Daniel Benesch

Western lifestyle has significant impacts on other parts of the world. Food consuming behavior is no exception. In this short article, I outline some of its effects on “Landgrabbing”, the world’s fishing industry and the dependence of our food supply chain on fossil fuels.

1) Landgrabbing

Landgrabbing describes the process that across the world more and more peasants, indigenous people, and fishers lose control over the natural resources they depend on. For instance, this could be the control over land, water and fishing grounds [1, p.53]. Many people, especially in the Global South, depend on these resources to make a living. Therefore, losing the right to use them has devastating effects on their lives. But how does land grabbing happen? Often land grabbing occurs as large-scale land acquisitions by private or public investors that buy or lease the land to produce agricultural products. Civil service organizations often criticize that the involved buyers and governments would act in legal gray areas. The “I.L.A. Kollektiv” – a group of researchers – also note that the people affected by these land deals are often not informed accordingly and often get pushed off the land they used so far with violence [2, p.72]. But why would a government allow those foreign corporations to get the right about their land and how is this connected to western food consumption?

Let’s dive in. Due to the consumer behavior of EU-countries, the EU is highly dependent on imports of agricultural products from the global south. Almost 60% of the land used to satisfy its demand for agricultural and forestry products comes from outside the EU [1, p.54]. Therefore, the demand for the Global South’s land is high. As a result, investors can make a lot of money by buying or leasing cheap land in these countries, producing demanded products and selling them to the Global North. But not just the investors win. For the governments of the countries in the Global South, these deals also can seem promising. It is important to know that secure land tenure and property rights are often not transparent in these countries [3]. That means, since often there is not a fixed noted private owner of the land, the governments can get money directly by leasing/selling it to the investors. This money could then be used for schools, infrastructure, and innovations to boost the economy. Also, the presence of big agriculture companies itself could be interesting for the governments. Compare the following two scenarios. In the first one, the indigenous people cultivate their land as they always did. In the second scenario, the land gets sold to a big company. The company comes and uses its high-tech machines and their state-of-the-art know-how to produce as much output as possible. The output of the land will be way higher in the second scenario. Thus the government might profit from this increased productivity by taxing the profits of the company. Also, the company might need to employ people to use their machines – jobs might get created. These are some economic incentives for the governments to accept land deals, even if this has negative effects on the environment (through the use of heavy machinery). The people that often suffer are the indigenous people that get pushed off their land. The often criticized high livestock consumption of Europeans also plays a vital part here. Three-quarters of the EU’s consumption of protein-rich feedstuffs currently came from abroad in 2019 [1, p.54]. That’s why the destruction of forests in South America gets more attractive for governments. With the new land, products can be produced and exported, jobs can get created, state income can be produced through taxes which then again can be spent on innovations, welfare programs and so on. Especially for countries with a high number of poor people, this is something to consider. When governments then act this way and harm their natural resources in exchange for wealth, it is not unusual to see an outcry happening in the Global North. These “developed” countries – which often are the ones with the biggest biological footprints [4]- complain that the poorer countries destroy their own natural resources and thereby harm the global environment (e.g. “Pray for Amazonia”) to lift themselves out of poverty while fostering these developments by their own CO2-heavy consumption behaviors.

2) Overfishing

This section is based heavily on Harald Lesch’s recent book “Die Menschheit schafft sich ab: die Erde im Griff des Anthropozän.” [5].

More than a billion people are dependant on fish as a source of protein. According to the FAO in 2016 61,3 % of fish stocks are fished to their limits, while another 29% are already overfished [5, p.251]. In the Mediterranean sea already 90% of fish stocks were overfished. Since EU-citizens like to eat lots of fish though, the demand for fish is high. This lead the EU to buy the rights to fish in western Africa for a cheap price. The huge and technically very advanced European ships that fish there can fish as many fish in one day as 50 local fishers would achieve together in 1 year [5, p.251]. Thereby, the fish demand of European people has devastating long-term effects on local fishers in poorer countries. The EU even subventions the building of those big fishing tanks [5, p.252]. Since the 1950s the amount of caught fish has increased by 400% while the population of fish in the sea got reduced by 50%. So there are more fishes caught than ones that are newly born, which is unsustainable.

