World Food Programme report on the state of the science on what climate change means for hunger, plus policy recommendations. Authored by IPCC Impacts Chair Martin Parry with Mark Rosengrant, Tim Wheeler and Global Dashboard’s Alex Evans (December 2009)

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I’ve said before that the easing of oil and food prices that followed the credit crunch and the global downturn gave policymakers a window of opportunity to take preventive action on scarcity issues. Now, alas, I think that window is starting to close – without their having done much about it.

To see why, first take a look at what the oil price has been doing over the last year (Brent crude futures, $/barrel; h/t BBC):

Then, put that against the longer term background of what’s been happening since 2000 (slightly older data here, via Mongabay, but usefully puts the BBC graph above in context):

As the second graph shows, today’s level of just under $80 per barrel already brings us back to where we were in around July 2007 – and that’s during a still shaky recovery from what’s generally agreed to have been the worst global recession since the early 1930s.

This is a striking rebound in such weak economic conditions – and calls to mind the consistent warnings from the IEA over the past 18 months that the collapse in investment in new supply during the financial crisis and subsequent downturn has set the stage for a new oil price crunch as soon as recovery gets underway (not to mention the fact that IEA’s chief economist thinks we’re looking at peak oil as soon as 2020).

With the oil price headed upwards, food prices can be expected to follow – because higher oil prices make biofuels more attractive, and raise the prices of on-farm energy use, fertilisers, transportation, distribution and various other elements of our energy-intensive food supply chains.

Sure enough, if we take a look at the latest FAO food price index, we find that it too has been quietly heading upwards over the last few months – and is now likewise back at where it was in July 2007. At that point, of course, the food spike was already well underway, with the tortilla riots in Mexico City that served as a wake-up call for many policymakers having come almost six months earlier.

On top of this, remember the really key point that the fall in food prices that took place during the global downturn gave minimal respite to the world’s poorest people – precisely because even as prices fell, they were also getting hammered themselves by the downturn.

The starkest indication of that is in the global total of undernourished people (shown here in a graph from the FT); when you realise that we haven’t just lost the progress of the last few years, but are in far worse shape that at any time since the last 60s, you start to see just what a catastrophe the combination of  food / fuel price spike followed by global downturn has been for development:

As I’ve argued in numerous previous posts, we were never out of the woods on the food / fuel pincer movement; it was the collapse in prices following the credit crunch that was the blip, not the price spike that preceded it. And what’s most frustrating now is the extent to which policymakers have frittered away the chance we had to get onto a more secure footing.

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- With the news that President Obama has nominated Ben Bernanke for a second term, over at the New Republic Noam Scheiber assesses the merits of continuity at the Fed. Stephen Roach, meanwhile, examines the case against the incumbent chairman, arguing that Obama’s decision should open a “broader debate over the conduct and role of US monetary policy”.

- Taking us back to the depths of last September’s financial meltdown, Faisal Islam has some interesting insights into the collapse of Lehman Brothers as viewed from British shores.

- Elsewhere, debate continues apace about the rights and wrongs of releasing the Lockerbie bomber. Suggesting that “cock-up offers as convincing an explanation as conspiracy for the handling of Mr Megrahi’s release”, Philip Stephens argues that the decision highlights the “price of realism” in foreign policy.

- Speaking of which, in the latest edition of FP Magazine none other than Paul Wolfowitz assesses the realist credentials of President Obama; providing at once a telling insight into the mindset of a man at the heart of foreign policy making during the Bush years.

- Mark Easton’s BBC blog, meanwhile, takes a look at how the British government is looking to influence public behaviour in light of the Chief Scientist’s warning of a “perfect storm” of energy, food and water scarcity by 2030.

- Finally, as President Obama holidays on Martha’s Vineyard, the White House announces what he’ll be reading on the beach. Slate offers its take here.

I’ve just been having another look at FAO’s seminal 2006 report about the environmental impact of meat consumption, Livestock’s Long Shadow. I figured I knew most of the stats about meat’s massive contribution to scarcity issues – but nope, I found myself astonished once again by the report’s headline stats.  Livestock:

• Uses 26% of the ice-free terrestrial surface for grazing, and 33% of the planet’s arable area for feedstock – in total, 70% of all agricultural land, and 30% of the land surface of the planet;
• Accounts for 70% of previously forested land in the Amazon (and that’s just the pasture – feedcrops are another big chunk again);
• Are responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions in carbon dioxide equivalent – that’s larger than transport – and for 37% of methane emissions (23 times as potent as CO2 in its warming effect);
• Uses 8% of global human water use, mostly in irrigation for feedcrops, and is probably the single largest sectoral source of water pollution;
• Accounts for 20% of total terrestrial animal biomass – squeezing out space for other species and hence contributing massively to biodiversity loss, mainly through destroying habitats (30% of the land surface of the planet, remember)?

