The Cost of Food

The World Bank recently reported that its food price index has increased by 29 per cent in the past year.

Of course the problem of higher food costs is felt most keenly in poor countries where it is reported that in many situations the price of food has risen 50 percent in the last six months. And it is no secret that hunger lies behind much of the social and political unrest around the world today.

We are told that higher commodity prices are benefiting some 24 million farmers in poor countries because they now receive more for their crops. However, the World Bank notes that the high cost of food has pushed 68 million people below the extreme poverty line, defined by an income of $1.25 (US) a day.

Analysts have identified at least four trends driving food prices higher: a rising middle class in emerging economies who want to eat better, weird weather patterns, a shrinking dollar which buys less grain than it used to, and the growing use of ethanol to fuel vehicles.

I will only comment on the fourth trend because we are capable of doing something about it. 

What we are witnessing is a massive paradigm shift in agriculture. Traditionally, agriculture was preoccupied with food production. For the past few decades at least, a lot of global dialogue has taken place about how agriculture can become more efficient in order to feed the world’s growing population. Now the momentum has shifted, especially in developed countries, to how agriculture can churn out more bio-fuel to replace the fossil fuels that are ever harder to extract from the earth. A tectonic shift!

The high demands of this new market have driven up the price of agricultural products around the world. But cash-strapped farmers can hardly be blamed for cashing in on this bonanza. Who wouldn’t force marginal and traditional grasslands into corn production if you can clear $1500 per acre annually by doing so? Or grow more canola that is destined for bio-diesel?

But there are some troubling questions that refuse to go away. If increasingly more foodstuffs go into fuel, where will our food come from in the future? Will depleted and eroded marginal grasslands of the future be useful for any agriculture at all? How will the lowest third of humanity feed itself tomorrow? What kind of cataclysmic social and political upheavals can we expect down the road?

If the current trend toward bio-fuels were seen only as a stopgap measure until other renewable energies can come on stream we could possibly be more optimistic. But much of society seems convinced that bio-fuels will allow us to maintain a status quo lifestyle without transitioning to renewable energies. Unless that notion changes, we, along with the global population, are in for a rough ride indeed.

Those of us concerned about a sustainable future should advocate for a halt to government incentives to the bio-fuels industry [which indirectly promote energy consumption], and replace these with incentives to curb energy consumption.

Jack Heppner

Capturing the Sun in our Homes

100 years ago,  Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb had a conversation with Henry Ford. He is recorded as saying, “We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

That was 100 years ago. Henry Ford’s imagination had been captured by the possibilities that existed around petroleum, and Edison was enamored with the potential of electricity, but even at that time, they saw that oil and coal would run out – and then what?

I am amazed at what has been developed with respect to the capture of solar energy, even though there has been minimal economic incentive to work at that. The inspiration for solar energy development has been that of Edison—vision.

50 years ago I tinkered with laying a black hose in the sun in order to get hot water for a shower. It worked – on a hot day, and that’s as far as I took it. It was so much easier to turn on the tap and draw hot water from the hot water tank, water which had been heated by electricity generated many miles away.

Thankfully others did not leave it at that. Thankfully others continued working at capturing the heat of the sun. The technology now exists that will heat the hot water you use in your home using the energy of the sun. This will work effectively most days of the year, even in winter, and on many days there will be more heat energy than what is needed for hot water. That heat can be used to heat your home. The technology exists! It is well established! Just talk to Lorena Mitchell at Evolve Green, a Steinbach based alternate energy company. 

And advocates of solar thermal installation maintain that the payback time for solar hot water systems is very reasonable – five or six years.

An aspect of the technological development of solar thermal that I find impressive is that it has proceeded with minimal subsidy compared to the huge subsidies we give to Big Oil, and to some extent also to Manitoba Hydro. This development has been driven primarily by people who have been passionate about finding ways of living that avoid the depletion of limited natural resources and our total dependency on distant energy sources, which by that very nature, are vulnerable to disruption.

Eric Rempel

A Convenient Truth

For more than half a century now, Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics have convinced most of us that the only way to view the real world is through the prism of economics. This way of seeing the world was based, at least in part, on Ayn Rand’s 1957 book, Atlas Shrugged, which promoted an extreme form of free market libertarianism. As Raj Patel notes in his latest book, The Value of Nothing, this “convenient truth” convinced us “…to believe that egoism would lead to the best of all possible worlds, and that any form of restraint would result in disaster.”

This “convenient truth” is what guided the American economic guru, Alan Greenspan, in his role as Chairman of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades before the economic meltdown in 2008. Under intense questioning by the US Congress, Greenspan admitted to a fatal flaw in his ideology, namely: that markets always know best. That same year, Larry Summers, Senior Economic Advisor to President Bush also admitted that “…his view that the market was inherently self-stabilizing has been dealt a ‘fatal blow’.”

It is hard for us to comprehend what the implication of such admissions might be. If the fundamental policy by which both government and business have operated for so long is in fact flawed, how do we proceed? Some continue to argue that this flaw in the system was based on faulty input data and that we could have fixed the problem if we had responded more quickly when it arose.

