Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
4. Sustainable Intensification
“We head into a perfect storm in 2030, because all of these things are operating on the same
time frame, …If we don't address this, we can expect major destabilisation, an increase in
rioting and potentially significant problems with international migration, as people move
out to avoid food and water shortages”, (Sample 2009)
The present food crisis, which started in early 2008, was triggered by rapidly rising
international prices of grains, propelled by a series of short-term factors forming a “perfect
storm”; more importantly, however, many underlying longer-term factors had been
brewing in the market for some time, making the crisis inevitable. (United Nations 2009:26)
What for the United Nations was an inevitable crisis, is for Sir John Beddington, Chief
Scientist to the UK government, a harbinger of an even more perfect storm of globalised
disorder and hardship as food begins to run short. A new consensus has been rapidly
appearing within elite groups, that food supplies are going to be compressed and this is
likely to become a prominent feature of the next decades. The analysis of the flows and
forces that led to the vortex of this storm forming quickly became divided between those
who view it as the product of the pressures stemming from the success of development and
resulting environmental pressures and those who view it as a product of the globalised
market in food. The former group tend to emphasise the importance of technological
innovation, underpinned by applied scientific research to increase the productivity of
agriculture. For them the pressures of inexorable global population growth to the peak of 9
billion in 2050, in tandem with the environmental pressures of global warming means that
the challenge is beyond distribution but of the absolute physical lack of agricultural
products. Often self-consciously they are echoing the arguments that launched the green
revolution, arguing for a renewal of that project but with a greater attentiveness to the
environmental consequences of such intensification of production.
The arguments that are most closely associated with the discourse of food security poses
three questions, that of the
access
to food, its overall
availability
and its relative
affordability
.
Within this discourse, questions of the demand for food and the conformation of those
foodstuffs, the power of the major market players and global management of those
resources are reified. It also tends towards the Malthusian, in that population dynamics are
almost always negative in their consequence, in that high numbers are an unmitigatedly bad
outcome and an aging population is just as problematic. In this we can see the arguments
around food security as a form of environmentalism, conforming closely to what Dryzek has
previously classified as 'administrative rationalism'. In this discourse liberal capitalism and
the administrative state are reified, with nature subsumed to human problem solving and
the key agents of change are experts and/or managers motivated by the public interest, the
'public' being a unitary group rather than a range of constituencies (Dryzek 1997).
Those who see the crisis as the result of the operations of the global market target a range of
actors and processes. Walden Bello, looking at the crisis from the perspective of the global
south points to the extension of liberal capitalism through the structural adjustment
programmes of the 1980s and 1990s that brought local food producers into the global market
and broke down the infrastructures looking to develop national capacity (Bello 2009). Others
point directly to the role of speculators in causing the volatility, as investors have poured
into complex speculative tools (Kaufman 2011). Yet, these critiques are often unable to adopt
positions of diametric opposition as they share some of the premises of the arguments of
their opponents. Most share the opinion that the planet is approaching its natural limits and
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