Food Security In Troubled Times : The global food system’s stability is under threat

Suman Sahai

The world is demanding more food each day. This is principally due to the demands of a growing population but also because people by and large are getting wealthier and want more and better food.

 Coinciding with this growing demand for food is the phenomenon of climate change which has already begun to threaten food output and reduce the amount of food available. These two simultaneous developments are threatening the stability of the global food system.

On the one hand climate turbulence , chiefly floods and droughts slash away the expected harvests of major staple foods like rice, wheat and corn so that there is less available. On the other hand, a ‘getting wealthier’ class of people in both developing and developed countries is wanting and able to eat better, especially meat and other animal products like butter, ghee, cream, cheese etc.

 All this is putting a lot of pressure on the land, leading to more and more intensive farming practices, using chemicals to extract the maximum out of plants and animals. So you have an overdosing of the land with chemical fertilisers to put in chemical nutrients rather than allow natural organic nutrients to build up in the soil.

Along with this comes the excessive use of toxic chemical pesticides to kill the pests that follow intensive chemical farming because their natural predators that keep them in check are dead. 

As our own experience with the South-west Monsoon shows us, the weather is getting increasingly uncertain. There are floods and droughts in unexpected locations, at unexpected times. Climate shocks, particularly droughts which are becoming more frequent now and occurring in unlikely locations, have caused the most upheavals in global food supplies. 

 

 The American Midwest is the world’s greatest producer of maize and soybean. The drought of 1988/89 swept through the maize-soya belt of the US. This resulted in a loss of 12% of global maize supply, which meant maize eating food importing countries had lesser maize to import at higher prices. 

 

The widespread drought of 2002/03, hit wheat production in Russia, Europe, India and China, resulting in a 6% reduction in global wheat supply. At the same time, the 2002/03 drought hit rice production in India , causing a decline of 4% in rice output. When there is a shortfall in global food stocks, the biggest casualties are food importing countries that are dependent on imported food.

 

India, and other Monsoon dependent countries, are particularly vulnerable to climate turbulence because a disturbance in the rainfall timing and pattern and the total amount of water received during the Monsoon period is a significant factor in India’s food self-sufficiency. 

The health of the Monsoon essentially determines the amount of rice, India’s major staple food, that will be produced. India’s Monsoon period has been on average 100 days long. This is the period during which the country receives almost all the water it will get from rainfall. 

The Monsoon period is already reduced by about 15 days so in effect the total amount of water we are getting has also gone down by some 15 %. This is having serious implications already and the situation is likely to worsen in the coming years. 

So how do we cope with the impacts of climate change and secure our food supply ? Well first, we need to get off the uniform, monoculture, chemical treadmill because that kind of chemical based intensive food production is the most vulnerable to climate shock. It also produces unhealthy food, contributes to worsening climate change and pretty much wrecks up the environment. 

There are some important changes we need to make but let’s start with a few. We need to get out our genetic diversity of crop plants and deploy it. 

If you have many varieties of rice in the field or of wheat or potato, or maize or whatever, then you are quite safe. If some varieties get destroyed because of unseasonal weather, others will survive, so you may have less food but you will have food. If you plant only that one high yielding variety backed up by chemical fertilisers and pesticides and that one variety falls to climate turbulence, then you have no food. So diversity is smart. 

Invest in millets, instead of just rice and wheat as staple foods in your kitchen. These little grains are nutrition bombs and can take on the worst of climate change. The ‘big’ millets are Sorghum (jowar) and Pearl millet (bajra). The ‘small’ millets are: 

* Finger millet (ragi) High in calcium, and makes rotis and snacks 

* Barnyard millet. Called ‘sawa’ in Hindi. Once a staple, it’s now eaten during fasts and is rich in iron 

* Foxtail millet. Can be cooked like rice and made into upma 

Then there are the fibre and mineral rich millets: 

* Kodo millet Little millet (kutki in Hindi) 

* Proso millet (cheena in Hindi).

