Ultra-processed food linked to big rise in dementia risk

Eating wholegrains, fruit and veg and other unprocessed foods lower the chance of dementia.Getty

From The Age

Regularly snacking on crisps, biscuits and other fatty, sugary foods significantly increases the risk of dementia, a study has shown.

Harvard University found that a diet high in ultra-processed items, which also include ready meals, fizzy drinks, breakfast cereals and cured meats, raised the chance of developing dementia by 58 per cent.

Researchers followed 5000 Americans for 10 years and found those eating the most junk food also had 46 per cent higher risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, the forerunner to dementia.

Processed meats, such as bacon, hot dogs and sliced ham, were found to contribute most to dementia risk.

Prof Cindy Leung, of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the study showed that the benefits of switching to healthy foods “extends well beyond our waistline”.

“The good news is we also found the opposite effect for minimally processed food,” she said.

“Those who ate the most minimally processed whole foods, like fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and unprocessed meats, were 41 per cent less likely to develop dementia. [Which means that the junk food eaters have 2.7 times the risk of whole food eaters!]

“This gives us optimism for clear and actionable next steps. Our study shows that eating healthy whole foods is an important behaviour that can protect our minds as we age.”

Although researchers said they could not prove that junk food was driving dementia they added that it was “biologically plausible” and fitted with growing scientific evidence that ultra-processed foods impact brain function.

Dr Alex Henney, an endocrinologist at the University of Liverpool, said that junk foods may drive obesity, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, all of which raise the risk of dementia.

Additives such as emulsifiers and preservatives may also drive inflammation, which has also been implicated in dementia.

The study was published in a special issue of The American Journal of Public Health, looking into the harms of ultra-processed foods.

Experts warned that the public was being prevented from making healthy choices because of “aggressive marketing and harmful food environments”.

New research published in the issue found that the ingredients in ultra-processed food were often combined in forms deliberately chosen to engage the brain’s reward systems, making them likely to trigger addictive patterns of eating.

Dr Ashley Gearhardt, professor of psychology, of the University of Michigan, found that quick-release carbs coupled with high fat created the “once you pop, you can’t stop” addictive quality of junk food.

“Real whole food did not trigger an addictive response,” she said. “Nobody is bingeing on that stuff. Nobody is saying ‘apple slices, bet you can’t stop once you start.’

“The number one lever that was pulled was rapidly delivering carbohydrates into the body. That was often complemented by fat.

“This is literally missing from Mother Nature. Our bodies never evolved to get this ‘one-two punch’ in these energy-dense concentrated packages.”

Researchers argued that many of the same corporate strategies used by the tobacco industry were now being employed to keep people addicted to disease-causing food.

They found that many US tobacco companies had bought into the ultra-processed food industry and were using sales tactics similar to those used for cigarettes to sell the products, such as flavour engineering, and creating seemingly “low-fat” versions to retain customers who were concerned about health harms.

“Ultra-processed food is not simply an issue of personal responsibility or individual choice,” said Dr Nicholas Chartres, the lead editorial author and researcher at the University of Sydney and the University of California, San Francisco.

“The evidence increasingly points to a commercial system that has engineered, marketed, and normalised products linked to widespread chronic disease. The public health and government response must reflect that reality.

“The research that has been published adds to a growing body of evidence that these products are associated with chronic disease and that they have addictive characteristics.”

Inflation only matters when the president's a Democrat

 By Adam Zyglis

How much emissions are produced by food/agriculture?

 From Our World in Data  (by Hannah Ritchie)

There are a wide range of estimates for how much of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from food. Some studies say this figure is one-quarter, some say it’s more than one-third.

Where do these differences come from? There are three reasons why some of these estimates vary so much:1) some studies do not include emissions from cooking and food waste;2) different studies disagree about the emissions from land use change and deforestation; 3) some, but not all, studies include non-food agricultural products such as cotton, wool, leather and biofuels

The specific number that answers this question depends on these three factors, but the range of possible answers is not too large: around 25% to 30% of global emissions come from our food systems, and this rises to around one-third when we include all agricultural products.

People are becoming increasingly aware that their diet comes with a climate cost. But just how much of our greenhouse gas emissions comes from food?

In a previous article I looked at where greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the food system came from – ranging from deforestation and land use, through to transport and packaging. The study my article was based on was published by Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek, estimated that the food system was responsible for one-quarter (26%) of global emissions.1 A new study, published by Monica Crippa and colleagues in Nature Food estimates a higher share: one-third (34%) of emissions.2

In this article I want to explain where the differences in these estimates come from. You can explore the results of the study by Crippa et al. (2021) on our work on the environmental impacts of food.