When EU-supported fishers use their huge ships to catch a particular kind of fish, they also catch fish for which they don’t have the respective right to fish them. As a consequence, this so-called “bycatch” usually gets thrown away. Firstly, the fish themselves get treated like a waste. Secondly, this poses a huge waste of food. The WWF estimated in 2016 that 40% of the yearly worldwide caught fish is bycatch that gets thrown away [5, p.253].

3) Climate

“Modern agriculture became the art of transforming oil into food.” [2, p. 61 – citing Clark and York, 2008]. According to the I.L.A. collective, the industrial production transformed agriculture from an energy-producing to an energy-consuming system. The average energy input to agriculture increased by 5000% in the last 60 years. In 2018 the agricultural sector contributed to 30% of the worldwide energy consumption and to 40% to the greenhouse gas emissions [2, p.61]. It is estimated that to produce one food calorie 10-15 fossil calories are necessary. The visual (click on the link: Fossil Energy in the food supply chain) shows how fossil energy takes place in the food supply chain.

Figure 52.1 – This graph shows the shares of fossil energy that different parts of the food supply chain have.

One sees that the majority of energy goes into conservation, consumption, cooling, drying, packaging, and transport while a relatively smaller percentage contributes to actually producing the food. The I.L.A. collective describes that just the cheap transporting made it possible that we can consume food from all over the world so cheaply. Therefore, our food production is very dependant on fossil energy. Since the latter is limited and is getting fewer and fewer this lifestyle is unsustainable. In addition, the prices for fossil oil are likely going to increase in the long run due to its scarcity. As a direct consequence, the prices of the foodstuffs will likely rise as well due to its dependence. Politicians and political organizations therefore often claim that people should buy more locally-grown food. While this certainly can have a positive impact since the product does not need to be transported across the world with CO2-harming planes and trucks, the authors point out that it is a misconception that locally produced food would lead to better CO2 rates automatically. Due to the relatively low share of fossil energy that the transport has in the food supply chain, it can be that a locally grown apple that gets cooled long in a cooling house has more negative effects with respect to greenhouse gases than fresh grown imported fruits 2, p.61]. So making the food supply chain more sustainable is not solved by just stopping imports of foreign products, although this can be one piece in a bigger process towards a more sustainable solution.

No matter whether we look at land use – where 60% of the land used to satisfy the EU’s demand for agricultural and forestry products comes from outside the EU, at fishing, where most of the fishing resources in the Mediterranean sea are over-fished or at the climate impacts of western food supply chains: These actions that are influenced by western food consumption behavior are not sustainable. What could be possible solutions? The utopia would be that due to revolutionary ideas of smart inventors:

• alternative, sustainable and not too expensive (s.t. the companies would really use them) fuels could be invented such that the food supply chain is not so highly dependent on fossil fuels anymore.
• the seas could be fished more carefully – e.g. by reducing the amount of “bycatch” – such that fewer fish get wasted, leading to more food for the small fishers as well as for the EU citizens.

Also, it would be great if indigenous people don’t get pushed off their land by force.

If we do not achieve this, the lifestyle that many rich countries currently enjoy – having access to a big variety of cheap food from all over the world won’t be sustainable. And even if one can go on like this for a while, it will be at the expense of others. Although each individual can make small changes by consumer decisions I personally expect more change from a political decision. Raising awareness in the society what our current lifestyle has for effects on a) other parts of the world and b) future generations might lead to pressure on politicians and to real reforms. Food consumption is just one piece of how our lifestyle affects others – [1] and [2] are further sources for interested readers.

[1] https://www.sdgwatcheurope.org/documents/2019/08/whos-paying-the-bill.pdf/

[2] https://aufkostenanderer.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/auf-kosten-anderer-zweite-auflage.pdf

[3] https://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/land-grabbing.html

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecological_footprint

[5] Lesch, Harald, and Klaus Kamphausen. Die Menschheit schafft sich ab: die Erde im Griff des Anthropozän. Komplett-Media, 2016.