[DEBATE] : Mother Earth's Triple Whammy: Why North Korea Was a Global Crisis Canary

[Riaz K Tayob]

THURSDAY 19 JUNE 2008
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Opinion
Mother Earth's Triple Whammy: Why North Korea Was a Global Crisis Canary

Tuesday 17 June 2008

North Koreans harvest rice outside Pyongyang. The famine that killed as 
much as 10 percent of the North Korean population in the 1990's was "a 
harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe." (Photo: Retuers)

    Gas prices are above $4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39% last 
year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue 
to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a TKO, a 
triple whammy from energy, agriculture, and climate-change trends. Right 
now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you're shelling out at 
the pump and the grocery store; but, unless policymakers begin to 
address all three of these trends as one major crisis, it could get a 
whole lot worse.

    Just ask the North Koreans.

    In the 1990s, North Korea was the world's canary. The famine that 
killed as much as 10% of the North Korean population in those years was, 
it turns out, a harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe -- 
though few saw it that way at the time.

    That small Northeast Asian land, one of the last putatively 
communist countries on the planet, faced the same three converging 
factors as we do now -- escalating energy prices, a reduction in food 
supplies, and impending environmental catastrophe. At the time, of 
course, all the knowing analysts and pundits dismissed what was 
happening in that country as the inevitable breakdown of an archaic 
economic system presided over by a crackpot dictator.

    They were wrong. The collapse of North Korean agriculture in the 
1990s was not the result of backwardness. In fact, North Korea boasted 
one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia. Despite claims of 
self-sufficiency, the North Koreans were actually heavily dependent on 
cheap fuel imports. (Does that already ring a bell?) In their case, the 
heavily subsidized energy came from Russia and China, and it helped keep 
North Korea's battalion of tractors operating. It also meant that North 
Korea was able to go through fertilizer, a petroleum product, at one of 
the world's highest rates. When the Soviets and Chinese stopped 
subsidizing those energy imports in the late 1980s and international 
energy rates became the norm for them, too, the North Koreans had a rude 
awakening.

    Like the globe as a whole, North Korea does not have a great deal of 
arable land -- it can grow food on only about 14% of its territory. (The 
comparable global figure for arable land is about 13%.) With heavy 
applications of fertilizer and pesticides, North Koreans coaxed a lot of 
food out of a little land. By the 1980s, however, the soil was 
exhausted, and agricultural production was declining. So spiking energy 
prices hit an economy already in crisis. Desperate to grow more food, 
the North Korean government instructed farmers to cut down trees, 
stripping hillsides to bring more land into cultivation.

    Big mistake. When heavy rains hit in 1995, this dragooning of 
marginal lands into agricultural production only amplified the national 
disaster. The resulting flooding damaged more than 40% of the country's 
rice paddy fields. Torrential rains washed away topsoil, while rocks and 
sand, dislodged from hillsides, ruined low-lying fields. The rigid 
economic structures in North Korea were unable to cope with the triple 
assault of bad weather, soaring energy, and declining food production. 
Nor did dictator Kim Jong Il's political decisions make things any better.

    But the peculiarities of North Korea's political economy did not 
cause the devastating famine that followed. Highly centralized planning 
and pretensions to self-reliance only made the country prematurely 
vulnerable to trends now affecting the rest of the planet.

    As with the North Koreans, our dependency on relatively cheap energy 
to run our industrialized agriculture and our smokestack industries is 
now mixing lethally with food shortages and the beginnings of climate 
overload, pushing us all toward the precipice. In the short term, we 
face a food crisis and an energy crisis. Over the longer term, this is 
certain to expand into a much larger climate crisis. No magic wand, 
whether biofuels, genetically modified organisms (GMO), or 
geoengineering, can make the ogres disappear.

    After the attacks of September 11, 2001, "We are all Americans" 
briefly became a popular expression of solidarity around the world. If 
we don't devise policy choices that address energy, agriculture, and 
climate, while replacing the idolatry of unrestrained growth at the 
heart of both capitalist and communist economies, the tagline for the 
21st century may be: "We are all North Koreans."

    Through a Glass Darkly

    For years, development experts have bemoaned the declining terms of 
trade that have kept some developing countries, and most poor farmers, 
mired in poverty. With the exception of the first energy crisis era in 
the 1970s, between the end of World War II and 2006, food prices never 
stopped sinking in relation to manufactured goods. Lower food prices are 
generally a boon for consumers. But they are devastating for the 
subsistence farmers who make up the vast majority of the world's poor.

    However, over the past three years, according to the World Bank, 
food prices have increased 83%. That may be only an annoyance for 
wealthy shoppers, but for the poor, who often devote more than 50% of 
their incomes to feeding their families, such staggering rises can be 
the difference between life and death.

