The meat of the global food crisis

Abstract

The global food crisis has been widely described in terms of the volatility of grain and oilseed markets and the associated worsening conditions of food security facing many poor people. Various explanations have been given for this volatility, including increasingly meat-centered diets and rising demand for animal feed, especially in China. This is a very partial reading, as the food crisis runs much deeper than recent market turbulence; when it is understood in terms of the biophysical contradictions of the industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complex and how they are now accelerating, meat moves to the center of the story. Industrial livestock production is the driving force behind rising meat consumption on a world scale, and the process of cycling great volumes of industrial grains and oilseeds through soaring populations of concentrated animals serves to magnify the land and resource budgets, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture. These dynamics not only reflect disparities but are exacerbating them, foremost through climate change. Thus, this paper suggests that rising meat consumption and industrial livestock production should be understood together to comprise a powerful long-term vector of global inequality.

Keywords:

• industrial livestock
• food crisis
• global inequality

Notes

¹Given the rising total population, this did represent a steady decline relative to the total global population since the early 1970s, from 26 to 13 percent.

²Other explanations include the fast-rising production of agrofuels from industrial grains and oilseeds, and their role drawing down global reserves and influencing the area planted in different grains; changing stock-to-use ratios and the lack of transparent management of grain reserves; fluctuating oil and agro-input prices; the increasing presence of speculative capital in agricultural futures and investment; drought-affected production shocks to some key surplus exporters; export restraints levied by some countries; and renewed Malthusian fears (some examples include Nellemann et al. 2008, Bello 2009, Brown 2009, 2011, FAO 2009a, Headey and Fan 2010). Champions of corporate–industrial agriculture and neoliberalism have tended to blame food price volatility on incomplete liberalization and state interference in markets, with key objects of criticism being agrofuel subsidies, export restraints, and restrictive intellectual property rights (Paarlberg 2010).

³For instance, Bello (2009, 105) cites a number of different estimates of the degree to which this demand was responsible for world food price spikes between 2006–2008, ranging from 20–75 percent, as given by the IMF, World Bank, OECD, and Oxfam.

⁴With this, the RFS can be seen to have become an increasingly significant lightning rod amidst the competing factions (divided by region and segments of agricultural capital) which ultimately give shape to US farm policy, as Winders (2009) has shown so well. In essence, farmers in the US ‘Corn Belt’ want to maintain the higher prices that the RFS mandate helps stoke, while major livestock producing regions worry about its impact on the rising cost of feed (Blas and Meyer 2012).

⁵The production and trade statistics in this paper have been summarized from FAO Statistics database (FAOSTAT 2012). National statistics for meat consumption were derived by adding production and imports together and subtracting exports. At the time of writing, trade statistics were available up to 2009, and production statistics up to 2010.

⁶This includes FAO groupings of North, South, and West Europe, but not Eastern Europe, where the demise of the Soviet bloc led to a dramatic fall in consumption in the 1990s before beginning to rise again after 2000.

⁷In 2012, the FAO listed 66 countries as LIFDCs, 39 of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. This listing is based on a low Gross National Income and an assessment of the average net food trade, considering trade volumes and an estimation of their caloric content over the preceding three years. Countries can choose to exclude themselves from this listing. This focus should not imply that vulnerability to world market price shocks is only present in the world's LIFDC's, only that it is generally greatest there.

⁸Although the explosive growth of industrial livestock has helped to lessen the problem of surplus grain absorption for large-scale producers, it has never fully resolved it, and surplus management has been a major factor in enduring subsidy regimes in the US and EU. Industrial agrofuels conceivably have an almost limitless absorption capacity, given the enormity of grains and oilseeds that are needed to produce a volume of ethanol or biodiesel that could substitute for oil on any significant scale. However, given the low energy return on energy investment (EROI), any large-scale substitution is filled with momentous contradictions (Giampietro and Mayumi 2009, Houtart 2010).

⁹The severe environmental, health, and aesthetic impacts, such as wreaking ‘smell-scapes’, has led to community resistance to large industrial livestock operations in some instances. This is widely recognized as one reason why some industrial livestock production in the US has gravitated towards poorer regions in pockets of the South and Midwest.

¹⁰Phosphate rock is the main source of phosphorous used in industrial fertilizers, and reserves are declining and could be gone within the next 50 to 100 years. As high quality reserves decline, extraction and processing becomes more expensive and shipping distances are growing, increasing energy demands, costs, and environmental impacts. Although there are considerable uncertainties about the absolute supply limits (and hence precise timelines), concern has been sometimes dubbed ‘peak phosphorous’ (Cordell et al.2009, Cordell and White 2011).

¹¹This also says nothing of the disastrous climatic repercussions that would ensue from more deforestation to expand the land area in cultivation or pasture, namely the huge carbon emissions and lost sequestration capacity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tony Weis

I would like to thank Philippe le Billon, Jamey Essex, and Melanie Sommerville for helpful feedback following the special session on the food crisis they organized at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Seattle in April 2011. I am also grateful for the comments given by anonymous reviewers at the JPS.