I love eating meat, but since I wrote The Feeding of the Nine Billion, I’ve been aiming to cut it out for 3 days a week.  Having re-read FAO’s report, I’m going to up that to four or five – as ways of reducing your carbon footprint and wider environmental impact go, this is a very low hassle,high impact option (especially if you have Sophie Grigson on your shelf).

Also, if you haven’t seen coverage of Tristram Stuart’s new book on food waste, then take a look…

From a post here last October:

[We can expect] a reduction in commodity prices for the duration of the global downturn (however long that may be) as demand for them falls.  As I’ve mentioned, futures prices for grain crops are already falling; we can expect that trend to be supported by falling energy prices, which will reduce some of the pressure on food that’s come via fertiliser prices, transport costs and demand for crops as biofuels.

That said, let’s be clear: the fall in commodity prices due to a global downturn does not mean that we’re out of the woods for good on high food and fuel prices. As Javier Blas notes in the FT today, the downturn also means that necessary investment in increasing supply will be put off.  As soon as we’re out of the dowturn and demand starts going up again, we’ll discover that there’s been no shift in the underlying supply fundamentals – and hence that the stagflation drivers we were all worrying about until the credit crunch really began in earnest are just waiting where we left them.

Latest oil price data (Jul 08 – now, courtesy of BBC News):

Latest FAO Food Price Index:

Food historian Tristram Stuart has a piece in the Guardian this morning asking the question: what’s one person’s fair share of meat consumption? 

After all, meat (especially red meat) and dairy products have a disproportionate impact on climate change – the livestock industry is responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions – as well as on land use, grain consumption, water consumption and other issues besides.  So if by now we’re all used to the idea that we can quantify our carbon footprint and compare it to what our personal share would be if we had a safe global emissions budget that was shared out equitably between the world’s people, then what would the meat equivalent - the sustainable ‘Big Mac footprint’, if you like – work out at? 

As Tristram acknowledges, it’s not as straightforward as ‘meat bad, vegetables good’, given that

no two pieces of meat are the same. A hunk of beef raised on Scottish moorland has a very different ecological footprint from one created in an intensive feedlot using concentrated cereal feed, and a wild venison or rabbit casserole is arguably greener than a vegetable curry. Likewise, countries have very different animal husbandry methods. For example, in the US, for each calorie of meat or dairy food produced, farm animals consume on average more than 5 calories of feed. In India the rate is a less than 1.5 calories. In Kenya, where there isn’t the luxury of feeding grains to animals, livestock yield more calories than they consume because they are fattened on grass and agricultural by-products inedible to humans.

Nonetheless, encouraged by the declaration of a meat-free day a week in Ghent, Tristram’s got his calculator out and made a guesstimate of the kind of consumption changes we might be talking about.  Here’s the deal:

Global average consumption of meat and dairy products including milk was 152kg a person in 2003. Average EU and US consumption, by contrast, was over 400kg, while Uganda’s was 45kg. In order to reach the equitable fair share of global production, rich western countries would have to cut their consumption by 2.7 times – and this doesn’t include the fact that the butter will have to be spread even more thinly if the global population really does increase by another 2.3 billion by 2050.

However, still further reductions would be necessary because global meat production is already at unsustainable levels. The IPCC among other bodies, has called for an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Since high levels of meat and dairy ­consumption are luxuries, it seems reasonable to expect livestock production to take its share of the hit. For rich ­western countries this would mean decreasing meat and dairy consumption to significantly less than one tenth of current levels, the sooner the better.

More evidence of increasing awareness of scarcity issues (and the consequent need for integrated policy approaches to managing them) over in the US: this presentation on ‘environmental challenges and global security’ from a colonel on the joint chiefs’ staff, given at a Department of Agriculture meeting on the food crisis held last week. 

Intriguingly, it includes a recommendation for a new National Security Council inter-agency policy committee on environmental security – which would develop a strategy to “utilize all elements of national power (diplomatic, information, military and economic)” so as to prevent conflict and promote regional stability.

The Department of Defense isn’t the only part of the US government where there’s innovative thinking happening on this area.  As I noted here last November, the National Intelligence Council’s report on global trends to 2025 placed a good deal of emphasis on scarcity issues,which was thanks to NIC’s Director of Analysis Mat Burrows.

Another key player in all of this is Carol Dumaine – like Mat, a career CIA analyst (where the Washington Post called her one of “the CIA’s dissidents”)  – who’s now over at the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence as their Deputy Director for Energy and Environmental Security. Carol describes herself as an “intelligence ecologist” and argues that current global challenges require “generalists who are specialists of the whole” – see this excellent presentation that she gave at an Institute for Environmental Security conference in DC in March.

