By Paul Roberts
Houghton Mifflin; 390 pages; $26
With at least 100 million people in 22 countries threatened by the global food crisis, world leaders are meeting in Rome to discuss a joint response. But to settle on solutions, we must understand root causes.
To explain this crisis, some put forth a simple story of shrinking supply: Severe drought in Australia decimated the harvest of one of the world's largest wheat exporters. Biofuel production in the United States alone is diverting 33 percent of our corn harvest to feed automobiles, not people.
But these are just proximate causes, others argue. The real culprit? The global food system itself: its inherent vulnerability, lack of democracy and increasingly concentrated power. Sure, droughts and biofuels have affected global supplies, but in Paul Roberts' new book, "The End of Food," we hear the "It's the system, stupid" argument. Though its ink was drying before this current crisis hit CNN's news cycle, "The End of Food" helps us connect the dots.
As more of the planet shifts to our centralized, industrial model of food procurement and our over-processed, fast-food style of food consumption, we are careening ever faster, Roberts argues, down an unsustainable road.
This global food system is wasteful at its core: "By one estimate, it takes 2,200 calories of hydrocarbon energy (from oil, natural gas, or coal) to produce a can of soda that contains just 200 calories of food energy." Roberts takes particular aim at factory-farmed meat, with its inherent squandering of abundance: Feedlot cattle, for example, require 20 pounds of grain to make a single pound of beef. (This conversion ratio is much higher than other estimates, because Roberts accounts for all of a cow's weight, including what is inedible.) And our food fate is increasingly determined by a cabal of companies controlling the market, from beef to bananas. Roberts peppers his pages with examples such as these: Chiquita and Dole control more than half of the world's banana trade; 21 cents of every dollar we Americans spend for food is now spent at Wal-Mart.
Roberts also highlights the international lending and trade policies, influenced by the interests of U.S.-based elites, which have forced countries to open their markets, creating vulnerability to the price spikes we see today. Remember the East Asian financial crisis of the '90s? The "tigers" - South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan and the Philippines - had nearly negotiated a $120 billion bailout when the International Monetary Fund announced "the money wouldn't be released until the ... governments promised to buy substantially more U.S. grain." The IMF also "sent Indonesian president Suharto a letter demanding that his country abolish all tariffs on imported rice - demands that were soon expanded to sugar, flour, soybeans, and corn." They did; they got the loan. Guess which countries are among the hardest hit by today's food crisis?
Indeed, Roberts' book might more aptly have been titled "The End of Our Oil-Addicted, Energy-Intensive, Monopolized Food System," but that doesn't really roll off the tongue. (Plus, it wouldn't have so clearly been tied to his previous book, "The End of Oil.")
As someone whose shelves are cluttered with food-politics tomes, I appreciated the inclusion of historic details often overlooked, such as the connection Roberts highlights between the so-called green revolution and our country's Cold War strategy. I also appreciated how Roberts often presents opposing sides of an argument, though the occasional sections where he doesn't are notable: In a short passage on "the 'meat revolution' that made us human," as he calls it, Robert neglects to mention the opposing version of this evolutionary story.
Roberts is strongest when he discusses, at the book's end, what we can do. With the industrial food system responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse-gas emissions (and livestock production alone accounting for 18 percent of emissions), now is not the time for half-measures. Sure, we can (and should) make constructive consumer choices, Roberts argues. He passionately calls for us to head back to our kitchens, for instance. And he writes that "if we're to have any chance of meeting future food demand in a sustainable fashion, lowering our meat consumption will be absolutely essential."
But he also calls for a "kind of direct action": "That means lobbying Congress to reform the farm program ... It means demanding that Congress increase funding for research into alternative farming methods ... It means lobbying school boards to improve lunch programs and dump junk food. It means working with the plethora of local and regional groups who are already building regional food systems. Ultimately, it means taking back control of your own food." In 2012, we will have another chance to rewrite our nation's multibillion dollar Farm Bill. Until then, see you at the school board meeting, city council offices - and in the kitchen. {sbox}
Anna Lappé is the co-author of "Hope's Edge" (Tarcher) and "Grub" (Tarcher). E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page M - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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