It is nothing new that estimates of food emissions span a wide spectrum. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Climate Change and Land reports a range from 10.8 and 19.1 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent (CO2e) emissions per year.3 That’s between 21% to 37% of global total emissions. Quite a big difference. We’ll soon see where these disagreements come from.

In light of this, the difference in estimates from Poore and Nemecek (2018) of one-quarter, and Crippa et al. (2021) of one-third are not that surprising. They fall right in the middle of this wide range. Given that they are using very different methods to get to these numbers it is actually encouraging, from a research perspective, that these estimates are so close to each other. But we should still try to figure out where the differences come from.

In the chart here I’ve shown the results of these two studies side-by-side. I’ve grouped emissions into their comparable parts of the food chain:

• Land use: this includes deforestation, peatland degradation and fires, and emissions from cultivated soils.
• Agricultural production: this includes emissions from synthetic fertilizers (and the energy used to manufacture them); manure; methane emissions from livestock and rice; aquaculture; and fuel use from on-farm machinery.
• Supply chain: this includes all emissions from food processing, packaging, transport, and retail, such as refrigeration.
• Post-retail: this is all the energy used by consumers for food preparation, such as refrigeration and cooking at home. It also includes emissions from consumer food waste.

Poore and Nemecek, shown on the left, estimated that food was responsible for 13.6 billion tonnes of CO2e. Crippa et al. estimate 17.9 billion tonnes of CO2e. So, there’s a difference of around 4 billion tonnes. Where does it come from?

• Consumer cooking and waste are not always included in Poore and Nemecek: the easiest difference to spot is that Poore and Nemecek only quantify emissions up to the retail stage of the supply chain. They don’t include energy use by consumers or consumer waste. As we see from the chart, this amounts to 2.1 billion tonnes CO2e.
• Land use emission estimates differ: the biggest difference is in land use emissions. Crippa et al. (2021) estimate emissions to be 2.5 billion tonnes CO2e higher. This can be largely explained by differences in the attribution of deforestation. They allocate all of global deforestation to agriculture. However, the authors note that this is a main limitation of their approach, since only around 80% of deforestation is driven by agricultural expansion (the rest driven by urban development, mining and other human land use change). So their deforestation estimate is possibly a bit too high. Poore and Nemecek only allocated 60% of deforestation to food systems. This might be a bit of an underestimate. Land use emissions due to agriculture are likely to be somewhere in the middle of these two values.
• Food vs. non-food agricultural products: the other main difference is that Poore and Nemecek only include food products in their 13.6 billion tonnes CO2e figure. Non-food agricultural products such as cotton, wool, leather, rubber and biofuels are not included. They do also provide a separate estimate which includes non-food products; this estimates that agricultural products as a whole contributes 33% to global emissions. Crippa et al. (2021) do include at least some of these non-food agricultural products in their estimate.

Comparing these two studies is useful because they highlight the main differences we see across the range of studies on food emissions. The big differences are: what stages of the supply chain are covered (some studies include consumer cooking and waste, some don’t); whether non-food agricultural products such as biofuels and textiles are included; and the biggest uncertainty is emissions from deforestation and land use change. The uncertainty in deforestation emissions estimates from the UN FAO can be as high as 50%, and over 100% for emissions from peatlands.4 Deforestation can also vary a lot from year-to-year, so decadal average values are often used.

How much of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food systems? The amount of uncertainty in these estimates means it’s helpful to understand where the differences come from, and that they all fall within a reasonably narrow range. If someone asks me, my response is usually “around 25% to 30% from food. Around one-third if we include all agricultural products.”

World inflation has peaked, but .....

Well, at last I have updated all my databases.  Almost all!

This chart shows the CPI inflation rate for the Big 8 economies (US, UK, Europe, China, Japan, India, Brazil, Russia) weighted by GDP, alongside the percentage of 43 world economies where the CPI inflation rate is above 6%.  The moral of the story is that inflation is falling in the Big 8, and also in the world as a whole.  

Inflation is falling because the impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is fading (in the sense that it's not making inflation worse, so year-on-year rates are falling); because commodity prices are declining; because growth is slowing; and because China's inflation rate has gone negative (one sign of just how weak China's economy really is).  It'll prolly take another year, perhaps longer, for Big 8 inflation to get back to 2%. 

