It is a truism that every society is only a few meals away from revolution, proven not for the first time when high food prices initiated the Arab Spring, and yet food security is a woefully neglected national security concern. America lacks a national food policy, even though we are headed towards a crisis.
HOMOGENEITY CREATES VULNERABILITY
The division of crops and livestock in industrialized conventional agriculture has had notable drawbacks. Grazing stimulates vegetative growth, keeps soil moist, and tramples carbon into soil. But even leaving aside the advantages of integrating the meat and vegetable industries, the cramped conditions in which meat is raised makes it more vulnerable. While this might include vulnerability to attack and sabotage intended to cut off supplies to military forces, the larger issue with the dense concentration of livestock is the potential for disease to spread rapidly through their ranks. It is for this reason that visitors to industrial chicken houses are forced to wear biohazard suits. The lack of adequate procedures for disposing of the massive quantities of sewage produced by such operations may also present a more direct health threat of disease to the surrounding human population.
The lack of diversity inherent in the system of conventional farming that emerged in the past 50 years or so has decreased resiliency. When locally grown food was the norm, diversity of crops was a necessity, but now that crops are primarily grown for export, farmers can specialize in growing a single crop en masse. This may put the farmer at greater risk of losing his entire crop to a single disease, similar to the devastation when the potato late blight fungus swept across Ireland in the 19th century, causing the Potato Famine. The potential for these sort of sweeping crop failures is particularly worrisome given the disappearance of the “landrace”, traditionally bred crops that maintain subtle variations, resulting in fields with varying heights. Greater uniformity has become the norm in order to control exactly when to harvest and irrigate the entire crop, but as a result the survival of the crop has become an all or nothing gambit. Whereas resistance to diseases, weather, and pests used to vary greatly between individual plants, now what is able to wipe out one plant is likely to be able to wipe out the entire crop. Modern industrialized agriculture may simultaneously contribute to and be particularly vulnerable to all three primary threats to crops, including microbes, weather, and insects.
CLIMATE CHANGE
Agriculture is the second largest contributor to climate change, which will in turn result in massive disruptions to agriculture over the next century. An increase in the average daily low temperature of a single degree Celsius can translate to a ten per cent loss in grain yields for wheat, barley, and rice alike. Given that climate change is expected to increase this temperature by between 1 and 5 degrees Celsius, climate change could result in the loss of half of our annual yield by the 22nd century. Climate change will also lead to over and under watering of crops, depending on region. While the east coast is expected to face a deluge, the interior of the United States will increasingly face drought as climate change worsens. Simultaneously, industrialized conventional farming methods utilizing pesticides have led to unhealthy soil, leaving crops less able to cope with drought than when soil was managed with traditional organic methods, according to the Rodale Institute.
PESTS AND PESTICIDES
Industrialized farms specializing in a few crops requires pesticides, whereas small scale farming was able to achieve similar security by using diverse crops. These pesticides contribute not just to unhealthy soil, but are also resulting in dwindling numbers of the insect pollinators our crops depend upon. The logic of pesticide use dictates applying stronger poison when the first fails, which can create pesticide resistant pests and weeds, even as it undermines natural selection of the crops themselves. Plants have their own immune system, and insects are naturally drawn to target plants that are already compromised.
SCARCE FISHING AND PIRACY
Artificial fertilizers from farms have also been largely responsible for polluting the Mississippi river to such an extent that they fed the unnatural growth of algal blooms, which in turn rendered thousands of miles of water in the Gulf of Mexico into oxygen deprived “dead zones” uninhabitable for fish.
Dwindling fish populations in coastal waters can spur non-state actors to initiate international crises. According to research done by Oceans Beyond Piracy (now known as Stable Seas) illegal fishing in Somali waters both represented a cause for distrust of foreign navies engaging in counter-piracy operations, and a central cause of piracy itself. It not only created a grievance motivating maritime terrorism, but removed the local fishers only viable alternative source of employment.