The signs are also positive that National Security Adviser James Jones recognises the importance of scarcity issues and the need for changes to machinery of government in pursuit of more effective approaches to them.  As a Washington Post profile of Jones published this morning observes,

Although the administration is barely more than 100 days old, Jones has launched an ambitious restructuring of the White House national security apparatus so it can focus on modern issues such as energy and climate change.

Although the food price crisis has slipped from the agenda as the credit crunch has gathered pace, for poor people around the world it hasn’t gone away – and may now be set to worsen again. 

While the FAO’s food price index has fallen by around 30% since its peak last summer, that only takes it back to May 2007 levels: still well above recent norms.  Meanwhile, the global total of undernourished people is now over a billion, up from 850m just a couple of years ago. Now, FAO officials say privately that they expect the next findings from the index to show a new increase. 

If that’s right, then we’re really moving in to worst case scenario for developing countries, who are already reeling from the credit crunch. So what’s happening here at the London Summit on this front?

I asked that to Douglas Alexander, the UK’s international development secretary, in a press conference he did an hour or so ago.  He pointed to the £200m the UK has committed to a new ‘rapid response social fund’ to provide safety nets for the most vulnerable people, and applauded the work of the World Bank and WFP in particular. On increasing supply, meanwhile, he suggested that infrastructure investment is crucial (which it is).

I also caught up with Peter Mandelson, the UK’s business secretary, and asked him how the trade system could be proofed against the kind of crazy security of supply perturbations that caused such problems last summer, when over 30 countries had export restrictions in place. He stressed that what’s needed is to keep markets open, and that any impediments to this would harm supply by undermining incentives.

In analytical terms, I can’t fault anything either of them said. But note the lack of specifics about what this summit should be doing: there’s no getting round the underlying fact that preventing a resumption of the food price spike isn’t on the agenda here.  It should be.  As a senior IMF official put it to David and I when we were over in DC recently: “the last thing we can afford now is another crisis creeping up on us”.

Earlier this week, I noted that the Daewoo land lease deal in Madagascar – under which the South Korean conglomerate secured the lease to one half of Madagascar’s arable land for, er, no money - had emerged as one of the main reasons for Madagascar’s recent coup d’etat, and that one of the first acts of the new President had been to cancel the deal.

Good for Madagascar, you might think: with luck, this will lead to food importing countries becoming a bit more intelligent about getting the politics and the social dimensions right when they negotiate such sensitive food security deals.

Or maybe not.  Here’s the view of Chosun Ilbo, one of South Korea’s largest newspapers:

Er… nope, words just fail me.

So instead I’ll just quote what Ban Ki-moon – South Korea’s first Secretary-General of the United Nations – said when speaking to the Korean Parliament last summer:

My friends, Korea is not doing what it must … In truth, I’m somewhat ashamed as secretary-general that Korea is not doing what it should … I hope that Korea reflects on its current standing in the world and [resolves] to contribute more to the UN’s official development assistance [ODA] and its peacekeeping activities.

Looks like he has an uphill struggle on his hands…

Back in November last year, I blogged on the land lease deal agreed between Daewoo, the South Korean company, and the government of Madagascar, under which the former would lease fully one half of Madagascar’s arable land for a hundred years.  Soon afterwards, the news emerged that Madagascar would receive no payment at all for the lease – the only upside would instead be the prospect of some job creation.

Since then, of course, Madagascar’s government has fallen in a coup d’etat.  But what I hadn’t spotted until a US Department of Agriculture official mentioned it to me last week is the fact that the land deal was front and centre in what made the coup happen.  Here’s Tom Burgis in the FT on Saturday:

“Everything was a monopoly with [President] Ravalomanana,” says Naina, a 41-year-old wood chopper in one of the capital’s poorest neighbourhoods. “The country could not develop.”

The bombshell that turned the discontent into outright anger and so brought an end to Mr Ravalomanana’s rule was news of a deal between the government and Daewoo Logistics. This envisioned leasing vast tracts of Madagascar’s arable land to the South Korean conglomerate to grow crops that would be exported from a country where aid agencies were battling rural starvation. “It was the news that said Daewoo expected to pay nothing for the land that accelerated the trouble,” says one well-connected Malagasy banker who asks not to be named.

At a stroke, alienated members of the Malagasy elite found the banner to which they could rally an urban poor already struggling to cope with rice prices driven higher by the global commodity boom. They also found a figurehead in Andry Rajoelina, a 34-year-old former DJ who had married into Malagasy aristocracy and built the capital’s foremost billboard advertising operation …

Thousands took to the streets, whipped up by the Daewoo deal as the symbol of all that was ill. Protests turned to looting. Scores died as buildings burned. Then, in early February, Mr Rajoelina lead a boiling crowd from the main square to the gates of the state palace. Amid the confusion, the presidential guard opened fire.