I think it quite likely that the longer-term underlying inflation rate has risen, because the key reason it got so low is offshoring and just-in-time manufacturing.  Goods were efficiently assembled from parts in different countries.  The progress of offshoring has stopped and reversed.   The war has shown that relying on other countries for key parts of your own country's manufacturing could be problematic, even disastrous.  Even in the absence of war, the lockdowns in China showed just how dependent manufacturing in developed countries was on the free flow of parts.  Tesla, which produces all its own chips, was unaffected by supply-chain breakdowns.  There is a lesson there for other CEOs.

We will never get back to the two decades of low inflation we have come to regard as the norm.  Whereas central banks struggled to raise inflation over these two decades, it is likely that they will now struggle to keep inflation at 2%.  Central to this is the realisation by the West that relying on China could be as strategically perilous as our naïve belief that Russia could be trusted and that we could rely on her for all our gas and oil.   I remember when Stephen Roach in 1989 (or thereabouts), when he was at Morgan Stanley, pointed out that the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the opening of Eastern Europe and China to world trade would drive the long-term rate of inflation down, and it did.   What we are seeing now is the partial reversal of this trend.  We no longer trust that politics will not impede trade. Globalisation is no longer fashionable.

Moreover, global warming has pushed up food inflation.  Who would have thought that alternating droughts and floods would push up food prices?  Amazing.  Well, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.  It will only get worse.

In other words, the fall in world inflation may be slower than in the cycles of the last 30 years, even if we have a deep recession, and underlying inflation will remain stubbornly high.  This has important implications for bond yields and PE ratios.  The major bull markets in asset prices were driven by a secular downtrend in inflation.  If that trend is over, valuation rates for all asset classes will rise, and that will keep their prices from rising.

Increasing Levels of CO2 Results in Less Nutritious Crops

Elevated levels of CO2 make it difficult for plants to obtain the minerals necessary to grow and provide nutritious food.

From SciTechDaily

For years, one of the only possible bright sides of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) seen by scientists is enhanced photosynthesis. After all, plants use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, so it was expected that higher levels of the greenhouse gas will lead to more productive plants. However, this effect may be less than expected because elevated levels of CO2 make it difficult for plants to obtain the minerals necessary to grow and provide nutritious food. This is explained by scientists from the Institute for Plant Science of Montpellier in France in a review published on November 3 in the journal Trends in Plant Science.

“There are many reports in the literature showing that the CO2 levels expected at the end of the twenty-first century will lead to a lower concentration of nitrogen in most plants, mainly affecting the protein content in plant products,” says first author Alain Gojon. “It is very important to understand why growing plants at elevated CO2 has such a negative effect on the protein content of most staple crops and the future of food.” Gojon is the research director of France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment.

Plants use photosynthesis to incorporate CO2 into sugars that they derive their energy from. However, photosynthesis does not provide plants with the key minerals they need to grow. For most plants, these minerals, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron, are picked up from the soil through their root systems. Nitrogen is particularly important as it is a key building block for the amino acids that plants use to make proteins.

Not only does a nitrogen deficiency mean that a plant will have difficulty building its tissues, but also that it will provide less nutrition to humans. “What is clear is that the nutrient composition of the main crops used worldwide, such as rice and wheat, is negatively impacted by the elevation of CO2. This will have a strong impact on food quality and global food security,” says corresponding author Antoine Martin, researcher of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

“Two main nutrients that are essential for human nutrition may be affected by this phenomenon,” adds Gojon. “The first one is proteins built from nitrogen. In developing countries this can be a big issue, because many diets in these countries aren’t rich in proteins and plants grown at elevated CO2 can have twenty to thirty percent less protein. The second one is iron. Iron deficiency already affects an estimated 2 billion people worldwide.”

Beyond global food systems, the lowered mineral status of plants due to increased atmospheric CO2 levels may lead to a negative feedback loop for mitigating climate change. “The terrestrial carbon sink associated with enhanced photosynthesis may be limited if most of the vegetation is deficient in nitrogen and other minerals, which may prevent any additional increase of CO2 capture from the atmosphere,” says Gojon.

“We would like to really understand the mechanisms that are responsible for the negative effects of elevated CO2 on the mineral composition of plants,” says Martin. “For example, we are currently exploring the natural genetic variation behind these negative effects, that could be used afterward to improve crops nutritional value under future CO2 atmosphere.”

