A fully referenced version of this report has been submitted to Shri Jairam Ramesh, Environment Minister of India, urging him to stop growing Bt cotton and other GM crops in India; it is posted on ISIS members’ website (details here) and can be downloaded here.

The Bt cotton killing fields

As the cotton growing season drew to a close in the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides once again became almost daily occurrences.  Officially, the total number of suicides within a six-week period between July and August 2009 stood at 15, but opposition parties and farmers’ groups said the true total was more than 150 [1]. Opposition leader N. Chandrababu claimed in a speech that he had the names and addresses of 165 farmers who ended their lives because of the distress caused by the drought.

By November, similar reports were coming from another cotton growing state Maharashtra. Farmers of Katpur village in Amravati district sowed Bt cotton four years ago. Instead of the promised miracle yields, huge debts have driven many to suicide, and cattle were reported dying after feeding on the plants [2] (see [3] Mass Deaths in Sheep Grazing on Bt Cotton, SiS 30).

One ray of hope was that the 5000-odd farmers of the Maharashtra village have decided to shun Bt cotton, and are now growing soybean instead. Some have also taken to organic farming.

“We were cheated by the seed companies. We did not get the yield promised by them, not even half of it. And the expenditure involved was so high that we incurred huge debts. We have heard that the government is now planning commercial cultivation of Bt brinjal. But we do not want Bt seeds of any crop anymore,” said farmer Sahebrao Yawiliker.

Successive studies in Maharashtra have concluded that indebtedness was a major cause of suicides among farmers [4].

Within a week, two farmers in neighbouring villages in Wardha district killed themselves. Their Bt cotton crops were devastated by lalya, a disease that caused the cotton plants to redden and wilt [5]. The first farmer, 55 year old Laxman Chelpelviar in Mukutban,  consumed the pesticide Endoulfan when the first picking from his six-acre farm returned a mere five quintals and an income of Rs15 000, way below his expenses of Rs50 000.  The second farmer, 45 year old Daulat Majure in Jhamkola, was discovered by his mother hanging dead from the ceiling. The cotton yield from his seven-acre farm was a miserable one quintal, worth Rs3 000.

Agricultural scientists said lalya points to a lack of micronutrients and moisture content in the soil. Lalya develops with pest attacks, moisture stress and lack of micronutrients in the soil. The plant’s chlorophyll decreases with nitrogen deficiency, resulting in another pigment, anthocyanin, which turns the foliage red. If reddening starts before boll formation, it results in a 25 percent drop in yield, said a scientist from the Central Institute of Cotton Research at Nagpur, who wished to remain anonymous. “Lalya is here to stay.” He declared.

According to the agricultural scientists, the disease has its roots in the American Bt technology that India imported. Almost all of the 500-plus Bt seed varieties sold in India in 2009 are of the same parentage, the American variety Coker312 Bt cotton, a top CICR scientist said. They are F1 hybrids, crossed with Indian varieties.

Coker-312 (initially from Monsanto) showed high susceptibility to attacks by sucking pests like jassids and thrips. The thrips disperse within plant cells, while jassids suck the sap as they multiply under a leaf’s surface, forcing the plant to draw more nutrients from the soil, aggravating the soil’s nutritional deficiency.

Another characteristic of Bt cotton that depletes the soil is that the bolls come to fruition simultaneously, draining the soil all at once. In a region like Vidarbha, plants wilt in two or three days. “It is like drawing blood from anemic woman.”

 “If such a technology mismatch continues, soil health and farmers’ economy will take a further hit,” a top ICAR scientist with years of experience in cotton research was reported saying [5]. “The state needs to take up soil and water conservation efforts on a war footing in Vidarbha.”

India has about ten million ha under hybrids and Bt cotton, much high than in China (6.3 m ha), US (3.8 m ha) and Pakistan (3.1 m ha). Unlike India, 79 other countries use self-seeding and non-Bt hybrids.

The cotton crisis and successive crop failures due to declining soil health goes hand in hand with the imported GM (genetic modification) technology, which is energy and input intensive, the report [5] concluded.

Other effects of Bt cotton the Indian scientists could have mentioned are the resurgence of secondary pests and especially the new exotic mealy bug pest introduced with the Bt cotton, as well as the reduced yields of other crops on land cultivated with Bt cotton [6] (see Mealy Bug Plagues Bt Cotton Fields in India and Pakistan, SiS 45).

A recent scientific study carried out by Delhi-based Navdanya compared the soil of fields where Bt-cotton had been planted for three years with adjoining fields planted with non GM cotton or other crops [7]. The regions covered included Nagpur, Amravati and Wardha of Vidharbha, which account for the highest Bt cotton planting in India, and the highest rate of farmer suicides (4 000 per year).

In three years, Bt-cotton was found to reduce the population of Actinomycetes bacteria by 17 percent. Actinomycetes bacteria are vital for breaking down cellulose and creating humus.

Bacteria overall were reduced by 14 percent, while the total microbial biomass was reduced by 8.9 percent. Vital soil enzymes, which make nutrients available to plants, have also been drastically reduced. Acid phosphatase which contributes to the uptake of phosphates was lowered by 26.6 percent. Nitrogenase enzymes, which help fix nitrogen, were diminished by 22.6 percent. The study concluded [7] that a decade of planting with GM cotton, or any GM crop with Bt genes could lead to total destruction of soil organisms, “leaving dead soil unable to produce food.”

After some respite in the post loan-waiver year of 2008, farmer suicides have begun to climb again [5]. The number of suicides in the six worst-affected western Vidarbha districts in 2009 was approaching 900. November saw 24 famers take their own lives in Yavatmal alone.

“Crop survival this year is only 44 percent in some blocks,” said Sanjay Desmukh, Yavatmal collector. “Rains have been scanty.”

Official records underestimate the real extent of suicides

According to Indian government records, 182 936 farmers committed suicide in India between 1997 and 2007 [8]. Nearly two-thirds occurred in five states, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, with one-third of the country’s population. The count has been rising even as the numbers of farmers are diminishing. As many as 8 million quit farming between 1991 and 2001, and the rate of quitting has only risen since.

These official figures tend to be huge underestimates. The records are collated by the National Criminal Records Bureau, a wing of the Ministry of home Affairs; but the numbers reported to the Bureau by the states are often massaged downwards. For example, women farmers are not normally accepted as farmers, as by custom, land is never in their names, although they do the bulk of the work in agriculture.

P. Sainath, the rural affairs editor of The Hindu and author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought, refers to the suicides as “the largest sustained wave of such deaths recorded in history”, and attributes it to India’s “embrace of the brave new world of neoliberalism.”

The rate of farmers’ suicides has worsened particularly after 2002 (the year GM crops were introduced to India, although Sainath does not say so). Between 1997 and 2001, the number of suicides was 78 737, or 15 747 a year on average. Between 2002 and 2006, the number was 87 567, or 17 513 a year on average.

Indebtedness the cause

Those who have taken their lives were deep in debt (as successive studies in Maharashtra confirmed [4]).  Peasant households in debt nearly doubled in the first decade of the neoliberal “economic reforms” [8], from 26 percent of farm households to 48.6 percent, according to the National Sample Survey data. But in the worst affected states, the rate of indebtedness is far higher. For example, 82 percent of all farm households in Andhra Pradesh were in debt by 2001-02.

Furthermore, those who killed themselves were overwhelmingly cash crop farmers growing cotton, coffee, sugarcane, groundnut, pepper, and vanilla. Suicides were fewer among those that grow food crops such as rice, wheat, maize and pulses.

Giant seed companies have been displacing cheap hybrids and far cheaper and hardier traditional varieties with their own products. A cotton farmer buying Monsanto’s GM cotton would be paying far more for seed. Local varieties and hybrids were squeezed out with enthusiastic state support.

In 1991, farmers could buy a kilogram of local seed for as little as Rs7 or Rs9 in today’s worst affected region of Vidarbha. By 2003, they would pay Rs350 (US$7) for a 450 gram bag of hybrid seed. By 2004, Monsanto’s partners in India were marketing a 450 grams bag of Bt cotton seed for between Rs1 650 and Rs1 800 ($33 to $36). This price was brought down by government intervention overnight in Andhra Pradesh, where the government changed after the 2004 elections. The price dropped to around Rs900 ($18), still many times higher than 1991 or even 2003.

Health and food costs sky-rocketed while farmers’ income crashed, and so did the price they got for their cash crops, thanks to subsidies to corporate and rich farmers in the US and EU. These subsidies on cotton alone destroyed cotton farmers not only in India but in African nations such as Burkina Faso, Benin, Mali and Chad.

As costs rose, credit dried up and debt went out of control, and the tides of suicides washed over India.

To add to the farmers’ plight, the unsustainable farming practices are coming home to roost. More than 1 500 farmers in the state of Chhattisgarh committed suicide, driven into debt by crop failures due to falling water levels, which dropped from 40 feet to below 250 feet in just the past few years [9].

More “sinister” GM crops

But there is yet a more “sinister reason” for the mass suicides: GM crops, notably Bt cotton. Millions of Indian farmers had been promised undreamt of harvests by switching to planting GM seeds. They borrowed money to buy the exorbitant seeds, only to find their crops failing miserably, leaving them with spiralling debt from which the only exit is suicide. British journalist Andrew Malone writing for the Mail [10] reported an estimated 125 000 farmers had taken their own lives directly as the result of GM crops; the crisis being branded “GM genocide” by campaigners. It is perpetrated by powerful GM lobbyists and prominent politicians all over the world who persist in claiming that GM crops have transformed Indian agriculture and producing greater yields than ever before. 

Malone described how he travelled to Maharashtra in the suicide belt to find out for himself who is telling the truth. There he witnessed the cremation of the body of the farmer in a cracked barren field near his home 100 miles from Nagpur in central India.

Death by insecticide

“As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana, 14, faced a grim future. While Shankara Mandauka had hoped his son and daughter would have a better life under India’s economic boom, they now face working as slave labour for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, they will be the lowest of the low.” Malone wrote.

