Global Farming

Climate change is bad for some, horrible for others and spectacular for those where frozen tundra and ice-blocked barriers transforming slowly to new farmland and easier access to mineral and petroleum resources, not to mention more efficient shipping lanes. If you live on an island atoll, with rising seas, everything you have will disappear under ocean waters. If you live in Russia or Canada, warming temperatures will open vast tracts of land to agriculture, mining, and oil drilling that was not possible without the change. Riches will explode!

The United States has been a huge agricultural exporting nation. Our Midwest prairies have pumped out massive amounts of grain to feed the world. We have abundance upon abundance, coupled with some of the most modern and efficient farming techniques known to man. As average global temperatures change, however, we have also witness massive flooding in some farm states, fires decimating valuable timberland in the West, and never-ending drought in the heartland, particularly those dependent on the southern reaches of the Ogallala Aquifer (which stretches from the Dakotas to north Texas) and even more particularly West Texas and south Kansas. It seems that the ground water in them thar’ parts has gone bone dry, even as the rains have become increasingly sparse.

The shifting supply of water will redefine the planet. As we lose water in primary agricultural regions, we will lose the export revenues that once went with those productive lands. Other nations will depend on greater imports of foodstuffs and other commodities. Water is life, but as the earth’s population increases, food has to be produced somewhere. To some the current, skyrocketing cost of basics (the price of the humble onion has tripled in India) is just the beginning of a restructuring based on changing supply and demand realities.

“Already, the world’s farms take up an area the size of South America. By 2050, a global population of nearly 10 billion people will require roughly 70 percent more food. We have two options: Either we need to get more food out of the land we already farm, or we need to farm more land.” New York Times, November 24^th. But until the tundra melts and Canada and Russia pick up the slack, where is the new food-growth-exporting going to come from?

China has been buying and leasing agricultural land in Latin America and across Africa’s Great Rift Valley with precisely that question in mind. But there is this not-so-little pocket of agricultural wealth that is exploding in the eastern part of Brazil. It’s called Mato Grosso (see map above). It’s still not the most accessible region, and better roads and infrastructure are a must for this area to achieve its potential. But Mato Grosso could easily become the next grain belt to a planet with a massively growling stomach.

Brown University Associate Professor (ecology and evolutionary biology), Stephen Porder, traveled the back roads to see for himself exactly what the potential for this rich soil region might be. “After a long flight from Boston, I rode the night bus nearly 500 miles of rutted roads to reach the frontier town of Canarana. Only about 25,000 people live here, but the main street has several stores selling million-dollar tractors. Waiting for my ride to the farm, I met a man from Silicon Valley who commutes every month to sell heavy equipment. He told me, ‘This is where the money is.’

“How can we determine if these farms are sustainable? Admittedly, it’s unnerving to stand in an endless sea of soybeans where there was once rain forest. Exotic animals like tapirs, jaguars and rheas wander through the monocrop desert, and macaws compete for airspace with crop dusters. But sustainability has little to do with appearances. Sustainability depends on whether a farm can continue to produce food over the long term, without irreparably damaging the environment or causing other land to be cleared in the quest for increased food production…

“We focused first on fertilizer. Fertilizer helps grow more food on a given plot of land, but overuse can have serious environmental consequences. Largely, these depend on how efficiently farms use nitrogen and phosphorus. These two elements, which limit how much crops can grow, are the main components of fertilizer. Crops don’t absorb all the fertilizer farmers apply, and what’s left behind often ends up in waterways, where it fuels algae growth. Fifty years of heavy fertilizer use in the breadbaskets of the United States and Europe has left lakes, rivers and coasts with algae-choked ‘dead zones.’

“We expected the story to be similar in Mato Grosso. But to our surprise, we’ve found that streams draining the farms there have no more nitrogen or phosphorus than those in adjacent forests. The deep tropical soils are highly efficient filters, removing nutrients before they reach the water. In the American Midwest, scientists have long been searching for ways to clean up farm runoff. In Mato Grosso, the soils do the work.

“But these same soils present a sustainability concern on a different front. After millions of years of heavy rainfall, Mato Grosso’s soils have lost nearly all their phosphorus. The soils efficiently remove phosphorus before it reaches the streams but also bind phosphorus added as fertilizer, leaving less for the crops. As a result, farms here require twice as much phosphorus fertilizer as their counterparts in more temperate regions, where the soils are younger and more fertile. And phosphate ore, the source of phosphorus fertilizer, is a finite resource…

“The fertilizer story makes it complicated to figure out the sustainability of Mato Grosso’s farms, which send their soy to China, as animal feed, and to Europe. Even more complicated is the question of how these farms will affect the global climate. The link, while not obvious, is important. Global warming results largely from burning fossil fuels. But another important contributor — about 15 percent of our carbon-dioxide emissions — comes from changing land use, primarily the burning of tropical rain forests to make room for food or biofuel crops. If we really want to know the environmental impact of these soy farms, we need to understand their effect on carbon-dioxide emissions.” NY Times.

No matter the complexity, the pressure is on. Mato Grosso is going to be the breadbasket to millions of people, and until they hit a sustainability wall – from that same climate change or the depletion of necessarily minerals from the soil (that cannot be replaced through importing fertilizer) – you can expect this area to become one of the most important agricultural regions on earth.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are going to witness massive shifts in geopolitical powers based on who has the water, who has the resources and who has the power to guard them against those who will try and steal the values they hold.