    There are a number of reasons for this recent spike. The price of 
oil, now near $140 a barrel, has certainly played a crucial role in 
this, both by driving inflation generally and because of its importance 
to modern, large-scale agriculture. So has the recent allocation of ever 
more agricultural land to biofuel production. U.S. farmers, responsible 
for 70% of all world corn exports, now dispatch one-fifth of their corn 
to ethanol production, which has had the effect of nearly doubling the 
price of corn.

    Global warming, too, has had an impact. Drought in Australia and the 
eastern United States, severe flooding in China and Bangladesh, rising 
ocean levels and fresh water shortages throughout the world are all 
thought to be related to climate change, though climate scientists 
cannot prove that any given weather anomaly is caused by global warming.

    Climate scientists can be fuzzy this way about causality in the 
short term. Paradoxically, however, they often see the future more 
clearly. For instance, the top global food policy think-tank, 
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), predicts that 
global warming will be responsible for a 16% decrease in agricultural 
gross domestic product globally by 2020. The Center for Global 
Development argues that developing countries, in particular, will be hit 
hard by climate change: By 2080, India, its report argues, will see a 
staggering 30-40% drop in agricultural production and Senegal will 
plummet 50%.

    In the United States, a much-anticipated, 
Bush-administration-delayed federal study foresees water shortages, more 
herbicide-resistant weeds, and more insect infestations as a result of 
climbing temperatures. The present food crisis, concludes Joachim von 
Braun of the IFPRI, "foreshadows what climate change will bring us."

    The other major driver of food price increases is certainly rising 
income levels in key developing countries. With more income, people can, 
of course, eat more, and eat higher off the hog -- or, put another way, 
they can eat hog in the first place, rather than the lentils or cassava 
on which they were subsisting.

    Over a decade ago, Lester Brown, the founder of World Watch, 
suggested that just such a crisis was on the way. He asked whether the 
world could possibly produce enough grain to feed a more prosperous 
China. Now, growing middle classes in China and India, the world's most 
populous countries, are, just as he predicted, changing their eating 
habits and consuming more meat (and so, indirectly, a great deal more 
grain, which is used to feed the animals they are now cooking).

    Lester Brown was ahead of the curve, but there were ample warning 
signs of an impending food crisis for those ready to see them. Oil 
prices have been steadily increasing since 2004 as a result of rising 
demand. They have been helped along greatly by growing chaos in the 
Middle East, fed by the Bush administration's foolhardy invasion of Iraq.

    Like the North Koreans, we, too, have been trying to squeeze more 
food out of a limited amount of land: arable land per capita is 
declining at a steady rate. Falling water tables and dry rivers v± think 
climate change again -- have no less surely pointed to a coming crunch 
for farmers dependent on irrigation. And don't forget: Critics of 
biofuels warned time and again that there wasn't enough elasticity in 
the food supply to take food out of the mouths of people in the Global 
South in order to fill the gas tanks of the Global North.

    Back in the early 1990s, the North Korean leadership failed to grasp 
the correlation between rising oil prices, declining food stocks, and 
environmental stresses -- and the political pundits and politicians of 
the planet conveniently wrote off the resulting catastrophe as uniquely 
the fault of the world's weirdest country. Instead of taking a timely 
hint, wealthier governments simply shrugged off the warnings of 
scientists, development professionals, and energy specialists about 
future crises.

    Responding to Riots

    There's nothing like a food riot, however, to get wealthy 
governments to sit up and take notice. Humanitarian organizations and 
aid officials may be concerned about people quietly starving to death in 
remote locations, but only when world security suddenly seems threatened 
and governments totter do rising food prices translate into a full-blown 
crisis. Washington, for example, woke up when riots broke out in Egypt, 
Haiti, and Indonesia, and the militaries in Pakistan and Thailand 
intervened to protect crops and storage facilities.

    In response to the sudden crisis splatting on the global windshield, 
the United Nations food aid agency, the World Food Program, called for 
$755 million in emergency contributions. Saudi Arabia, its coffers 
flooded with oil profits, promptly promised $500 million. The World Bank 
then announced that it was increasing its overall support of global 
agriculture by $2 billion in 2009, while Washington offered $5 billion 
in food aid over the next two years.

    Such an emergency response may, indeed, be necessary, but it is also 
distinctly inadequate. The Director-General of the U.N.'s Food and 
Agricultural Organization, Jacques Diouf, has called for a minimum of 
$30 billion a year for a global agricultural restructuring. It's not at 
all clear who will pony up such sums, which, in any case, will be too 
late for countries like Haiti whose subsistence farmers needed help 
before their most recent growing seasons started. Most importantly, 
though, as an approach, it's too conventional and, in the long run, 
bound to fail.