But the proverbial horses are already out of the barn and it will be difficult to round them all up. Thoughtful people everywhere are beginning to look around for new and better models. As Raj Patel urges, “We need not only a new way of mooring our expectations of our society and our economy, one based on richer human assumptions about human nature, but also a different ideology governing the exchange of goods and services.”

So, even while many are attempting to re-create the world that ended in economic collapse, many governments and millions of individuals around the world are attempting to address the fatal flaw Alan Greenspan spoke about. There is a growing recognition that business needs the checks and balances provided by a thoughtful society in order to be sustainable into the future.

Not that the economic prism through which we have been trained to see the world is shattered, we can all begin to build well-balanced kaleidoscopes through which to envision a new future. Instead of a singular focus on economic theory, we can now begin to envision a world that encompasses other values besides making money.

What would you want to inject into this new vision? I have some ideas. How about adding sustainability into the formula, both economic and environmental. And while we are at it, why not insert a notion of justice that would invite both the underprivileged and the overprivileged to a common table that has enough for all?

Jack Heppner

Resiliency and Self Reliance

To be resilient as an individual or as a community we must retain, nurture and in some cases recapture at least some degree of self-reliance. One of the defining characteristics of the 20^th century was “the separation of thinking from doing” and so diminishing our ability to be self-reliant. So says Matthew B. Crawford in, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.”

By mid-century, much to our chagrin in the West, sociologists were beginning to point out similarities between Soviet and Western societies. One of these was the increasing number of jobs that were being radically simplified. In both societies there was a growing separation of planning from execution. The social “machine” responsible in the Soviet Union was the state and in the West it was corporations.

Both Stalin and the Harvard MBA elite had become fans of Frederick Taylor’s work, “Principles of Scientific Management.” According to this new model, wrote Taylor, “The managers assume the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae.”

Once concentrated in this form, knowledge could then be doled out to individuals in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some “part” of a process. And, because simplified tasks require little on-going judgment or deliberation, skilled workers could be replaced with unskilled workers with lower pay.

When Henry Ford tried this new production style, workers at first felt revulsion at this devaluation of their work. By the end of 1913, if the company needed 100 new men they had to hire 963. To overcome this reluctance to degradation, Ford had to double wages for his workers – quite contrary to the new vision. But now workers became more willing to give their lives to meaningless, simplified work.

As we entered the 21^st century, most of the work available to the masses consisted of simplified tasks computers could still not do. Individual workers were not expected to “understand” or find meaning in their work – at least one rationale for part-time jobs with minimal pay and benefits.

This general milieu in which “thinking is removed from doing” has resulted in a loss of self-reliance for the many. They simply see themselves as insignificant cogs in the economic wheel. But they depend on that wheel to keep turning just to get by. Assuming that nothing can change, they are content to fill their days with deeply unsatisfying modes of work.

The tragedy is that once this wheel stops turning as predicted, such individuals are ill prepared to think their way toward self-sufficiency. And should they do so, by that time they have lost most of the traditional skills that kept their forefathers alive through difficult times.

Although the challenge is formidable, it is important that this generation finds ways to re-skill itself in order to become more self-reliant on more fronts and consequently more resilient as well.

Jack Heppner 

Wood Heat in Southeast Manitoba

When the South Eastman Transition Initiative met last week to discuss “How do we keep Warm” we did not know Lac du Bonnet would have a 6 hour power outage later that same week. Nevertheless, I suspect the possibility of such an outage was lurking in the mind of those attending the meeting.

Let's face it. As long as our faith is in Manitoba Hydro: that it will supply reliable electricity forever, why should we be concerned about power outages? Nothing will ever be more convenient that simply moving the thermostat up if we want more heat. But is such faith reasonable or justified?

Our focus at our meeting was wood heat. We had a good discussion. As Gabriel Gagne told us about his experiences with wood heat, it struck me how, in the wooded parts of Quebec, Ontario and the Northeast USA, there is a strong culture of wood heat. Because of this the manufacturers of modern wood stoves are situated there, there are many certified installers of masonry stoves there, and there is a culture of woodlot management. All of this is absent here on the prairies.

Because of the absence of forest on the prairies, wood heating has always been a challenge here, so when coal became available, the shift to coal, even for rural residents occurred quickly. Later when cheap hydro and natural gas became available, this too was quickly embraced. Here in southeastern Manitoba, we have the forest, but we are so much a part of the prairies, that we adopted the prairie culture.

Of course it is true that we can never heat the world with biomass. There simply is not enough biomass. But there is also no way we can continue to heat the world with natural gas or coal. One size won't fit all, and for us, living adjacent to a significant forest, wood heat is something many of us need to take seriously.

At our meeting, we heard that modern EPA certified wood stoves, not only burn significantly cleaner than non-certified stoves, they also get up to 50% more heat out of wood fuel than basic wood stoves. A good stove is expected to do two things well. First of all it is to combust the fuel as completely as possible. The only thing coming out of the chimney should be water vapour and carbon dioxide – no soot and no carbon monoxide. Both are signs of incomplete combustion. The hotter the fire, the better combustion occurs, so a stove needs to be designed to burn hot. The stove is also expected to transfer the heat generated by combustion to the room. This can only be done by cooling the hot gases. So the second function works against the first function. This is why a well designed stove separates the two functions.

