An Overview of American Food Resilience

Presenter: Gerry Marten

Unexpected failures in food production or distribution could conceivably be so severe or long-lasting that they disrupt the food supply. What are the risks and how serious are they? What can be done to reduce the risks or cope with failures if they occur? This presentation offers a preliminary examination of these questions, along with a resilience perspective that could help explore them in greater depth. It also briefly examines what is already happening in government, civil society, and the private sector and what environmental professionals can do to help address this issue.

See Food Resilience: Promoting a Secure Food Supply.

Late last year, a working group of AESS members was formed to address the food resilience issue. Difficult-to-predict disturbances such as large-scale crop failure, an influenza pandemic, or an energy crisis could conceivably disrupt food production or distribution severely enough to set in motion a breakdown in food supply, leading to hunger or even starvation. Cities are particularly dependent and vulnerable. It’s difficult to get a clear grip on the risks because the food system is overwhelmingly massive and complex, and failure could take forms never seen before, but the stakes are high. The working group chose to place its initial focus on the United States because the prospect of a food crisis in the United States has received relatively little attention. The bounty of food in America could be deceptive.

Food resilience is related to food security, but the two are not identical. Food security is broader. Food security is about everyone’s access to adequate food for a healthy life. Social justice is important. Food resilience is about one aspect of food security—the ability to withstand disturbances that could lead to a failure in food supply.

I think of food resilience from an “EcoTipping Points” perspective. The website EcoTippingPoints.org features success stories from around the world about turning environmental and social decline toward a course of restoration. It shows how vicious cycles drive decline and offers lessons from the stories about what it takes to leverage a turnabout from decline to restoration. America’s capacity to withstand disturbances that could disrupt its food supply may have declined substantially in recent decades. The challenge is to restore that capacity.

I want to use the story of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina to show what I mean by resilience. In August 2005, Katrina transformed half the city of New Orleans into a ghost town in a single day. I lived in New Orleans before Katrina. The house in which I lived is still an empty shell eight years after the hurricane, and so are most of the houses for miles around it. There is still not a single supermarket, shopping mall, or other substantial retail outlet in an area extending for miles. I know that right up until Katrina, the main thing that hurricanes meant to people in New Orleans was hurricane parties. How could they be so mistaken about the risks? What went wrong? The New Orleans story is about a gradual decline in resilience that led to sudden disaster.

New Orleans was able to withstand numerous hurricanes during its earlier history because, until the middle of the twentieth century, houses were built only on high ground where flooding was unlikely. If there was any risk of flooding, the houses were built well above the ground so floodwater would pass underneath. New Orleans was also protected from storm surges by miles of wetland between the ocean and the city. There had been powerful hurricanes every ten to twenty years, but no lasting damage. The city always recovered quickly.

[Demonstration by tilting a cereal box to show that it tips over—“collapses”—only when pushed past a threshold. If the disturbance is relaxed short of that threshold, the box returns to its original position—“recovers.” This is resilience.]

Vulnerability to hurricanes gradually increased during the last half of the twentieth century because people had a false sense of security from the flood-control levees. Like so much of America, New Orleans embarked on rapid suburban expansion. Subdivisions were built on low-lying, floodable ground, and houses were built right on the ground. Even a few feet of floodwater could make it necessary to rip out all the walls, ruined by mold. At the same time, the levees were gradually deteriorating, no longer providing the absolute protection that everyone assumed was there. Most important was the deterioration of the wetlands that protected the city from coastal storm surges. In fact, as a consequence of changes in wetland ecology brought on by levees, Louisiana has been losing a football field of coastal wetland every ten minutes for the past fifty years.

[Demonstration using a cereal box with a much narrower base than the first box, showing that it’s much easier to tip over the box. The second box represents greater vulnerability to the same disturbance as before—a loss of resilience.]

Key Questions

The working group is framing the food resilience issue by addressing four key questions:

What are the main lines of vulnerability in the food system, including production and distribution? How are the risks changing through time?
What is the significance of globalization, multinational corporations, agricultural technology, local food systems, and other key dimensions of the food system for food resilience? What are leverage points for improving resilience?
What is already being done by government, civil society, and the private sector in support of food resilience?
What can environmental scientists, teachers, and other environmental professionals do through research, education, community action, or other means to improve resilience?