Dwindling reserves of fish may also inflame tensions in the South China Sea, where contested waters are rich not only in oil, but also fish. As fishermen are unable to net sufficient quantities of fish, they are likely to wander further out to sea, and may drag their home nation-states into conflict if fired upon. Considering that China’s government has demonstrated great concern over its nation’s food security, its inflammatory rhetoric regarding the South China Sea may also be driven in part by its concerns over losing access to this fishing, not to mention the larger threat of a blockade preventing it from receiving food imports. OODA’s “China Threat Brief” highlights its provocative attempts to forestall its regional rivals from gaining control of these waters, and also cites a DIA assessment that China is becoming emboldened to expand its power projection beyond these regional waters.
UNSUSTAINABLE FARMS
As fossil fuels become increasingly scarce, increasing food prices may result from the increasing expense of tractor costs, or even an inability to receive shipments of food, given their low level of appropriability. Moreover, fertile soil and sufficient water sources are similarly becoming scarce resources.
Farmland is declining even as the human population is increasing. By the 22nd century, the global population is expected to have doubled even as the bulk of semiarid land has been reduced to desert, should current trends hold. Once top soil erosion results in desertification, the effect is difficult to reverse. The turnover is startling, with the farmland used up and abandoned in the past fifty years potentially equaling that being actively worked today. As demonstrated by David Montgomery in his book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, historically civilizations would relocate when these fundamental agricultural resources were expended, but there is no longer an abundance of uninhabited land for people to move into. Beginning in the 1980s, the total agricultural land being worked started to decline for the first time. The long-term implications of this could include rampant immigration and even armed conflict over territory. Environmental refugees already outnumber political refugees.
A Cornell University research project led by David Pimentel back in the 1990s found that the estimated cost of preventing soil erosion was one sixth of the cost of attempting to reverse the effects, but the cost of preventive measures remains several times higher than the immediate benefit to farmers. Farmers often have no choice but to act in a short sighted manner, as the financial burden of adopting methods that would enable them to preserve their land for future generations would bankrupt them in the present. While soil is unlikely to dwindle to crisis levels as soon as fossil fuels, the six-fold cost estimated by Pimentel will have to be paid if preventive measures are not heavily subsidized now.
DEVELOPING ECONOMIES
Industrialization has brought on urbanization, which has itself played a key role in the dwindling acreage of farmland. The total acreage of American farmland was reduced by 10 million acres in the decade from 1967 to 1977 alone. Britain has already sacrificed 15 percent of its agricultural land to its cities. But this effect of urbanization is exemplified by the development of Silicon Valley, which only a few decades ago was dominated not by edifices of glass and steel and concrete, but by farms and orchards.
Industrialized economies have a conflict of interest, which has led in part to today’s unstable agricultural practices. During the so-called “Green Revolution” after World War Two, pesticide use was driven by the need to find a new market for military chemicals, just as tractor use was driven by a need to find dual uses for the infrastructure for building tanks. Farming is no longer appealing in the modern American service economy, as demonstrated by census data indicating the age of the average American farmer has been increasing for decades. Admittedly decreasing numbers of agricultural workers do not necessarily reflect decreasing production given that automation has been taking over, but it remains a cause for concern as we look to the future.
If industrialized service economies like the United States cannot maintain a robust agricultural sector, it may create a conflict of interest for international development aid, as excessively industrialized nations come to depend on other economies remaining largely agricultural, rather than “developing”. This sort of neo-colonialism would represent a notable reversal from the past, when colonies were pressured into producing more appropriable cash crops rather than food. Comoros still has not recovered, with a third of its imports comprising food, due to their excessive economic specialization in the field of cash crops demanded by their former colonial overseers. Attempts to “modernize” agricultural technique in developing countries may also back fire, as crop yields were found to double in Nigeria once subsistence farmers stopped using chemical fertilizer and returned to the labor intensive traditional approaches they are uniquely capable of implementing.
