Mapping Hacks

Each time i read another sensationalising “food crisis” article, I grumble. What else is the blogosphere for, but to get things like this off one’s chest;

So, prices of all kinds of food staples are rising globally, rapidly. Some - like rice - are specifically singled out, and specific warnings actually serve to worsen price inflation by sending those markets panic signals.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) serves as a kind of global food pricing watchdog and they have been making worried sounds for the last couple of years at least. Last month, FAO published in association with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) a neat short paper on Fighting Food Inflation Through Sustainable Investment.

So far so great and for me this shed some light on why food inflation is happening. Their lightning summary of causes:

On the supply side:

• Agricultural subsidies rendering more efficient production elsewhere, unprofitable
• Lower stock levels due both to increasing cost and change in stock management practises
• Rising fuel costs

On the demand side:

• Increasing demand for, and shipping cost of, grain as animal feed in “emerging markets”
• Impact of biofuels/agrofuels on grain supplies for food consumption
• Speculation, reflecting futures in current prices.

Yet the main thrust of this document barely seems credible to me. It seems inarguable that government policy of tinkering with export quotas and price controls is worsening the macro problem. Certainly if other FAO assessments are to be read right, food inflation turns into a “crisis”-like situation at around the same time as policy measures start to drastically restrict exports in anticipation of a future “crisis” - a kind of society-level hoarding.
One minute, the EBRD offers an acknowledgement that large offshore “agroholdings” businesses owned by private funds are moving in on marginal agricultural land which has become profitable again with increased prices - in places like the Ukraine and Poland. Next minute, there’s talk of “farmer access to credit”, as if the grass-chewing family farmer is still a figure who exists in reality. What the EBRD proposes are government measures designed to indirectly subsidise, rather than directly subsidise, massive agribusiness by (re)building transport infrastructure for long-distance shipping and large-scale storage. Credit facilities for farmland-based mortgages that will collect the equity in the land into ever fewer hands. The response is essentially “throw more hardware at the problem”, cross fingers, and rely on regulation to keep papering over the cracks.

There are serious historical precedents for great infrastructural change simultaneously in both agricultural production, and transportation technology. These changes both corresponded to and helped cause large-scale social change. The late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, canalization and the railways came along with a change in land management, enclosure, irrigation practises - an Agricultural Revolution to complement the Industrial one.

I suppose there was a corresponding set of changes after the Second World War, with containerisation, motorway transport, and mobile refrigeration alongside combine harvesters, effective pesticides, vast landholdings and the rest of industrial agricultural practise. This was also called a Green Revolution, a term that doesn’t work so well today.
So it makes sense that we should be looking for this pattern of change to happen once more. Some radical change in agricultural practise seems to be the only way out of this series of interlocking causes of rapid and socially unsustainable global food price inflation. Look at the FAO/EBRD six causes again; one of those is rising fuel costs, and another three are directly caused by rising fuel costs.

The nicest explanation of this I have seen was produced by Caroline Lucas MEP back in 2006, when food price inflation seems to have become really noticeable to the specialists. Her report, Fuelling a Food Crisis, works on the theme of Achieving food security in an era of peak oil is an urgent political priority. This will involve a more towards more low-energy and low-inpit farming, and the development of more localised markets.

(Hooray for Caroline Lucas MEP! Years ago, when Mapping Hacks was still in production and before the INSPIRE Directive had its first reading, she was the only South-East MEP who wrote back to me with an opinion on INSPIRE. We sent a complimentary copy of the book to her office when it came out; I wonder whether she ever got to look at it.)

Whether or not one buys into the discourse of “peak oil”, higher energy prices are both here to stay and are in broad side-effects socially desirable, if energy price dependence of food prices can be addressed. Reformation of agricultural and transportation technology, hand-in-hand, seem required to fix the underlying problems of food pricing. Further movement along the path we’re now on, hoping the faltering state apparatus will continue to be able to pick up the pieces, is building a road to nowhere.

The only thing i knew about FAO up til now was that they support and develop the fine open source GIS project GeoNetwork, which began as a FAO project. It’s a java-based package for cataloguing and publishing collections of geographic data in a range of legally-mandated formats. Through the UN they promote GeoNetwork to organisations like CGIAR to publish increasing amounts of their fieldwork data in sustainable agriculture, nearer to real time.

FAO also collects a lot of interesting historical and comparative pricing and trading data at FAOSTAT. What is published here only goes up to 2006, when the first signs of global inflation across all food types started to kick in. FAO’s more recent reports have statistics up to 2008, and while the FAOSTAT interface will generate nice tables and flash maps, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s rallying cry comes to mind: “We want the data, we want it raw, and we want it now!”

Update… I’m told that the FAOSTAT core data is now undergoing substantial update and review, after which more recent data will appearing through their web service interface. There are substantial archives through which one can “drill down” to more report data going back to the early 60s’. I still suspect it to be the tip of the iceberg of what’s available in FAO archives, though.

Posted in data, book, economics, permacrisis |

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