A few responses to Prince Charles

I just read the transcript of Prince Charles' speech on sustainable agriculture in DC last week. There are a lot of good ideas, and a few areas in which I think more can be said.

Ag subsidies: I believe there’s a strong consensus across many individual issues and disciplines that American and European agricultural subsidies are wasteful and counter-productive. The challenge is a political one – there are about 20 farm states, and it’s very difficult to get things done legislatively in other areas (health care, immigration, climate change, you pick) without the support of at least some of that bipartisan group of 40 farm senators. It’s not a rich-world-only issue, too – here’s a year-old WSJ article (subscription required) on how difficult it has been to repeal fertilizer subsidies in India despite 40 years of trying, and recent fertilizer subsidies in Malawi have become a darling case study of country-led agricultural development proponents, despite criticism by the World Bank and others.

Scale: I think Prince Charles is too blasé about dismissing the benefits of scale for cost and efficiency of agricultural production. Cost is important not as much to you and me, but definitely to the urban slum-dweller in Cairo or Mumbai who spends 2/3 of his or her income on food. And efficiency is important for the environment – less yield per hectare of land means more land under cultivation, and since there’s not much unused cropland around the world, this results in degradation and cultivation of ecologically sensitive areas like the Amazon, the Sahel, Indonesia’s peat swamps, etc. If we can replicate current yields at scale using organic methods, that would be great, but the burden of proof is still on those who claim this can be done.

Local production: Another attractive idea that I think is easier to apply to ourselves (living in not only the richest but also one of the most agriculturally productive countries), but runs into difficulty when generalized across the world. There is a lot of upside in smallholder productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa, but in other regions that import food today – I’m thinking of mainly the Middle East and China – it would be very difficult for them to produce more food domestically without exactly the kind of unsustainable drawing down of natural capital that Prince Charles rightly warns against. If we want the most holistic and least naturally destructive agricultural system at a global level, it has to include a significant component of trade between the most fertile parts of the world and the less fertile but more populated parts (unfortunately the two don’t match).
To close, a photo I took from an airplane of pivot-irrigated wheat in the middle of the Egyptian desert, with water drawn unsustainably from the underlying aquifer (we do this in the American West, too). We Americans are very fortunate for the fertility as well as the economic prosperity of our country, and not all countries have the agro-ecological potential to feed themselves in a sustainable way.

India's invincible fertilizer subsidies

Long but fascinating WSJ article on the history of fertilizer subsidies in India. A few choice quotes (and apologies for the lack of synthesis and commentary):

In 1967, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imported 18,000 tons of hybrid wheat seeds from Mexico. The effect was miraculous. The wheat harvest that year was so bountiful that grain overflowed storage facilities. Those seeds required chemical fertilizers to maximize yield. The challenge was to make fertilizers affordable to farmers who lacked the cash to pay for even the basics—food, clothing and shelter. Back then, giving cash or vouchers to millions of farmers living all over India seemed like an impossible task fraught with the potential for corruption. So the government paid subsidies to fertilizer companies, who agreed to sell for less than the cost of production, at prices set by the government.

In budget crunches, subsidies on those fertilizers have been reduced or cut, but urea's subsidy has survived. That's because urea manufacturers form a powerful lobby, and farmers are most heavily reliant on this fertilizer, making it a political hot potato to raise the price.

With urea selling for a fraction of the price of other fertilizers, farmers began using substantially more of the nitrogen-rich material than more expensive potassium and phosphorus products.

In the state of Haryana, farmers used 32 times more nitrogen than potassium in the fiscal year ended March 2009, much more than the recommended 4-to-1 ratio, according to the Indian Journal of Fertilizers, a trade publication. In Punjab state, they used 24 times more nitrogen than potassium, the figures show.

Under the new plan, the government will offer subsidies to fertilizer companies on the nutrients, such as sulphur, phosphorus and potassium, from which their products are made, rather than the fertilizer products themselves. The idea is to provide incentives for farmers to apply a better mix of nutrients. But in a major compromise, the government left in place the old subsidy on urea—meaning farmers will still have a big incentive to use too much of it.