All of these are now quite easily available in the market and can be cooked in different ways for tasty, nutritious meals. So start making some changes in the food you bring home

Source: https://www.thecitizen.in/opinion/food-security-in-troubled-times-962233?infinitescroll=1 

Agriculture faces a threat as man, animal conflicts begin to escalate

 Suman Sahai

Apart from the vagaries of the weather which present a huge challenge to India’s agriculture and food production, animals raiding crops constitute another, not insignificant challenge. In the plains of Uttar Pradesh, large herds of the antelope called “nilgai” and abandoned cows cause massive damage to standing crops. The nilgai, because of its name that ends in “gai” (cow), is assumed by villagers to have some association with the cow. That makes it holy, and the village people will not kill it even if it rampages through their fields. Explaining that it is a kind of deer, not a cow, doesn’t seem to convince and nobody wants to take the risk of bringing upon themselves a heap of cosmic curses by taking the life of a holy animal.

Cows that have been abandoned have turned feral and also extremely aggressive. They move in large gangs and can decimate great tracts of standing crops in one visit. They charge at farmers who try to chase them away and, in several instances, have gored people seriously enough to cause death. So, farmers have started fencing their fields at great cost, a cost they can ill afford. Both the nilgai and the feral cows are not restrained by barbed wire which they break through, so in desperation, some farmers have begun to use the concertina wires used in high security areas. These wires have sharp blades along their length and when animals try to push through, they are lacerated by the blades, injuring themselves badly. This is causing a painful dilemma for farmers who do not wish to hurt animals, but have no other way of protecting their crops and livelihoods.

In mountainous regions like Uttarakhand, it is big gangs (technically called “sounders”) of wild boar (wild pigs) that do the damage. Farmers are abandoning agriculture, leaving their fields fallow because the marauding boars come at night and dig up the fields, eating whatever is planted and destroying the field bunds and boundaries. The boar are also aggressive animals and in numbers they are dangerous since they attack when confronted. The male boar, which has one or two upturned tusks, can rip open a man’s abdomen if threatened.

The other, more recent, problem in the hills are the rhesus, or the red face (and red bottom!) monkeys. These rhesus monkeys are not native to the mountain areas of Uttarakhand but have been trucked up from the plains, as one hears, where they have set up home in the shaded nooks of government buildings and where the packed lunches of employees provide rich pickings. The North and South Blocks of Raisina Hill in New Delhi, the seat of India’s government, are preferred locations.

Stories of marauding monkeys entering government offices and destroying files have appeared in the media. True or not, they have given a convenient excuse to the worthies in the government to attribute the disappearance of controversial, inconvenient files to the raiding rhesus monkeys! To rid themselves of the monkey pest, Delhi decided to collect the simians and truck them up to the hills.

These monkeys, however, are not “wild” animals. Born in cities, they are urban creatures brought up on snatched human food. No wild berries or succulent leaves for them, their food preferences tend to parathas and sandwiches when they are not being fed bananas by devout Hindus propitiating the avatar of Hanuman.

Bewildered by the unfamiliar terrain in the mountains of Uttarakhand, they do not rush to the forest, presumed by North Block babus to be their “natural” home, but gravitate to inhabited areas because that is what they are accustomed to. In the hills, they descend on orchards and agricultural fields.

When they raid orchards, they eat some fruit and destroy far more, plucking the unripe fruit and throwing it down. In fields, they will eat what they want but will have uprooted many more plants by the time they leave. They are quite destructive, our close relatives after all!

This is a partial snapshot of how the man-animal conflict plays out in rural areas, where the livelihoods of farmers comes under strain because of the damage caused by animal populations that should be better managed.

Uttarakhand did for a while declare wild boar to be “vermin” that could be killed if causing damage to crops. The ridiculous condition was that a forest official had to be informed of a wild boar attack, and then he would come to destroy the animal. This assumed that the boar would hang around till the official arrived to slaughter them. Naturally they didn’t, and the scheme did not work.

The culling of natural populations of fast-breeding animals like deer, boar, etc, is practiced in many countries, including most of Europe. This keeps the population at a manageable number such that their habitat can support. That way a man-animal conflict is avoided. This would be a solution for India if implemented sanely. Some wildlife enthusiasts would proclaim that humans have no place on this planet, whose original inhabitants were the wild animals, and the earth should revert to them.

Although I see a certain theoretical point in that argument, I am inclined towards a policy of co-existence as we are now also part of the ecosystem.

Source:- https://www.asianage.com/amp/opinion/columnists/270723/suman-sahai-agriculture-faces-a-threat-as-man-animal-conflicts-begin-to-escalate.html

In India, has the environment now been destroyed beyond recovery?

 Suman Sahai

With dramatic changes in the climate overtaking our world, the ferocious pollution in Delhi, the most polluted city in the world and across North India, the irony should not be lost on anyone that world leaders will be sitting down to yet another ineffectual talkathon on arresting climate change just over a week from now.