Shankara drank insecticide to end his life 24 hours earlier. He was in debt for two years’ earnings and could see no other way out of his despair.

“There were still marks in the dust where he had writhed in agony. Other villagers looked on – they knew from experience that any intervention was pointless – as he lay doubled up on the ground, crying out in pain and vomiting.”

Neighbours gathered to pray outside the family home. Nirmala Mandaukar told how she rushed back from the fields to find her husband dead. “He was a loving and caring man,” she said, weeping.

Shankara’s crop, Bt cotton, had failed twice. Like millions of other Indian farmers, he switched from traditional seeds to GM seeds, beguiled by the promise of bumper harvests and future riches. He borrowed money to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with mounting debts and no income.      

 “Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonizing deaths. Most swallow insecticide – a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.” Malone wrote. “Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and ‘agrarian distress’ that is the real reason for the horrific toll. But as I discovered during a four-day journey through the epicentre of the disaster, that is not the full story.”

In one village, he found 18 farmers had committed suicide after being “sucked” into GM debt.  Village after village, families told how they had fallen into debt on being persuaded to buy GM seeds. Famers paid £10 for 100 g of GM seeds, a thousand times the cost of traditional seeds. The GM salesmen and government officials promised farmers that these were ‘magic seed’ that yield better crops without parasites and insects.

Far from being magic seeds, the GM crops were devastated by bollworms. They also required double the amount of water.

When rains failed for the past two years, many GM crops simply withered and died.

In the past when crops failed, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year. But with GM hybrid seeds, they have been unable to do that.

Suresh Bhalasa was another farmer cremated the same week, leaving a wife and two children. His family had no doubt that their troubles began the moment they were encouraged to buy Monsanto’s Bt cotton.

“We are ruined now,” said the 38-year-old widow. “We bought 100 grams of Bt cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to the field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.”

Monsanto admitted that soaring debt was a “factor in this tragedy,” but said that cotton production had doubled in the past seven years. A spokesman blamed other reasons for the recent crisis, such as “untimely rain” or drought, and that suicides have always been part of the rural Indian life.

Malone’s findings on GM cotton and farmers suicides confirm what we reported in 2006 [11] (Indian Cotton Farmers Betrayed, SiS 29); when organic cotton was already providing farmers a lifeline [12] (Message from Andra Predesh:Return to organic cotton & avoid the Bt cotton trap, SiS 29; see also [13] Stem Farmers’ Suicides with Organic Farming, SiS 32).

Yield ‘jump’ due to Bt cotton?

However, the findings by journalists and activists on the ground were contradicted by a discussion paper [14] of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) of the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research). The CGIAR describes itself [15] as a “strategic partnership” of 64 members supporting 15 international centres working in collaboration with many hundred of government and civil society organizations as well as private businesses around the world.

Based on the analysis of information from a variety of official and unofficial sources, published and unpublished studies, the IFPRI paper [14] concluded that “there is no evidence of a “resurgence” of farmer suicides in India in the last five years, and that Bt cotton technology has been “very effective overall in India.”

It stated that Bt cotton is “neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the occurrence of farmer suicides.” Nevertheless, “in specific regions and years, where Bt cotton may have indirectly contributed to farmer indebtedness, leading to suicides, its failure was mainly the result of the context or environment in which it was planted.”

These conclusions absolve Bt cotton from having played any part in the farmers suicides, laying practically all the blame on inappropriate rainfall and drought, with no mention of the exorbitant price of GM seeds compared with traditional seeds; nor of failed harvests or of increased pesticide use.

Actually, the data presented showed that the two states with the largest planted areas of Bt cotton, Maharashtra (1 840 000 ha) and Andhra Pradesh (830 000) in 2006 (Table 7 of IFPRI paper) were also the ones with the highest suicide rates that year.

The following year’s harvest in Maharashtra was no better despite the hype of a ‘bumper crop’ by the state government suspected of intending to boost the image of Bt cotton and to depress the price [16]. Farmers were reporting huge losses. One Bt cotton farmer harvested 80 quintals (1 quintal = 100 kg) in 45 acres and expected to harvest a further 80 quintals at most. As cotton seed is about one-third lint, the actual lint yield was less than 12 kg/acre or 32.5 kg/ha. The state had projected a total production of 7 000 000 bales (1 bale = 170kg), but the Divisional Commissioner of Amravati said it would not exceed 4 000 000 bales. In the end, the official record on the Indian Government’s Cotton Corporation of India database was 5 000 000 bales [17].

The most dubious claim in the IFPRI paper [14] was in a graph showing that the average yield of cotton for all India shot up from about 300 kg/ha to 500 kg/ha in the five years after Bt cotton was introduced in 2002, an increase attributed largely to Bt cotton. But when the average cotton yields by region were plotted, no such jump was evident; and even less so when the average yields by states were plotted (see Figure 1). Maharashtra, the state with the largest area of Bt cotton, had the lowest yields.

Without a proper statistical analysis, it is impossible to tell if the trend before and after the introduction of Bt is different; furthermore, there is no evidence Bt cotton is responsible for any yield ‘jump’.

The official Indian Government data [17] do not present yields from Bt cotton separately from those of non-Bt cotton. The IFPRI paper [14] provided some information on the number of hectares planted with Bt cotton in its Table 7 for the years 2002 to 2006. In 2004, 500 000 ha were planted with Bt, representing 5.69 percent of the total8 786 000 ha of cotton land. If Bt cotton were solely responsible for the increase in yield to 470 kg/ha reported that year, the 5.69 percent of land planted with Bt cotton would have had to yield a miraculous 2 460.5 kg/ha, because the extrapolated yield without Bt cotton, according to the old curve would have been only 350 kg/ha.

Clearly other factors were responsible for the increase in yield that apply to cotton crops in general, Bt and non-Bt, as was pointed out by a researcher of the Coalition for a GM-Free India [18]: an enormous increase in irrigation, good rainfall (for rain fed crops), increase in use of fertilizers and hybrid seeds (including Bt hybrids with indigenous varieties) and lack of pests.

But are the reported increases in yields reliable?

Figure 1  Yield jump due to Bt cotton. Top, average cotton yields for all India 1980-2007; middle, average cotton yields for different regions 1975-2007; bottom, average cotton yields for states, 1975-2007 (redrawn from [14])

Questionable reliability of data

The reliability of the Indian Government’s database [17] is open to question. For example, the production of the whole of India for 2008 was recorded at 31 500 000 bales, giving an average yield of 567 kg/ha. But according to the later estimate by American agencies, the 2008 production was 23 000 000 bales [18], or an average yield of only 414 kg/ha. Data from other countries such as the United States and China also showed that yields of cotton have stagnated since the introduction of Bt cotton.

Massive failures of Bt cotton crops in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra were widely reported in the first year of introduction [19-22] (Bt cotton fails in India, Science in Society 16). The Khargone district in Madhya Pradesh facing a severe drought reported 100 percent Bt cotton failures compared with 20 percent failures of non-Bt cotton. The Vidarbha cotton belt in the adjoining state of Maharashtra reported more than 30 000 ha damaged by root rot with over 70 percent of the crop areas affected. Farmers in both areas were demanding compensation.

In 2005, in advance of a deadline for a decision on license renewal, Greenpeace India and the Sarvodaya Youth Organization released two versions of a report on Bt cotton prepared by the Joint Director of Agriculture of Warangal District, Andhra Pradesh (AP).  The data in the original report, commissioned under a memorandum of understanding between the AP government and Monsanto-Mahyco, revealed a comprehensive failure of Bt cotton in AP.  The second visibly tampered-with version exaggerated the yields, thereby substantially reducing Monsanto’s compensation to farmers [23] (India’s Bt Cotton Fraud, SiS 26).

Local scientists and farmers accused the State Agriculture Department scientists of “fudging data” on Bt cotton performance [24]. “For example, 4 is made into 14 quintals yield, and figures are similarly concocted to show reduced pesticide use.”

Monsanto commissioned a study using a market research agency for the 2004 season (see below), which claimed that Bt cotton yield was up by 58 percent on a country wide basis, resulting in a 60 percent increase in farmers’ incomes; and in Andhra Pradesh, a 46 percent yield increase and a 65 percent reduction in pesticide costs gave a 42 percent increase in income to farmers. Every one of those claims was directly contradicted by independent research on the ground [25].

A notorious paper by Martin Qaim (University of Bonn) and David Zilberman (University of California, Berkeley) was published in the top journal Science, claiming outstanding (80 percent) yield increases from Monsanto’s GM cotton; and projected the results as relevant to farmers throughout the developing world [26]. The paper drew a storm of protest, as it derived all its data from Monsanto, and its findings were completely at odds with the reports coming from Indian farmers. Dr. Devinder Sharma, a food policy expert, called Qaim and Zilberman’s paper a “scientific fairytale” [27].

These Bt fantasies were contradicted by independent studies.

Independent studies contradict claims of Bt yield jump

Agricultural scientists Dr Abdul Qayum and Kiran Sakkhari conducted an independent study on Bt cotton on a season-long basis for three years in 87 villages of the major cotton growing districts of AP – Warangal, Nalgonda, Adilabad and Kurnool – and found against Bt cotton on all counts [28].

· Bollgard (Monsanto’s Bt cotton) failed miserably for small farmers in terms of yields; non-Bt cotton  surpassed Bt in yield bynearly 30 percentwith 10 percent less expense

· Bollgard did not significantly reduce pesticide use; over the three years, Bt farmers spent Rs 2 571 on pesticides on average, while the non-Bt farmers spent Rs2 766

· Bollgard did not bring profit to farmers; over the three years, the non-Bt farmers earned on average 60 percent more than Bt farmers

· Bollgard did not reduce the cost of cultivation; on an average, the Bt farmers had incurred 12 percent more costs than non-Bt farmers

· Bollgard did not result in a healthier environment; researchers found a special kind of root rot spread by Bollgard cotton, infecting the soil so that other crops would not grow.