Reference: “The decline of plant mineral nutrition under rising CO2: physiological and molecular aspects of a bad deal” by Alain Gojon, Océane Cassan, Liên Bach, Laurence Lejay and Antoine Martin, 3 November 2022, Trends in Plant Science.
DOI: 10.1016/j.tplants.2022.09.002

The miracle tree to feed the world & slash emissions

From Canary Media

Feeding the world without frying the world would be a miraculous achievement. Somehow, we’d need to grow far more food with far less environmental impact while using far less land. We’d also need to grow far more trees, so we could store more carbon on earth and reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Well, a miracle has arrived.

It’s called pongamia, an ordinary-looking tropical tree with agricultural superpowers. It produces beans packed with protein and oil much like soybeans, except it has the potential to produce much more nutrition per acre than soybeans. It’s hardy enough to grow on just about any land, no matter how degraded, without any pesticides or irrigation. It not only removes carbon from the atmosphere, which combats climate change, but it also sucks nitrogen out of the air, so it usually doesn’t need fertilizer that accelerates climate change.


In other words, it’s a dream crop for a hot and hungry planet that’s running out of fertile farmland and fresh water while choking on pollution from agrochemicals. At a time when modern farming is under attack for poisoning and depleting soils, pongamia can stabilize and restore soils. At a time when the food system generates one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, growing pongamia cuts emissions, sequestering about 5 tons of carbon per acre per year.

Basically, pongamia is an answered prayer for the planet in vegetative form — a reforestation crop that can replace deforestation crops like soy and palm oil without diesel tractors or chemicals or even added water. It’s a self-sufficient, heat-tolerant, drought-tolerant, jungle-tough badass of a tree that can produce monster yields on marginal land on a warming planet.

It may sound surprising that after growing wild for thousands of years throughout South Asia and Australia, pongamia is only now being domesticated and reinvented as a super-crop in the United States. But if we’re going to reduce agricultural emissions by 75 percent by 2050 to meet the goals of the Paris accord, while increasing agricultural production by 50 percent to feed 10 billion people, we’re going to need some surprises.

You probably haven’t heard of pongamia before, which is probably a giveaway that it hasn’t yet transformed the global agricultural sector, and that this column won’t be uninterrupted good news. The world is currently mired in a food crisis, created by horrific droughts in Africa and elsewhere as well as the war in Ukraine, and pongamia obviously hasn’t saved the day.

But the crop itself really is as cool and miraculous as it sounds. It really could help feed and heal the world. And the story of Terviva, the Oakland-based company that’s trying to bring pongamia to the masses, is a cool and miraculous story.

So let’s do the good news first.

Pongamia is not a new tree or a rare tree. It was cited for its healing properties in ancient Ayurvedic texts, and while it’s still most common in India, it can now be found all over the world, including in a park near my Miami home. It’s got a broad canopy, an extensive root network, and pretty white and pink flowers that bloom in the spring, so it’s often planted in yards or parking lots as an ornamental, windbreak or shade tree. Its oil, also known as karanja, is used in India as a natural lubricant, varnish and lamp oil. Pongamia seeds also produce the active ingredient in the antifungal remedies you can buy at CVS.

But plant guides warn that pongamia’s seeds have a ​“bitter taste and disagreeable aroma,” with some guides suggesting they’re poisonous, which explains why they’ve never caught on as animal feed or human food. And that explains why pongamia was never cultivated as a crop before a University of California, Berkeley business student named Naveen Sikka visited central India in the spring of 2009, to see if the tree could produce sustainable biofuel.

At the time, the U.S. and European Union had ambitious new biofuel mandates, and investors were blasting money into the space; the oil giant BP had just made a massive investment in a bioenergy research center at Berkeley. Sikka knew biofuels had one serious downside: Using good farmland to grow energy instead of food leads to the clearing of natural carbon sinks to create more farmland to replace that food. But when he saw pongamia flourishing in rocky soils in India’s arid badlands, he saw a unique opportunity to grow renewable fuel on low-quality land so that it wouldn’t compete with the food supply or drive deforestation.

Sikka’s idea when he founded Terviva was to create a genetic library of pongamia traits, a kind of arboreal 23andMe, then breed the superstar trees that could create the most fuel on the worst land. The biofuels market tanked while he was still fundraising, and Terviva had several near-death experiences as it burned through cash, but miracles soon began to happen.