The 2023 UN Climate Change Conference will be held in Dubai from November 30 to December 12, 2023. The main meeting will be the COP 28 (28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties) as well as the 18th meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol. And the fifth meeting of the parties to the Paris Agreement.

The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 was an international treaty to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases causing global warming. Industrial countries with high emissions were required to cut back more than the less polluting developing countries.  

The Paris Agreement of 2015 was a pledge to keep global temperature rise well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to aim to keep the rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The hyperbolic agenda of COP 28 is: Fast-tracking energy transition and slashing emissions before 2030; Transforming climate finance, delivering on old promises and setting the framework for a new deal on finance; Putting nature, people, lives, and livelihoods at the heart of climate action; and even more immodestly -- Mobilising for the most inclusive COP ever. I wonder how many people believe any of this.

Nothing except hot air has emerged from these treaties and the global climate has only worsened, causing the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, to despair recently that humanity has “opened the gates to hell” by allowing the climate crisis to worsen.

As if to provide the scientific underpinning to Mr Guterres’ hopelessness, a new report has just come in October titled “The 2023 State of the Climate Report: Entering Unchartered Territory”. Brought out by Oxford University Press, the report is authored by a multi-disciplinary team of scientists from different countries.

The headline message of the report is that “Life on Planet Earth is under Siege and we are now in Unchartered Territory’’ This bald, terrifying statement says in so many words that it is possibly too late to reverse the damage done to the climate and that it is going to get increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to predict the timing, the nature and severity of anomalous events that will take place in the future.

2023 will probably turn out to be a benchmark year when many planetary boundaries were irretrievably breached. In July, 2023 was recorded as the hottest year on record. Scientists derive from paleo evidence that this July was probably the hottest in 100,000 years. If that doesn’t sound crazy enough, July 2023 is also when the Antarctic Sea ice reached its lowest level so far and unprecedented numbers of wildfires were seen across temperate areas, particularly in North America.

Asia is turning out to be particularly vulnerable to climate upheavals and disasters. We are seeing the increasingly vulnerable state of North India, particularly in the Indo-Gangetic plains, where high levels of pollution persist for months and uncharacteristic weather events have become more frequent. Cloud bursts and heavy monsoon rains cause flash floods and landslides in northern India. The heavy, nonstop rain for three days starting with a cloud burst wrought havoc in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand in 2021. If the devastating floods of Pakistan in 2022 and the frequent flooding in Bangladesh and China are any indication, the Asian region has already slipped into a highly atypical weather pattern.

The climate of the regions around the Hindukush and Himalayan mountains is directly influenced by the snow-capped ranges which are bearing the brunt of global warming. Glaciers here are melting at a quickened pace. It is estimated that over half of the earth’s 215,000 glaciers will melt by the end of the century, even if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Images captured by Nasa satellites reveal that the Himalayas have already lost about one third of their permanent ice (permafrost) in just the last 50 years. This has serious implications for the water availability in the major rivers of North India.

When glaciers melt and retreat, glacial lakes are formed collecting the melted water. These are fragile, highly unstable structures that can rupture their banks easily, resulting in large volumes of water flowing down in torrents, producing devastating floods. Such GLOFs (Glacial Lake Outburst Floods) are becoming more frequent. A GLOF event is what caused the 2013 Kedarnath disaster, when at least 5000 people lost their lives.

 A GLOF is also what caused the flash floods in Sikkim in 2023 where along with a significant number of lives lost, huge damage was caused to expensive infrastructure, including Chungthang dam and hydroelectric power project. In a swiftly warming world, there is a greater likelihood we will see more instances of catastrophic floods caused when the unstable glacial lakes breach their insubstantial banks. As it is, satellite data show that the last 30 years have seen a big surge in the volume of glacial lakes.

All this tells us how precarious our hold now is on the planet that has sustained human civilisations over millennia. Population growth coupled with an economic growth model that is anchored in a rapacious appetite for more and more has extracted more resources and emitted more pollutants that the environment could handle. We have destroyed the equilibrium of nature. I could end on a prescription of “What to Do” to make things good again, but the solutions have been screamed from the rooftops at every COP meeting. Only, nobody listened. I am afraid that they will not listen at COP 28 either.

Source: https://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/columnists/191123/suman-sahai-in-india-has-the-environment-now-been-destroyed-beyond.html