Another report, The story of Bt cotton in Andhra Pradesh:  Erratic processes and results [29] published by the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture (CSA), documented the controversial events surrounding the failures of Bt cotton during its first three years of commercial cultivation in Andhra Pradesh.

In the first year (2002-2003), the popular non-Bt hybrid yielded on average 276 kg/ha compared with 180 kg/ha from Bt-cotton (an increase of 53 percent). The average net return for non-Bt farmers was Rs2 147 compared with Rs518 for Bt farmers, an increase of 314 percent. Some 71 percent of farmers on Bt cotton suffered a net loss compared with only 18 percent of farmers who planted non-Bt cotton. Similar surveys carried out in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh by New Delhi based Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology confirmed the dismal results of Bt cotton; farmers who planted Bt cotton suffered a net loss of Rs 3 300 per acre, whereas those growing non Bt hybrids and desi varieties (indigenous non Bt cotton) gained Rs10 750 and Rs 8 250 respectively. These trends were confirmed in a third study by non-government organization, Gene Campaign.

Monsanto-Mahyco, however, conducted its own survey, which presented positive findings for Bt cotton.

In the second year (2003-2004), Monsanto-Mahyco commissioned a survey by a market research agency A C Nielson, which came up with the appropriately positive report. However, a season-long monitoring by Deccan Development Society, Permaculture Association of India and Andhra Pradesh Coalition in Defence of Diversity (APCIDD) returned quite different findings. It showed that Bt crops did not significantly reduce the cost of pesticides, they required more insecticide sprays for controlling sucking pests than non-Bt crops, and Bt crops led to a 9 percent reduction in yield and less net profit for farmers (see Table 1).

In the third year, the areas planted with Bt expanded again, to six times the previous year, as conditional approval was granted by the GEAC for commercial release for RCH2 Bt, a Bt hybrid with an indigenous variety of Rasi Seeds, for South and Central India.

Mass Bt crop failures were detected early in the season in Warangal district. The government had sent out 50 teams of experts to visit the fields and compile a report, but no information was forthcoming. By November 2004, the agricultural officials in Warangal admitted that out of 20 000 ha of Bt cotton grown in the district 65 percent was damaged by wilt, where the flowers, bolls, and the plants dried up resulting in very low yields. In contrast, only 15 percent of the non-Bt crops were damaged.

Qayum and Sakhari continued a fourth successive year of study on Bt cotton in Andhra Pradesh for the APCIDD, the Deccan Development Society and the Permaculture Association of India [30]. They compared the performance of Bt cotton with non-Bt cotton, and organic (NPM, non-pesticide management) cotton and the corresponding economic returns to farmers.

The previous report [29] from 2002-2005 covered the Bt cotton hybrids MCH162 and MCH184 introduced by Mahyco-Monsanto. These hybrids were found to have “failed miserably” as small farmers could neither reduce pesticide use nor cost of cultivation, and some diseases similar to Rhizotaria root rot and bacterial leaf blight had widely spread first in Bt hybrid cotton, which later infected the non-Bt hybrids. As a result of the report and extended agitation by farmers in the region, GEAC and the Government of Andhra Pradesh imposed a ban on the cultivation of Mahyco-Monsanto hybrids in the state during 2005-2006.

Between 2004 and 2006, a number of new hybrids were released for cultivation in Andhra Pradesh. These include RCH 20, ProAgro368, Bunny and Mallika, in addition to Rasi’s RCH-2. So the study for 2005-2006 analysed the performance of all the Bt hybrids in nine villages in three districts, Warangal, Adilabad and Nalgonda [30].

The results showed that NPM cotton and non-Bt cotton cost less than Bt cotton by 22.83 percent and 16.66 percent respectively and resulted in better net economic return by 35.35 percent and 8.81 percent respectively. There were only slight differences in yields with Bt cotton hybrids ahead of non-Bt and NPM cotton by 6.09 and 6.6 percent respectively. The greatest savings were in the cost of seeds. Bt-hybrid seeds cost Rs1 750 per acre compared with Rs481.8 for non-Bt hybrid seeds, and Rs473.7 NPM-hybrid seeds.

Incidentally, the average yield over the five years 2002-2006 for Andhra Pradesh according to state record was 328 kg/ha [30]. But the figures from the government database [17] gave an average of 485 over the same period, an inflation of 48 percent.

While the incidence of American bollworm – the pest that Bt cotton protects against – was low throughout the study area irrespective of whether Bt, non-Bt or NPM cotton was grown, other important pests, the sucking pests, were rampant. The incidence was higher in Bt cotton fields and extended to longer duration, so Bt farmers had to spray once or twice more than non-Bt farmers, while NPM farmers did not have to use insecticides at all. These findings confirmed results obtained earlier, which we reported in detail [31] (Organic Cotton Beats Bt Cotton in India, SiS 27).

In 2007, a study on Bt cotton in Vidarbha documented that it has failed in the region [32]. Suman Suhai, director of Gene Campaign, told The Hindu that despite knowing that Bt cotton would not work in rain fed areas, the government had introduced it in Vidarbha, and as a result the high input costs of Bt cotton had increased indebtedness in an area already heavily indebted. The study showed that 70 percent of small farmers had already lost their landholdings as collateral for loans that they could never repay.

Suhai said seed dealers encouraged farmers to buy far more fertilizer and pesticide than was needed, raising their input costs. They promised farmers 12 to 15 quintals per acre when the actual harvest was in the range of three to 5 quintals per acre. At the same time cotton price came down with the import of Chinese cotton. On average, farmers who adopted Bt cotton lost Rs1 725 per acre.

The study further revealed that many farmers adopted Bt cotton because they believed it was a “government seed”, instead of being privately produced and marketed. They also adopted it because the government was activity promoting it. Local officials like the Agriculture Commissioner of Amravati were aware of the failures of Bt cotton, but the state agriculture department continued to promote it.

The study also collected evidence of other effects of Bt cotton on plants and animals: cattle deaths in areas where they grazed in harvested Bt cotton fields [3]. Women working in cotton fields had complained of rashes (see [33] (More Illnesses Linked to Bt Crops, SiS 30), and mango trees that were not flowering. But the government has turned a deaf ear to those reports to this day.

Vandana Shiva has roundly condemned the IFPRI paper in her critique [34], exposing all its false claims. More recent field studies in Vidarbha carried out by her organization Navdanya showed a 13-fold increase in pesticide use by farmers since Bt cotton was introduced in 2004.

A 2008 survey comparing Bt cotton with organic cotton showed that organic producers earned on average Rs6 287/acre, nearly ten times as much as the Rs714/acre income of Bt cotton farmers.

These problems with Bt cotton are not unique to India. We reviewed GM cotton failures around the world at the beginning of 2005 [35] (GM Cotton Fiascos Around the World, SiS 26), notably Indonesia, China, and The United States.  

Independent study in US confirms Bt cotton failures

A 4-year study [36] by researchers at the University of Georgia and the US Department of Agriculture confirms that the use of GM cotton did not provide increased return to farmers in the United States. On the contrary, it may decrease income by up to 40 percent [37] (Transgenic Cotton Offers No Advantage, SiS 38).

The researchers grew a number of different cultivars of cotton at two locations in the state of Georgia. The transgenic varieties consisted of two main traits, herbicide tolerance and Bt biopesticides, alone and variously combined (stacked); they were

1. Bollgard (B), expressing the Bt toxin Cry1Ac from soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis to control the cotton bollworm
2. Bollgard II (B2) expressing two different Bt toxins, Cry1Ac and Cry2Ab, to delay the evolution of pest resistance
3. Roundup Ready (RR), tolerant to glyphosate herbicide;
4. Bollgard/Roundup Ready (BR)
5. BollgardII/Roundup Ready (B2R)
6. Liberty Link (LL), tolerant to herbicide glufosinate

Five different non-transgenic cotton cultivars were also grown. Each cultivar, whether transgenic or not, was managed to maximise profit, as consistent with practices recommended by the University of Georgia.

The results showed that “no transgenic technology system produced significantly greater returns than a non-transgenic system in any year or location.” The returns are dominated by yields, and could be reduced by 30-40 percent. In 2004 at one of the two locations, the non-transgenic variety produced a return of $1274.81 per ha compared with $858.73 for BR, $737.41 for B2R, and $876.14 for LL.

The researchers remarked that the high investment for transgenic crops before any yield is realised is a predicament for growers, one shared by farmers in India and elsewhere.

It is a pity that the researchers have not included organically managed cotton in their study, because it is clearly a much better option.

Bt cotton does not protect against cotton bollworms as intended and worse

Bt cotton is supposed to protect against cotton bollworms on account of one or more genes coding for a family of proteins from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that are specifically toxic to them.

However, farmers have found that Bt cotton did not always live up to expectations. In the first year of its introduction in India, Bt cotton crops in the Bhavanagar, Surendranagar, and Rajkot districts of Gujarat were reported to be attacked by bollworm [38].

By 2005, scientific studies from several countries backed up farmers’ experience. Scientists in India, China and the United States found that the levels of Bt toxin produced by Bt crops vary substantially in different parts of the plant and in the course of the growing season, and are often insufficient to kill the targeted pests. This could lead to greater use of pesticides, and accelerate the evolution of pest resistance to the Bt toxin [39] (Scientists Confirm Failures of Bt-Crops, SiS 28).

Scientists at the Central Institute of Cotton Research found that the amount of Cry1Ac protein varied across the Bt varieties and between different plant parts [40]. The leaves had the highest levels; whereas the levels in the boll-rind, square bud and ovary of flowers were clearly inadequate to fully protect the fruiting parts producing the cotton bolls. Increasing numbers of armyworm (Helicopverpa armigera) larvae survived as toxin levels dropped below 1.8 mg/g wet weight of the plant parts. Thus, a critical level of 1.9 mg/g was needed to kill all the pests. Regardless of plant varieties, the level of toxin decreased with the age of the plant, though the decrease was more rapid in some hybrids than in others. By 110 days, Cry1Ac expression decreased to less than 0.47mg/g in all Bt hybrids.

