Will food and Ag Come out of the Shadows at Copenhagen?

Money talks, power whispers – it’s a norm of politics that may be challenged at the Copenhagen conference, which will decide if the world’s power brokers are ready to adopt a treaty in time to prevent irreversible climate pollution.

For the dozen years since the Kyoto protocol of 1997 was adopted, someone or other has kept agriculture and food on the lonely margins of the debates on the causes and cures of global warming. The informed public knows there is a debate about global warming, and also knows about the importance of transportation and building efficiency to climate protection. But except for gee-whiz coverage of local food and the occasional story about cow farts and methane emissions, the conservative, liberal and highbrow media are as one when it comes to excluding the whole nine yards of the food system from the environmental or climate discourse.

But as Copenhagen talks open – and the talking will go on far beyond negotiating tables, because the whole world is watching – at least five organizations are coming prepared to put food on the radar, if not on the front burner where it belongs. The Minneapolis-based Institute for Agricultural Trade and Policy is sending a staff delegation armed with short and pithy discussion papers and twitters. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change is pushing measures designed to store about a hundred million metric tonnes of carbon in agricultural soils. And the Food and Agriculture Organization is entering the fray as if it were a Non Governmental Organization instead of a sidelined United Nations agency, showing off its publication on how climate protection moves can add to the income of impoverished farmers. Action Aid and Food First are flogging a report showing how the battle against poverty and climate chaos can be joined. The feisty forces of Via Campesina, the global organization of peasants and farmers will also be on the streets, demanding attention be paid to the smallholder alternative to industrial agriculture.

There are three reasons why these messages should receive a serious hearing, no matter what doesn’t happen at Copenhagen.

First and most obvious, food and agriculture systems are responsible for about a third of all global warming gases, a fact that’s evaded the glare of public attention and regulation for far too long. As with most things related to food and ag, recognition of this reality is suppressed by presentations in charts that display statistics with a sleight of hand that invisibilizes ag and food. Even the Pew Center brochure repeats the standard piechart showing transportation as the cause of 26 per cent, electrical power plants blowing off 32 per cent, and industry burning up 23 per cent of global warming emissions, while agriculture is dwarfed at 7 per cent. Through such convenient fictions, the fact that food is processed by industry before it’s transported and then refrigerated and prepared with electrical power before the energy-intensive package is carried off to landfill disappears from the charts. And just as the smoke that comes from all those food and ag applications is kept out of the public eye, so is awareness of the industrialized food system and multinational corporations behind that industrialized food system, corporations with the power to have their unregulated way by whispering.

But one thing makes food and ag dramatically different from the electrical power, transportation and industrial sectors — the food system’s partners as global warming culprits. Food and agricultural solutions can be implemented by millions and billions of people taking a personal and active role; as tough as that is, it’s a picnic compared to pressuring governments to clamp down on the majors of the car, highway, steel, coal and electricity industries.

Food, by contrast, is amenable to direct and personal agency, not reliant on corporate or government say-so. Since about 20 billion meals are eaten every day around the world, there are about 20 billion opportunities a day to do the right thing by personal, health, public health and climate health standards. Any action times some variant of 20 billion has the prospect of delivering impact.

Take food waste, an amazing 50 per cent of the food that’s produced, transported and stored after using up so much energy, then hauled to landfill sites where it will rot to produce methane, over 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas. Almost all that waste, enough to get us well on our way to meeting the stiffest environmental targets, can be reduced by conscious and responsible shopping, food prep or composting. Just composting the food thrown out in the US, according to the December issue of E Magazine, is the equivalent of taking six millions cars off the road. It’s just as easy to get at the 500 billion plastic bags used around the world every year. I’d like to say Just Do It, but the slogan was taken by another industry.

The third reason to highlight food and ag is that funding to support sustainable climate-protecting production is also the way to support the poorest people in the world, allowing us to solve two grievous problems at once.

Farmers on some 500 million small (two hectares or less) farms produce food for half the world’s people, though the 1.5 billion people living on these farms are among the world’s poorest and hungriest people. A new report by Action Aid and Food First reviews literally hundreds of studies showing that productivity on these farms can be boosted with simple tools and methods, even as the farm’s soil is deliberately used to store additional carbon, thereby keeping it out of the atmosphere. A program that used tax revenues from carbon emissions to fund farmers who adopt such carbon-storing practices could reduce global warming and poverty. Both Action Aid and the FAO show how. It’s not exactly rocket science.

To get such points in the debate, we need to take the wraps off food and ag. Once the spotlight is on, a long list of people-powered initiatives can do what apparently no powerful government or corporation can – which may be one of the deep background reasons why food has been kept off the agenda so far.

Adapted from NOW Magazine, December 10-16, 2009. Wayne Roberts is the author of the No Nonsense Guide to World Food.