poor farmer in Zambia. She and her family are not starving – this year – but they have no margins and very little opportunity to get out of poverty. Godfrey Boma has more land and has invested money he earned from other businesses into farming and that allows him to make at least double yield per hectare and to grow and sell more.

Sebastian Scott in Zambia and a project in Tigray in Ethiopia demonstrate that organic farming methods have the potential to substantially increase yields, and pineapple growers in Uganda fetch a good price exporting organic products. In Namibia we discuss that cattle breeding is one of the best ways to produce food in large tracts of the world that are too dry or cold for cropping.

We end the Africa chapter with a discussion about the way ahead for African agriculture. Our conclusion is that social and economic factors are a lot more important than the technological factors which often dominate the discussion, e.g. fertilizers or GM crops.

     V        The cow grazing in the highway

India is largely vegetarian and still has the most cattle in the world. The cow is a classic – and still relevant – focus of our report from India. Through interviews with the National Dairy Development Board and farmers in Gujarat, we describe the choice that India has; the path of brutal industrialization or of a gradual adaptation of its production system to new conditions and diets. 

Agriculture in Gujarat is a commercial success; on the other hand it has caused severe soil erosion and loss of biodiversity which we study in the village Khorwad. Even more seriously for farmers in Gujarat as well as in many other parts of the world, water resources are depleted. Rajput Ramjibhai Khodabhai and his neighbours in the village Jaloya have no water left and therefore no future.

We end our journey in India in the fancy restaurant the Table in Mumbai, to discuss how food habits are becoming increasingly global; even beef hamburgers are now found in restaurants.  

VI          Please switch off the light in the stable when you leave the village

Our report from Sweden discusses the process of commercialization and mechanization of farming that has substantially reduced the number of farms – as well as the number of shops and people in the country sides. A development which is similar to most parts of Europe.

As agriculture landscapes cover half of the land, its role in maintaining bio-diversity and landscapes can hardly be exaggerated. We discuss the loss of biodiversity both in the farming landscape and in agriculture, that is, the reduction in varieties and breeds. Increasingly farmland is also being lost to “development” in the form of supermarkets, roads and parking lots.

The family Johansson in Värmland shows how 10 farms became one in one generation. The main driver has been competition, but we also show how government policy shaped farms.  Stänkdalen, an organic farm with production of rape seed oil and ice cream, is an example of a farm that goes another way, but still feels the pressure from the market.

VII         The dictatorship of the penny

We sum up the economic and social drivers that shape agriculture, how the forces of global competition affect the decisions of farmers and food industries.  We discuss how despite breakneck rationalization, most farmers still have difficulties making ends meet. And as a result of successful rationalization in farming, areas with “competitive farming” are social deserts with almost no people left.

The power of the food chain has moved away from farmers and food producers to huge companies selling inputs and to supermarkets. Fewer actors produce most of our food. They market many different brands but most food is essentially a reformulation of a few ingredients.

External costs caused by farming is not included in the price and the benefits of good farming practices are to a very small extent compensated for – food is simply too cheap. This leads to large scale environmental destruction and cruel systems of keeping animals.

VIII        To feed the soil or eat the earth?

Is it possible to feed 9 or 10 billion people in a sustainable way?

Our visit to Pudu Peppers, a company for intensive green house production in the Netherlands, demonstrates how far intensification can go and that the potential to increase yields is huge. But it comes at high environmental costs.

Food production has almost tripled in 50 years, and a lion’s share of the increased production has come from intensified land use and not from expansion of agriculture area. We expect this to continue. Meanwhile, there are opportunities to expand agriculture in Africa and parts of Latin America. The problem is not yet shortage of land, but that this land is needed to produce essential ecosystem services.

There are opportunities to increase productivity both with conventional and organic methods. We have a choice and that choice must look further than just the yield per hectare; it must take agriculture´s other roles into consideration as well.

IX          The future in your fridge – 30 years from now

While we will hardly go back to national self-sufficiency, it is clear that the global food model has reached the end of the road and has many negative side effects. 

The industrial model leads to impoverished bio-diversity and is a high risk gamble; it is both possible and desirable to farm in an organic way. A re-integration of crop production and livestock, and consumption and production is needed. Meanwhile we will develop new production systems for bio energy and perennial crops. Local and regional foods will return or be re-developed.

Changes in diets will continue to shape agriculture, and agriculture development will continue to shape diets. Food will become more expensive, and staple foods such as grain and root crops will also in the future dominate our food systems. Meat will be more expensive and therefore consumption will be reduced. Other sources for food will be developed in the sea and there is a big potential to reduce waste in the whole food chain.

The design

The Swedish version of the book has 176 pages of 240*170 mm, with a total of 250,000 characters, including spaces (excluding the preface and some informational text about the SSNC). It has full colour print with a large number of pictures. The body of the Swedish book is attached. Many more good pictures are available.

Adaptations and variations

The authors are open to discuss adaptations for particular markets, e.g. by making special reports.

If the publisher is interested, we would be very keen to further develop the last chapter with reports from a few show cases for the future.
 

The authors

Ann-Helen Meyer von Bremen has worked as a journalist for 25 years, with specialization in food and agriculture especially its relation to the environment. The interface between the farm and the fork is what interests her the most. She has won a number of journalistic awards and is a popular lecturer and moderator.

Gunnar Rundgren was a farmer and has been one of the pioneers of the organic movement in Sweden since 1977. He served as the president of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements 2000–2005. He has worked as a consultant for the United Nations, The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and others. He published the book Garden Earth – from hunter and gatherers to global capitalism and thereafter in 2013. He is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Forestry and Agriculture.