Hat tip to a colleague who first passed this on to me.

Quick-and-dirty calculation of ag footprint

Following a comment discussion on resource footprints over at Greed, Green and Grains, I felt the urge to do a very rough calculation of the relative per capita agricultural footprints of a few countries (U.S., China, India, and Brazil). Here’s what came out:

	U.S.	Brazil	China	India
Caloric consumption (Kcal/capita/day)	3,855	3,118	2,970	2,348
Ag footprint (Kcal/capita/day)	6,024	4,819	3,979	2,597
Relative ag footprint (U.S. to country)	1.0x	1.3x	1.5x	2.3x
Relative oil footprint (U.S. to country)	1x	~5x	~12x	~30x

I’m not surprised by this result – back-of-the-envelope is that U.S. eats ~70% more calories, gets 23% of calories from meat/dairy compared to 6% in India, and uses 3.4 kg of feed per calorie of animal product vs. 1.8 kg since U.S. is more heavily weighted toward meat. Add these factors up and the overall gap not much bigger than double.

I didn’t include waste because while consumer waste is much lower in developing countries, harvest and post-harvest waste is much higher. Even if we do assume the U.S. wastes 40% and India only 10% of food production, the ratio only jumps to 3.3x – still an order of magnitude less than the oil consumption differential of ~30x.

India is about as extreme an example as you can get – not only low average caloric intake (people tend to forget that India has worse malnourishment than Sub-Saharan Africa), but abnormally low meat consumption when adjusted for income level due to cultural/religious factors. So unless my calculations are totally off (and I’ll lay out the details below, so someone can point out if they are), we can say with confidence that rich-poor differential in per capita agricultural footprint is an order of magnitude smaller than the rich-poor differential in energy footprint.

(If you adjust calories consumed for local yields, the gap will be even smaller due to low agricultural productivity in many developing countries… but that's an entirely different topic.)

Calculation details
To simplify I made the assumption that a calorie of grain has a fixed “agricultural footprint.” I used FAOStat data on per capita caloric consumption and FAPRI data on per capita meat and dairy consumption. Conversions for calories/kg and feed conversion are from internet and personal knowledge – please let me know where they’re wrong.

Animal product	Kcal/kg	kg feed/kg product
Beef	1,500	8.0
Pork	2,800	4.0
Mutton/Goat meat	2,070	4.0
Chicken	1,440	2.0
Milk	600	1.5
Cheese	3,300	1.5
Butter	7,720	1.5

I’m missing fish and eggs. There are probably other errors as well – tell me!

Oil footprint, by the way, is based on barrels of oil consumed per capita per day.

Update: How convenient - the FAO's 2009 State of Food and Agriculture report (entitled "Livestock in the balance") has a chart showing calories of livestock products consumed by region. My estimates were within 100 calories for each, which gives me incremental confidence in my answer above.

“Solutions” for wildlife conservation, cont.

To pirates, add military standoffs in disputed territory:

It seems the very adorable Asiatic black bears of Kashmir are one group that is pleased by all the conflict there. Authorities estimate that their population has gone from 800 in 1990 to 3,000 now. They (and other endangered species in the area, presumably) are benefiting it seems from lingering fear of violence, which stops poachers and hunters, as well as the dearth of hunting rifles after the Indian authorities confiscated them as an attempt to quell the separatist revolt that started twenty years ago.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like this particular “solution” generalizes (not to mention the terrible human costs):

It looks like conflict itself is terrible for wildlife, and happens disproportionately in biodiversity hotspots. One study found that 80 percent of the armed conflicts between 1950-2000 took place in these areas important to maintaining plant and animal diversity. Detrimental effects on population and habitat, such as those suffered by the DRC's gorilla population are well known.

The bright side, looking at the Kashmir bear evidence and the Korean DMZ, seems to be that when conflict pauses, the animals benefit as well as the humans.

Is green technology like vaccine technology?

