[Pollinator] NYT: Our Coming Food Crisis by Gary Nabhan

Mon Jul 22 15:32:18 PDT 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/opinion/our-coming-food-crisis.html?pagewa
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<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/opinion/our-coming-food-crisis.html?pagew
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 <http://www.nytimes.com/>  <http://www.nytimes.com/> The New York Times
<http://www.nytimes.com/> 

  _____  

July 21, 2013

Our Coming Food Crisis

By GARY PAUL NABHAN

TUCSON, Ariz. - THIS summer the tiny town of Furnace Creek, Calif., may once
again grace the nation's front pages. Situated in Death Valley, it last made
news in 1913, when it set the record for the world's hottest recorded
temperature, at 134 degrees. With the heat wave currently blanketing the
Western states, and given that the mercury there has already reached 130
degrees, the news media is awash in speculation that Furnace Creek could
soon break its own mark. 

Such speculation, though, misses the real concern posed by the heat wave,
which covers an area larger than New England. The problem isn't spiking
temperatures, but a new reality in which long stretches of triple-digit days
are common - threatening not only the lives of the millions of people who
live there, but also a cornerstone of the American food supply. 

People living outside the region seldom recognize its immense contribution
to American agriculture: roughly 40 percent of the net farm income for the
country normally comes from the 17 Western states; cattle and sheep
production make up a significant part of that, as do salad greens, dry
beans, onions, melons, hops, barley, wheat and citrus fruits. The current
heat wave will undeniably diminish both the quality and quantity of these
foods. 

The most vulnerable crops are those that were already in flower and fruit
when temperatures surged, from apricots and barley to wheat and zucchini.
Idaho farmers have documented how their potato yields have been knocked back
because their heat-stressed plants are not developing their normal number of
tubers. Across much of the region, temperatures on the surface of food and
forage crops hit 105 degrees, at least 10 degrees higher than the threshold
for most temperate-zone crops. 

What's more, when food and forage crops, as well as livestock, have had to
endure temperatures 10 to 20 degrees higher than the long-term averages,
they require far more water than usual. The Western drought, which has
persisted for the last few years, has already diminished both surface water
and groundwater supplies and increased energy costs, because of all the
water that has to be pumped in from elsewhere. 

If these costs are passed on to consumers, we can again expect food prices
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/food_prices/
index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> , especially for beef and lamb, to rise,
just as they did in 2012, the hottest year in American history. So extensive
was last year's drought that more than 1,500 counties - about half of all
the counties in the country - were declared national drought disaster areas,
and 90 percent of those were hit by heat waves as well. 

The answer so far has been to help affected farmers with payouts from crop
insurance plans. But while we can all sympathize with affected farmers, such
assistance is merely a temporary response to a long-term problem. 

Fortunately, there are dozens of time-tested strategies that our best
farmers and ranchers have begun to use. The problem is that several
agribusiness advocacy organizations have done their best to block any
federal effort to promote them, including leaving them out of the current
farm bill
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/farm_bill_us
/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> , or of climate
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/climate-and-
energy-legislation/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  change legislation at
all. 

One strategy would be to promote the use of locally produced compost to
increase the moisture-holding capacity of fields, orchards and vineyards. In
addition to locking carbon in the soil, composting buffers crop roots from
heat and drought while increasing forage and food-crop yields. By simply
increasing organic matter in their fields from 1 percent to 5 percent,
farmers can increase water storage in the root zones from 33 pounds per
cubic meter to 195 pounds. 

And we have a great source of compostable waste: cities. Since much of the
green waste in this country is now simply generating methane emissions from
landfills, cities should be mandated to transition to green-waste sorting
and composting, which could then be distributed to nearby farms. 

Second, we need to reduce the bureaucratic hurdles to using small- and
medium-scale rainwater harvesting and gray water (that is, waste water
excluding toilet water) on private lands, rather than funneling all runoff
to huge, costly and vulnerable reservoirs behind downstream dams. Both urban
and rural food production can be greatly enhanced through proven techniques
of harvesting rain and biologically filtering gray water for irrigation.
However, many state and local laws restrict what farmers can do with such
water. 

Moreover, the farm bill should include funds from the Strikeforce Initiative
of the Department of Agriculture to help farmers transition to forms of
perennial agriculture - initially focusing on edible tree crops and
perennial grass pastures - rather than providing more subsidies to biofuel
production from annual crops. Perennial crops not only keep 7.5 to 9.4 times
more carbon in the soil than annual crops, but their production also reduces
the amount of fossil fuels needed to till the soil every year. 

We also need to address the looming seed crisis. Because of recent episodes
of drought, fire and floods, we are facing the largest shortfall in the
availability of native grass, forage legume, tree and shrub seeds in
American history. Yet current budget-cutting proposals threaten to
significantly reduce the number of federal plant material centers, which
promote conservation best practices. 

If our rangelands, forests and farms are to recover from the devastating
heat, drought and wildfires of the last three years, they need to be seeded
with appropriate native forage and ground-cover species to heal from the
wounds of climatic catastrophes. To that end, the farm bill should direct
more money to the underfinanced seed collection and distribution programs. 

Finally, the National Plant Germplasm System, the Department of
Agriculture's national reserve of crop seeds, should be charged with
evaluating hundreds of thousands of seed collections for drought and heat
tolerance, as well as other climatic adaptations - and given the financing
to do so. Thousands of heirloom vegetables and heritage grains already in
federal and state collections could be rapidly screened and then used by
farmers for a fraction of what it costs a biotech firm to develop, patent
and market a single "climate-friendly" crop. 

Investing in climate-change adaptation will be far more cost-effective than
doling out $11.6 billion in crop insurance payments, as the government did
last year, for farmers hit with diminished yields or all-out crop failures. 

Unfortunately, some agribusiness organizations fear that if they admit that
accelerating climate change
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?
inline=nyt-classifier>  is already affecting farmers, it will shackle them
with more regulations. But those organizations are hardly serving their
member farmers and ranchers if they keep them at risk of further suffering
from heat extremes and extended drought. 

And no one can reasonably argue that the current system offers farmers any
long-term protection. Last year some farmers made more from insurance
payments than from selling their products, meaning we are dangerously close
to subsidizing farmers for not adapting to changing climate conditions. 

It's now up to our political and business leaders to get their heads out of
the hot sand and do something tangible to implement climate change policy
and practices before farmers, ranchers and consumers are further affected.
Climate adaptation is the game every food producer and eater must now play.
A little investment coming too late will not help us adapt in time to this
new reality. 

Gary Paul Nabhan <http://garynabhan.com/i/>  is a research scientist at the
Southwest Center at the University of Arizona and the author of "Growing
Food in a Hotter, Drier Land: Lessons From Desert Farmers in Adapting to
Climate Uncertainty." 

Jennifer Tsang

Marketing Director

Pollinator Partnership

www.pollinator.org 

423 Washington St. 5th Fl.

San Francisco, CA 94111

T: 415.362.1137

F: 415.362.3070

 <http://pollinator.org/SHARE.htm> 

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