Copyright

The authors hold the right to the text and to the pictures.

Contact: Ann-Helen Meyer von Bremen, phone +46 705626406, ann-helen@uttryck.se

Gunnar Rundgren, phone +4670-5180290, gunnar@grolink.se

Someone is reading

The sales of my book Garden Earth is progressing, albeit a bit slowly. I have got some interesting feed back from some readers and a few reviews have been published:

“While this book represents serious and well researched scholarship, abundant with factual data from authoritative sources, it is written in a very accessible style with a sense of personal warmth and lighthearted humor that keeps one’s interest without excessive jargon. [...]  This work gives us an excellent tool for understanding agriculture and food systems through a social ecology compatible lens, and a valuable contribution to the discussion of how to bring about a society that is rational, prosperous, equitable and ecologically based.”

Writes Grace Gershuny in a review of Garden Earth at the web site of the Institute for Social Ecology
You can read the whole review here.

"If you want to read only one book on sustainability, I warmly recommend this one! This one gives me hope for the future. But we are still facing the biggest challenge in the history of the modern human being."

writes Kristian Stålne in a recent review of Garden Earth.  The book is used as literature in a university course on Sustainable Transition.

Meanwhile this blog now has some 5,000 page views per month and my Swedish blog some 2,500 page views per month. 

The convenient illusion of the fair market

Jopseh raking sea weeds from the beach

I am spending a few days at the Sarova Whitesands in Mombasa, a very large and posh hotel (participating in a workshop).

Every morning there is an army of people raking sea weed from the beach. They are paid by the government to clean up the beach to make it attractive for tourists.

It is just one of many examples of how those that are better off - including myself - benefits from the poverty of others. If Joseph and his colleagues got paid the same as I, or you, this work would be so expensive that it would not be possible to do it.

Also those that never go abroad or even see or meet a really poor person can still benefit from their labour. A glaring examples was of course the collapse of the textile factory building in Bangladesh which left more than a thousand people dead. It is their blood that makes our clothes cheap. Of course one can argue that if we didn't buy the clothes, or if tourists didn't come to Mombasa, these people would have no work at all. But I do think that is a far too convenient argument that we have heard to often. People with privileges always find moral excuses for maintaining them.

Our excuse is that the market is always fair. This is underpinning our whole society. Markets are by definition self-regulating and fair. 
  
But, the unequal value we (well we don't want to admit that it is "we", but instead it is this power of nature - the market) assign to peoples work is simply not fair or reasonable, it doesn't matter if we discuss the difference between the top CEO in Sweden and the workers in the same company or the difference between those workers in Sweden and the farmers producing their morning coffee. As we all live in the global economy, comparisons should also be global, and measuring (in)equality should be global.


And the sea weed? Unfortunately nobody takes care of the sea weed - it is an excellent fertilizer. It is washed out into the sea, and most of it comes back the next morning...
I think Joseph is done now, time for a swim.

Heinberg: growth will end.period.

Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with; only relative growth is possible. The world economy is now a zero-sum game, with a shrinking pie to be divided. According to Richard Heinberg in End of Growth, Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, the three factors that stand firmly in the way of further economic growth are: resource depletion (oil, minerals, fresh water), negative environmental impacts (climate change, pollution, loss of biodiversity), and financial collapse (debt crisis).

The language is vivid and clear, the argumentation is solid. Heinberg clearly has both broad and deep knowledge about many important parts of the marvelous creation that we call society, and why growth will end.


The industrial revolution was really a fossil fuel revolution. Petroleum plays as big role in this book as it does in modern society. “Energy is not just a commodity; it is the prerequisite for any and all activity. No energy, no economy,” says Heinberg, an American journalist and the author of ten books. He serves as a Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and was one of the first to bring up the huge impact peak oil would have on modern society.

Not only are fossil fuels depleted but also fresh water is being critically overused and degraded. In the US, many mineral resources, including bauxite, copper, iron ore, magnesium, phosphate rock, potash, and zinc, are well past their peak rates of production.

The central discussion in End of Growth, however, is the financial collapse of 2008, and the following global crisis including the Euro crisis, Heinberg says “marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades.” He says that “the entire economic system had come to depend on impossible-to-realize expectations of perpetual growth and was set to detonate.” Money was tied to banks making money when issuing loans and credit was tied to assumptions about growth. When growth stalled in 2008, there was a chain reaction of defaults and bankruptcy.

I find it very hard to know if the financial turmoil of today is really a fundamental break or just one of many stations on the path of a train downhill. Viewed in the longer perspective, I have no doubt that Heinberg’s link between the economy and resource depletion is real. Whether contraction is chaotic or controlled, and whether it comes sooner or later, a radical simplification of the economy is more or less inevitable, as systems designed for cheap energy and resource depletion reach environmental limits.

When energy declines, the trend toward specialization will be reversed and so will urbanization. Urbanization depends on surplus agricultural production from agriculture, which in turn depends on cheap oil. Whether we like or hate globalization and specialization, we will rely more on local resources and production capacity. “How far we will go towards being local generalists depends on how we handle the energy transition of the 21st century,” says Heinberg.

Heinberg certainly doesn’t sugarcoat his messages. It is possible to have a civilization without fossil fuels, but this civilization will be different than ours. How far will we have to retreat? Can we surrender cars, highways, and supermarkets, but still keep cultural exchange, tolerance, and diversity, healthcare, and instant access to information?, he wonders.

