That Old Horseman again

Famine

**Audio Version**

The relative stability of the global climate since the end of the last ice age was almost certainly a factor in the development of agriculture, and of the civilisation we take for granted. The world is now home to almost 8 billion humans, and if present trends continue, may peak at 10.5 billion at around 2080. The real situation is probably not so ‘rosy’ however: the climate that coddled humanity for the past ten thousand years is no more, and our ability to feed ourselves must be considered doubtful. Climate chaos means agricultural chaos, and agricultural chaos means food shortages. Agricultural failure has always been a part of the picture, sometimes disastrous, sometimes manageable, but we are now entering an era where agricultural shocks are more common, more severe and are far more likely to co-incide across multiple breadbasket regions. Even in this supposedly ‘normal’ moment, 29% of the population are food-insecure. The types of weather that our disruptions to the climate are producing, (and will certainly produce more of), will bring about severe, widespread, and probably catastrophic food insecurity within the next decade or two (Kornhuber et al, 2023). We have engineered the conditions for famine on a scale never experienced in human history.

The last ice-age ended around 14,000 years ago, and was followed by period of gradual warming, which leveled off about 10,000 years ago, into a remarkably stable period known as the Holocene. The earliest archaeological evidence of agriculture is the cultivation of faba beans in the Levant, dated to around 14,000 years ago¹. The farming of wheat is reckoned to have begun about 10,000 years ago. Maize cultivation started 8,700 years ago. In other words, most, if not all of the crops that nourish humans today were developed during a period when the climate was particularly stable. As we enter a period of potentially severe, (and in human terms permanent) climatic instability, it is likely that food production will become ever more fraught. Conditions will be ‘normal’, and conducive most of the time - the fat part of the bell-curve - but at the ever-increasing pointy ends of that curve, it is the anomalous events that will do the damage. According the the Colorado State University: “…with a shift of only 2 standard deviations, what was once ordinary becomes rare, what was once very rare becomes ordinary, and what was once almost unheard of becomes merely unusual” https://changingclimates.colostate.edu/docs/BellCurveAveragesExtremes.pdf

https://petergardner.info/2017/03/heatwaves-normal-curves-and-climate-change/

In this piece, I want to show how farming is being, and will increasingly be, impacted by the changing climate. I also want to point to some of the changes we can make to the ways we feed ourselves that might improve our resilience.

Subtle Weather Changes

Agriculture developed in each region in close association with climate. The species grown and the specific cultivars within those species, the agricultural calendar and the range of ancillary farming activities and livelihood strategies all reflected a long process of trial, error and refinement. In Africa the climate was so predictable that farmers 50 years ago knew exactly when to prepare their fields and sow their crops. They knew how many days it would rain for and for how long the moisture would stay around. When I worked in Niger, Ethiopia and Senegal in the early 2010’s, farmers reported that they could no longer rely on the rains. Rain would come early, or late. It would start, and then stop, causing a young crop to die. The farmer would then need to plant again. This could happen two or three times in a season – a huge imposition on labour and food/seed reserves. And at the other end of the season, there was no certainty that the rain would continue long enough to bring the crop to maturity. Crop improvement agencies such as the International Centre for Crop Research in the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) report that traditional varieties of millet used in the Sahel could take up to 120 days to mature. These days, such a long-developing cultivar is untenable in many areas, so the goal is to breed cultivars that can be harvested in as little as 60 days. The growing season is being squeezed into a smaller and smaller window (with potential ‘costs’ in terms of disease resistance, yield potential, genetic diversity etc).

Extreme Weather Events

The broad type of farming activity that can be undertaken is determined by climate: we can’t grow bananas in Tasmania, and we can’t grow (rain-fed) maize in the desert. But beyond those broad brushstrokes, it is the weather, and particularly the extremes of weather that decide the success or failure of farming enterprises. The fate of a crop can hinge on a single day – of extreme heat, extreme rainfall, or extreme wind or cold. But just as likely are the seasons of extreme – be that drought, or rainfall – such as the UK has experienced for two years running, flooding fields, preventing planting and drowning crops (Horton, 2024).