If it is not careful, America could lose access to the world’s breadbasket. For the time being America remains one of the world’s greatest producers of food. But so is China, and that has not stopped it from looking to the future by buying up foreign farmland. Elizabeth Gooch and Fred Gale of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a report on this matter just over a year ago. They noted that China was shifting its investing strategies, placing a greater emphasis on “mergers and acquisitions” than more clear cut land purchases, and that while the Chinese government has rapidly escalated their support for investments in foreign agriculture in the new millennium, the scope of this escalation has been exaggerated by international media, in large part because actual Chinese investments are dwarfed by those initially announced. Nevertheless, they also found that, as of 2016, “Chinese enterprises had investments in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries valued at $26 billion”, spread over a hundred countries, but mostly concentrated in “neighboring countries in Southeast Asia, Russia’s Far East, and Africa that have unexploited land and are often receptive to Chinese investment”. The USDA report also argued that China’s failures in its bid to improve its food security may be the result of its “inexperience in global markets, lack of language skills, local bureaucracy, corruption, and political instability” while “the United States’ abundant endowment of productive farmland, leadership in agricultural technology, efficient management and marketing, and skilled and experienced managers are all advantages that may help it retain its role as China’s leading supplier of agricultural imports”. Data regarding China’s agricultural land acquisition from 1987-2016 can also be obtained from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies’ China Africa Research Initiative (CARI).
FOREIGN DEPENDENCY AND FOOD SOVEREIGNTY
As local produce has become the exception rather than the norm over the past half century, communities have become more vulnerable. If there were ever a major disruption to the transportation infrastructure which has enabled our specialized system of conventional agriculture to emerge—which becomes increasingly probable as fossil fuels become increasingly scarce—our grocery stores would likely be empty in two to three days. The implications of food interdependence for alliances may also be demonstrated in the near future, as a no-deal Brexit raises concerns about shortages of imported foods the public has become accustomed to, even if starvation is hardly a risk.
Demand for grain was served by domestic supply everywhere save western Europe until the postwar era, when the Asian, Latin American, Eastern European, and African regions all began to depend on grain imports from a handful of exporting countries, which currently comprise the United States of America, Australia, and New Zealand. This lack of geographic diversity ensures that grain prices around the world already fluctuate due to crops suffering from weather, pest, and/or disease issues concentrated in a single region. However, underlying this man-made problem is a geographical and geological one. The loess soils best suited to grain production are concentrated in the Midwestern United States, Northern China, and Northern European countries, meaning that erosion in these three regions might prove disastrous for the planets overall ability to produce grain, even if more countries attempted to regain something of their previous “food sovereignty”. Disastrous consequences can emerge when grain supply cannot keep up with demand. In 1972, amidst domestic crop failures for the second year running, India was unable to import grain already purchased from the United States by the Soviet Union. As a result, 800,000 Indians died of famine.
Even local crops may be less resilient if they are grown with seeds bought from a distant industrial scale supplier. Due to epigenetics, the inherited variations in an observable phenotype that can manifest from the same genes, the seeds from a farmer’s own crop are likely to be better adapted to the unique conditions characteristic of his field, as compared to seeds bought from somewhere else. Though in this case, if foreign seed supplies were cut off, it might actually make agriculture more robust as farmers were forced to use seeds from their own crops.
As a result of the risks and foreign influence associated with importing food, grassroots “Food Sovereignty” movements have emerged. The term was originally coined by the international farmer’s movement “La Via Campesina” back in 1996. It should come as no surprise that the push for “Food Sovereignty” has been particularly prevalent in Hawaii, the most culturally and geographically isolated state in the union and one of only a few U.S. states with a history of true autonomy. Beginning in 2008, six nation-states have incorporated food sovereignty into their constitutions, namely Ecuador, Venezuela, Mali, Bolivia, Nepal, Senegal and Egypt. Bolivia has also recently announced that it aims to be de facto, not merely de jure, food sovereign, by next year.