End of Growth is not a comforting book to read, and it shouldn't. “I may seem to have gone out of my way to focus relentlessly on negative prospects, discounting possibilities and opportunities while highlighting limits and dire outcomes,” writes Heinberg and explains that because the end of growth is an unattractive notion most people are likely to avoid considering it.

Heinberg identifies, like many others, that the problems of dwindling resources and environmental destruction are compounded by population growth. Any gains from increased efficiency of resource use are erased by growing populations.

One aspect of demography missing in this otherwise excellent book is that of demographic changes themselves causing growth to shrink or even cease altogether. The importance of population growth for our unprecedented economic growth is underrated. There is a very strong correlation between the phases of the so-called demographic transition and economic growth. Countries that undergo the transition will have a once-in-the-lifetime-of-their-civilization window of opportunity, when workers are many, the number of children has gone down and the number of elderly is still small.

In the same way, once the cohorts of working shrink and population ages, growth will inevitably slow down. Heinberg notes this about China, “Beginning in 2015, China will see a growing number of older citizens relying on a shrinking pool of young workers.” However, this is not unique for China. Japan and most of Europe has already undergone this transition, which is a major reason why their economies hardly grow anymore. Apart for the resource scarcity, environmental problems and financial melt-down, I venture that we also reach Peak Work. In the United States, 67 percent of the people in working age were engaged in the labour force in 1998, up from around 50 percent in the 1950s; this has now dropped to almost 63 percent and the numbers are still falling

The list of critical problems facing civilisation is nearly endless, but for each problem there is a solution. But if there are so many solutions are available, why does the scenario for the future look so dreary? asks Heinberg and explains that most people assume that solving a problem means being able to continue doing what we are doing now. “Yet it is what we are doing now that is creating our problems.”

The mere idea that all challenges are problems to be fixed is perhaps “part of the problem”. John Michael Greer talks about the difference between a problem and a predicament. A problem calls for a solution; a predicament, by contrast, has no solution. Faced with a predicament, people come up with responses. Those responses may succeed, they may fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but none of them will “solve” the predicament, in the sense that none of them can make it go away.

It seems to me that it is hard to discern what is needed to save the economy from imploding with a big bang – something that will cause enormous suffering and social strife – and what is needed to induce a smooth transition. This is, of course, extremely difficult to know when you are in the middle of it. One thing seems clear – that it can hardly be more of the same that will get us out of the mess.

Heinberg also sees a conflict between the survival strategies of individuals and what is good for society at large, at least in the short-term. Individuals should be disengaging from consumerism, getting out of debt, becoming more self-sufficient. But if everyone did this, it would keep the economy from recovering and would push us further into recession.

Heinberg points to local currencies, Transition towns and cooperatives as useful tools. He also floats the idea of locally-based Community Economic Laboratories established in the center of towns. But he also notes that “there is no hope in hell that Transition initiatives, co-ops, and alternative currencies will spring up fast enough and on a sufficient scale to avert general economic misery.” Heinberg banks on our abilities as social beings; he believes our most valuable assets will be local communities composed of people who are willing and able to work together. To maintain the social cohesion must be our single highest priority.

Heinberg has changed the discourse from discussing why growth should end to that growth will end. Period.


Read more: Richard Heinbers's web site
Other endorsments
"Heinberg shows how peak oil, peak water, peak food, etc. lead not only to the end of growth, and also to the beginning of a new era of progress without growth.”
–Herman E. Daly, Professor Emeritus at School of Public Policy, University of Maryland and author of Beyond Growth

“Dig into this book! It is crammed full of ideas, information and perspective on where our troubled world is headed – a Baedeker for the perplexed, and that’s most of us.”
–James Gustave Speth, author, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability
More endorsements for ‘The End of Growth’

Ebook
I used  End of Growth as a test case for reading an e-book. I liked the book a lot more than I liked reading on the PC-kindle! Admittedly the Kindle was great for copying text and for highlights, but somehow I don't get the same overview when reading on the e-book.  Perhaps it will come with practice.

African Experiences in Resilience and Sustainability

I have had the pleasure of being one of the co-editors of the book, Organic Agriculture: African Experiences in Resilience and Sustainability, which is now published by the FAO.
The book is available for download at: http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3294e/i3294e.pdf

The publication stems from the conference on Mainstreaming Organic Agriculture in the African Development Agenda, held in Lusaka, Zambia, from 2 to 4 May 2012. All papers and presentations from the conference is available here.

Ten of the papers of that conference has been reworked into this beautiful book.The different chapters in the book document sustainability experiences, including: mainstreaming organic agriculture into African development approaches; community-based livestock systems combining holistic range management; indigenous ethno-veterinary practices and customary systems of resource management; ecofunctional intensification through management of legumes, systems of rice intensification and integrated farming; and smallholders’ knowledge harnessed through family farmers learning groups and customized information and communication technologies.
 
Included in the book is the Lusaka Declaration on Mainstreaming Organic Agriculture into the African Development Agenda, which was an outcome of the Conference. Among others it said:

We agree that organic agriculture  plays a key role in sustainable development, food security, poverty reduction, environmental security, climate change adaptation, human health, preservation of indigenous knowledge, plant varieties and animal breeds as well as socio-cultural development. We shared international research results confirming that the adoption of organic agriculture practices significantly increases yields and improves livelihoods and food security in Africa.  Based on locally available renewable resources instead of purchased chemical inputs (over 90 percent of which are imported in sub-Saharan Africa), organic producers are less vulnerable to international input price volatility. Moreover organic agriculture is climate smart agriculture, as it produces lower emissions and also provides much greater resilience in times of climate extremes such as drought and heavy rains.  