The warming of our atmosphere means that there is a lot more energy in the system, and this results in increased intensity of weather events at the extremes. Heavier rainfall events, hotter temperature peaks and colder temperature troughs. No matter how much a crop might benefit from on-average higher temperatures (or as the disingenuous have claimed – higher CO₂ levels), it can still be destroyed, literally in a day, by extreme temperatures or by flooding. The frequency of these types of events is increasing rapidly worldwide. A United Nations report shows that extreme weather events jumped by 83% in the decade between 2000 and 2019 compared to the previous decade (UNDRR, 2020).

These events make the headlines when they affect large populations, but they also affect farmers and farming activities. Farmers are typically a resilient lot, but each ‘shock’ erodes some of that resilience. For a family farm, the loss of a crop can mean the loss of a year’s income, whilst cleaning up after an event (rebuilding, de-fouling fences, disposing of dead livestock, replacing machinery) only add to the workload and financial burden. Moreover, farming increasingly operates within a corporatised system, subject to the predatory (or at best parasitic) demands of a financial system intent on generating short term profit.

Drought

At the time of writing, ‘extreme or exceptional’ drought conditions pertained across parts of Central America, Canada, the Amazon basin, Central and West Africa, North Africa, northern Ethiopia, Russia, China and some parts of Australia. These regions include some of the world’s most important food producing areas. Drought is not an unusual phenomenon in itself, but the frequency and severity of drought has increased by more than a third in the past quarter of a century (Ellerbeck, 2022), and according to the United Nations, 75% of the world's population will be affected by 2050.

The causes of drought are complex, but the increase in incidence and severity are almost certainly caused by climate change (and there are numerous drivers under this broad banner), and direct human impacts, in particular, the clearing of forests. The nature of drought also seems to be changing. New forms of ‘drought’ have been reported, such as ‘green drought’ in Africa, where enough rain falls early in the season to give the appearance of plenty, but not enough to provide the soil moisture to grow crops. In southern Australia we have observed what have been called ‘snap droughts’, wherein, though annual rainfall might be close to average, rain simply does not fall for 2-3 months, distressing even the native vegetation, and severely impacting the operations of farms. The timing of rainfall can be critical even in the temperate zone. In southern Australia’s mediterranean climate, cropping is mostly rain-fed, (and in the absence of irrigation), occurs in winter. If the autumn is dry, and the ‘break’ comes too late, then it can be too cold for crops to grow well by the time the systems of the Southern Annular Mode move back over the continent and start to deliver rain.

Part of the reason for the unreliability of the autumn ‘break’ in southern Australia is that the warming climate is moving the ‘tropics’ pole-ward. In central Australia, the delineation between summer- dominant rainfall and winter- dominant rainfall used to sit about 30km north of Alice Springs, on the Tropic of Capricorn. Over the past twenty-five years, this delineation has shifted southward by about 500km. In effect the tropics are expanding, and whilst this may lead to more rainfall overall in particular places, the additional rain may be of limited benefit if it is lost to increased evapo-transpiration (due to higher temperatures), or if the ecology, or agroecology (for bio-physical, political or social reasons) is not able to adapt to the new pattern. With the expansion of the tropics there has been a concomitant increase in the spread and risks of tropical pests and diseases. This has potential impacts far from the tropics: Queensland Fruit Fly has established as a major pest in parts of northern and central Victoria over the past five years, and a succession of unusually wet springs has enabled the spread of allium rust through virtually all Victorian garlic crops over the past three years². Human health too can be directly affected, particularly with the expansion of mosquito borne diseases such as dengue fever and encephalitis.

Coincident Crop Failures

Climate change changes everything. The stability of the Holocene climate is no more, and extreme weather events are increasing rapidly in frequency and severity. It is only a matter of time before a critical fraction of the worlds agricultural production is compromised at the same time. It is not hard to imagine: drought in South-Eastern Australia, Canada and East Africa; ongoing war in Ukraine; massive floods in the maize growing areas of the US; locust plagues in Africa; drought across China and South-East Asia, late snowfalls across Europe; political unrest in Brazil. And it is not just crops. Agriculture needs a workforce, especially in the global south, but extreme weather events, such as heatwaves can disable or kill people at least as quickly as they can kill plants. Conditions of humid-heatwave could, and probably will, decimate some rural populations in the coming decades³.