Sources of Risk

With regard to the first question above, it’s easy to list sources of risk:

The diminishing gap between global food-production capacity and the food needs of a growing human population. The ability to meet food needs when things go wrong is greater when food-production capacity comfortably exceeds food needs. Unfortunately, that cushion is eroding as agricultural land is lost to urban expansion, erosion, salinization, and other abuses, while aquifers—providing irrigation water on which so much of the increase in agricultural production during recent years has depended—are rapidly being depleted. At the same time, the increase in demands on the land from an exploding human population has been exacerbated as people around the world have increased the percentage of animal products in their diet.
Natural disasters. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters can disrupt food supplies to people rendered helpless and dependent. Natural disasters are significant because they are so common. Past experience and current preparedness offer institutional lessons.
Crop failures due to extreme weather. These are expected to become more frequent and severe due to global climate change. I recently read an article about perceptions of Nigerian farmers regarding weather changes they have experienced during recent decades, particularly drought. Their perception is simple. Eventually, they expect to die of starvation if the trend continues.
Failures in food production due to the introduction of a devastating crop or livestock disease. Scientists at the University of Minnesota have conducted a simulation that shows how a single handkerchief laced with hoof-and-mouth disease placed in a cattle stockyard can spread the disease around the entire region before anyone realizes what is happening, making it necessary to slaughter all the cattle in the region. This could happen as an act of terrorism or by chance, as happened with the introduction of Mad Cow Disease to Britain several years ago.
An energy crisis that disrupts food processing and distribution as well as inputs for agricultural production. Modern agricultural production and food processing, refrigeration, and transport are highly dependent on fossil fuels. An electricity failure in the Beijing region several years ago shut down trains bringing food to the city, leading to a panic run on food retail outlets.
A major volcanic eruption. A major eruption can cloud the atmosphere, dramatically reducing crop production by reducing sunlight and putting sulfuric acid into rain. This kind of eruption has happened every few centuries, disrupting plant growth on a regional or global scale for months or, in some cases, years. It appears that volcanic eruptions in Iceland—and possibly other parts of the world—were responsible for mass starvation in Europe and the death of malnourished people from disease during the sixth century, fourteenth century, and eighteenth century. The Great Famine of 1314–1317 killed approximately half the population of northern Europe.
Agribusiness, multinational corporations, globalization, and international trade. A few international conglomerates control the food system, exercising enormous political influence on a national and international scale for trade rules, intellectual-property rights, and other legal conditions that favor their profitability—a business model that can conflict with a reliable food supply for their customers, as well as the ability of farmers and laborers involved in the production, processing, and distribution of food to earn enough to feed themselves. Particularly alarming has been the marketing of genetically modified crops by way of “terminator seeds” that force farmers to purchase new seeds each year. This dependence is a surefire formula for disaster, as seen with Bt cotton, which was widely adopted in India during the years following 2005. Shortages of Bt cotton seed and soaring prices for the seed during the past two years have triggered an epidemic of high production costs, crop failure, farmer despair, and suicides. On the American scene, food-retailing corporations have displayed their callousness by pulling out of poor urban neighborhoods, creating “food deserts” that make it difficult to purchase decent food at a decent price.
Social conflict. Starvation has often been associated with war and is still a prominent feature of civil wars around the globe. Another “war” has been large-scale agricultural land grabs in poor countries by multinational agribusiness in recent years. China, for example, is buying multimillion-acre chunks of farmland across Africa, typically paying government officials to whom the land does not even belong. People who occupied the land for generations are displaced with no legal recourse and the prospect, at best, of becoming poorly paid laborers. Similarly, rainforest dwellers have been pushed off their land in Southeast Asia to make way for rubber and oil-palm plantations that have expanded dramatically under the impetus of foreign markets and foreign investment. Turning to a national scene in Europe a few years ago, the British government had to shut down a truckers’ strike to prevent starvation in London.
Food commodity futures. Food commodity futures originated as a form of insurance for buyers and sellers to deal with uncertainties about future prices. They have deteriorated into a gambling operation controlled by a handful of large corporations that manipulate the market speculatively for profit and to the detriment of stability in food supply.
The decline of household and government food storage. This decline has weakened stored food stocks as a buffer against fluctuations in food supply, undermining a strategy that has been a mainstay of human survival throughout history. Governments have cut costs by scrapping food-storage depots, and the food supply chain’s business model of rapid turnover leaves little scope for filling the gap when something goes wrong. This is an example of the conflict between efficiency and the redundancy necessary for resilience. Global food storage, which forty years ago was enough to feed the world for several years, is now down to two months, and the rapid turnover of food in American cities has reduced storage in all forms to about a week’s food supply.
Excessive and dysfunctional social complexity. Social complexity can paralyze the capacity to deal with challenges. It has exploded with globalization and the ascendance of computers, permeating every aspect of contemporary society. Joseph Tainter’s book The Collapse of Complex Societies (1989) examined dozens of cases of past civilization collapse and found two common threads. First, collapse of food storage and food supply was a major part of the story as things fell apart—often a central driver of collapse. Second, social complexity increased over the centuries as a civilization grew and developed. The complexity was useful until it passed a point where the “overhead” costs of maintaining the complexity exceeded the benefits. A cultural value for social complexity continued as decline set in, and complexity continued to increase until dysfunction rendered the civilization vulnerable to any serious challenge that happened to come along at that time and place, such as environmental deterioration, military threat, or infrastructure failure. Today’s social complexity could be a serious obstacle to strengthening resilience.