The Lusaka Declaration also urges all African Governments to include organic agriculture in their policies and agricultural development agenda, including their Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Country Compacts and Investment Plans, in consultation with the organic agriculture stakeholders in their countries.

Capitalism: The right to extract wealth

"When we buy stock we are not contributing capital: we are buying the right to extract wealth."

(Marjorie Kelly,The Divine Right of Capital, 2001)

The legitimacy of capitalism rests on two arguments, closely related to each other.

The first is a system that in a rational way, through peoples’ self-interest, efficiently organizes production and consump­tion, with little or no government control. This system creates increasing wealth. Although this system has created enormous wealth and a tremendous increase in useful as well as useless ‘things’, the wealth is very unevenly distributed, resulting in enormous gaps in society. It has also not made people more satisfied. Meanwhile, it has created havoc in nature, from pollution of a local water source to disruption in life-supporting cycles such as the carbon and nitrogen cycles. ‘As efficient as markets may be, they do not ensure that individuals have enough food, clothes to wear, or shelter,’ says Stiglitz (2002: 222). There is a need for constant government intervention to correct all so-called market failures. It is wise to exempt large parts of society as well as nature from the logic of the market. Most people who are essentially positive towards capitalism and market economy realize that.

The second argument is a moral defense both for the accumulation of capital and for making profit. Even if it can appear a bit unfair, these mecha­nisms are needed to stimulate innovation and development. In the long view, everyone will benefit. The sometimes absurd profits are explained—and defended—by Schumpeter (1942) as follows: Spectacu­lar profits, much bigger than needed to motivate the action, are gained by a very small group of winners. The possibility, the dream, of these enormous gains stimulates normal business more efficiently than if everybody got only a very modest profit. They overestimate the possibility for the big win in the same way as a poker player or a lottery-ticket buyer. In Schumpeter’s view, one should agree to these giant profits, and the thereby associated differences in income and wealth, because it is the best way to stimulate development. This is the essence also of others’ defense for capitalism, even if modern propo­nents mostly express themselves a bit more politically correctly than Schumpeter did. Let us study this argument a bit more in depth and how well it passes the test of reality.

Capitalism doesn’t require limited companies, but it is the institution that most clearly epitomizes capitalism. Take the example of a small limited company. It has existed for 10 years and its total revenue over 10 years is in the range of US$ 30 million. The start-up capital invested in stocks was US$ 60,000. The shareholders have got small dividends over the year, just corresponding to a typical interest rate; they wanted to keep the profits in the company to allow for rapid growth. Through accumulated profits, the company is now worth some US$ 500,000; that is, the value of the ‘investment’ has increased eightfold in 10 years. This is nothing exceptional but all in all it is a reflection of a moderately successful company.

During the 10 years of existence, some 10 people have been working in the company. They have had a good salary; they even have been part of a profit-sharing programme. One now wonders why the ones who invested the original capital 10 years earlier should be the owners of the whole company. Isn’t it the fruits of the 10 people who work that has made it what it is today? The original capital, representing less than 1 person-year of work in value is now worth more than the 100 person-years of work dedicated to the company over the years. Strangely, this is accepted as the most natural thing.

The stated purpose of limited companies is to supply their owners with profits. This is motivated by the owners supplying the capital that is needed to start and invest in the operations. This is also the reality when many companies start. The bulk of the trade in stocks is not about company start-ups, however, but about stocks that are bought and sold purely speculatively. In the period 1900–1953, new stocks contributed less than 5% of the needed capital for business in the United States. At the end of the 1990s, only 1% of the value of the stock that was bought and sold reached the companies, the rest was only transfer between stockowners (Kelly 2001).

As the system is now, the stockowners have the power over compa­nies and the exclusive rights to profits. Not the total right actually; the other power centre in society, the state, has ascertained its share of the profit through company taxes, in almost all societies. One can also see this as a payment for the services companies get from society, such as an educated work force, health system, legal system and protection. The employees, the clients, the local community or the environment have no right to a share in profits. Between 1987 and 1997, the stocks in the Dow Jones index went up 300%. In the same period, real wages in the United States dropped 7%. That can hardly be fair, reasonable or even efficient. As Schumpeter (1942) noted, when companies are not managed by entrepreneurs but by professional managers, and owned by investors, the whole idea of ownership and entrepreneurship is destroyed.

In a limited company, the owner has unlimited rights to the profits of the company, but only limited responsibility for the losses. This is the essence of limited companies; 200 years ago this didn’t exist. It is an innovation and a privilege extracted by the rich in the same way as the nobles saw to it that their rights were enshrined in law. There were shareholding companies earlier, but the owners were personally responsible. The emergence of limited companies is the first example, and one of the clearer examples, of how the wealthy class tries to privatize gains and socialize losses, something that became very apparent during the financial crisis of 2008/2009 where a trillion of dollars or more were used by governments just to prime the financial markets because they were not willing to take any risks; the same markets that claims the legitimacy of their mere existence with that they are needed to provide businesses with risk capital!

It is an undisputed fact that capitalism is very good in making business out of innovation, but that doesn’t mean that most ground­breaking innovations in society have been made by private companies. On the contrary, most big innovations have taken place in very different arenas. Automobiles, television, radio, nuclear power, antibiotics, wind power, sailing, electrification and the Internet are all examples of groundbreaking technologies that were driven primarily by governments or by curiosity and the ‘wish to know’ rather than by capitalist innovation (Hourihan and Atkinson 2011). When a big leap in technology has already been made, entrepreneurs find commercial uses for the new technology. The Internet is a very good example of this. Entrepreneurs are also very good at moving those technologies out to the people.