Several such ‘shocks’ could (and do) happen around the world, at any time, and even were it concurrently, the food system would (mostly) cope. But add a few more co-incident events, and make some of the major ones multi-year events so that reserves are drained, and the system will fail. Actually, the system will not fail. The system will do what it is supposed to do, and supply food to those who are able to pay for it. Those who cannot afford to pay, will need to ‘make do’. For the most vulnerable, this means famine, and given that, as I mentioned above, that 29% of the world’s population – at least 2.3 billion – are currently food insecure, this will be a famine on an unthinkable scale. Meanwhile, a further thirty percent of the population will slip into food insecurity, having liquidated all their assets just to survive. These people who will die or find themselves on the edge of hunger are not the people who created the crisis, and beyond irony, their loss will make almost no difference to global greenhouse gas emissions.

The first domino to fall in such a set of events could be as far away as the next El Nino: as Richard Crim shows, these events are becoming much more pronounced. During La Nina events, heat is absorbed into the oceans. During an El Nino, it is released to the atmosphere::

“The [recent 2024] Ocean Heat Content numbers are OMG bad. It implies that 2025 will be like 2022. A La Nina year in which temperatures actually increase. No cooling off, just a lot of heat building up in the oceans and a monster El Nino slouching toward Bethlehem”.

The World is already vulnerable

Even before any noticeable influence of a changed climate, an unusually powerful El Nino in the 1870’s brought on severe drought that caused the deaths of up to 50 million people in India, China, Africa and South America in the 1870’s (Marshall, 2018). The conditions of ongoing hunger are always multi-factorial, and this famine event was no exception, the drought and subsequent crop failure being exacerbated by colonial resource appropriation. Certainly, colonial authorities seem to have made little or no efforts to mitigate the situation anywhere: racist narratives assumed that vulnerability to famine was one expression of a people’s ‘backwardness’, and their plight inevitable, and subtly ‘deserved’.

Governance was also instrumental in creating famine in Ireland (1845-52), Bengal (1943-44) and Ethiopia (1983-84). In these cases, ‘production shocks’ (drought or plant pathogen) created a vulnerability, but indifferent or malign policy created the famine (Keneally, 2010).

It is worth noting that even in our world of (apparent) plenty, with international trade connecting every region and every locale, and with capital markets that are ascribed the ability to allocate resources ‘efficiently’, that famine has not been eradicated. Hunger remains endemic in many regions, including the Horn of Africa, Sudan and Ethiopia, where even in ‘normal’ times, 7 million people are dependent on international food aid. A hidden hunger is even more widespread, as a huge percentage of children, even in relatively well-off communities are denied diets adequate for a human to grow and thrive, with chronic shortage of micro-nutrients and complete proteins.

The global economy aspires to efficiency - but the measure of efficiency is not the nutrition of the poor, it is the degree to which money generates more money. So you can stand in Ethiopia and watch convoys of trucks carrying food grown on Chinese-owned farms drive through villages of hungry people on their way to China. Politics matters too, so you can pay farmers in the Mid-West of the US to grow more corn than is needed, and then sell the excess as food aid, thus undermining African agricultural economies. In fact, the dismantling of the traditional food systems of the global south served two conjoined interests: one was to thwart the (feared) spread of communism by ensuring that the growing urban populations of emerging nations were well fed and complacent, and secondly, to continue the colonial project of incorporating the global south into the capitalist economy. The poor and powerless of the world are only served by the system so long as it is profitable and expedient to do so. If (when) a real global food shortage emerges, it’s hard to believe that the vulnerable of the world will not be left to fend for themselves.

The interlinked nature of our world promises, and sometimes delivers, protection and relief from food shortage. A production shock in one region can be easily offset by normal production elsewhere (Janetos, 2017). International organisations, international markets and shipping provide the links, and if you are not desperately poor (or you don’t look too deeply either at the big picture or the fine details), it all seems to work reasonably well. Indeed, the high priests of conventional economics count the ‘successful’ feeding of the burgeoning world population as one of the great successes of capitalism and free markets. Yet global food production will need to double on 2005 levels by 2050 (Tilman et al, 2011). This is both a matter of straight-up population growth, and also of increasing wealth leading to an increase in consumption of meat (with significant amounts of grain inefficiently diverted to stockfeed). This increase needs to be achieved in a context of global soil deterioration, severe limitations and ethical constraints on the expansion of agriculture into ‘virgin’ lands (destruction of forests), diminishing fossil fuel reserves and an increasingly erratic climate.