In a separate study, scientists at the same institute tested the susceptibility of an insect pest from different regions in India to Bt toxin [41]. The LC₅₀ – the concentration killing 50 percent of the larvae – of Cry1Ac ranged from 0.006 to 0.105 mg/ml. There was a 17.5 fold overall variability in susceptibility among the districts. The highest variability of 17.5 fold was recorded from districts of South India. The variability in pest susceptibility, like the variable expression of the Cry1A proteins in Bt crops, will reduce the efficacy of Bt pest control.

At the Institute of Plant Protection, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing researcher found that the toxin content in the Bt cotton varieties changed significantly over time, depending on the part of the plant, the growth stage and the variety. Generally, the toxin protein was expressed at high levels during the early stages of growth, declined in mid-season, and rebounded late in the season. In line with the study in India, the scientists found that the toxin content in leaf, square, petal and stamens were generally much high than those in the ovule and the boll [42].

From the beginning, scientists have predicted another problem, that the bollworm would develop resistance to Bt toxin, and hence a general recommendation was that 20 percent of the land should be set aside for planting non-Bt crops to act as ‘refugia’ to slow the development of Bt resistance; and the pro-GM lobby has been congratulating itself at how Bt resistance has not developed [43]. But as pointed out by Prof. Joe Cummins of ISIS [44] (No Bt Resistance? SiS 20), the ‘refugia’ were fictitious; as the US Department of Agriculture had recommended insecticide sprays on both non-Bt crops in the refugia and Bt crops.

But by 2005, Bt resistance in bollworms had indeed emerged in Australia [39]. A population of the Australian cotton bollworm, Helicoverpa armigera – the most important agricultural pest in Australia as well as China, India and Africa – has developed resistance to Cry1Ac at 275-times the level that would have killed the non-resistant insect [45]. Some 70 percent of the resistant larvae were able to survive on Bt cotton expressing Cry1Ac (Ingard), which has been grown in Australia since 1996.

A new variety of Bt cotton containing both Cry1Ac and Cry2Ab was commercially released in late 2003. Resistance monitoring in Australia and China had suggested that pest susceptibility to Cry1Ac was declining in the field. In 2001, a strain of cotton bollworm was isolated from the survivors in the New South Wales and Queensland monitoring programme that appeared to be resistant to Cry1Ac. The researchers have now confirmed the findings [45, 46], and attributed the high level of resistance to a 3- to 12-fold over-expression of an enzyme, serine protease, which binds avidly to Cry1Ac toxin, preventing it from acting, and possibly, detoxifying it by breaking it down.

Another problem more serious than Bt resistance in the targeted pest is the emergence of secondary pests. And this has happened first in China and then in India and Pakistan [6].

China was initially held up as the success story on Bt cotton [39]. It first granted permission to Monsanto to grow the crop in 1997, and for the first several years reported great reductions in the use of pesticides. Early warnings appeared in a study published in 2002 by researchers at an institute funded by China’s Environmental Protection Agency. It found that although Bt cotton was effective in controlling bollworm, it had adverse impacts on the bollworm’s natural enemies and was not effective in controlling many secondary pests. A second study published in October 2004 found that Bt cotton did not reduce the total numbers of insecticide sprays because additional sprays were needed against sucking pests.  A study of 481 Chinese farmers by researchers at the Cornell University released in 2006 reported that after seven years, populations of other insects such as mirids have increased so much that farmers have had to spray their crops up to 20 times a growing season [47].

One of the researchers, Per Pinstrup-Anderson, well known for supporting GM and professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy at Cornell said: “These results should send a very strong signal to researchers and government that they need to come up with remedial actions for the Bt-cotton farmers. Otherwise farmers will stop using Bt cotton, and that would be very unfortunate.”

The study found that farmers in the survey who had planted Bt cotton were doing well initially, and by year three, cut pesticides by 70 percent and earned 36 percent more than farmers planting non-Bt cotton. By 2004, however, they had to spray just as much, resulting in a net average income eight percent less than conventional cotton farmers because Bt seed costs three times as much as conventional seed.

The other researchers were Shenghui Wang, Cornell Ph.D. now an economist at the World Bank, and Cornell professor David R. Just. They stress that secondary pest problems could become a major threat in countries where Bt cotton has been widely planted.

Undaunted, the supporters of GM continue their positive spin. In the abstract of a paper published in  Science in 2008 [48] the authors wrote: “Our data suggest that Bt cotton not only controls H. armigera on transgenic cotton designed to resist this pest but also may reduce its presence on other host crops and may decrease the need for insecticide sprays in general.”

In the full paper, however, the authors reported that mirids, podsucking bugs that used to be controlled by spraying and by competition with the bollworm, have now become key pests of cotton in China. They conclude their paper with the statement: “Therefore, despite its value, Bt cotton should be considered only one component in the overall management of insect pests in the diversified cropping systems common throughout China.”

Grassroots researcher Ram Kalaspurker based in Yavatmal, Maharashtra in India, was among the first to document (with video and photography) the emergence of secondary pests and even a totally new exotic pest, giant mealy bugs that have infested Bt cotton plants, and spreading to near-by plants [49] (Deadly gift from Monsanto to India, SiS 38). The problem is so serious that a special combined session of entomology and pathology groups was convened in the entomology panel meeting on 10 April 2008. It stated [50] “All the participant entomologists were unanimous in expressing their concern on the emergence of new insect pests over the past 4 years, particularly after the introduction of Bt-cotton. Severe infestation of mealy bugs, mirid bugs and thrips was recorded in several parts of the country. Mealy bugs in Gujarat and mirid bugs in Karnataka were reported to have caused significant economic damage.”  An arsenal of deadly insecticides has been suggested by some entomologists to deal with these secondary pests as well as with resistant bollworms.

Scientific consensus for organic non-GM agriculture

There is a developing scientific consensus that organic non-GM agriculture and localized food (and energy) systems are what the world needs for food security that would also save the climate [51] (Food Futures Now: *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free , ISIS publication).

Prince Charles was so distressed by the plight of the suicide farmers that he set up a charity, the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation [52] to help those affected, and to promote organic Indian crops instead of GM crops.

Bt cotton has been an unmitigated disaster for India in exacerbated farmers suicides. But the ecological and agronomic nightmare is still unfolding, in plagues of secondary and novel pests, pest resistance, novel diseases, and worst of all, soils so depleted in nutrients and essential microorganisms that they will no longer support the growth of any crop.  

There is no doubt that those who insist on promoting GM crops for farmers in India and elsewhere in the developing world [53] (Beware the New “Doubly Green Revolution”, SiS 37) are perpetrating a crime against humanity.

Not long ago I was standing in a bookshop, minding my own business, when a book title leapt out in front of me. The book was "History’s Worst Decisions and the People Who Made Them". It documents the sorry tales of dozens of people throughout history who, with the best of intentions, made some fascinatingly terrible choices.

I scanned the book’s contents page, purposefully, looking for a specific name – that of the recently deceased, Iowa born agronomist, Norman Borlaug. I failed to find him amongst all the unfortunates chosen for inclusion, but then I really didn’t expect to. My lack of surprise was not because I didn’t think he was deserving – I would likely have put him at top of the list myself – but because, in general, the human race is largely ignorant of the grave implications of his work. This ignorance is made glaringly obvious when you consider he is widely celebrated as one of the greatest benefactors of the human race. He even received a Nobel Peace Prize, amongst several other awards, for his disaster of a contribution to mankind.

Mr. Borlaug is father of the very inappropriately named ‘Green Revolution’ – the post World War II industrialisation of agriculture. He is credited with saving millions of people from starvation after World War II. And, credit where credit is due – he probably did. He hybridised seed strains to develop high yield varieties, which in and of itself might not have been such a bad thing. But Borlaug’s work didn’t stop there. The outcome was the creation of a colour-by-numbers, fossil fuel-, chemical- and irrigation-dependent approach to agriculture that saw large scale monocrops become the system of choice worldwide and gave birth to the ‘get big or get out’ agricultural policies of the 1970s. The resulting reductionist bid to deal with, and capitalise on, all the symptoms of this unnatural shift then gave birth to that ultimate method of social control and profiteering – genetic engineering.

The industrialisation of our food supply means that our current production is extremely oil intensive. It has been calculated that, on average, it takes ten calories of fossil fuels to produce one calorie of food in our current setup. Some food has an even more ridiculous ratio – like corn-fed feedlot beef which consumes about 55 fossil fuel calories to one calorie of meat. We are effectively eating oil.

This is of course an insane state of affairs. As oil production wanes this puts us in an extremely vulnerable position. If our current system remains unchanged, we face acute food shortages in the near future, and that’s without even taking into account the major crop failures we’re getting now as a result of climate change. It is precisely why in 2008, when oil prices tripled in a matter of months, people began to riot worldwide as they got priced out of the ability to eat. The recession has somewhat alleviated this problem, but it won’t be long before crisis strikes again and becomes a permanent condition for humanity.

Big Agribusiness not only uses a disproportional amount of oil, they also empty our soils of life and organic matter (primarily carbon) – destroying the natural soil fertility that would make their fertiliser-in-a-bottle products obsolete and thus also making agriculture the largest contributor to climate change. Same goes for water. Agriculture, as implemented today, is by far the largest consumer and contaminator of water of all industries. Its runoff is also responsible for large and growing ocean dead zones in coastal areas around the world. It is also the biggest driver of deforestation and the main culprit for the mass extinctions and biodiversity loss currently underway.