By now we’re all well used to the idea that oil, diamonds, coltan, poppies and other high-value commodities can lead to a ‘resource curse’ in fragile states – for instance when the resource endowment ‘crowds out’ other sectors of the economy (e.g. through exchange rate rises), or props up poor governance.  Hitherto, though, only a few food crops – like coffee and cocoa – have been on the list of potential resource curse drivers.

I found myself wondering a couple of weeks ago whether the prospect of long term food price inflation and proliferating security of supply concerns  in places like China, South Korea and a raft of Gulf countries, might lead to growth in the pool of potential resource curse drivers.  Having seen the first government fall as the result of a landgrab deal, I think we now know the answer…

I shouldn’t laugh, as clearly it behoves all right-thinking people to applaud examples of UN agencies ‘delivering as one’ wherever we may find them.

But still, perhaps one may be permitted a small chuckle of surprised delight upon receiving a press release from a UN agency proclaiming its assistance to the UN’s food task force – when the agency in question is the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Apparently the IAEA has helped 24 African countries to eradicate the deadly cattle disease rinderpest. Alas, details of how this has been achieved were not provided.  But there is much enjoyment to be had in speculating.

IAEA have also provided this photo with their press release, which shows Dr. Chiklu Mba, the head of IAEA’s Plant Breeding Unit. Rather fabulously, the caption explains that he is ”examining mutant banana samples”.

Join us here again at the same time next week, when the World Food Programme will be with us to set out their ambitious plan for making a success of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference in 2010.

While the UK struggles with snow, spare a thought for Kentucky, which is suffering from an ice storm:

The storm has been blamed for 27 deaths in Kentucky, mostly from carbon monoxide poisoning from generators. More than 175,000 homes and businesses served by 55 water systems remained under orders to boil water, emergency officials said.

But there’s good news for my GD colleagues who major on community resilience:

The chairwoman of an Ohio County school board converted a middle school into a shelter. And in Murray, Murray State University’s student-run radio station was the only source of communication.

An unexpected problem has emerged, however: a peanut panic.

Making matters worse, because of a recent salmonella outbreak, federal officials on Thursday recalled all “ready to eat” meal kits that included packets of peanut butter. The packets had been distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

In a news conference on Thursday, Gov. Steve Beshear tried to send a reassuring message to residents who had received the food packages. He said there had been no reports of food-related illnesses, even though more than 100,000 emergency packages had been given out in storm recovery efforts.

Mr. Beshear said he had eaten one of the peanut butter products and suffered no ill effects. As an alternative, emergency officials were trying to hire a private food vendor to secure hundreds of thousands of prepared meals, the governor said.

Yum yum.

As David just noted, this morning’s Lex column in the FT is relatively upbeat about the dangers of protectionism, arguing that “the disaggregation of global supply chains, the source of the huge efficiencies that companies pass on to consumers, will not be easily undone.”

Whether or not that’s right (and like Willem Buiter, Martin Wolf is also a good deal more downcast than the Lex team), it’s interesting to compare today’s Lex column with what they had to say about capital flows to emerging markets just a couple of days ago.  Here’s the bit that made me sit up:

Take Brazil and India, the globe’s ninth and 12th biggest economies, according to the International Monetary Fund’s latest estimates. While the developed world is expected to shrink by 2 per cent this year, the IMF reckons Brazil will grow by 2 per cent, and India by 5 per cent. Why? One answer is that they have stable banks, relatively closed economies, and large internal markets. This has insulated them from much of the global turmoil.

The contrast with East Asia is stark. Singapore’s economy shrank at an annualised 17 per cent rate at the end of last year, South Korea by some 20 per cent. Yet this is not for lack of capital. Asian economies, after all, are global creditors. Their economies have shrunk instead because they are heavily oriented towards collapsing international trade. Meanwhile, their local markets are undeveloped and weak. Asia’s challenge is how to best deploy its accumulated surpluses to boost domestic demand.

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Image Author: mike_is_scrumptious

Assume a robust global deal on climate and the world’s cities will have to transform their infrastructure, economies and societies in little more than a generation.

Assume uncontrolled emissions growth and they face growing impact from a less hospitable and more volatile climate.

Either way – big changes are on the way. Few cities’ leaders grasp the scale of the challenge, especially in developing countries, where towns and cities will have an additional 1.5bn residents to cope with by 2030.

This new think piece has been prepared as part of the British Council’s Climate and Cities programme. Download the pdf (which has full references) or read the full text below the jump.

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OK, it’s only NYC East Village Gastropub “EU” – but it makes for a snappy photo:

What went wrong?  The original review from New York magazine rings a bell:

The menu at E.U. is a schizophrenic mélange of received trends and styles, centering on European comfort foods. You can get German sausages squeezed into a bun made of fresh pretzel dough, and two styles of Euro burger: the German, topped with liverwurst and bacon, and the Cheddar-and-gravy-smothered English (mine was overdone).

Apply your own similes and metaphors as required.