The system is dependent on finite resources

The exponential growth of the human population over the past century was made possible by a one-off bonanza of cheaply available energy in the form of coal, oil and gas. Even leaving aside the climate impacts of these fuel sources, the system is in crisis. As ‘B’ (an energy systems insider) from the “Honest Sorcerer’ substack makes abundantly clear, the richest, easiest and cheapest-to-access sources of oil (and most other resources) have been exhausted already, and all future reserves will require ever increasing amounts of energy and finance to exploit, being deeper, lower quality or in difficult locations. The result is an ever-diminishing energy-return-on-investment (in both a financial and energy sense). This situation will lead to somewhat higher prices, but in the febrile economies of a climate change and energy constricted world, there are very real limits to the price that can be sustained on many, or most key economic activities. Agriculture is one example: if fuel prices rise beyond a certain point, farmers will have difficulty running their tractors, and, already heavily indebted, many will become insolvent. Transport costs will rise. The cost of synthetic fertilisers (made with gas) will rise.

It is worth mentioning two other finite elements that are critical to agriculture, and diminishing rapidly. These are Phosphorus and Potassium. As usual, the wealthy will be largely untouched for a long time, but, priced out of the market, the poor will be even less able to grow the food they need. As these factor shortages deepen, food production will begin to decline. Slowly at first. Populations will feel the pinch. There will be discontent amongst the wealthy. There will catastrophe amongst the poor. That doubling of production seems a long way off.

What is to be done?

Here I am at a loss. I know I am, as a writer, supposed to know, to convince you of this-or-that. Tim Flannery has suggested giant floating kelp farms in the oceans, (possibly sequestering carbon), but also creating perfect growing environments for shellfish that could provide the world’s protein (Flannery, 2017). Alas, it is more likely to provide protein for the rich, and protein for the the rich’s pigs, chickens and aquaculture fish. Still, the proposal, if scaled has wide benefits, and is a way of increasing food supplies that improves, rather than worsens our climate situation. George Monbiot has been promoting the concept of ‘precision fermentation’, using atmospheric nitrogen and sunlight to create ‘food’ (Monbiot, 2022). Who knows, it might be delicious? What we can say with certainty is that such high-tech production will be firmly held and defended by giant corporations, and our access to it will depend on our ability to pay. Monbiot’s vision is a world where farming is left behind, and land is re-wilded and allowed to regenerate. I remain deeply unconvinced: from perspectives of culture, equity, scalability and acceptance. In any case, if either of these approaches were to be refined and scaled in time, let alone to operate in the Public Interest, it would take a massive pre-emptive investment of public money, and it would have to happen very, very soon.

At the more local level, we ordinary folk need to begin transforming our relationship to food - to take more responsibility for ourselves. We need to consider how climate change and resource depletion are likely to impact in our specific situations. Think of a place similar to yours, but perhaps 2-400km closer to the equator. What grows there? What are the traditional crops (and cuisine) in analogous parts of the world? We need to grow what we can in the most efficient way that we can. That might mean wicking beds, permaculture systems (Mollison, 1988), or just a simple vegetable garden in place of a lawn. We need to do things that do not make economic sense right now, like trying to grow a proportion of our needs. For protein, that might mean a milking goat, a patch of beans, or a grove of nut trees. For energy, we might plant olive trees, or learn where our local wild trees are and harvest them in the autumn. If we have some land, we might grow small crops of grain - wheat, barley or faba beans - these require labour, but the technologies are simpler than you might think and really quite convivial. For now, a lot of us live out of a supermarket - tethered to global supply chains - but the future might not afford us that dubious privilege. We have been lulled into dumb consumerism. Our future food security demands we learn the skills of our forebears. I’m not just saying ‘look after yourself’ here: I’m saying that the looming crisis absolutely applies to you, and that you cannot look after someone else if you cannot look after yourself.

We need to build mutual support networks in our regions and probably beyond. The climate change/resource depleting world will be a world of heightened risk. You will probably not be able to insure your home. You will be hit with many more severe weather events than you are now. You may not be able to buy, or afford many of the things you now regard as essential. You will probably not have a job, or if you do, you will struggle to make ends meet. The government may not be coming to help. The government may have been taken over by self-serving religious nuts and demagogues. The government may be wholly owned by a dissociated and sociopathic oligarchy.

