Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Climate Insurance to Protect Our Food Supply?
With climate change making extreme weather the new normal, it's prudent to do everything we can to protect our food supply
I feel uneasy sleeping in a house without functioning smoke detectors. I lock my doors at night. I salt my sidewalk when it's icy. I always wear my seatbelt. Like most people, I prefer to minimize my chances of getting hurt or wrecking my car or house, despite the fact that my house, my car, and my health are all (thankfully) insured.
When it comes to agriculture and climate change, I'd like to see our nation take the same approach. Even though most farmers have crop insurance, we should make sure we are also helping them adapt their cropping and livestock systems so that they don't get wiped out by floods and droughts in the first place. Climate change is making extreme weather the new normal. It's prudent to do everything we can to protect our food supply.
Unfortunately, most agriculture lobbyists are too single-minded as they try to influence the soon-to-be-written 2012 Farm Bill. Several farm state legislators, aligned with commodity groups like the American Soybean Association, are advocating for what are called "shallow-loss" revenue insurance programs, in which up to 95 percent of farmers' revenue is guaranteed. But in this push to give farmers unprecedented levels of financial risk avoidance, there has been no mention of the need to help farmers prevent crop and livestock losses in the first place.
Farmers have always been at the mercy of the weather, which is why the federal government has offered subsidized crop insurance since the late 1930s. This kind of income insurance is critical to help keep farmers on the land, but our food supply needs insurance, too.
Right now, there are no requirements for farmers receiving subsidized crop insurance to comply with even the most minimal conservation measures that would help keep topsoil from washing away during floods, much less are they required or even encouraged to adopt farming practices that might help them avoid losing fields of food when extreme weather hits. This puts not only our food supply, but also taxpayers' pocketbooks, at risk. There is currently no limit on how much the federal government can spend on crop insurance payouts, and none proposed if insurance programs are expanded.
There are ways to make agriculture more resilient to extreme weather. Farmers can plant more perennial crops, which require less water and hold on better to soil during floods. In drought-prone regions, they can select drought-tolerant crop varieties or change grazing or irrigation methods, among other strategies. In the same way that I get a lower car insurance rate because my car has airbags, we must encourage farmers to adopt measures like these to reduce risk on the ground. Taking steps to make food production more stable in the face of climate change is good for farmers and for taxpayers.
It's clear from the more than $11 billion the federal government spent on crop insurance in 2011 that our country values keeping farmers in business. If we also value our food supply, we need to couple crop insurance with "climate insurance" to make sure that in the wake of the next round of floods and droughts, our food is safe, and so are our farmers.
8 Comments so far
Show AllThank you for such a well thought out and researched article. I often find myself in a reflexive stand about climate change, that we have to STOP doing so much, and your understanding has demonstrated that we can be proactive even with the very problems that arrange for climate change, ie our modern farm and food system.
This is probably one of the best ideas, and conservative at that, I've seen about food security yet.
The best crop insurance is to grow your own
This article is a good example of the contrast between mitigation (doing something to stop global warming) and adaptation (preparing for the effects of global warming). Practically speaking, adaptation will always be important, but never as important as mitigation.
With Texas frying like a bug under a magnifying glass, there will not be any more practical adaptation than getting the hell out. Insurance is a particularly frivolous idea in the face of the global warming, because the concept of insurance is meant for scattered injuries, not general catastrophes.
It's a shame to waste energies on futile adaptations, when agricultural reform is indeed central to meaningful mitigation. Livestock accounts for HALF of greenhouse emissions, from all sectors. We could shut down every coal-fired power plant tomorrow if we decided we could get by without so much meat.
Hansen has discussed reforming agricultural practices to convert farmland from a carbon source to a carbon sink:
"Present agricultural practices, based on plowing and chemical fertilizers, are dependent on fossil fuels and contribute to loss of carbon from soil via land degradation. World agriculture could sequester 0.4-1.2 GtC per year by adopting minimum tillage and biological nutrient recycling. Such a strategy can also increase water conservation in soils, build agricultural resilience to climate change, and increase productivity especially in smallholder rain-fed agriculture, thereby reducing expansion of agriculture into forested ecosystems."
The Case for Young People and Nature (2011)
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110505_CaseForYoungPeople.pdf
Reading this article and the posts so far raised a question in my mind. If the suggestions here were adopted would the same level of production be maintained? Anyone know enough about this subject to venture an opinion or have a definitive answer? TIA.
The answer to your first question is No...with a "but".
The "but" is that current production is often more than is really needed, and in some cases -like corn/feed corn and cotton- current production is so high it is actually destructive, to markets, diets, and ecosystems.
Real change in Ag practice could result in production levels equal to now, but only after a substantial transition period.
But since shortages are caused almost wholly by the trifecta of (1) misallocation (2)poor technique/crop choice and (3) unused arable land (i.e. the suburbs and auto transport systems), then a dip in production should not be a problem.
Call that an "opinion". "(D)efinitive answer(s)" are like blood in the water for the lurking CD sharks and should be avoided. ;)
Thanks Matti! Shark danger duly noted. :)
Or: We should design the food system to allow for farmers to sell their products locally to their community. Unfortunately the industrialized agriculture system has designed a regulatory framework that makes it almost impossible for small scale farmers to sell their products directly to their consumers that know and trust them.
Example: In the areas of meat processing a farmer has to build expensive facilities in order to comply with federal regulations whether they are selling meat from 1 cow, or 2 pigs.
These regulations are supposed to protect, nonetheless we have countless incidents of tainted USDA inspected foods entering the market place, while direct neighborly exchanges from farmers practicing sustainable methods are prohibited.
Food Sovereignty !!!
The fundamental mistake that this article makes is in assuming that the current Industrial Ag famers will be the resilient, organic, polyculture farmers of the future.
That's what leads to this silly notion that potentially lower rates on hypothetical "climate change insurance" is what will stimulate change to resilient techniques.
What needs to happen is that people interested in sustainable Ag need to form various kinds of consortia and BUY THE LAND, then convert it to better techniques.