Not only did the Green Revolution make our entire food system wholly dependent on finite resources, and make it function in such a way that it undermines them all, it also shifted demographics (his work has fueled a population boom whilst transitioning much of the world’s population off the land, where they could have been small scale stewards of it, into city dwellings) to such an extent that we may well see widespread starvation as peak oil issues become more pronounced, and widespread revolution and bloodshed if we can’t find a way to peacefully re-ruralise the world so we can get back to a sustainable footing.

In short: we’ve been subsidising our food supply over the last sixty years by stealing energy, soil, water and health from the future. But, now, the future is here. In saving millions, Borlaug could well have consigned many more millions, or even billions, of us to death. He has left us with quite a legacy – the enormous challenge of having to find a way to rapidly but peacefully reverse his life’s work.

If you read any economic, financial, or political analysis for 2010 that doesn’t mention the food shortage looming next year [2010], throw it in the trash, as it is worthless. There is overwhelming, undeniable evidence that the world will run out of food [in 2010]…. – 2010 Food Crisis for Dummies

The food crisis he’s talking about is not constrained to just the two-thirds world countries…

Thanks Norman. We know you meant well…. Pity you couldn’t have hung around long enough to see it all play out.

Beginning a Detour Around Catastrophe?

In light of these realities, I like to find hope where I can. Realising the implications of the thoughts above, some local initiatives are looking at ways to reduce this outright vulnerability. And now, finally, at least on the surface, it looks like the UK government may be beginning to take this issue a little more seriously as well.

Plans to boost food production in Britain and reduce its impact on the environment have been unveiled.

The government’s 20-year food strategy includes making land available for people to grow their own food and more healthy cooking courses.

… The Tories said ministers "belatedly" recognised the need for food security after a decade of declining production.

Environment Secretary Mr Benn unveiled the government’s Food 2030 plan at the Oxford Farming Conference and said a rising population and climate change meant food could not be taken for granted.

… The government also wants less food waste, more food bought in season to reduce environmental impact and to encourage people to buy sustainably-farmed food. – BBC

There are some excellent signals in the Food 2030 report – like a push for more land for communities to grow their own food on, and training thousands more teachers and students in how to grow their own (the ‘Growing Schools‘ program). I really wish I could end this article right here – on this positive note. Unfortunately I can’t. Industry lobbyists are clearly working behind the scenes to ensure this crisis will not only maintain their current level of profits, but also increase them.

The food strategy, set to be launched on Tuesday by Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, will encourage consumers to throw less food away and to adopt leaner and healthier diets. It will promote higher crop yields, urge food producers to reduce the impact they have on the environment, and recommend a move towards accepting GM crops in order to create a "sustainable and secure food system for 2030". – Telegraph

GM crops for more security? How, exactly, does that work in light of this, this, this, this and this? And how can the words ‘GM crops’ and ‘healthier diets’ coexist in the same paragraph? (See this, this and this for example.)

Furthermore:

… the report will pledge that the UK will keep lobbying to create a more liberalised global food market. – Telegraph

A "more liberalised global food market" will bring profits to a few commodity brokers, but will also continue dismantling the food economy in ‘developing’ countries – whilst we have the deluded belief we’re helping ‘the poor’ to raise their standard of living to something resembling ours (a dangerous ambition). It will continue to pit low wage workers in these countries against local farmers in the North, undercutting and disincentivising them. In both the South and the North, we need more farmers – millions more – not less.

The campaign group Sustain said the report avoided tough issues…. "The government’s food vision is hardly worthy of the name. The document proposes a series of minor tweaks to our fundamentally unsustainable food system."- Guardian

Borlaug’s ’strategy’ was to keep perservering down the Road of Vulnerability, perpetually and furiously trying to stay one step ahead of all the problems the industrial system creates – fossil fuel consumption, soil and water loss and contamination, plant disease and pest attack, etc. This culminates in the need to forever tweak plant characteristics through chemicals and genetic engineering.

Defenders of the green revolution, such as Borlaug, place their hopes on the promise of a never-ending cycle of innovation. We’ll keep redesigning plants into organisms that yield ever greater bounty, while consuming fewer nutrients, staying one step ahead of the grim reaper, for as long as necessary. Science will save us.

But what if scientists poured as much energy into studying how to improve organic farming methods as they did into recombinant DNA? The authors of "Organic agriculture and the global food supply" believe that current organic farming yields could be greatly increased, if we knew more about how to build ecologically balanced agricultural systems. But such research hasn’t been the priority of either academia or government. It’s time for that to change. It’s time to show organic farmers the money. – Salon.com

Biodiverse systems are proven to be more productive. A progressive, staged reversion to small scale polycultures will restore soil, water, personal and even climate health – making risky genetic engineering redundant. Such a reversion is a win-win-win situation.

What will stop such a reversion happening is the perceived need to persevere with a profit and competition-based economy and a lack of education in genuinely holistic agricultural, biological science. Industry will fight us every step of the way. The perversion of the market system is that, up until a tipping point that leads to complete social collapse at least, the greater the suffering the more profit there is to make. These companies are incentivised to ensure their products are continually required. (The corporate dissatisfaction with Michelle Obama’s organic garden is a case in point.) Hence my continual cry that we need to change society at a wholly foundational level. The ‘free’ market economy, even if it were truly free, would not enable us to buy our way out of this mess.

The longer we avoid the need to decentralise and relocalise our food systems, the greater the crisis. While we study options for systemic change, duplicating landshare initiatives like this is a great way to get started at a grass roots level, and Michael Pollan’s one and a half hour presentation below begins to tackle the political policy changes we need to push for to get things moving in the right direction.

The good news is there is a growing food revolution. We just need to ensure our politicians allow it to flourish and don’t give in to the greenwashing demands of Big Agribusiness. The ‘Food 2030′ announcement risks leading the world’s citizenry to assume something tangible is actually being done to address this painfully sharp edge of the biggest convergence of crises in human history, when it really is just a little medicine mixed with a large dose of placebo.

One way or another, we’re beginning to see the end of the industrial agriculture era. Our task is ensuring it gets replaced as rapidly and painlessly as possible with relocalised, resilient systems.

What do you think? Are we facing crisis? If so, what should we be doing about it?

Michael Pollan: Deep Agriculture
Duration: 1:26:14
Click on ‘Watch Full Program’ link at bottom right of video screen

India is a country where water shortages have become so acute that the failed monsoon rains in 2009 had people literally killing each other over buckets of water, and tensions are still rising. (See this video also.) In many places cities are receiving less than half the water their populations need to meet basic requirements, and the constant bickering between individual states often breaks down into violent clashes.

Glaciers that provide melt water in the north are disappearing. and fast. Indians are simultaneously switching to a more westernised diet, which has enormous impacts on water usage, and large scale monocrops for biofuels add to the disaster. Presently 90% of India’s water usage is for agriculture. This percentage is rising, whilst competition is increasing with the growing industrial sector. India’s population is expected to surge to 1.5 billion people by 2050, and the country is still rapidly urbanising – with city dwellers using a lot more water than their rural counterparts. It is predicted that by 2020 most major Indian cities will run dry.

And India is not alone with these problems.

Businesses, of course, are making the most of the situation to cash in on the intense demand. I think it’s time to pay attention to water harvesting words of wisdom, and solve these problems at source – and in doing so also heal the land:

With wisdom and wit, Anupam Mishra talks about the amazing feats of engineering built centuries ago by the people of India’s Golden Desert to harvest water. These structures are still used today — and are often superior to modern water megaprojects. – YouTube

Hat Tip: Robert Windt

And, for good measure:

Further Reading:

• Letters from Sri Lanka – The World’s Largest Water Harvesting Earthworks Project
• The Muffin Tin and the Sponge
• Harvesting Urban Drool
• Water Harvesting DVD
• Water Worries

History is littered with sordid tales of tribes and nations taking the best land and resources from others by force. These were in times where the population density was so low that greed, rather than need, was often the primary motivator. Two thousand years ago, for example, the world population was 3% of what it is today.

Today’s politically correct and population dense world doesn’t look so kindly on such pillaging (although, of course, it still goes on). The modern way is far more, let’s say… discrete. Rather than a sword or a tank, the weapon of choice is now more often a checkbook. The motivation, however, seems to still be the same.

Although the average person may not realise it, water shortage concerns are reaching the highest levels – resulting in a race between some of the world’s most powerful groups to privatise and take control of this most essential of resources.

The two clips below share a frightening insight into the exploitation, profiteering and control of water.

The key issue at stake is whether we determine water to be a ‘need’, or a ‘right’. The former understanding labels water as a ‘good’ (product, commodity) that can be privatised and ‘managed’ for profit, the latter a basic right that should be denied no one, and kept in the public domain for the greater good of all. The speaker is Maude Barlow, author of the Who Owns Water? post we just ran (highly recommended reading). Maude Barlow is the Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and a board member of Washington-based Food and Water Watch.

Part I – Duration 31 minutes

Part II – Duration 35 minutes

by Maude Barlow (founder of the Blue Planet Project) & Tony Clarke, originally published September, 2002

Water – a need, or a right?

Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations.

As the World Summit on Sustainable Development draws closer, clear lines of contention are forming, particularly around the future of the world’s freshwater resources. The setting of the summit paints the picture. Government and corporate delegates to the September meeting will gather in the lavish hotels and convention facilities of Sandton, the fabulously wealthy Johannesburg suburb that houses huge estates, English gardens and swimming pools, and has become South Africa’s new financial epicenter. There, they will meet with World Bank and World Trade Organization officials to set the stage for the privatization of water.

At the same time, activists from South Africa and around the world with a very different vision will gather in very different settings to fight for a water-secure future. One such venue will be Alexandra Township, a poverty-stricken community where sanitation, electricity and water services have been privatized and cut off to those who cannot afford them. Alexandra is situated right next door to Sandton and divided only by a river so polluted that it has cholera warning signs on its banks. There could not be a more fitting setting for Rio+10 than South Africa, because neighboring Sandton and Alexandra represent the great divide that characterizes the current debate over water. Moreover, South Africa is the birthplace of one of the nucleus groups that form the heart of a new global civil society movement dedicated to saving the world’s water as part of the global commons.

