Sunday, August 12, 2012

The Drought

The first half of 2012 has been the hottest on record for the United States. More than 50% of counties in the United States are now officially designated “disaster” zones.  Memories of the US Dust Bowl era of the 1930s are recalled. The reason given in 90% of cases is due to the continent-wide drought that has been devastating crop production. 48% of the US corn crop is rated as “poor to very poor”, along with 37% of soy. 73% of cattle acreage is suffering drought, along with 66% of land given to the production of hay. With the US producing half of all world corn exports, as corn and soy crops wilt from the heat, without coordinated governmental action we can expect a replay of the disastrous rise in food prices of 2008, which caused desperate, hungry people to riot in 28 countries. In that instance, food was available, but hundreds of millions of people couldn’t afford to buy it. Should food prices increase to anywhere near the levels of four years ago, it will be a catastrophe for the 2 billion people who are forced to scrape by on less than $2 a day. With the possibility of food shortages, the vultures of finance, otherwise known as commodity speculators, will again begin to circle the food markets, looking for a killing. As the financial markets were not re-regulated after the economic crisis of 2008, hedge funds and short-sellers will inevitably be on the lookout for additional profits by gambling on the price of food, exactly as they did four years ago

Food producers – particularly large agricultural and food processing operations – grow for the market, not to provide food for a particular region. Their goal is profit, not nutrition, health, or taste. In practice, the priorities of capitalism dictate the solutions on offer.  The $383 million in emergency drought payments to farmers that was recently voted for in Congress is money directly from cuts to conservation programs designed to promote more sustainable farming practices.

 US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has resisted calls to reduce or eliminate the federal mandate that sees more than one third of the US corn crop diverted to ethanol refineries to make “bio-fuel” to burn in car engines. The federal government has mandated that over 13 billion gallons of ethanol be made from corn this year, which would equate to 40% of this year’s crop. Supposedly adopted to reduce demand for “overseas oil” and associated geopolitical concerns, after oil almost topped $150 a barrel in 2008, the Barack Obama administration raised the federal requirement to 36 billion gallons by 2022, with at least 15 billion coming directly from corn. Even on the best of days, turning corn into ethanol is an idiotic thing to do. Many studies have shown that it takes more energy to turn the corn into ethanol than is recovered when the ethanol is burnt in a car engine. Not only that, but ethanol doesn’t have the energy density of gasoline, so cars running on a mixture of ethanol and gasoline have to burn more fuel to go the same distance and the blended mix costs more to transport. In any year, this is bad policy: in a year of extreme drought, it should be a criminal offense to waste food resources in this manner.  One of the more ridiculous irrationalities to emerge from the anarchy of capitalist decision-making, the cost of ethanol-blended gasoline in the US is also on the rise. Growing crops in the West is heavily dependent on oil for fertiliser production and mechanisation — to the extent that it takes 10 calories of oil to produce 1 calorie of food, and because ethanol derived from corn — which in turn is derived from oil, is increasing in price because the corn is dying. Rather than downsize the powerful corn-to-ethanol industry, Vilsack has instead sacrificed 3.8 million acres of conservation land for grazing and the production of hay.

Driven by profit the agro-industry practice of feeding corn to cattle in huge, enclosed feeding lots to speed the fattening process also needs urgent re-examination. Apart from the misallocation of corn, the knock on effects of that decision for animal and human welfare, the incubation and mutation of pathogens, the disposal of huge volumes of toxic animal waste laden with antibiotics and growth hormones, all contribute to the incredibly wasteful, dangerous and unsustainable nature of capitalist agriculture.

 There is a continuation and extension of the policies of unsustainable food production practices that don’t even feed people successfully due to its inherently anti-ecological dynamic that is based on short-term measures and growth in the interest of profit. Around the world, there are no circumstances, even ones as cataclysmic climate change that brings droughts or floods that take precedence over the need to accumulate capital by the tiny segment of society that actively benefits from the process. If we are to survive at all on a planet that looks remotely like the one we were born on, we must confront the system that produces a society in conflict with itself and the natural world for the same reason — class ownership. That means building an organised resistance in every workplace, community, school and farm all across the world.  For the good of humanity and the bio-sphere upon which we depend we have to organise and not let the capitalist class get away with their predatations upon Nature.

At a press conference where Vilsack predicted food price rises, he offered his own personal solution to the drought crisis: “I get on my knees every day, and I'm saying an extra prayer now. If I had a rain prayer or a rain dance I could do, I would do it.” That's the best the representatives of capitalism can do. Appeal to invisible beings in the sky.

Adapted from here

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