How Fast Are We Tipping?

Two articles by The Guardian came my way today.

Illustration by Thomas Pullin

The first, 'Mass starvation is humanity's fate if we keep flogging the land to death', forecasts our doom if we don't reverse current trends, focusing, in particular, on the impact of increasing demands for environmentally degrading foods, such as meats.

The other, published by the same author, is, perhaps, a response to the first: 'Meat tax ‘inevitable’ to beat climate and health crises'. It suggests a ''shift from subsidisation to taxation of the meat industry”. What do you think?

Photograph: John Giles/PA

Costs of Livestock

Livestock occupies around 30% of Earth’s land surface, with some 33% of the planet’s arable land now devoted to producing feed for livestock rather than food for people (FAO). 

Around 80% of the world’s soybeans and more than 50% of all corn produced are destined for livestock feed. The manufacturing of fertilizers to grow feed crop requires the burning of fossil fuels estimated at producing 42 million metric tons of CO2/year (AAI, 2010). The conversion of vegetation for livestock pasture and cropland for feed production release an estimated 2.4 billion metric tons of CO2 each year (ibid). Furthermore, the livestock sector alone accounts for around 27% of global water use; producing meat requires 5 times more water than vegetables.

The resource-hungry livestock sector and its supply chain account for 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, 44% of those being in the form of methane (CH4), and the remainder almost equally shared between N2O and CO2. Cattle alone represents 65% of the sector's emissions, with the bulk of emissions originating from enteric fermentation, feed production, manure management and energy consumption / Source: FAO

Intensive livestock production, which tends to be clustered in smaller land plots due to their proximity to ports and cities have poor waste recycling leading to nutrient overloads and pollution. 

Heard about theDead Zone which appears in the Gulf of Mexico every year around mid-summer? 

The Dead Zone is an area characterised by low oxygen levels (threatening all aquatic life) and, this year, was the largest measured since 1985, an area about the size of Slovenia (22729 km²) / Photograph: Dead Zone in the Mississippi River Delta 

The pollution of the dead zone is directly linked to runoff from the Mississippi River, with recent studies identifying large corn, soy, and wheat-growing farms as the main culprits of eutrophication. The investigation conducted by MightyEarth in 2016 mapped the supply chains of the top meat and feed companies (Cargill, Bunge, Tyson) and overlayed it with data of nitrate levels in watersheds experiencing high concentrations of fertilizer pollution. Tyson Foods stood out in particular

Check out the interactive map here! / Source: MightyEarth

UNCCD Calls For A Shift From The Current "Age of Plunder" Toward An "Age of Respect" of Biophysical Limits

HAPPY WORLD SOIL DAY!

Roughly half of the world's surface area has been converted to land grazed by domesticated animals, cultivated crops, or production forests resulting in the loss of more than half of the world’s forests. 

Soil health can be defined as “the continued capacity of the soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans.” At present, land degradation and desertification are rampant threats to the sustainability of livelihoods, a phenomenon mostly experienced in drylands, which support over 44% of world food production.

Degraded dryland ecosystems increase vulnerabilities. Photo: Binh Thuan, Thien Anh Huynh/Vietnam/UNEP

Drylands are fragile ecosystems characterized by infertile soils and sparse vegetation cover and where average rainfall is counterbalanced by evapotranspiration. In 2000, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) estimated drylands to cover 40% of the global land surface. Recent studies (Huang et al., 2015) have shown that this figure will increase to 48% by 2025 and 56% by the end of the century. Such an expansion will further undermine soil's carbon sequestration potential and enhance regional warming. Land degradation and desertification will be exacerbated in drylands located in developing countries ''where 78% of dryland expansion and 50% of the population growth will occur under'' (Huang et al., 2015).

The UNCCD Global Land Outlook report published this year qualifies our current food system as inefficient, highlighting the current patterns of food production, distribution, and consumption as highly unsustainable. It criticizes the current agribusiness model which ''benefits the few at the expense of the many: small-scale farmers, the backbone of food production for millennia, are under immense stress from land degradation, insecure tenure, and a globalized food system that favors concentrated, large-scale, and highly mechanized farms'' (GLO, p.11).

Corporate Social Responsibility

Global interconnectedness and the significance of climate change have increased the need for corporations to be transparent and socially, environmentally responsible:  

General Mills's global responsibility:
 ''we are committed to combating climate change 
by working towards sustainable emissions levels 
by 2050 and reducing GHG emissions by 28% by 2025'' 

 Nestlé has ''further strengthened'' its environmental commitments 

How transparent are corporations' motivations? And, more importantly, how sustainable can major corporations be? Can ''fair trade'', ''organic'', ''sustainable'' labels be deceptive? 

Nestlé promised to end deforestation in its supply chain after its responsibility in deforestation was exposed. I highly recommend taking a look at Greenpeace's  'How Palm Oil is Still Cooking the Climate' (the 'still' was added ten years after the original report in 2007).

Remember this? 

In 2010, Nestlé was Caught Red Handed (in its contribution to the deforestation for Palm Oil) and Greenpeace launched a massive campaign against KitKat (owned by Nestlé)

The bountiful rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia have helped address the world's thirst for palm oil, currently supplying about 85% of demands and they are not about to have a break. 

Just like corn and other cash crops, palm oil's value comes from its versatility. It is found in half of packaged products sold in supermarkets (and non-food products like biofuel). Significant pledges were made in light of COP21 to cut forest loss by half by 2020. By 2014, governments and corporations adopted 'no deforestation, no peat, no exploitation' (NDPE) policies: 

''Consumers have sent companies a clear signal that they do not want their purchasing habits to drive deforestation and companies are responding'' (Paul Polmann, Chief executive officer of Unilever, 2014). 