This movement originates in a fight for survival. The world is running out of fresh water. Humanity is polluting, diverting and depleting the wellspring of life at a startling rate. With every passing day, our demand for fresh water outpaces its availability, and thousands more people are put at risk. Already, the social, political and economic impacts of water scarcity are rapidly becoming a destabilizing force, with water-related conflicts springing up around the globe. Quite simply, unless we dramatically change our ways, between one-half and two-thirds of humanity will be living with severe freshwater shortages within the next quarter-century.

It seemed to sneak up on us, or at least those of us living in the North. Until the past decade, the study of fresh water was left to highly specialized groups of experts — hydrologists, engineers, scientists, city planners, weather forecasters and others with a niche interest in what so many of us took for granted. Many knew about the condition of water in the Third World, including the millions who die of waterborne diseases every year. But this was seen as an issue of poverty, poor sanitation and injustice — all areas that could be addressed in the just world for which we were fighting.Now, however, an increasing number of voices — including human rights and environmental groups, think tanks and research organizations, official international agencies and thousands of community groups around the world — are sounding the alarm. The earth’s fresh water is finite and small, representing less than one half of 1 percent of the world’s total water stock. Not only are we adding 85 million new people to the planet every year, but our per capita use of water is doubling every twenty years, at more than twice the rate of human population growth. A legacy of factory farming, flood irrigation, the construction of massive dams, toxic dumping, wetlands and forest destruction, and urban and industrial pollution has damaged the Earth’s surface water so badly that we are now mining the underground water reserves far faster than nature can replenish them.

The earth’s “hot stains” — areas where water reserves are disappearing — include the Middle East, Northern China, Mexico, California and almost two dozen countries in Africa. Today thirty-one countries and over 1 billion people completely lack access to clean water. Every eight seconds a child dies from drinking contaminated water. The global freshwater crisis looms as one of the greatest threats ever to the survival of our planet.

Tragically, this global call for action comes in an era guided by the principles of the so-called Washington Consensus, a model of economics rooted in the belief that liberal market economics constitutes the one and only economic choice for the whole world. Competitive nation-states are abandoning natural resources protection and privatizing their ecological commons. Everything is now for sale, even those areas of life, such as social services and natural resources, that were once considered the common heritage of humanity. Governments around the world are abdicating their responsibilities to protect the natural resources in their territory, giving authority away to the private companies involved in resource exploitation.

Faced with the suddenly well-documented freshwater crisis, governments and international institutions are advocating a Washington Consensus solution: the privatization and commodification of water. Price water, they say in chorus; put it up for sale and let the market determine its future. For them, the debate is closed. Water, say the World Bank and the United Nations, is a “human need,” not a “human right.” These are not semantics; the difference in interpretation is crucial. A human need can be supplied many ways, especially for those with money. No one can sell a human right.

So a handful of transnational corporations, backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are aggressively taking over the management of public water services in countries around the world, dramatically raising the price of water to the local residents and profiting especially from the Third World’s desperate search for solutions to its water crisis. Some are startlingly open; the decline in freshwater supplies and standards has created a wonderful venture opportunity for water corporations and their investors, they boast. The agenda is clear: Water should be treated like any other tradable good, with its use determined by the principles of profit.It should come as no surprise that the private sector knew before most of the world about the looming water crisis and has set out to take advantage of what it considers to be blue gold. According to Fortune, the annual profits of the water industry now amount to about 40 percent of those of the oil sector and are already substantially higher than the pharmaceutical sector, now close to $1 trillion. But only about 5 percent of the world’s water is currently in private hands, so it is clear that we are talking about huge profit potential as the water crisis worsens. In 1999 there were more than $15 billion worth of water acquisitions in the US water industry alone, and all the big water companies are now listed on the stock exchanges.

Water Lords

There are ten major corporate players now delivering freshwater services for profit. The two biggest are both from France — Vivendi Universal and Suez — considered to be the General Motors and Ford of the global water industry. Between them, they deliver private water and wastewater services to more than 200 million customers in 150 countries and are in a race, along with others such as Bouygues Saur, RWE-Thames Water and Bechtel-United Utilities, to expand to every corner of the globe. In the United States, Vivendi operates through its subsidiary, USFilter; Suez via its subsidiary, United Water; and RWE by way of American Water Works.

They are aided by the World Bank and the IMF, which are increasingly forcing Third World countries to abandon their public water delivery systems and contract with the water giants in order to be eligible for debt relief. The performance of these companies in Europe and the developing world has been well documented: huge profits, higher prices for water, cutoffs to customers who cannot pay, no transparency in their dealings, reduced water quality, bribery and corruption.

Water for profit takes a number of other forms. The bottled-water industry is one of the fastest-growing and least regulated industries in the world, expanding at an annual rate of 20 percent. Last year close to 90 billion liters of bottled water were sold around the world — most of it in nonreusable plastic containers, bringing in profits of $22 billion to this highly polluting industry. Bottled-water companies like Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Pepsi are engaged in a constant search for new water supplies to feed the insatiable appetite of this business. In rural communities all over the world, corporate interests are buying up farmlands, indigenous lands, wilderness tracts and whole water systems, then moving on when sources are depleted. Fierce disputes are being waged in many places over these “water takings,” especially in the Third World. As one company explains, water is now “a rationed necessity that may be taken by force.”

Corporations are now involved in the construction of massive pipelines to carry fresh water long distances for commercial sale while others are constructing supertankers and giant sealed water bags to transport vast amounts of water across the ocean to paying customers. Says the World Bank, “One way or another, water will soon be moved around the world as oil is now.” The mass movement of bulk water could have catalytic environmental impacts. Some proposed projects would reverse the flow of mighty rivers in Canada’s north, the environmental impact of which would be greater than China’s Three Gorges Dam.

At the same time, governments are signing away their control over domestic water supplies to trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, its expected successor, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the World Trade Organization. These global trade institutions effectively give transnational corporations unprecedented access to the freshwater resources of signatory countries. Already, corporations have started to sue governments in order to gain access to domestic water sources and, armed with the protection of these international trade agreements, are setting their sights on the commercialization of water.

Water is listed as a “good” in the WTO and NAFTA, and as an “investment” in NAFTA. It is to be included as a “service” in the upcoming WTO services negotiations (the General Agreement on Trade in Services) and in the FTAA. Under the “National Treatment” provisions of NAFTA and the GATS, signatory governments who privatize municipal water services will be obliged to permit competitive bids from transnational water-service corporations. Similarly, once a permit is granted to a domestic company to export water for commercial purposes, foreign corporations will have the right to set up operations in the host country.

NAFTA contains a provision that requires “proportional sharing” of energy resources now being traded between the signatory countries. This means that the oil and gas resources no longer belong to the country of extraction, but are a shared resource of the continent. For example, under NAFTA, Canada now exports 57 percent of its natural gas to the United States and is not allowed to cut back on these supplies, even to cut fossil fuel production under the Kyoto accord. Under this same provision, if Canada started selling its water to the United States — which President Bush has already said he considers to be part of the United States’ continental energy program — the State Department would consider it to be a trade violation if Canada tried to turn off the tap. And under NAFTA’s “investor state” Chapter 11 provision, American corporate investors would be allowed to sue Canada for financial losses [see William Greider, "The Right and US Trade Law: Invalidating the 20th Century," October 15, 2001]. Already, a California company is suing the Canadian government for $10.5 billion because the province of British Columbia banned the commercial export of bulk water.The WTO also opens the door to the commercial export of water by prohibiting the use of export controls for any “good” for any purpose. This means that quotas or bans on the export of water imposed for environmental reasons could be challenged as a form of protectionism. At the December 2001 Qatar ministerial meeting of the WTO, a provision was added to the so-called Doha Text, which requires governments to give up “tariff” and “nontariff” barriers — such as environmental regulations — to environmental services, which include water.

The Case Against Privatization

If all this sounds formidable, it is. But the situation is not without hope. For the fact is, we know how to save the world’s water: reclamation of despoiled water systems, drip irrigation over flood irrigation, infrastructure repairs, water conservation, radical changes in production methods and watershed management, just to name a few. Wealthy industrialized countries could supply every person on earth with clean water if they canceled the Third World debt, increased foreign aid payments and placed a tax on financial speculation.

None of this will happen, however, until humanity earmarks water as a global commons and brings the rule of law — local, national and international — to any corporation or government that dares to contaminate it. If we allow the commodification of the world’s freshwater supplies, we will lose the capacity to avert the looming water crisis. We will be allowing the emergence of a water elite that will determine the world’s water future in its own interest. In such a scenario, water will go to those who can afford it and not to those who need it.

This is not an argument to excuse the poor way in which some governments have treated their water heritage, either squandering it, polluting it or using it for political gain. But the answer to poor nation-state governance is not a nonaccountable transnational corporation but good governance. For governments in poor countries, the rich world’s support should go not to profiting from bad water management but from aiding the public sector in every country to do its job.

The commodification of water is wrong — ethically, environmentally and socially. It insures that decisions regarding the allocation of water would center on commercial, not environmental or social justice considerations. Privatization means that the management of water resources is based on principles of scarcity and profit maximization rather than long-term sustainability. Corporations are dependent on increased consumption to generate profits and are much more likely to invest in the use of chemical technology, desalination, marketing and water trading than in conservation.

Depending on desalination technology is a Faustian bargain. It is prohibitively expensive, highly energy intensive — using the very fossil fuels that are contributing to global warming — and produces a lethal byproduct of saline brine that is a major cause of marine pollution when dumped back into the oceans at high temperatures.

The antidote to water commodification is its decommodification. Water must be declared and understood for all time to be the common property of all. In a world where everything is being privatized, citizens must establish clear perimeters around those areas that are sacred to life and necessary for the survival of the planet. Simply, governments must declare that water belongs to the earth and all species and is a fundamental human right. No one has the right to appropriate it for profit. Water must be declared a public trust, and all governments must enact legislation to protect the freshwater resources in their territory. An international legal framework is also desperately needed.