    After all, the wealthiest countries continue to show little or no 
interest in altering the policies that have contributed so decisively to 
the food crisis in the first place. Take the United States. It "ties" -- 
places restrictions on -- about 70% of its aid. That means recipient 
countries must use that aid to buy U.S. products, which, of course, will 
do little to strengthen local economies. Washington has also cut its 
international agricultural research by as much as 75% at a time when 
agricultural production is no longer keeping pace with population 
increases. Add in the $280 billion farm bill that Congress has just 
passed which, unbelievably enough, provides continued subsidies to 
"farmers" (read: agribusiness) already benefiting enormously from high 
food prices. And the European Union, like the United States, is refusing 
to backtrack on its commitment to boost biofuels produced from grain.

    Nor is there much hope for a new Green Revolution. While the 
campaign to disseminate modern, industrial agricultural techniques that 
began in the 1960s did increase food production, rural poverty in the 
developing world remained endemic (which is why the current food crisis 
is so devastating to subsistence farmers). Today, a repetition of that 
Revolution's combo of hybrid seeds, intensive irrigation, and the heavy 
application of petroleum-based fertilizers holds little promise.

    Water is scarcer. Oil (and thus fertilizer) is considerably more 
expensive. The promised next stage of the Green Revolution, the 
application of biotech advances through genetically modified organisms 
to produce new, high-yield, insect-resistant crops, generally hasn't 
lived up to its hype in the developing world.

    Yet Western seed companies are taking advantage of the crisis to 
tout this particular high-tech solution. Oddly enough, all this is 
depressingly reminiscent of the North Korean leadership's fascination 
with quick fixes in the 1990s. North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, for 
instance, touted potatoes as a miracle crop, but the True Potato Seed 
project sponsored by the U.S. government never panned out. Giant rabbits 
produced by a German breeder as a newfangled North Korean livestock were 
a dead-end, probably because the animals themselves consumed as much 
food as they ultimately yielded. A variety of high-yield "supercorn" 
hasn't yet revolutionized North Korean agriculture. Neither in North 
Korea nor in the world at large has anyone yet figured out a technical 
shortcut to permanent cornucopia.

    Markets to the Rescue?

    Perhaps the most conventional approach to the crisis has been to 
rely on market mechanisms. Consider the International Food Policy 
Research Institute, a product of the Green Revolution and its leading 
booster, and its eight-point plan for solving the crisis. Several of the 
steps are eminently sensible, such as expanding humanitarian assistance 
to food-challenged countries, reversing biofuel policies, and investing 
in social programs such as school feeding programs and health care. In 
the mix, however, are more of the same old market mantras. IFPRI 
recommends, for instance, the elimination of the export bans which 40 
countries, including India and Indonesia, recently implemented to keep 
food from flowing out of the country through trade. And it has tried to 
revive a dead horse by urging further World Trade Organization (WTO) 
negotiations to reduce barriers to global trade in agricultural products.

    Pundits and policymakers addressing food problems have called for 
the elimination of government regulations and tariffs ever since England 
repealed its Corn Laws in the 1840s. In the last quarter century, the 
removal of trade restrictions of every sort facilitated greater 
agricultural production globally. Free trade helped large producers grow 
more and sell it cheaper abroad. But free trade hasn't helped the rural 
poor -- or poor countries.

    Quite the opposite. The increased concentration of corporate farming 
and the dismantling of state programs that sustained the agricultural 
sector have driven small farmers out of business all over the planet, 
while making many of those who remain ever more dependent on expensive 
chemical pesticides, fertilizer, and seeds. For instance, as a result of 
the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico lost 1.3 million 
agricultural jobs, forcing many desperate small farmers to cross into 
the United States as migrant workers. Even more strikingly, the 
continent of Africa went from a net exporter of food in the late 1960s 
to a net importer today -- thanks to the World Bank and the WTO riding 
roughshod through the continent in the same cavalry unit as the four 
horsemen of the apocalypse. The Bank's "structural adjustment programs" 
and the WTO's "tariff reductions" don't quite have the ring of war, 
pestilence, famine, and death, but they have been just as devastating.

    The quest for perfect markets usually conceals a global shell game 
in which wealth is redistributed from the many to the few. To even the 
playing field that markets constantly tilt in favor of the powerful, and 
to direct funds toward environmental sustainability, governments need to 
intervene in the economy.

    After all, private enterprise is not going to invest in the 
large-scale improvement of rural infrastructure -- the capital costs are 
high and profit margins far too low. More controversially, developing 
countries may need to maintain, or even reestablish, tariffs and 
subsidies to protect local producers. Since it is both sold and 
consumed, food should be considered a strategic resource, a matter of 
national security. It should be left out of trade negotiations in the 
same way that the "national security exception" allows governments to 
subsidize and protect their military industries as they please.

