Tuesday, 13th April 2010
What will shape the future of farming in the EU after 2013?
The relentless march of the Green army is threatening to trample EU agriculture underfoot. For millennia Europe’s farmers have been the guardians of the countryside. We have a rural landscape that is both attractive and productive thanks to generations of farmers. We have a history and tradition of protecting the environment and ecology, sustaining wildlife and nurturing biodiversity. Yet Europe’s farmers face unprecedented challenges against a background of a regulatory regime that is driven by environmental puritans who have little understanding of, or sympathy for, the farmers of today.
Our farmers are caught in the middle of a political ‘fan dance’ where on the one hand there is a rising global demand for more food, while on the other, the tools that would enable them to increase food production are either being denied or withdrawn.
The World Bank predicts that by 2030, food demand will double as the world population increases by an additional two billion people. An extra 6 million people are born every month. That’s like adding the population of Scotland every four weeks to the global tally. By 2030 the world population will have expanded by such an extent that we will require a 50% increase in food production to meet anticipated demand. By 2080 global food production would need to double. But the reality is that global food production is declining rather than expanding. The world is losing an agriculturally productive area the size of the Ukraine (250 million hectares) each year due to climate change and spreading desertification. So how can we close the circle?
According to the OECD, food prices will continue to rise by as much as 20% to 50% over the next decade. With recent hunger riots in over 40 countries, the food crisis is by no means a new phenomenon. The threat of malnutrition on a massive scale is looming. Prices are likely to remain high for at least 10 years. The age old patterns of famine are changing and the rich nations of the world are now going to have to feed people we didn’t expect to have to feed. Two-thirds of developing countries are net food importers and are extremely vulnerable to volatile world food prices. Of the 850 million people suffering from hunger today, about 820 million live in developing countries, the very countries expected to be most affected by climate change.
At the same time ddiets are changing radically in nations such as China, India, Brazil and Russia, where economic growth has boosted meat consumption. In China, it is up by 150 per cent since 1980. In India, it has risen by 40 per cent in the past 15 years. The demand for meat from across all developing countries has doubled since 1980. Unsurprisingly, farmers are following this trend by making the switch from grain to livestock to meet this intense market shift in demand. Of course calorie for calorie, you need more grain if you eat it transformed into meat than you do if you eat it turned into bread. You need three kilos of grain to produce a kilo of pork and eight to produce a kilo of beef. As a result, farmers now feed 250 million more tonnes of grain to their animals than they did twenty years ago. This in turn has caused a crunch in global grain stocks.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that, over the next 100 years, a one-metre rise in sea levels would flood almost a third of the world's crop-growing land. Add to this the use of productive farmland to grow biofuels and the conversion of corn into bio-ethanol in the US, where they say the amount of maize required to fill the tank of a single family saloon would feed a human being for a year and you begin to see the impact that climate change is having on farming globally.
We are also facing a new crisis involving a global shortage of water. Water supplies, even in some parts of Europe, have become critical. Rainfall in Spain has fallen by 40% annually while mean average temperatures have risen by 5%. Rivers and streams have simply dried up. There are 263 rivers worldwide which cross international boundaries, many of which are being significantly degraded through poor and uncoordinated management. These river basins cover half of the Earth’s land surface, are home to 40% of the world’s people across 145 countries and contain 60% of global river flows. Reduced water access in affected countries could, in the long term, threaten EU imports of water intensive foods such as sugar, coffee, maize and beef.
In Darfur, we witnessed perhaps the first war over water. I have just returned from a visit to the Central Asian republics where the Aral Sea, once the fifth largest inland lake in the world, has been reduced to less than 30% of its original size. Its surface area has fallen by a dramatic 23 metres. It is like pulling the plug out of a bath and watching the water simply drain away. This global catastrophe was caused by ill-conceived irrigation schemes during the Soviet times, but is being exacerbated today by reservoirs, dams and hydro-power schemes as each country tries to seize and hold its share of the water resources.
Tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes in the Karakalpakstan region of Uzbekistan due to water shortages. We may shortly have to consider creating a new designation of Environmental Refugee.
There is also a need to address the question of sustainability in respect of our current manufacturing and industrial practices. To make a one litre plastic bottle which is designed to be filled with water, it takes 110 litres of water. To manufacture one litre of bioethanol requires 1100 litres of water. In a world confronted by water shortages, such profligacy cannot be sustained.
Europe’s farmers are well placed to provide solutions to many of these global problems. We have the land, we have the resources, we have the capacity and we have the scientific know-how to help us feed ourselves and feed the world. The one thing we don’t have is the political will. Instead of helping our primary producers to thrive, we place endless regulatory burdens in their way. For example, instead of developing GM technology, we have driven it out of Europe.
Biotechnology will help to overcome the global shortage of grain and to counter the hunger riots in developing countries. Genetically modified foods offer a potential way out of this looming crisis, but the tabloid press and their ‘Frankenstein Food’ headlines and the Greens, have scared us into a zero-tolerance regime on GM foods, without due cause, across the EU. The recent decision by the European Commission to approve a GM potato crop was a case in point. The Greens went into a frenzy of rage. Meanwhile tens of millions of hectares of GM crops are being grown successfully across the world, mostly using EU technology, developed by EU scientists who have been driven into exile.
Genetically modified insect and disease resistant crops reduce the number of pesticide and herbicide applications. Herbicide resistance permits direct drilling of the seed thus reducing the cultivation required and the consequent consumption of fuel. Biotechnology also provides higher crop yields without the requirement for additional farmland and enables crops to be grown in marginal areas such as saline soils, soils poor in nutrients and drought affected regions.
But instead of embracing biotechnology we deny our farmers access to its benefits, while handing a key commercial advantage to our direct competitors outside the EU. Meanwhile, driven by the Green lobby, we ban hundreds of commonly used pesticides, herbicides and fungicides based on the spurious claim that they are potentially carcinogenic. The carefully controlled use of these agro-chemicals has helped dramatically to increase food production and has ensured plentiful supplies of clean and healthy food for decades. Banning the use of GM crops and simultaneously banning agrochemicals is perverse and stupid.
EU policy in respect of GMs needs to be radically overhauled. We need to revisit our attitude to GM foods and accept that scientific advances in biotechnology offer a way to alleviate hunger in the poorest nations while at the same time reducing costs for our own EU food producers.
We must recognise the role of our primary producers in ensuring the long-term capacity and capability of our food supply. We must address the imbalance in power between the big supermarket giants and food producers. The EU also needs to reduce the regulatory burden on farmers and ensure that primary producers operate on a level playing field with foreign competitors.
So we must do everything possible to promote and encourage the entrepreneurial spirit of our farmers and to ensure they reconnect with consumers. If we are to secure a sustainable future for the EU agricultural sector then we must give a high priority to protecting the interests of those who live and work in our rural areas. Only by so doing, can we hope to lead the world in producing high quality food in a healthy environment and a beautiful countryside while at the same time ensuring the future security of food supply to our citizens.
