As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown struggles to keep the United Kingdom economy afloat his ministers will be relieved to see that food-price inflation appears to be on its way down.
On commodity markets the wheat price is barely half what it was a year ago. And as it falls more food prices look set to tumble. But before cracking open the Bollinger, the Brown Cabinet should ponder the implications of food prices closely bound up with commodity movements.
The UK food supply is now more dependent on globally traded grains than at any time in history. This makes it unstable and vulnerable to the kind of meltdown that threatened the banking industry.
First, there’s the danger of extreme weather events. Grains are at risk from heavy rainfall and drought.
Then there’s the reliance of wheat farmers on oil. To grow the crop, they need diesel to power their machines.
Then there’s the oil in the chemical fertilisers and pesticides, without which their soils would scarcely grow a thing. Little wonder, then, that wheat price movements reflect almost exactly the fluctuations of the oil market. Finally, the grain-based food supply is largely controlled by commodity traders and brokers — speculators dictate the price and availability of many foods on supermarket shelves.
In the early days of the second world war, prime minister Winston Churchill called on Britain’s farmers to boost the supply of home-grown food.
Today they would be unable to respond. First they would have to negotiate prices for fertilisers and pesticides, then await shipments of oil.
Wartime farming was powered by the sun, and at the heart of Britain’s food production was grassland. Most food animals were raised on it, in a sustainable production model. Grasslands do not need chemical fertilisers or pesticides, particularly when they contain nitrogen-fixing clovers and deep-rooting herbs.
Supplemented by cereals and root crops, pastures produced most of the beef, pork, dairy, eggs and poultry.
Grasslands produced most of the UK’s grain crops too. Wheat and barley were grown in rotations which included two or three years of grass. Undergrazed pasture soil builds fertility as plants and soil fauna decay. When the grass is ploughed and sown with a cereal crop, the plants use the recycled nutrients. This mixed farming was still common in the 1960s.
Yields of individual crops were generally lower than they are today, but since farmers bought few inputs, they made more money. And the output per hectare from a well-run mixed farm was often higher than it is today.
Powering the whole system was grass. The field acts as a solar panel, capturing solar energy and using it to build sugars from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Not only did grassland produce copious amounts of food, it removed carbon from the air.
Agribusiness interests — generously supported by western governments — all but destroyed this system. In place of pastures they have substituted internationally traded grains. For Britain wheat has been the means of globalising production and taking away food security.
For more than three decades governments — particularly the United States and the European Union — have used the subsidy system to maintain a surplus of wheat on world markets, sweeping away pasture systems and making it more profitable for farmers to confine their animals to sheds and feedlots.
The grain-based system wouldn’t survive without public subsidies.
Spending under the common agricultural policy still amounts to €50-billion across EU member states. British farmers receive €3,8-billion. The main beneficiaries are large-scale arable growers and commodity companies.
In west Somerset, southern England, many country lanes run red during the deluges. This is silt from fields whose fertility and organic matter have been depleted by too many grain crops. Higher levels of organic matter would end the erosion and protect towns against flash floods.
What’s more, the efficient use of grasslands would help to meet the challenge of climate change.
The Royal Society, the independent academy of science in the UK, has estimated that better management of farmlands could capture as much carbon as is accumulated in the atmosphere each year. A US group, Carbon Farmers of America, estimates that returning the US prairies to the soil organic matter levels of the original prairie grassland would return global carbon dioxide counts to pre-industrial levels.
As in wartime, the British countryside could once again be at the heart of a national revival. —