Technological development was rather slow before capitalism, and one of the reasons was that there were few incentives for people to improve efficiency. The rich could extract value added by serfs, tenants or slaves and didn’t need mechanization and the poor had neither resources nor real possibilities to turn any innovation into business. Having said that, there is certainly no reason to believe that innovation will cease without the profit motive. To make the job easier or more entertaining is a driver for innovation as well. Human nature is curious and innovative and that will be the case also without profit motives. To do something new, something good, not only for oneself but for the whole community can be a forceful driver, and it is also something that could be highlighted and emphasized more in a way that it renders more status.



(Extract from Garden Earth: from hunter and gatherers to global capitalism and thereafter
Available from Create Space, Amazon.com , Amazon.de, Amazon.es, Amazon.fr, Amazon.it, Amazon.co.uk and most book retailers)

The frog that jumped out!

Communicating climate change: may the force be against you!

Posted by Ugo Bardi

Yoda's three fingered force push - from Star Wars.

Don't you have the impression, sometimes, that the force is against you? Every time you try  to say something about the dangers of climate change, you see people literally being pushed away from you by an invisible force. It feels like being Star War's Yoda, pushing away enemies with "the force". Read more


This is to spread the word about a new blog initiated by Ugo Bardi and others.
It presents itself like this:

Telling the truth is not enough

This is a blog dedicated to communication in climate change. 

We are a group of concerned people who believe that the risks involved with climate change are clear enough that it is time to act.


So far, however, the task of communicating the urgency of the climate problem has not been successful. Telling the truth turned out not to be enough to spur people into action. We need to do way better.

This is what we want to discuss in this blog. We need to learn how to communicate. It means to learn how to tell the truth on climate in a way that doesn't scare people  but, on the contrary, stimulates them to action. It is possible, but we need to do it right.

We chose the image of the boiling frog as a reminder of the human situation on planet Earth. We hope it is to be intended as meaning that we are (or should be) more intelligent than frogs. We can still jump out! 

 

Another inequality measure - airmiles

Sometimes images are telling a lot. The picture below is from worldmapper and shows the flights in kilometers from different places. It says something about carbon foot print and it certainly says something about inequality in the world. Especially inequality between the countries.


"In 2000 civilian aircraft flew a total of 25 billion kilometres. If someone flew this distance they could circle the earth more than 630 000 times. If the total distance flown by all aircraft passengers was divided equally between everyone living in the world, we would each fly 317 kilometres a year. In fact some people fly thousands of kilometres a year, whilst others have never been in an aeroplane. The people flying the most kilometres tend to be from island territories. On the other hand, people from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, also island territories, are amongst those flying the smallest number of kilometres per year."

Growth is gone - welcome steady-state

Perhaps we should stop discussing whether growth is good or bad and just conclude that it is ending...
Clearly, growth has stalled the last decade. Of course, some still put their faith into that growth will restart again, and they have all kinds of ideas what societies should do to re-start growth. Many, including myself, question the growth paradigm itself. Well, perhaps we don't have to discuss it anymore - growth is declining.



This is particularly apparent if we look at GDP per capita which adjust for population growth. In most rich countries the number of people working in the economy is declining and with them economic growth - Macrofugue Analytics talks about Peak Capitalism. In most parts of the world, we have reached Peak Child. For a while those countries, such as China will go through a period of growth stronger than ever before and ever after, but gradually growth will subside. While we will not run out of fossil fuels, there is no doubt that new sources are much more expensive to extract and has lower EROEI than earlier finds and therefore contributes less to growth. 

It seems to me that young people in Europe or North America today can not assume - as my generation did - that things will be better and better. And this is even without the drama of climate change taken into account. Youth unemployment in Spain has reached 56 percent these days.

So, instead of arguing if growth is good or not, perhaps we should instead discuss how we will manage a society without growth. Also those that are in principle in favour of continued growth might find it wise as a safeguard - a contingency planning.

It seems to me that we need to re-think a lot in our societies if growth is not there. One apparent thing is of course pensions. We can already see a pension squeeze in many countries. Intra-generational conflicts might increase when the cake is not constantly growing. Many business models are built on assumptions of growth and many peoples' housing "careers" are built on ideas of ever increasing house prices - assumptions that already have proven wrong and dangerous. 

As a matter of fact it might be the case that our entire system requires growth. But then we would have to revisit the system rather than desperately trying to incite new growth, with higher and higher social costs.

The religious belief in constant progress needs to be revisited.


read also:
Lagom is good enough
We get richer also without growth
Aging populations will end growth
Japan: post growth and post-peak-oil works?

 

 

Can we shop our way to a better world?

When you buy a cup of coffee for €2, the farmer gets 3-4 cents for the coffee in that cup. If you buy a cup of organic and fair trade coffee, you may have to cough-up €2.50 and the farmer will get 4-5 cents. The farmer’s income will increase by an impressive 20-25 percent. Looking at it from another perspective, it seems that you will need to spend 50 cents to increase the farmer’s income by 1 or 2 cents. This example throws up the question whether the market mechanism is efficient in transforming consumers’ willingness to pay for direct or indirect benefits of a product.

Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) such as fair trade, organic, and eco-labels have emerged as part of a number of converging – and associated – trends such as:

- emphasizing the market and consumer choice as important tools to accomplish ethical, economic, environmental or social goals;

- facilitating government de-regulation, which leaves more self-regulation to the industries;

- holding those that bring products to the market place accountable for the quality of the products, a responsibility that extends to the suppliers of the products, and their suppliers in turn;

- introducing a stiff global competition which makes differentiation in the market place an essential survival strategy to escape ‘commodity hell’;

- organizing production into so-called value chains where each link is taken care of by independent companies that are under the constant threat of being exchanged, constantly competing with others.