The reality is that the industry will continue flourishing (expected to produce 128 million tons by 2022) while forests continue being cleared (see, for example, A Deadly Trade Off). Executive chairman of Malaysia's IOI Group (one of the world's leading palm oil players) is very optimistic, expressing the company's vision to ''widen the geographical spread of palm oil products in the world and push the boundaries where palm oil can be applied and used''. If it produces four tonnes of crude palm oil (CPO) per hectare a year, IOI aims to double it. Indonesia's Minister for Economic Affairs is even more straightforward: “we will not let go of even one tonne of trade contract or potential demand palm has globally”. The country has made plans to convert around 18 million hectares of rainforests into plantations by 2020. 

Companies like Nestlé are shielded from the stains of deforestation with logos that certify their sustainable sourcing. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) does just that. 

What is 'sustainable'? Source

Making sure the sourcing of companies (and the legitimacy of logos and certificates) is truly sustainable requires tracing the activities back to the plantation levels. The Guardian published an article recently, titled Nestlé, Hersheys and Mars breaking promises over palm oil use. These food brands have reportedly been sourcing their palm oil from the vanishing Sumatran rainforest, where complex supply chains sometimes involve traders linked to illegal logging. 

Update: a new study has determined that the loss of primary forest habitats (from deforestation linked mainly to palm oil exploration) has led ''to an equivocal or higher threat of extinction'' of the Sumatran tiger. Tiger densities were reportedly 31.9% lower in disturbed areas, and, considering that 80% of the Sumatra's remaining hill, lowland and peat forest is already disturbed, forest conservation will determine the fate of Sumatran tigers and other species at the brink of extinction (Luskin et al., 2017).

Governments and corporations are responsible for large-scale land-cover changes and land-use dynamics. Traders should be held accountable for new plantation expansions across their supply chains. On the other hand, the regulators - governments - seem to be shying away from their commitments. 

What do you think?

The Monopoly of Food Supply: Social-Ecological Costs

If 20 years ago around 600 companies were manufacturing seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, in 2011, just 10 companies controlled 75% of the seed market share and 11 companies controlled 98% of the pesticide and fertilizer market share.

High-yielding varieties (HYV’s) are at the core of the Green Revolutions as they require less land area than traditional varieties to achieve the same yield. The HYV’s increase the productivity of capital and are referred to material-biased innovations, relating to the large material inputs required to sustain the growth of the new seeds (fertilizers, pesticides, controlled supply of water from irrigation). Some chemical inputs can severely undermine the health of soils and ecosystems, remaining in the ecosphere for long periods of time.

The Patent on Nature 

Let's take the example of Cargill's expansion in India, as per documented by Brewster Kneen in Invisible Giant- Cargill and its Transnational Strategies. India's 'New Policy on Seed Development' in 1988 (created in the context of an economic crisis and an IMF-guided structural adjustment) fuelled partnerships between domestic and foreign companies. A Cargill press release in the 1990's stated ''all Cargill hybrids sold in India are derived from imported germplasm as part of the Cargill strategy of providing the best genetics of the world to the Indian farmer''. According to the author, ''such statements expresses a deeply colonial attitude'' and ''contempt for indigenous knowledge in general and traditional plant selection and genetic conservation in particular''.

Protesting against patented Cargill hybrids in the 1990s

The author reports, from his conversation with the managing director of Cargill Seeds India at the time, that the company's intentions were clear: ''industrial use of corn is on the increase, and if we grew more corn there would be more industrial use [...] through the Seed Association of India we have been lobbying the government (Page 133). 

Agrobiodiversity

While an entire section of the FAO's CSA sourcebook highlights the importance of ''genetically diverse varieties and breeds'' to boost the resilience of agroecosystems, it also acknowledges that very few crops currently provide most human energy needs (5 grains provide 60%).

Agrobiodiversity (the genetic resources for food and agriculture, resulting from natural selection processes and careful selection by farmers over time) is under threat by industrial agriculture. For instance, only 10% of the 10,000 varieties of wheat recorded in 1949 are being produced in China today; more than 95% of apple varieties recorded in the 1900s in the United States are no longer cultivated. 

Fertilizer pollution

Chemical fertilizers and hybrid seeds have revolutionized agricultural production but they are accompanied by heavy social-ecological burdens.

Did you know that India is the second largest emitter of CH4? The country produces about 20% of the world’s rice and has the largest ruminant population in the world! 

About 73% of Nitrous Oxide (N₂O) emissions are accounted by agricultural activities. Anthropogenic N₂O, a potent GHG which has a GWP 296 times that of  CO₂  at a 100-yr time horizon, largely comes from reactive nitrogen inputs from synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use, but also manure applications, cropland expansion, fossil-fuel combustion and biomass burning related to these activities (Tian et al., 2015). Globally, atmospheric N₂O has increased by 18% since industrial levels and contributes approximately 7% to the radiative forcing (Forster et al. 2007). 

The addition of nitrogen into the atmosphere disrupts the global nitrogen cycle and undermines biosphere integrity, with ''cascading effects'' as Nr (reactive nitrogen) moves along its biogeochemical pathway (Smil, 2001). Nitrate, one of the major forms of Nr, is especially mobile in the soil and is more susceptible to being lost through leaching. Hence, its an important source of groundwater contamination, which is used for irrigating most crops in India.

Also, it has been estimated that increased air temperatures will, on the one hand, result in increased N₂O emissions in most land ecosystems due to ''stimulations of nitrifiers and denitrifiers activity and nitrogen supply through mineralization'', but may, on the other hand, reduce N₂O emissions through soil drying and stimulation of plant growth and nitrogen uptake (Luo et al., 2013).