India's former intransigence on GHG emissions has unfortunately quickly reasserted itself after a brief hiatus.

Then just yesterday, India’s prime minister ratcheted up the rhetoric again, reiterating the need for developed countries to provide developing countries with the wherewithal to clean up their economies—essentially for free. From the FT:

“Climate friendly and environmentally sound technologies should be viewed as global public good,” [Prime Minister Manmohan] Singh told the United Nations-sponsored Delhi High Level Conference on Climate Change: Technology Development and Transfer. “Such an approach has been adopted successfully in the case of pharmaceutical technologies for the benefit of HIV/Aids victims in developing countries. The moral case of a similar approach for protecting our planet and its life support systems is equally compelling.”

Chinese officials quickly echoed the call, saying that access to advanced technologies was “crucial” to the outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit. That repeated call for unfettered access to clean technology is the one thing that unsettles big companies (such as General Electric, Siemens, and the like) which are otherwise thrilled about the business prospects of a world dedicated to rebuilding its entire energy infrastructure.

The comparison of green technology to pharmaceutical technology is a brilliant one for developing countries – if I were them I'd ride it for all it’s worth.

Enough (hunger)

I’m currently reading Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, based on a trusted recommendation, and am finding it surprisingly substantive for a book written by two WSJ journalists. I’m about halfway through and will post more when I’m done, but two quick thoughts for now.

First, I had not appreciated at all the bizarre distortions created by the U.S. food aid system (aid is required to come from U.S. farms) and the “Iron Triangle” of farmers, shippers and charities which upholds is. The resistance to spending just 25% of food aid budget on locally produced food (which would be much more cost-effective) is astounding (it was quashed in Congress four years running from 2005-2008).

Second, everyone (Bono, Tony Blair, the authors, etc.) fixates on hunger in Africa specifically, but there are more undernourished people in South Asia than in Africa, and Africa has less than 30% of the billion undernourished people in the world. The lion’s share are in Asia (despite the Green Revolution!). So it’s good to keep that in perspective.

Update: Right, so apparently I posted on the latter less than two weeks ago, in response to an NYT article on the same topic.

Malnutrition worse in India than Africa

“India is an economic powerhouse and a nutritional weakling.”

This is from this NYT article on malnutrition in India; it is no surprise that malnutrition is prevalent, but this statistic surprised me:

India is often compared — and often compares itself — with China, but the fact is that as China became an economic powerhouse it greatly reduced malnutrition. In an all-fronts effort, China cut child malnutrition by two-thirds between 1990 and 2002. Today only 7 percent of Chinese children under age 5 are underweight, whereas the figure for India is 43 percent. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, which most people assume to have the direst poverty statistics, the average child-malnutrition rate is 28 percent.

I would not have guessed 50% worse than the average of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Infant mortality stat of the day

The bad news is that infant mortality is still far too high, and is highly concentrated: just three countries — India, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo — between them account for 40% of the world’s under-5 deaths.

That is Felix Salmon; the good news is that worldwide, infant mortality fell 28% between 1990 and 2008.

Agricultural challenges in India

India's major water problem is making headlines thanks to this year's drought. But the underlying imbalances are deeper than one year's late monsoon, some of which are beyond water altogether:

“We can manage the drought,” said T. Nanda Kumar, secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture. “We have managed earlier droughts. But we need to move some people out of agriculture. I don’t think that a 17 percent share of G.D.P. and a 50 percent share of employment are viable in the long run.”

Obviously improving the productivity of agriculture would be a wonderful thing, but it is easier said than done. The NYT captures the often misunderstood point that the next green revolution in India will be driven by effective management, not technology.

One problem now, as opposed to in the 1960s, is that there are no obvious technological breakthroughs to radically change the status quo. During the green revolution, India introduced high-yield seeds and fertilizers and expanded irrigation.

Today, the challenge is more nuanced, involving a nationwide coordination effort to improve irrigation, better capture rainwater and conserve groundwater while lifting production — the type of complicated management task that critics say is rarely the strong suit of the Indian bureaucracy.