Let me expand a bit on this last point.

In the movie The Godfather, Vito Corleone, the mafia boss played by Marlon Brando, is asked by his godson Jonny Fontane to help secure a film role that will boost his fading career. The head of the film studio has previously refused to give Fontane the part. The Godfather tells Johnny, "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse." One morning the studio director wakes up to find the head of his expensive racehorse on his bed. Fontane is subsequently given the part.

This is basically what the chain leaders, i.e. supermarkets or corporations, have done; given suppliers an offer they can't refuse – follow the standard. Suppliers in the chain, all the way to the farmers, and sometimes even the suppliers to the farmers, should follow the standards developed by the chain leaders. In many cases, the standards also shift the costs away from the chain leader to the suppliers. In order to enforce compliance, suppliers have to use verification mechanisms, normally private certification bodies, authorized by the chain leaders or auditors from the chain leader.

At a point in time, NGOs realized that consumer activism could be a tool to accomplish goals. This first took shape as boycott, that is refusal to buy products from companies because of their behavior. When companies tried to get away from their responsibilities by outsourcing, NGOs pointed out that those chain leaders had responsibilities for the whole chain. In some cases, this led to the NGOs initiating sustainability schemes, either in partnership with an industry or alone.

We don’t have VSS for social conditions for labour in Scandinavia – but there is a Food Justice Certified scheme developed in the USA now. Why? Because it is needed in the USA but not in Scandinavia (at least not in the same way as in the USA). VSS has emerged in the space between that well regulated by the markets and by the governments respectively. If we view their existence as a result of “policy failure” or “market failure”, it means that if the markets and governments did their job properly they would not be needed at all.

The example of the coffee cup shows that the market mechanism is not a particularly efficient tool for accomplishing non-market goals. Let me give a few more examples.

VSS is often presented as an option for small-scale farmers, but they are oversold in this regard. In general, only a small proportion of the farms will be able to participate in the new value chains. The sustainability schemes constitute one factor among many discriminating small producers, be it farmers or food processors. Farmers with more resources are able to capitalize more on the opportunities. The processes of certification also, almost inevitably, favor the rich over the poor, both in developed or developing countries.

I started an organic farm in 1977 in Sweden. From 1985 onwards, organic farms have been certified to voluntary standards. The number of organic farms in Sweden has grown from a few hundred in the early eighties to nearly 12,000. The market share has gone from 0 to 4-5 percent. Around 17 percent of arable land is organic. So this is a real success story. However, growth has slowed down despite the fact that a totally overwhelming majority of the population says that they want to eat organic food. Also, many farmers go organic mainly because of the compensation for environmental services that they get from the European Union and the government and not because of market demand. Looking at the bigger picture, the growth of the organic sector has done nothing to curb the rapid decline of farming in the country. The number of farms has halved in the same time that the organic market has developed.

Most VSS in the agriculture sector have regulations that production can't be approved if it is established on land that until recently was rainforest. If certified production becomes important, however, the net effect will be that the certified producers will buy existing land and other producers will continue to exploit the forest frontier with the money they get from selling land to the certified ones. This process has been ascertained in Brazil, where soya production – now certified as forest-friendly – push cattle ranchers to the forest zone. In reality, the impact of these standards is almost zero on deforestation, compared to government regulation. They do make consumers feel good, though.

They also are problematic to apply in situations caused by the sum of individual actions: for e.g. it is almost impossible to ascertain whether one farmer uses groundwater sustainably; it is the sum of water used by all farmers in the catchment area that will determine whether it is used sustainably or not. VSS in management of commons has existed for millennia, e.g. in the management of fisheries, forests, irrigation or pastures. But the modern sustainability schemes are based on the market and individual companies, which is contrary to the foundations of the long standing method of management of the commons.

When discussing the impact of a certain standard, it is often contrasted against a worst case scenario. The producers that first go for a VSS are, to a very large extent, those that have production already close to compliance, which is why there are many organic smallholders producing coffee, but almost no organic flower producers in the market place. Meanwhile, proponents of the schemes mostly contrast their affiliated production with worst cases of non-certified production.

I tell this not to make the case that organic farming and other VSS have failed, but to make the case that using the market and consumer purchase to accomplish policy goals is often less efficient than government regulations, direct subsidies, ban etc.

In general, VSS is not particularly efficient in dealing with problems that are rooted in fundamental structures of society, the market and the economy. They do normally work well when they are about a simple substitution of a technology, e.g. chlorine-free paper or CFC-free fridges. But things like that can – and should – be accomplished by mandatory regulations.

Ultimately, whether VSS delivers or not may be a sub-set of the bigger question, “Can we shop our way to a better world?” While I do think that we should buy organic and other products that are a better choice here and now – and to pay a bit more for them –I also firmly believe that this will only have small effects.

In State of the World 2013, Annie Leonard (the person making the excellent video Story of Stuff) points out that the focus on sustainable consumption “distracts us from identifying and demanding change from the real drivers of environmental decline…. Describing today’s environmental problems and solutions as individual issues also has a disempowering effect, leaving people feeling that their greatest power lies in perfecting their daily choices.” I couldn’t agree more.

The Rise of Africa - a fairy tale?

During my recent trip in East Africa, I saw a frenzied building activity in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Kampala. I saw an industrial park outside Kampala, and even between Mwanza and remote Tabora in Tanzania a new road was built. Oil drilling is set to commence in Uganda and gas pipelines are built from gas fields off the coast of Kenya and Tanzania. It seems like a lot of money is spent and investments are high. So far you could say that I witnessed the Rise of Africa – an increasingly popular narrative. 