It is strikingly clear that neither governments nor their official global institutions are going to rise to this challenge. This is where civil society comes in. There is no more vital area of concern for our international movement than the world’s freshwater crisis. Our entry point is the political question of the ownership of water; we must come together to form a clear and present opposition to the commodification and cartelization of the world’s freshwater resources.

Already, a common front of environmentalists, human rights and antipoverty activists, public sector workers, peasants, indigenous peoples and many others from every part of the world has come together to fight for a water-secure future based on the notion that water is part of the public commons. We coordinated strategy at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, last January. We will be in South Africa for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in September and in Kyoto, Japan, next March, when the World Bank and the UN bring 8,000 people to the Third World Water Forum. There, we will oppose water privatization and promote our own World Water Vision as an alternative to that adopted by the World Bank at the Second World Water Forum in The Hague two years ago. We will stand with local people fighting water privatization in Bolivia, or the construction of a mega-dam in India, or water takings by Perrier in Michigan, but now all of these local struggles will form part of an emerging international movement with a common political vision.Steps needed for a water-secure future include the adoption of a Treaty Initiative to Share and Protect the Global Water Commons; a guaranteed “water lifeline” — free clean water every day for every person as an inalienable political and social right; national water protection acts to reclaim and preserve freshwater systems; exemptions for water from international trade and investment regimes; an end to World Bank and IMF-enforced water privatizations; and a Global Water Convention that would create an international body of law to protect the world’s water heritage based on the twin cornerstones of conservation and equity. A tough challenge indeed. But given the stakes involved, we had better be up to it.

Switzerland is often portrayed as a clean, green, intelligent, peace-loving nation. Dramatic landscapes apparently have beautiful, golden, braided-haired women prancing about innocently picking flowers from hillsides dripping in milk, honey and chocolate.

But, the beauty of globalisation and the international food swap model is that the darker side of modern industry can be hidden away on the other side of the world. Embarrassing, incriminating activities can be kept separate from oompa loompaville, away from prying eyes and swept into the remotest places – where there are virgin soils still to be found and gorged upon, where environmental regulations are weak or nonexistent and where legal protection for indigenous people are disincentivised in the quest for profit and ‘development’.

The Swiss company Syngenta – one of the world’s largest transnational agribusiness corporations, one well-known for its production of agrochemicals and GM seeds – however, has still managed to attract attention to itself even in far away Brazil. Like with other agribusiness companies we could mention, competitiveness is key to success, and externalising costs – at any cost – is one of the best ways to achieve this.

I won’t give you a long treatise on the document embedded here, but leave you to peruse yourself. In it you will find details about illegal GMO and chemical polluting and the persecution and murder of the local people who were inconveniently protesting against the same. Syngenta stands accused of violating Brazil’s Federal Constitution, their environmental laws, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and other national and international laws.

Further Reading:

• Food Miles, or Fair Miles?

by Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

China walks a tightrope between feast and famine.

As the U.N. climate-change conference in Copenhagen approaches, we are in a race between political tipping points and natural ones. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to keep the melting of the Greenland ice sheet from becoming irreversible? Can we close coal-fired power plants in time to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau? Can we head off ever more intense crop-withering heat waves before they create chaos in world grain markets?

These are all climate-change issues, but they have something else in common: food. Copenhagen will be about climate, of course, but in a fundamental sense, it must also be about whether we will have enough to eat in the decades to come.

We need not go beyond ice melting to see that the world is in trouble on the food front. As the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets continue to shrink, sea levels will rise, threatening rice harvests around the globe. Recent projections show that the sea could rise up to six feet this century (if the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would rise by 23 feet). According to the World Bank, it would take only a three-foot rise in sea level to cover half the rice fields in Bangladesh, a country of nearly 160 million people. Such an increase would also inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half the rice crop in Vietnam, the world’s No. 2 rice exporter. And it would submerge parts of the 20 or so other rice-growing river deltas in Asia.

Melting mountain glaciers are even more worrisome. The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland recently reported the 18th consecutive year of shrinking mountain glaciers around the world, from the Andes to the Rockies, from the Alps to the mountain ranges of Asia. Of these, the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau threatens to shrink food supplies most sharply. Their annual ice melt sustains the major rivers of India and China – the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze and Yellow rivers – during the dry season. And this water in turn supplies irrigation systems.

Yao Tandong, one of China’s leading glaciologists, warned last year in the journal Nature that two-thirds of the country’s glaciers could be gone by 2050, and has said that "the full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe."

It will also lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. China is the world’s leading producer of wheat. India is No. 2. These two countries also dominate the world’s rice harvest. But unlike in the United States (the third-largest wheat producer), where wheat is watered largely by rainfall, most crops in China and India are irrigated. The vanishing of mountain glaciers in Asia therefore represents the biggest threat to the world food supply that we have ever seen. .

For complete article, please click here.

Piles of rubbish, and an incredible stench, border a main market street in
Leh, Ladakh, Jammu & Kashmir, northern India. Photo © Craig Mackintosh

The stresses in our early twenty-first century civilization take many forms – social, economic, environmental, and political. One distinctly unhealthy and visible illustration of all four is the swelling flow of garbage associated with a throwaway economy. Throwaway products were first conceived following World War II as a convenience and as a way of creating jobs and sustaining economic growth. The more goods produced and discarded, the reasoning went, the more jobs there would be.

What sold throwaways was their convenience. For example, rather than washing cloth towels or napkins, consumers welcomed disposable paper versions. Thus we have substituted facial tissues for handkerchiefs, disposable paper towels for hand towels, disposable table napkins for cloth ones, and throwaway beverage containers for refillable ones. Even the shopping bags we use to carry home throwaway products become part of the garbage flow.

The throwaway economy is on a collision course with the earth’s geological limits. Aside from running out of landfills near cities, the world is also fast running out of the cheap oil that is used to manufacture and transport throwaway products. Perhaps more fundamentally, there is not enough readily accessible lead, tin, copper, iron ore, or bauxite to sustain the throwaway economy beyond another generation or two. Assuming an annual 2-percent growth in extraction, U.S. Geological Survey data on economically recoverable reserves show the world has 17 years of reserves remaining for lead, 19 years for tin, 25 years for copper, 54 years for iron ore, and 68 years for bauxite.

The cost of hauling garbage from cities is rising as nearby landfills fill up and the price of oil climbs. One of the first major cities to exhaust its locally available landfills was New York. When the Fresh Kills landfill, the local destination for New York’s garbage, was permanently closed in March 2001, the city found itself hauling garbage to landfill sites in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Virginia – with some of the sites being 300 miles away.

Given the 12,000 tons of garbage produced each day in New York and assuming a load of 20 tons of garbage for each of the tractor-trailers used for the long-distance hauling, some 600 rigs are needed to move garbage from New York City daily. These tractor-trailers form a convoy nearly nine miles long – impeding traffic, polluting the air, and raising carbon emissions.

Fiscally strapped local communities in other states are willing to take New York’s garbage – if they are paid enough. Some see it as an economic bonanza. State governments, however, are saddled with increased road maintenance costs, traffic congestion, increased air pollution, potential water pollution from landfill leakage, and complaints from nearby communities.

In 2001 Virginia’s Governor Jim Gilmore wrote to Mayor Rudy Giuliani to complain about the use of Virginia for New York City’s trash. “I understand the problem New York faces,” he noted, “but the home state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison has no intention of becoming New York’s dumping ground.”

Garbage travails are not limited to New York City. Toronto, Canada’s largest city, closed its last remaining landfill on December 31, 2002, and now ships all its 750-thousand-ton-per-year garbage to Wayne County, Michigan.

In Athens, the capital of ancient and modern Greece, the one landfill available reached saturation at the end of 2006. With local governments in Greece unwilling to accept Athens’s garbage, the city’s daily output of 6,000 tons began accumulating on the streets, creating a garbage crisis. The country is finally beginning to pay attention to what European Union environment commissioner Stavros Dimas, himself a Greek, calls the waste hierarchy, where priority is given first to the prevention of waste and then to its reuse, recycling, and recovery.

One of the more recent garbage crises is unfolding in China, where, like everything else in the country, the amount of garbage generated is growing fast. Xinhua, a Chinese wire service, reports that a survey using an airborne remote sensor detected 7,000 garbage dumps, each larger than 50 square meters in the suburbs of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing. A large share of China’s garbage is recycled, burned, or composted, but an even larger share is dumped in landfills (where they are available) or simply heaped up in unoccupied areas.

These examples of China’s waste problems are disturbing by themselves. But a broader analysis of potential consumption patterns in China in the near future shows why the existing western economic model as a whole will fail.

For almost as long as I can remember we have been saying that the United States, with 5 percent of the world’s people, consumes a third or more of the earth’s resources. That was true. It is no longer true. Today China consumes more basic resources than the United States does.

Among the key commodities such as grain, meat, oil, coal, and steel, China consumes more of each than the United States except for oil, where the United States still has a wide (though narrowing) lead. China uses a third more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is nearly double that of the United States. It uses three times as much steel.

These numbers reflect national consumption, but what would happen if consumption per person in China were to catch up to that of the United States? If we assume that China’s economy slows from the 10 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent, then before 2030 income per person in China will reach the level it is in the United States today.

If we also assume that the Chinese will spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then we can translate their income into consumption. If, for example, each person in China consumes paper at the current American rate, then in 2030 China’s 1.46 billion people will consume more paper than the world produces today. There go the world’s forests.

If we assume that in 2030 there are three cars for every four people in China, as there now are in the United States, China will have 1.1 billion cars. The world currently has 860 million cars. To provide the needed roads, highways, and parking lots, China would have to pave an area comparable to what it now plants in rice.

By 2030 China would need 98 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 85 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world’s oil reserves.