The challenge is not unique to India, but India's enormous population and overburdened environment makes it particularly acute and urgent.

"The Himalayas Have Stopped Smiling"

A reader passes along this unfortunate news:

Poor crop yields, water shortages and more extreme temperatures are pushing rural villagers closer to the brink as climate change grips Nepal. Farmers say changing weather patterns have dramatically affected crop production, leaving them unable to properly feed themselves and getting into debt.

More than 3.4 million people in Nepal are estimated to require food assistance, due to a combination of natural disasters, including 2008/09’s winter drought – one of the worst in the country’s history.

Nepal is seeing an increase in temperature extremes, more intense rainfall and increased unpredictability in weather patterns, including drier winters and delays in the summer monsoons. The changes, partly due to the impact of melting Himalayan glaciers, could also be felt well beyond Nepal’s borders.

It's always hard to draw a conclusive line between the effects of climate change and natural year-to-year variations - it always irritates me when people count Hurricane Katrina as a direct result of climate change, for example (not true). But this is nevertheless an ugly preview of what a warmer world could look like (not to mention falling crop yields in major breadbaskets, etc.).

Shrinking glaciers in the Himalayas would have repercussions well beyond Nepal - they are the source of the major rivers bringing water to the two most populous countries in the world, and international tensions are already rising.

India and China initiate domestic climate change action

The developed world reacted with consternation to India's announcement that they would accept no greenhouse gas emissions limits from the international community, so it's great news to see that a domestic cap-and-trade system has been proposed:

India has approved in principle new trading plans centred on energy efficiency as part of efforts to shift to a greener economy to fight climate change, opening up a potential market worth more than $15 billion by 2015.

Even better, China appears to be taking its own steps in the right direction:

China's top legislature, for the first time in its history, is specifically addressing climate change with the review of a draft resolution, after hearing a report on the growing environmental problem Monday.

Ni Yuefeng, a vice-chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) environmental and resources protection committee, said the resolution shows the NPC is taking the issue seriously. The details of the resolution are expected to be on the agenda today.

The resolution will pave the way for future environmental legislation, Yang Fuqiang, director of global climate change solutions at environmental group WWF, told China Daily Monday.

This is in fact doubly good news, as not only does it signal greater willingness by the two most populous countries to take action to control their own emissions, but it also weakens the arguments of those Americans who would protest that the U.S. "taking the lead" on emissions reduction wouldn't have any impact. Simplistic game theory says so... but luckily that doesn't appear to be holding in this case.

P.S. I was once eating dinner in Beijing when they "made it rain" (see picture with the linked article), and the results were pretty astounding - a torrential downpour kept us in the restaurant for the next three hours.

India also wants Repsol

Apparently China isn't the only one interested in Repsol's declining Argentine assets:

India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation is looking for a partner to push forward a possible $17bn bid for YPF, the Argentine arm of Spanish oil group Repsol, according to people close to the matter.

...

ONGC Videsh, the foreign arm of the state oil company, is aggressively looking to expand abroad as it seeks to secure enough energy to meet its long-term growth targets of at least 10 per cent a year.

ONGC last year acquired Imperial Energy, a London-listed oil company with most of its assets in Russia, for £1.3bn ($2.2bn).

“The reason ONGC Videsh is so aggressive is that it has been given a very clear mandate from the government of India to secure as much energy as possible to help the nation sustain its growth targets,” said Kumar Manish at KPMG in India.

I'm pretty sure ONGC isn't at the forefront of technology to revive output from declining fields, so while in general it's a good time to be shopping for natural resources, this particular deal is making China and India seem a bit less like far-sighted visionaries and more like dumb money.

Via Green Sheet.

Impending water crisis in India

Via FP Passport, India is worried it will run out of water, and rightly so:

Parts of India are on track for severe water shortages, according to results from NASA's gravity satellites.

The Grace mission discovered that in the country's north-west - including Delhi - the water table is falling by about 4cm (1.6 inches) per year.

Writing in the journal Nature, they say rainfall has not changed, and water use is too high, mainly for farming.