Africa is now sometimes referred to as the New China. Africa’s booming economic growth fuelled by a rigorous focus on government and citizen accountability will boost poverty reduction and prosperity, according to the World Bank’s latest Africa’s Pulse, the twice-yearly analysis of the economic trends and latest data on the continent.

“The broad picture emerging from the data is that Africa’s economies have been expanding robustly and that poverty is coming down,” says Shanta Devarajan, the World Bank’s Chief Economist for Africa, and lead author of Africa’s Pulse. Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, the report found, economic growth remained strong at an estimated 4.7 percent. Excluding South Africa, the region’s largest economy, the remaining economies grew at a powerful 5.8 percent—higher than the developing country average of 4.9 percent.”

This "Africa Rising" narrative has been recently also been taken up by cover stories in Time Magazine and The Economist.

And as I said, there is building going on. But....

To compare Africa’s current development with China’s is nonsense in my view. China was always an industrial powerhouse – its GDP was much bigger than the whole of Europe before European imperialism. It has just undergone a temporary slump. In contrast Africa was never industrialized and it has been plundered for centuries, most importantly of its biggest resource – its people. Colonization certainly didn’t help.

For how long have you seen “made in China” on products you buy in the shop? And how often do you see “made in Nigeria/Kenya/Uganda/Zambia” on anything you buy? Even in African countries themselves, most industrial goods are imported from China, Thailand, India, USA or Europe. South African supermarkets are increasingly dominating the shopping scene in East Africa, and in their shelves most stuff is imported. And all those wonderful East African textiles – made in Bangladesh.

The industrial park I saw outside of Kampala seems to house mainly import/export companies. And looking in my own field of expertise, agriculture, it is still mainly dependent on manual labour with very low productivity.

Africa attracts a lot of investments  now. Part of it is from the African diaspora. Foreign remittances are said (of course data here is extremely fuzzy) to be bigger than total aid. Of course, all this money pouring in will have to be spent. Of course it will trigger economic growth, but there is no guarantee for a lasting development.

 “The idea of development as industrialization has been completely abandoned in the last few decades. Free market economics has come to advise poor countries to stick with their current primary agriculture and extractives industries and "integrate" into the global economy as they are. Today, for many champions of free markets, the mere presence of GDP growth and an increase in trade volumes are euphemisms for successful economic development. But increased growth and trade are not development”.

writes Dick Rowden in Foreign Policy.

The data behind the Rise of Africa narrative is also questioned. Morten Jerven’s research, Poor Numbers, in various Anglo-phone African nations suggests that the data supplied by national records and statistical offices are highly unreliable, with figures that substantially misstate the actual state of affairs.

Also, an economic growth rate of 5% per year is not so impressive when it is put in relation to the growth of the population. After all it is the growth per capita that counts when it comes to poverty reduction. Again, compare China with a 8% economic growth with almost no population growth with Sub-Saharan Africa with a population growth that is almost as big as economic growth. Between 1980 and 2010 GDP per capita in 2005 International dollars increased only from 1,800 per person to just above 2,000, albeit with a drop down below 1,500 in the early nineties (source).

Some are terrified by the growth of population in Africa, but by and large Africa is not much populated compared to Europe and Asia. Perhaps, this population growth also holds a promise for the future. The biggest shift in Africa’s demography resulting from the population boom is the increase of the working age population. In 2010, 34 per cent of Africans were aged between 25 and 59. They represent 34 per cent of the population or 353 million people. By 2050 this number is expected to reach 892 million people, representing 45 per cent of the population. This would represent a dramatic shift in the world’s labor force, with Africa likely to replace China as the biggest contributor to the global workforce.

Historically, a big work force has been one of the major drivers for economic development. But historical relations might no longer hold: in an industrial development with increasing automation the importance of the size of the workforce will perhaps be less pronounced. We already see that industries are to some extent coming back to the USA and Europe. In general, it seems like industries are going the same way as farming, a constant over-production as a result of that increase in productivity is quicker than growth of demand. This means that the industrialization path for development will be increasingly narrow and hard to go for newcomers.

Of course, there will be spots and pockets than can thrive without either industrial development or agriculture productivity growth; living on tourism or mining for instance. And there are countries which can – and have already – developed industries. After all Africa has 54 countries with varying conditions. But for a large scale development of Africa it needs both agriculture growth and industrialization. And both seem hard to get.

Peak Child - Peak capitalism?

The ideal family is no longer big

World population continues to grow, but the number of children in the world has now reached its peak. In 1960 we were 1 billion children below 15 years of age and we were 35% of the world population. Now there are 1,9 billion children in the world, but they are but 27% of world population. In 2050 there will still be an estimated 1.9 billion kids. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/p2k0data.asp

The good news is that populations are actually stabilizing. We doubled global population between 1960-1990 – but this will most likely never happen again.


In all major rich countries – with the USA as a remarkable exception – population is stabilized or would even fall were it not for immigration. In many other countries birth rates have plummeted. Remains a number of poor countries with still very rapid rates – just come home from East Africa which is one of the regions with still increasing population. It is worth noting that population growth rates in Africa are still not as rapid as they have been in Asia.

http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_2.htm

The era of colonization of the globe of human kind is rapidly coming to a close, with nature resources sucked up and population now filling space after space. With this closing, our economic system is also bound to change. 

