The columnist in the moral ivory tower

When it comes to food, George Monbiot applies the opposite logic compared to when he discusses poverty, growth or climate policy.

In the article The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People George Monbiot takes a giant swing at small peasant romanticism in general and Chris Smaje in particular. He states that the ”movement’s quest for rural simplicity drifted into a formula for mass death”.

I am sure Smaje will write a response, hopefully less vitriolic than Monbiot’s. But here is my view on some of the issues.

In the article, Monbiot refers to the enormous increase in production of industrial agriculture, the same industrial agriculture that he (rightly) detests.  He then states that this increase in production and global transports have reduced starvation tremendously: ”Returning to earlier modes of subsistence is a formula for global catastrophe on a scale that defies imagination.” Monbiot claims that cheap food is essential for the poor, who otherwise is condemned to death (by the rural romanticizers).

But Monbiot has a very simplistic reasoning. The linkages between cheap food, access to food, production and (global) markets is not at all that straight forward. If anything the links and causalities are the opposite to what Monbiot says, explicitly or implicitly.

It is true that famines have decreased tremendously the last sixty years, but there is no strong causal link between this and global food production. The link is rather to reduced poverty, democracy and a host of other processes. Ironically, Monbiot puts forward the example of famine in China as the main example of how death in famines have shrunk. But the famine in China was clearly caused by exceptionally bad politics and economics.

It is well know, and ascertained among others by the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, that “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.”. He showed that most famines have occurred in situations where there was food available but social and economic conditions prevented people having access to that food. Many countries with hungry populations export food at the same time as some of their people are starving to death.

The effects of prices on food production and its distribution is a complicated matter and the effects differ for the urban and the rural poor, between different groups of rural poor and differ in the short and the long term. Increasing production when there is no demand leads to falling prices, which paradoxically can lead to an even worse situation for the rural poor, who make up the majority of those hungry. Most of them are dependent on farm incomes, either as small-holders or as landless individuals seeking employment by farmers. A surplus of food, with falling prices, creates a bigger problem as it drives small farmers off the market so that they cannot buy the things they need for production or for their families. Better prices enable farmers to respond by expanding production, something that was very visible in the period 2004-2009, when global food prices doubled (but thereafter fell again).

Monbiot, claims that there is a wealth of evidence that higher food prices exacerbate hunger, but the only “evidence” he produces is a link to an article which states that the last years’ hike in food prices are mainly caused by increasing costs of energy and fertilizers. The author states that “Subsidising fertilisers may seem an obvious solution to a problem created in large part by the high cost of fertiliser. However, this just maintains a food system which has given us an obesity epidemic, left millions malnourished, contributes to climate change and is the main factor in the loss of biodiversity. Targeted actions to ensure healthy and nutritious food is affordable for everyone may be more cost effective in reducing negative consequences from higher food prices (my italics) and help to transform the food system to a healthier and more sustainable future.” Hardly a strong argument for cheap food.

Monbiot supports the global trade in foods with a very simplistic logic: ”if there is a bad harvest or outright crop failure in one place, food can now be shifted from regions with a crop surplus”. This is obviously true. But the linkages between global trade and food supplies is a lot more complex. When farmers in one country are outcompteted by cheap imports, they reduce their production and the country becomes structurally dependent on imports. Europe has let almost 100 million hectares of farm land revert to forest or lying idle, while European farmers buy soy from South America and European food industries buy palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia. Europe could produce those, or equivalent crops, within its own territory, but it is simply cheaper to import them.

”Farming accounts for some 70% of employment on that continent [Africa], and most of the farmers there are desperately poor. Part of the reason is that they are unfairly undercut by the subsidised products dumped on their markets by exporters from the US and the European Union.”

Who wrote that? The younger Monbiot.

For a more nuanced discussion of how globalization affects food security see this article based on research by Jennifer Clapp.

It is perhaps easiest for me to just let the former (anti-capitalist) Monbiot make the argument against his newer (eco-modernist) incarnation.

When discussing gas prices in the UK, Monbiot doesn’t argue that prices shall be lower for the benefit of the poor, on contrary he (rightly) supports hig prices because “The truth is that we can’t afford not to transform our economies. It’s not decarbonisation that’s unaffordable; it’s climate breakdown”. I totally agree. But why not use the same reasoning when it comes to food production? After all, cheap food is also a result of the fossil fuel economy and has as many disadvantages as global warming?   

Similar to “we need to grow more food to lift people out of hunger” many claim that we need “we need to grow our economies to lift people out of poverty”. But Monbiot has understood that this argument is flawed and he belongs to the Anti-Growth Coalition.

And finally, once upon a time Monbiot was also vary favorable to small farms and wrote: “A shift from small to large farms will cause a major decline in global production, just as food supplies become tight.”  

Those were the days.

George Monbiot puts himself in a territory of moral superiority implying that those who advocate organic and small farm production condemn billions to starvation. But according to his own assessment, the conventional food system is also deeply problematic and the main driver of destruction. His alternative, as promoted in his recent book Regenesis, is land-less/ high-energy industrial food production. In my view, that is an even more cruel fantasy, locking humanity into a system bound to fail.