It's not news that profligate pumping is major threat to India’s water security, and India's energy subsidies for farmers are a classic example of a populist but terribly environmentally destructive policy. And despite recent droughts in some parts of the country, the NASA data confirms this view:

Weather and climatic factors are not responsible for water depletion in the northwestern states of Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab, according to the NASA study.

"We looked at the rainfall record and during this decade, it's relatively steady - there have been some up and down years but generally there's no drought situation, there's no major trend in rainfall," said Matt Rodell, a hydrologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington DC.

"So naturally we would expect the groundwater level to stay where it is unless there is an excessive stress due to people pumping too much water, which is what we believe is happening."

Democracy is a great form of government in many ways, but its vulnerability to populist policies and obstructionist minorities mean its ability to control environmental degradation is often weak. Although the environmental record of China, which doesn't think much of democracy, is not exactly stellar.

Natural resources and economic growth

Some striking economic facts on China, India and Latin America from NextBillion.net:

In 1980 the Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) economy was twice as large as that in China and India. By 2004, LAC was 20% smaller than China and India. The fast economic growth of these two countries was accompanied by a speedier integration in world markets, while LAC stayed behind. Today, China’s and India’s combined share of world exports is 50% larger than LAC’s share, while in 1990 the opposite was true.

What's striking is that this reversal took place in the context of Latin America being rich in natural resources, and China and particularly India being resource-poor - a stark macro-level illustration that resource wealth all too often does not translate into economic prosperity.

The roots of India's emissions skepticism

George Monbiot defends India's continued refusal to agree to GHG emissions reduction targets:

... it has almost been a point of pride in India not to respond to the requests of richer nations to limit its emissions.

I think there are several reasons for this, not all of them discreditable. The first is that Indian people and governments have rightly perceived that when it comes to acting on climate change, most developed countries are all leaf and no plums. They make grand statements (remember the G8 meeting) about the need to cut emissions, but in most cases they haven't been translating them into domestic policy (the UK is now an exception). With some justice, India has suspected that it is being urged to implement global policies that the rich nations have no intention of honouring.

Indians are also painfully aware that the rich nations in the past deliberately prevented their nation from developing. England, for example, banned the import of calico (cotton cloth) from India, in order to protect its own textile industries. It went on to smash Indian looms and cut off the thumbs of Indian weavers in order prevent them from making their superior products. As Ha Joon Chang shows in his book Kicking Away the Ladder, England's industrial revolution was made possible by preventing India's. Many people there suspect that attempts to limit India's future greenhouse gas emissions have the same purpose.

India has every right to be skeptical. On the other hand, it will be very hard to foster a global consensus on emissions reductions if key nations - maybe even just one, like India - insist on "taking care of themselves". What a game-theoretic conundrum.

India tells Clinton 'no' on climate

Remember when India refused to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions at all?

Well, they haven't backed down yet.

India takes a hard line - no GHG cuts

India's new stance on climate change is unambiguous and unencouraging:

India said it will reject any new treaty to limit global warming that makes the country reduce greenhouse-gas emissions because that will undermine its energy consumption, transportation and food security.

Cutting back on climate-warming gases is a measure that instead must be taken by industrialized countries, and India is mobilizing developing nations to push that case, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told the media today in New Delhi.

“India will not accept any emission-reduction target -- period,” Ramesh said. “This is a non-negotiable stand.”

India's moral argument is that 1), most of the excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now were pumped out by the now-industrialized countries, and 2), their emissions are still >15x below those of developed countries like the U.S. on a per capita basis:

Ramesh reiterated India’s previous offer to contain CO2 emissions per capita below those of developed nations.

India, the second-most populous nation, only emits 4.6 percent of the global carbon-dioxide emissions, while the U.S. produces 20.9 percent, he said.

Hard to tell if this is a negotiating tactic or genuinely drawing an ideological line in the sand, but particularly if it's the latter it will make it much harder to reach a global accord on reducing emissions (let alone if India gets China and Brazil on board).