The Food Crisis of 2007–2008

The food crisis of 2007–2008 provides an example of how food supply can fail under contemporary conditions. The prices of food commodities such as wheat, rice, corn, and soy doubled during 2007–2008, causing food riots in approximately 60 nations. The prices have stayed high since then. How did this happen?

The initial price increase in 2007 was triggered by poor harvests in Europe and Australia due to drought and the diversion of grains to biofuel production. At the same time, an increase in the price of petroleum added to transportation costs and ultimately the cost of food. In response to international food-price increases, some of the key grain-exporting nations restricted exports to protect their domestic food prices and food supplies. The diminishing food supply on the international market drove international food prices even higher, creating a vicious cycle that caused food-exporting nations to restrict exports further.

Additionally, the increase in food prices was accelerated by a low “stock-flow ratio”—low wholesale food storage. On top of this, the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 and the recession that followed reduced international credit, limiting the ability of nations with food shortages to buy food from abroad. The recession also created unemployment that undermined consumers’ ability to purchase food.

Then commodity futures trading came into the picture. The recession led to a decline in the U.S. dollar, which led investors to shift from conventional investments such as stocks to commodities, including food commodities. This stimulated higher food prices and created a vicious cycle in which investors were further attracted to food futures, driving food prices even higher.

Improving Resilience

Turning to the second working-group question above, here are some very preliminary takes on leverage points for improving resilience. While it makes sense to address identifiable sources of risk and reduce those risks wherever possible, this strategy also has some conspicuous limitations. Many sources of risk—such as multinational corporations controlling food-supply chains and food commodity markets—are too massive, complicated, and powerful to realistically expect much scope for leveraging change.

Moreover, because failure could occur for reasons that we haven’t even thought of, it’s important to consider strategies that can apply across a broad spectrum, regardless of the source of breakdown. Food storage is a prime candidate for improving resilience because it can fill the gap for just about any failure in food supply. While far from easy, food storage may be more amenable to change than many other interventions that come to mind.

Social safety nets could also have a role, and reduction in dysfunctional social complexity may be absolutely essential for improving resilience. While substantial changes in social safety nets and social complexity could be impossibly difficult in many ways, there may be some possibilities at the local level. In general, local autonomy and self-sufficiency seem to offer the most promise for improving resilience because a relatively small number of people can do what makes sense regardless of what’s happening in the rest of the world.

Current Activity

Turning to the third question above, what’s currently happening? The attention of academics and nonprofit organizations such as the United Nations, WorldWatch Institute, and Earth Policy Institute is directed primarily toward chronic food problems in poor countries. In the U.S., the focus is also on chronic problems such as social justice, nutritional quality, and health consequences such as obesity. While this is not the central focus of food resilience, the misfortunes of disadvantaged people can be relevant as “canaries in a coal mine” for what could someday happen to the rest of us.

I’ve begun to survey perceptions and activities of government agencies. The U.S. government has been concerned primarily with natural disasters and threats of terrorism rather than intrinsic vulnerabilities in the food system. So far, my progress in discovering further-reaching connections between government and food resilience has been limited. It has been difficult to get through to people who are both knowledgeable and willing to speak about it candidly. The common reaction is, “Somebody else may be dealing with it.”

Investigating ongoing preparedness for natural disasters, including “mass feeding,” could be a way to learn about the existing role of government, nonprofit organizations, and private-sector food providers in food resilience. However, disaster-preparedness plans are often official documents not available for public distribution, and the plans that I’ve managed to see contain little concrete detail about what will actually happen. They mainly list what agency will be responsible for what, without describing concretely how it will be done or requiring designated agencies to make the preparations necessary to do it.

The Hawaii Example

I’ve learned the most from several people in Hawaii State Civil Defense, who have told me about disaster preparation from their perspective. Hawaii is an extreme case because of its isolation, but the isolation and dependence of cities everywhere may in fact be similar.

During a disaster, government in Hawaii is responsible for transporting food from wherever it’s available—such as grocery stores, warehouses, the harbor, or the airport—to places such as shelters if conventional transportation breaks down. However, government is not responsible for the supply of food, whether the mass-feeding requirement is relatively short-term, such as after a hurricane, or long-term, such as during an influenza pandemic. The supply of food in any disaster will be whatever the private sector provides.

How about food storage in Hawaii? Assuming a worst case such as a direct hit by a severe hurricane, most of Oahu’s one million inhabitants could be homeless and in need of food for a month. Assuming just one meal per person per day, as many as 30 million meals could be needed for the entire period.

FEMA has 35,000 MREs—Meals Ready to Eat—in warehouse storage on Oahu, a token quantity. The quantity of “on-the-shelf” storage in grocery stores and their warehouses is estimated to be enough for five days, though much of it may not be in a form that is easily consumed and much of it may be lost because warehouses are located near the harbor and are therefore subject to storm-surge damage. Food will also be lost due to lack of refrigeration. Electrical power could take 6–12 months to restore fully.

Military food storage is not for civilians, though the airport and harbor should be functioning within a week after a hurricane, when the military could fly in a limited quantity of food. Military food assistance by sea could be forthcoming in about two weeks.

The Role of Environmental Professionals

Turning to the last question above, what can environmental professionals do? One approach is to ask practitioners what they need. I asked Hawaii Civil Defense, and they told me that their most important need is to get more people to store more food for emergencies. Civil Defense advises the public to store a week’s supply of food and water that they can take with them to a shelter on very short notice, but it’s not really happening.

There are myriad other ways that environmental professionals can help. For example, they can help make sense of the food system’s overwhelming complexity. Network analysis could help provide some insights. How does the spread of failure through a system depend on system structure? Is a modular structure more resilient than the highly connected structure so characteristic of our national and globalized food system?

Environmental professionals can also help put food resilience issues into relief by showing how apparently separate issues are connected through the food system and how they connect to drivers of vulnerability. Consider, for example, the issue of expanding the export of dairy products from California to China, which is expected to multiply its consumption of dairy products as much as twentyfold during the next fifteen years. California dairy farmers want to respond to this expanding market. However, they will no longer be feeding soy meal to their cows because the price of soy has tripled in the past few years, so they are turning to locally grown alfalfa, which requires a lot of irrigation water. This raises the issue of whether so much of California’s precious water should be passed to China in the form of dairy exports or used in some other way to serve local needs.

These are only a few examples. There are hundreds of ways that environmental professionals can help clarify issues and step into key domains of the action arena to enhance American food resilience. Presentations in the food resilience sessions at this conference will begin to lay a foundation for sketching out some of those possibilities.