Evident from our meeting was that there is also a lot of interest in solar energy. Our next meeting will be devoted to harnessing solar energy. Mark February 21 on your calendar and check our website for more, up-to-date information.

Eric Rempel

Canada's Image

World leaders recently met in Cancun for United Nations climate change negotiations, and once again Canada was one of the few countries actively working against a climate agreement. This may come as a surprise; after all, Canada is known around the world as a nation of beautiful, unspoiled nature, full of people who are in touch with the soil and the forests, where wildlife flourishes and fish are plentiful. Growing up, that was the image I had of Canada, and it was a point of pride for me. Canada, I thought, was one of the last places on earth that remained pure and wild, and it would stay that way because Canadians value nature like no others. That is what I thought.

Our actual record of protecting the environment is far from the ideal I thought I knew as a child. Even though we committed to the Kyoto Protocol, we’ve spent most of our time since then trying to get out of it. The Kyoto Protocol was the result of a climate conference in which all of the nations involved pledged to take concrete steps to meet solid targets for environmental progress, particularly in regard to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The pledges made there were to be binding, yet Canada has actually increased greenhouse gas emissions dramatically since the Kyoto agreement, and nobody has held our government accountable. Who can? At the climate talks in Copenhagen last year, Canada was the recipient of the “fossil award”: we were the least willing, of all of the nations involved, to take climate action. The fossil award is an international embarrassment. Is there any way we can now reclaim our international image? And finally, at the talks in Cancun, Canada was one of only three nations who attempted to block an extension of the Kyoto protocol. On the train of international progress, Canada is leaning on the brake lever. But if the (supposedly) binding requirements of the Kyoto Protocol aren’t enforced by the UN, and international embarrassment isn’t enough to get our government’s attention, then who can hold them accountable?

We can. Our government is ultimately only accountable to us, the citizens. This is our country, and taking care of the environment is our responsibility – and that includes what the government does in our name. Canada’s tar sands are one of the largest devastations of nature in the world, and the oil money they provide is the main reason our government keeps trying to shirk its environmental obligations. Write your representative to let them know that you’re not okay with expanding the tar sands at the expense of not only Canada’s environment, but of the global climate. And at the same time, make changes in your own consumption: the less oil we use, the less we’ll need the tar sands. Invest in renewable energy, rather than oil companies. Educate yourself. After all, the only difference between the beautiful image of Canada I grew up with and our current international image as the world’s biggest “fossil” is human behaviour.

Jeff Wheeldon

How do we Keep Warm

I am of an age when I can remember a rural community where wood heat was the norm. Every year my father would hire a local youth, provide him with an axe, and send him into the bush ½ mile away to cut the next winter's firewood supply.

In 1956 my parents built a new house. In this house they installed an oil burning furnace. I don't recall the rational that justified this shift from wood heat to oil heat, but I expect it was considered a sound decision, based on economics. On the one hand there was the time and cost that went into felling the trees, getting them to the yard, cutting them to length, getting the dried wood into the house, and stoking the fire. On the other hand, all that was needed was a call for the fuel delivery truck, and the fuel would be pumped into the storage tank. Marvellously, a thermostat controlled the room temperature. Viewed that way, the fuel oil option made sense. But I do not think my parents even considered, at that time, that they were substituting a non-renewable, fossil energy, transported thousands of miles for a renewable, local energy source.

But that was the beginning. That was followed by the Trans-Canada Gas pipeline in 1958, and in 1967 the Nelson River power stations were first connected to the provincial power system.

Today we are more or less dependant on Alberta natural gas and hydro electricity generated in northern Manitoba for our home heating. Were either of these energy sources to be seriously disrupted during cold weather, people in southern Manitoba would die! Is it that hard to envision an accident, a terrorist attack or a natural disaster that would result in such a disruption? Is it reasonable to expect gas from Alberta to keep flowing for ever?

But we don't need to be that vulnerable. Last week I wrote here about an energy policy of Fee and Dividend. Such a policy would significantly increase the cost of energy from distant sources, but it would also put money into our pocket that we could choose to use to improve energy efficiency. I find it exciting just thinking about where that might lead.

But it seems unlikely that we are going to get the political leadership that will give us a rational energy policy. So what can we do? Ought we to go back to the way things were being done 75 years ago? No! We have learned a great deal about many aspects of energy efficient design since then.

There is much that our local government could do to encourage preparedness. 95% of homes being built today are built with today's energy picture in mind, rather than a reasonable projection towards the future. Visionary local government leadership could give us building codes that would provide an incentive (both negative and positive) to builders and developers to orient houses for solar gain.

And there are things we can do as individuals. Join us for a discussion of this on January 18 at Steinbach 55 Plus. For more information check our web site.

Eric Rempel

This column is prepared by the South Eastman Transition Initiative, advocating sustainable lifestyles in southeastern Manitoba. Go to southeasttransition.com.