How far does our (alleged) humanitarian ethos go? A first question might be ‘who do you feel responsible for?’ Personally, communally, theoretically/globally? I know that we in the wealthy global north have some great skills and plenty of form in the practice of indifference when it comes to the majority world. But really, what can you do in the face of as much as half of the world’s population facing catastrophic famine? Even if there are some food reserves, and these can be mobilised to areas of need, what organisational structures exist that could operate at this scale? Which regions would we support? How long would the intervention be needed? What food reserves could possibly be adequate, and what rich-world domestic politics would need to be overcome to release the food to where it is needed? And what if these crises just keep coming around (which they will)? Anything that could possibly make a difference - like supporting local agriculture, or maintaining a diversity of crops – needed to be started decades ago. Needed to have not been dismantled by colonialism and ‘development’ in the first place.

How, I wonder, does one comport oneself when half of the world’s population is at immediate risk of death by starvation? What could we rich folk do that is adequate to the moment? I know people who could hold their heads up in such a calamity, knowing that they have done all that they could, and through a lifetime. But I also know that those same people will suffer terribly, acutely aware that they have failed. And in the midst of that calamity, despite the pain, those people will say: “All is lost. Now let us take the next step”. And the rest of us? Will we finally shake off the smug complacency, the thin veneer of impunity our wealth affords us, until it doesn’t?

I think it safe to say that this famine, this coming famine, will be the decisive moment when the old story of human exceptionalism, productivism and separation collapses along with the competitive, consumerist societies it has spawned. This next few decades will be a trial (in the old sense of the word) for humanity. Dramatic and catastrophic change is baked in. For indigenous people the trial is to survive, hold and rebuild (and to slough off any exploitative values that have metastasised into them from the capitalist world) . For the Global North, the trial is to transform utterly. If we can reinvent ourselves, and rebuild a respectful and regenerative relationship to the rest of the living world, the crisis might usher in a new golden age wherein our descendants find their true purpose in being alive on this planet. If we cannot, then the future is very bleak indeed.

References

Ellerbeck, (2022), Droughts are getting worse around the world, here’s why and what needs to be done, World Economic Forum.

Flannery, Tim, (2017), Sunlight and Seaweed: An Argument for How to Feed, Power and Clean Up the World, The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, Australia.

Horton, Helena, (2024), Farmers warn ‘crisis is building’ as record rainfall drastically reduces UK food production | Farming | The Guardian

Janetos, Anthony (2017), Vulnerable system? What if world's breadbaskets experience crop failure at same time? - Genetic Literacy Project

Keneally, T. (2010) Three Famines, Public Affairs

Kornhuber, K., Lesk, C., Schleussner, C. F., Jägermeyr, J., Pfleiderer, P., & Horton, R. M.. (2023). Risks of synchronized low yields are underestimated in climate and crop model projections. Nature Communications, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38906-7

Marshall, Michael, (2018), A freak 1870s climate event caused drought across three continents | New Scientist

Mollison, Bill, (1988), Permaculture, A Designer’s Manual, Tagari Press, Tyalgum.

Monbiot, George, (2022), Fermenting a Revolution, https://www.monbiot.com/2022/11/26/fermenting-a-revolution/

Tilman, David et al (2011), Global food demand and the sustainable intensification of agriculture | PNAS https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1116437108

UNDRR (2020), The human cost of disasters: an overview of the last 20 years (2000-2019), https://www.undrr.org/publication/human-cost-disasters-overview-last-20-years-2000-2019 (accessed 05/06/2024).

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1. There are live, and lively debates around this, with some holding that agriculture goes back tens of thousands of years, in the middle-east, the Americas and Australia. Inevitably, the evidence is slim, and many such arguments tend to hinge on how we define agriculture.

2. Leaving organic growers in a conundrum: lose the crop? Or save the crop with fungicides, ceasing to be organic and compromising the fungal life of the soil. These are the pivotal decisions that farmers have to make in order to maintain a livelihood and maintain food supplies to the towns and cities.

3. ‘Wet-bulb’ temperatures over 35 degrees are critically dangerous for humans and other mammals. https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2023/12/01/new-perspective-on-limits-of-survival-and-liveability-in-extreme.html