    On Being Canaries

    Any response that doesn't address all three converging trends -- 
rising energy costs, stagnant per-capita agricultural production, and 
climate change -- will ultimately fail, just as it did in North Korea in 
the early 1990s.

    Land, energy, and the biosphere are limited resources. And it's not 
only a peak in oil that we may be approaching. The depletion of oil 
resources and the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions from their 
current levels have at least entered mainstream discussion. Less well 
known, however, are the problems of peak land and peak water.

    The last time food prices shot up, in the 1970s, the U.S. response 
was to put more land into agricultural production. This was the infamous 
"fencerow-to-fencerow" policy of Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz that 
Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, has linked to the glut 
of corn -- and corn syrup -- that has so profoundly affected global 
diets. But re-Butzing American agriculture is no longer an option. "For 
the first time in our history, we're pushing up against the edge in 
terms of quality land," says Otto Doering, a professor of agricultural 
economics at Purdue University. "We're in a somewhat fixed box."

    The same applies to the world at large. Although rainforests are 
still being transformed into farming plots and pasture -- only 
increasing carbon emissions into the atmosphere -- humanity is reaching 
the limits of arable land. Chalk it up to urbanization, climate 
change-caused drought, and a loss of soil fertility through the 
application of too much fertilizer. Whether forest or farmland, we are 
losing productive land at a rate of one hectare every 7.67 seconds. 
Sure, there's some wiggle room in Africa and Latin America, but bringing 
this additional land into cultivation will buy us only a little time -- 
at the expense of the overall environment.

    The water situation is even more precarious. The world is facing a 
declining reserve of fresh water with the depletion of underground 
reserves in India, China, Africa, and even the United States. (Say 
goodbye to the Midwest's mighty Ogallala aquifer, which nourishes 
America's breadbasket). Aside from the 1.1 billion people who already 
lack safe drinking water, according to the U.N., this crisis threatens 
farming, which monopolizes 70% of all fresh water.

    Global temperature increases will only aggravate the situation. 
Rising oceans will inflict death-by-salt on increasing amounts of 
low-lying farmland, while drought dries up once fertile farming regions. 
Any intensification of the Green Revolution, dependent as it is on 
chemical fertilizer and irrigation, is only likely to add to the 
problem. And don't count on the oceans to offset the food that will no 
longer be grown on land. The catch of wild fish has remained pretty much 
the same since the mid-1980s, and fish farming, too, requires land, 
water, and energy.

    In the long run, the only realistic response is a comprehensive 
program to address, in tandem, the triple crises of energy, climate, and 
land and water resource exhaustion. If policymakers take into 
consideration only one, or even two, of the components of this trinity, 
they may well end up doing more harm than good. The making of biofuels 
from corn, for instance, was an attempt to address the problems of the 
cost of energy and the dangers of climate change, but it neglected to 
consider the effect on agricultural production -- hence, the 
disastrously soaring price of corn. Calls for the next phase of a Green 
Revolution, which address agricultural production, are guaranteed to 
play havoc with the energy and water crises.

    Such partial approaches don't work largely because they assume 
unlimited resources. The original sin of unrestrained growth can be 
found in the economic theologies of both communism and capitalism. In 
these systems, neither the state nor the market has ever operated 
according to ecological principles. Now, we must quickly explore ways of 
boosting agricultural production in fundamentally sustainable ways 
without, somehow, expanding our carbon footprint.

    Certainly organic farming will play a role here. Although Green 
Revolution guru Norman Borlaug has dismissed organic agriculture as 
incapable of feeding the world, an important new study published by 
Cambridge University Press shows that organic systems in developing 
countries can produce 80% more than conventional farms.

    Integrated farming systems that rely on sustainable energy -- solar, 
wind, tidal -- will also be critical. No-till agriculture can cut down 
on energy use and soil erosion.

    While properly wary of snake-oil salesmen, neither can we afford to 
be Luddites. New technologies will play a role as well, as long as they 
reduce fertilizer and pesticide use, don't shackle debt-ridden farmers 
to major seed companies, and meet strict consumer safety requirements.

    Even if global food prices stabilize this year and projections of a 
record grain harvest hold, the underlying problems will remain.

    So it was with North Korea. With emergency assistance, the country 
pulled back from the brink by 2000. In 2008, however, it is again in a 
serious food crisis, thanks to high energy prices, flooding, and a 
shortfall in last year's grain harvest. Once again, North Korea is the 
world's canary. As we sit in the dark in the deep hole that we've dug 
for ourselves, will we finally heed its warning?

    ------------

    John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the 
Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author of numerous articles on 
food policy and on North Korea.

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