What China is teaching us is that the western economic model – the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy – is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2030 may have an even larger population than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.” And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where we all depend on the same grain, oil, and steel, the western economic model will no longer work for the industrial countries either.

The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy – one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress. Can we build it fast enough to avoid a breakdown of social systems?

Adapted from Chapter 1, “Entering a New World," and Chapter 6, “Early Signs of Decline,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), available for free downloading and purchase at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm.

Further Reading:

• An Industrial Revoluton Like No Other
• Developed?

In recent years there has been a growing concern over thresholds or tipping points in nature. For example, scientists worry about when the shrinking population of an endangered species will fall to a point from which it cannot recover. Marine biologists are concerned about the point where overfishing will trigger the collapse of a fishery.

We know there were social tipping points in earlier civilizations, points at which they were overwhelmed by the forces threatening them. For instance, at some point the irrigation-related salt buildup in their soil overwhelmed the capacity of the Sumerians to deal with it. With the Mayans, there came a time when the effects of cutting too many trees and the associated loss of topsoil were simply more than they could manage.

The social tipping points that lead to decline and collapse when societies are overwhelmed by a single threat or by simultaneous multiple threats are not always easily anticipated. As a general matter, more economically advanced countries can deal with new threats more effectively than developing countries can. For example, while governments of industrial countries have been able to hold HIV infection rates among adults under 1 percent, many developing-country governments have failed to do so and are now struggling with much higher infection rates. This is most evident in some southern African countries, where up to 20 percent or more of adults are infected.

A similar situation exists with population growth. While populations in nearly all industrial countries except the United States have stopped growing, rapid growth continues in nearly all the countries of Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. Nearly all of the 80 million people being added to world population each year are born in countries where natural support systems are already deteriorating in the face of excessive population pressure, in the countries least able to support them. In these countries, the risk of state failure is growing.

Some issues seem to exceed even the management skills of the more advanced countries, however. When countries first detected falling underground water tables, it was logical to expect that governments in affected countries would quickly raise water use efficiency and stabilize population in order to stabilize aquifers. Unfortunately, not one country–industrial or developing–has done so. Two failing states where overpumping water and security-threatening water shortages loom large are Pakistan and Yemen.

Although the need to cut carbon emissions has been evident for some time, not one country has succeeded in becoming carbon-neutral. Thus far this has proved too difficult politically for even the most technologically advanced societies. Could rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere prove to be as unmanageable for our early twenty-first century civilization as rising salt levels in the soil were for the Sumerians in 4000 BC?

Another potentially severe stress on governments is the coming decline in oil production. Although world oil production has exceeded new oil discoveries by a wide margin for more than 20 years, only Sweden and Iceland actually have anything that remotely resembles a plan to effectively cope with a shrinking supply of oil.

This is not an exhaustive inventory of unresolved problems, but it does give a sense of how their number is growing as we fail to solve existing problems even as new ones are being added to the list. Analytically, the challenge is to assess the effects of mounting stresses on the global system. These stresses are perhaps most evident in their effect on food security, which was the weak point of many earlier civilizations that collapsed.

Several converging trends are making it difficult for the world’s farmers to keep up with the growth in food demand. Prominent among these are falling water tables, the growing conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses, and more extreme climate events, including crop-withering heat waves, droughts, and floods. As the stresses from these unresolved problems accumulate, weaker governments are beginning to break down.

Compounding these problems, the United States, the world’s breadbasket, has dramatically increased the share of its grain harvest going to fuel ethanol–from 15 percent of the 2005 crop to more than 25 percent of the 2008 crop. This ill-conceived U.S. effort to reduce its oil insecurity helped drive world grain prices to all-time highs by mid-2008, creating unprecedented world food insecurity.

The risk is that these accumulating problems and their consequences will overwhelm more and more governments, leading to widespread state failure and eventually the failure of civilization. The countries that top the list of failing states are not particularly surprising. They include, for example, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Haiti. And the list grows longer each year, raising a disturbing question: How many failing states will it take before civilization itself fails? No one knows the answer, but it is a question we must ask.

We are in a race between tipping points in nature and our political systems. Can we phase out coal-fired power plants before the melting of the Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible? Can we gather the political will to halt deforestation in the Amazon before its growing vulnerability to fire takes it to the point of no return? Can we help countries stabilize population before they become failing states?

We have the technologies to restore the earth’s natural support systems, to eradicate poverty, to stabilize population, and to restructure the world energy economy and stabilize climate. The challenge now is to build the political will to do so. Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. Each of us has a leading role to play.

~~~~~~~

Adapted from Chapter 1, “Entering a New World,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), available for free downloading and purchase at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm.

Today we are an oil-based civilization, one that is totally dependent on a resource whose production will soon be falling. Since 1981, the quantity of oil extracted has exceeded new discoveries by an ever-widening margin. In 2008, the world pumped 31 billion barrels of oil but discovered fewer than 9 billion barrels of new oil. World reserves of conventional oil are in a free fall, dropping every year.

Discoveries of conventional oil total roughly 2 trillion barrels, of which 1 trillion have been extracted so far, with another trillion barrels to go. By themselves, however, these numbers miss a central point. As security analyst Michael Klare notes, the first trillion barrels was easy oil, “oil that’s found on shore or near to shore; oil close to the surface and concentrated in large reservoirs; oil produced in friendly, safe, and welcoming places.” The other half, Klare notes, is tough oil, “oil that’s buried far offshore or deep underground; oil scattered in small, hard-to-find reservoirs; oil that must be obtained from unfriendly, politically dangerous, or hazardous places.”

This prospect of peaking oil production has direct consequences for world food security, as modern agriculture depends heavily on the use of fossil fuels. Most tractors use gasoline or diesel fuel. Irrigation pumps use diesel fuel, natural gas, or coal-fired electricity. Fertilizer production is also energy-intensive. Natural gas is used to synthesize the basic ammonia building block in nitrogen fertilizers. The mining, manufacture, and international transport of phosphates and potash all depend on oil.

Efficiency gains can help reduce agriculture’s dependence on oil. In the United States, the combined direct use of gasoline and diesel fuel in farming fell from its historical high of 7.7 billion gallons (29.1 billion liters) in 1973 to 4.2 billion in 2005–a decline of 45 percent. Broadly calculated, the gallons of fuel used per ton of grain produced dropped from 33 in 1973 to 12 in 2005, an impressive decrease of 64 percent.

One reason for this achievement was a shift to minimum- and no-till cultural practices on roughly two fifths of U.S. cropland. But while U.S. agricultural fuel use has been declining, in many developing countries it is rising as the shift from draft animals to tractors continues. A generation ago, for example, cropland in China was tilled largely by draft animals. Today much of the plowing is done with tractors.

Fertilizer accounts for 20 percent of U.S. farm energy use. Worldwide, the figure may be slightly higher. As the world urbanizes, the demand for fertilizer climbs. As people migrate from rural areas to cities, it becomes more difficult to recycle the nutrients in human waste back into the soil, requiring the use of more fertilizer. Beyond this, the growing international food trade can separate producer and consumer by thousands of miles, further disrupting the nutrient cycle. The United States, for example, exports some 80 million tons of grain per year–grain that contains large quantities of basic plant nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. The ongoing export of these nutrients would slowly drain the inherent fertility from U.S. cropland if the nutrients were not replaced.

Irrigation, another major energy claimant, is requiring more energy worldwide as water tables fall. In the United States, close to 19 percent of farm energy use is for pumping water. And in some states in India where water tables are falling, over half of all electricity is used to pump water from wells. Some trends, such as the shift to no-tillage, are making agriculture less oil-intensive, but rising fertilizer use, the spread of farm mechanization, and falling water tables are having the opposite effect.

Although attention commonly focuses on energy use on the farm, agriculture accounts for only one fifth of the energy used in the U.S. food system. Transport, processing, packaging, marketing, and kitchen preparation of food are responsible for the rest. The U.S. food economy uses as much energy as the entire economy of the United Kingdom.

The 14 percent of energy used in the food system to move goods from farmer to consumer is equal to two thirds of the energy used to produce the food. And an estimated 16 percent of food system energy use is devoted to canning, freezing, and drying food–everything from frozen orange juice concentrate to canned peas.

Food staples such as wheat have traditionally moved over long distances by ship, traveling from the United States to Europe, for example. What is new is the shipment of fresh fruits and vegetables over vast distances by air. Few economic activities are more energy-intensive.

Food miles–the distance that food travels from producer to consumer–have risen with cheap oil. At my local supermarket in downtown Washington, D.C., the fresh grapes in winter typically come by plane from Chile, traveling almost 5,000 miles. One of the most routine long-distance movements of fresh produce is from California to the heavily populated U.S. East Coast. Most of this produce moves by refrigerated trucks. In assessing the future of long-distance produce transport, one writer observed that the days of the 3,000-mile Caesar salad may be numbered.

Packaging is also surprisingly energy-intensive, accounting for 7 percent of food system energy use. It is not uncommon for the energy invested in packaging to exceed that in the food it contains. Packaging and marketing also can account for much of the cost of processed foods. The U.S. farmer gets about 20 percent of the consumer food dollar, and for some products, the figure is much lower. As one analyst has observed, “An empty cereal box delivered to the grocery store would cost about the same as a full one.”

The most energy-intensive segment of the food chain is the kitchen. Much more energy is used to refrigerate and prepare food in the home than is used to produce it in the first place. The big energy user in the food system is the kitchen refrigerator, not the farm tractor. While oil dominates the production end of the food system, electricity dominates the consumption end.

In short, with higher energy prices and a limited supply of fossil fuels, the modern food system that evolved when oil was cheap will not survive as it is now structured.

# # #

To continue reading about localized agriculture and urban gardening, see Farming in the City at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/PB3ch10_ss5.htm.

Adapted from Chapter 2, “Deteriorating Oil and Food Security,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), available for free downloading and purchase at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm.