9 August 2023. Agriculture | BigTech
The global food system is broken. We could start by sorting out fertiliser. // Facing down Big Tech over local news. [#485]
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1: The global food system is broken. We could start by sorting out fertiliser
I don’t think we can say often enough that the global food system is broken. One of the problems here is that the current model—heavily dependent on chemical fertilisers—helped to feed the world during the rapid growth in population in the late 20th century. So we are perhaps being slow to respond the evidence that the food system as a system has overshot, and now contains the seeds of its own collapse.
At the same time, the whole system is tightly locked into a series of behaviours that means that even small adjustments create adverse short-term effects, which discourages governments from making changes.
In a recent piece in International Politics and Society, Jayati Ghosh looks at these issues through the lens of chemical fertilisers.
But first, her summary of what is wrong with the current system:
Largely dominated by multinational corporations, it enables and encourages unsustainable and unhealthy production and consumption patterns and generates enormous waste across all stages of production and distribution. The global food system also produces massive greenhouse-gas emissions, thereby inflicting substantial ecological damage, and deprives small-scale farmers in many countries of secure and viable livelihoods.
And that is just on the production side. When it comes to consumption, access to food is highly unequal, which means that levels of hunger are now increasing again after a period of decline.
Nitrogen-based fertilisers are produced using natural gas, and their price has gone up sharply since natural gas prices increased in the early 2020s, and again since Russia attacked the Ukraine. The profits of the world’s nine largest fertiliser companies have also gone up sharply as well. They doubled between 2020 and 2021, and all but doubled again between 2021 and 2022.
(Source: Grain.org)
According to Ghosh, profit margins also increased as well, up from a cheerful 22% to an eye-watering 36%. More evidence, perhaps, that much of the inflation that we’re seeing at the moment has little to do with wages and quite a lot to do with corporate greed. (And also here on Just Two Things.)
Fertiliser prices have come down since the beginning of the year, but all the same small farmers worldwide are paying far more for it than they were a couple of years ago. Fertiliser prices are about three times what they were then.
The result is that they reduce their use of fertiliser, which reduces their yields. Costs are up, incomes down, which increases their debt levels. And since small producers grow the majority of the world’s food, it also threatens food security.
Some countries, such as India and Kenya, have increased subsidies to farmers to try to reduce this risk. The EU has taken measures to increase fertiliser production. But, as Ghosh argues, these short-term responses make the long-term position worse:
(T)he use of chemical fertilisers is itself associated with major ecological problems, posing risks to sustainable agriculture and the planet. In addition to accounting for 2.4 per cent of all greenhouse-gas emissions , chemical fertilisers are responsible for soil degradation, ozone depletion, biodiversity loss and air pollution.
There are other existing agricultural technologies that can help with yields while managing down the use of chemical fertiliser in the global food system. These include practices like crop rotation, and the use of natural fertilisers and pesticides:
This approach would not only reduce costs for farmers, but also mitigate the environmental damage caused by nitrogen fertilisers.
And:
(A) growing body of evidence suggests that carefully implemented agroecological approaches could significantly boost productivity and soil quality and could be scaled up as needed.
But: Ghosh describes these as the “Cinderellas” of agricultural policy. They are viable, but not enabled. Most aid programmes, and most private investment, continues to promote the increased use of chemical fertilisers, even though this doesn’t seem to produce better outcomes.
She mentions one example of this:
(T)he Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), founded in 2006 with the support of major foundations, advocates an industrial model of agriculture that involves extensive use of high-yielding seed varieties in conjunction with reliance on chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Independent studies , as well as evaluations commissioned by AGRA itself , have found that the organisation is far from meeting its goals of doubling yields and incomes for millions of smallholder African farmers.
To be sure, this transition has to be managed carefully. Sri Lanka banned chemical fertiliser imports in 2021, and the result was a decline in food production and acute food shortages. But even here, the story is more complex.
Solving the problems of both climate change and biodiversity loss requires that we also shift the world’s food system away from its dependence on fossil fuel outputs. In turn, this requires, almost certainly, that we also do something about the concentration of firms at the heart of both agricultural inputs and outputs.
Monoculture in the fields starts with the business monocultures of the global agricultural system. Starting with inputs like fertilisers is a way of nudging the whole system in a different direction, so the overall system pattern starts to take a different shape.
2: Facing down Big Tech over local news
Big tech, specifically Google and Facebook, is having a standoff in Canada over plans by the Canadian government to make them pay for access to local news. The Online News Act doesn’t come into force for another six months, but the two companies have already said that they will block news links when the Act comes into force.
Reuters summarised it this way:
The independent budgetary watchdog in Canada estimated last year that news businesses could receive about C$330 million ($249 million) per year from deals mandated under the legislation... Facebook and Google said the proposals were unsustainable for their businesses and for months signaled possibly ending news availability in Canada unless the act was amended.
Hamilton Nolan, an American journalist who writes about corporate power, suggests on his Substack that this fight is all about market power. (But don’t look at his column if you don’t like profanities in your writing.)
People who grew up in past generations, when America had thriving newspaper and magazine industries, are often curious what happened to them... The answer is that middlemen figured out how to take all the money out of the business. The biggest of those middlemen are Google and Facebook. If newspapers had been able to start publishing online but continue to make the same ad revenue that they had in print, everything would have been fine.
(Those were the days. A newstand in Chicago, 2006. Photo: ChrisMetcalfTV/flickr. CC BY 2.0)
Before the internet, local newspapers were a local advertising monopoly, in effect, and sometimes that didn’t, in truth, produce good outcomes. The internet offered a combination of both locally targeted advertising and scale.
The tech platforms... got to serve news up to the public as if they were publishers, and they got to reap the ad revenue from that audience, but they did not have to actually hire any reporters or do any journalism. Like sponges, they found a way to insert themselves between the audience and the media, and soak up the money that was flowing between them.
Nolan notes that this is a simplified version of what happened, but it’s not inaccurate. Google makes noises about caring about local news, but not so much that it is willing to do anything about it:
Google’s parent company is worth more than $1.6 trillion, and the value of the entire US newspaper industry today is only around $20 billion. If Google wanted to, it could easily purchase every remaining paper in America and run them as nonprofits, thereby ensuring that local news doesn’t die out, and ensuring a continuing flow of news content for themselves, and earning a lot of good PR by appearing to be something less than vultures.
Of course, this isn’t just a conversation about business models. It’s widely agreed that there is a strong connection between journalism, including local journalism, and democracy. In the face of disappearing local media, people have asked governments to step in. (Australia did something similar a couple of years ago.)
The Online News Act requires digital platforms to pay a small fee for the use of news, and allows news organisations to negotiate collectively with the platforms. Hence the toys being thrown out of the pram by the platforms. Nolan suggests that this is not about the money:
Their real fear is that if this law (which is similar to one that passed in Australia in 2021, prompting the same reaction ) gets established as a model then it will spread around the whole world, which would materially impact the existence of news as a clean and easy revenue source for these middlemen.
And he also suggests that part of this fight is about measures of social value as against measures of financial value. “The news industry”, he writes, “is vastly more socially valuable than these companies”:
The biggest value that tech platforms offer to society is convenience. They improve communications and provide a huge boost to efficiency on a global scale... But the loss of most of the news media... More misinformation, more corruption, a dumber and less informed populace, more conspiracy theories, more extremism, and a much greater ability of powerful people and institutions to enact their selfish will (be) unchallenged.
In short, there’s a reason why people talk about media as being “the fourth estate”, an essential part of the political structures of democracies—and sometimes with certain rights enshrined in political constitutions, as in the United States.
So if that’s what’s at stake, Nolan says, the Canadian government needs to make sure it doesn’t blink first:
So the proper response when these companies threaten to shut off news if we ask them to pay for it is: Go ahead, f*****s. Do it! Will this suck? Yes, at least in the short term.
But, he says, the short term pain is worth it, because the alternative—the continuing slow death of news outlets—is much worse:
Nobody alive today has seen what the absence of a functional news industry at the local and state level over a long period of time looks like... The only winners will be rich people and crooks. We don’t want to go down that road.
j2t#485
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