Capitalism as we know it can’t manage a steady-state economy and it has also big problems to work with a stable population as things look like. After all, growth is the lifeblood of economic system and in that sense it probably doesn’t matter much if the growth is from increased consumption per capita or by increased population.

Perhaps "Peak child", "Peak oil" and "Peak soil" don't spell the end of capitalism, but they at least form "Peak capitalism". 

Anything too big to fail is too big!

Why on Earth is it Eaarth with an extra ‘a’? Perhaps it is a smart trick to draw attention to the book: Eaarth: Making a life on a Tough New Planet. However I do realize that Bill McKibben has chosen this to convey a very serious message—the message that the blue-green grand oasis we have seen on the pictures taken from Apollo 8 has become a very different planet; our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that we never experienced before. “It’s a different place. A different planet. It needs a new name. Eaarth”, he says.

In the first half of the book McKibben makes a strong effort to justify this dramatic expression. He does that well, I must say. The ice caps are melting, species are becoming extinct, wildfires are raging, record heat is being recorded every season and strong storms and floods are growing more frequent and severe, washing away our roads and bridges. He says that even “on the old stable planet” we are falling hopelessly behind. Today, one in every four bridges in the United States needs major repair or upgrades. And it's all going to get worse, even if we curb emissions today–which we clearly don’t.

Like many modern writers, McKibben focuses a lot on the connection between energy and economic growth. The more you produce the more energy you need and the more energy you use, the more things you produce. I believe this link is now well established.

Some people think we shouldn’t paint too gloomy a picture of the situation, as it may make people depressed and thereby passive. McKibben is clearly not in this camp. Neither am I. But even my appetite for doomsday meets its match here. I am afraid that spectacular weather events are somewhat overused to prove that global warming is here and that it is going to be hell. He claims that the “great boreal forest of North America is dying in a matter of years”. I remember that I sat crying in my spruce forest some 30 years ago when we had a rapid dying of forests in Sweden and other parts of Europe. The whole forest would be wiped out we were told. Today we have more trees than ever before!

It takes a few examples like these to undermine the story. But I don’t want to do that. McKibben is basically right, even if he might be wrong in some details, and uses too many “events” and not enough science to build the case.

Perhaps he is also overemphasizing on climate change being the single most pressing issue for our civilization. He does point to peak oil and a few other indications to show that the system has reached its limits, but climate change stands out as clearly the number one issue to be solved. While I dread climate change, I do think human civilization can survive it. But it will cost. And when energy is scarce and many other resources are depleted, we might not be able to afford the things we need. Having said that, climate change is certainly a threat that needs immediate action and attention.  

On page 99 he shifts attention to “after the flood”. Because there will be an after.

”the trouble with obsessing  over collapse, though, is that it keeps you from considering other possibilities...There is no real room for creative thinking....The rest of this book will be devoted to another possibility – that we might choose instead to manage our descent. That we might aim for a relatively graceful decline.” From there McKibben tries to explain how such a new civilization would look like and how we would reach there.

And it is this part of the book that is most interesting—at least for someone who no longer needs to be convinced of global warming. While our current civilization heralds risk, speed, complexity and expansion, the new world will be built on robustness, dependable technologies, locality, and resilience. McKibben builds a credible case for how the local, slow and close will help us out, “we’re talking walk or trot or jog, not canter or gallop”, comparing the shift with the difference between a thoroughbred and a workhorse of sturdy build.

Written in the aftermath of the biggest bail-out in history (the book was first published in 2010), McKibben says that anything too big to fail is by definition too big, advocating smaller units and less complexity. His own small state of Vermont, small scale farming, farmers markets and distributed power (people producing their own power from wind, sun, biogas etc.) are examples of how smaller units can work well—and bring other qualities. For instance, on average, people visiting a farmers market have ten times as many conversations per visit than those visiting a supermarket. The change will partly be driven by us choosing to do things, buying local for instance, and things we are forced to do such as repairing the local road because the central government can’t afford it, or fixing a local power source when the central supply has collapsed.  

Bill McKibben sees mostly good things with the transition that will come, the transition that has to come regardless of whether we want it or not. But he is not immune to the advances of contemporary society and its value.

”... our national and global project has been about more than accumulation and expansion, more than cars and factories. It’s also been about liberation – the slow but reasonably steady progress of valuing more and more people....The process that made us anonymous to our neighbors carried real benefits not just costs”.

The Internet is the savior here; it is both a global project that knits us together and something that allows restless globetrotters such as McKibben and myself keep in contact with the rest of the world without necessarily accruing air miles. But is the Internet really so resource saving? I have my doubts about it.   

Much of what McKibben advocates make sense. My main concern is that he overlooks the effects of the enormous inequalities in societies and the logic of the capitalist economy. The models of communities working nicely together are not applicable for a civilization where one percent has fifty percents of the assets and where half of the population shares a mere one percent of all wealth. Capitalism is both a cause and a result of this unprecedented period in history and it seems unrealistic to believe that capitalism can survive the descent into a steady-state economy with a smaller footprint. And it seems even more unrealistic to expect that it will bring us there! Without addressing this, the graceful descent is not likely to come true, or at least not be graceful.

It is worth reading on both sides of the Atlantic, on both sides of the Pacific as well as at the shores of the Indian Ocean.  

Check out Bill McKibben's Official Site for much more information about Eaarth.

Bill McKibben (born 1960) is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. In 2010, the Boston Globe called him "probably the nation's leading environmentalist" ^[3] and Time magazine described him as "the world's best green journalist."^[4]

In 2009, he led the organization of 350.org, which organized what Foreign Policy magazine called "the largest ever global coordinated rally of any kind," with 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries.

(Wikipedia)