The first miracle was the de-bittering of pongamia. Sikka had hoped it could be made palatable, at least for cattle, though he feared that would require nasty chemical solvents unfit for human consumption. He was stunned when his team figured out a way to do it with a solvent already consumed by quite a few humans: alcohol.

That’s when Terviva began to pivot from fuel toward its current mission of ​“planting millions of trees to feed billions of people.” As a child, Sikka regularly visited relatives in India, and after college, he worked for the U.S. State Department in West Africa, so he had witnessed the developing world’s desperate need for protein and vegetable oil firsthand. Now he had a way to grow a lot without using any productive land.

The problem was finding someone to do the growing, because farmers are notoriously reluctant to gamble on untested crops, especially tree crops that take four years to yield their first harvest. Farmers are only willing to take a risk like that when they are, as Sikka puts it, ​“totally fucked,” which brings us to Terviva’s second miracle: A bacterial disease began wiping out Florida’s citrus trees, inspiring some totally fucked farmers to take a chance on pongamia on a few of their worst tracts of land.

So far, pongamia has lived up to its billing, producing yields comparable to Midwestern soybeans in much poorer soil with virtually no chemicals or added water. In test fields, some trees are producing yields four to 10 times higher than soybean fields. Pongamia is basically vertical soy, except it doesn’t need to be plowed or sprayed or irrigated. It simply converts sunlight, air and rain into protein and oil — plus an extract from the de-bittering process that Terviva has successfully patented as a bio-fungicide. And the field results should only improve with experience and advanced breeding of the superstars from the test fields.

Terviva has now raised more than $100 million, hired more than 100 employees, sequenced the entire pongamia genome, and built a solid reputation as an ag-tech startup. Ultimately, though, Sikka is building a food company, which is why he’s so excited about miracle number three: De-bittered pongamia oil turned out to be a golden-colored substitute for olive oil. A glowing analysis by the food consultancy Mattson found it produced an ​“indulgent mouthfeel” reminiscent of foods fried in butter. Pongamia also has enormous potential as a protein for plant-based milks and meats, as it contains all nine essential amino acids.

The food giant Danone is now partnering with Terviva to develop pongamia as a climate-friendly, climate-resilient, ​“regenerative,” non-GMO alternative to soy and palm oil, which are increasingly unpopular with consumers who care about sustainability. The first products featuring Terviva’s newly branded ​“Ponova oil” could hit the market early next year.

“The universe has smiled at us so often. We’ve had so many strokes of dumb luck to get where we are,” Sikka says.

“And we still haven’t made a dent.”

You knew the bad news was coming eventually. After 12 years of miracles, Terviva now has 1,500 acres of pongamia in the ground. But around the world, there are about 300 million acres of soy in the ground. Sikka had hoped farmers would rush to pongamia once the Florida experiment proved the concept, but that has not happened. The world finally has a high-yield, low-impact crop that can grow almost anywhere, and it’s still a rounding error, barely a blip on the global landscape.

“It just shows how hard it is to change agriculture,” Sikka says. ​“It takes forever, even when everything goes right.”

The thing is, agriculture does need to change for the earth to remain hospitable to humans, and forever is too long to wait.

Sikka continues to hope that more farmers will embrace pongamia. He also hopes that institutional investors with deeper pockets and greater risk tolerance than farmers will finance much larger projects to plant tens of thousands of acres of pongamia. But since hope is not a business plan, Sikka has figured out a way to generate revenue and start selling ingredients without reshaping the agricultural landscape. There are already over 1 million tons of pongamia seeds on trees growing wild in India, and Terviva is now paying impoverished villagers to pick them.

It’s a complex undertaking, requiring delicate negotiations with village elders, direct payments through mobile phones, and sophisticated geolocation technology to trace the seeds. But it’s already produced 5,000 tons of beans, enough to take Ponova oil to market, while injecting $2 million into impoverished rural areas. Sikka believes India can be an economic engine for Terviva, and vice versa. He also believes pongamia could inspire the Danones of the world to invest in other exotic tree crops indigenous to the global South, from ramon seeds to croton nuts to Bambara beans.

Again, though, Terviva’s 5,000 tons are a pittance compared to the world’s 350 million tons of soybeans, and $2 million barely counts as a drop in the $200 billion global cooking-oil bucket. Unfortunately, the problem of feeding the world without frying the world is an almost indescribably gigantic problem.

By 2050, the agricultural sector will have to produce a couple billion additional tons of food each year without clearing any additional forests. That will require dramatic changes on the demand side, like wasting less food, eating less beef and using less good land to grow biofuels. It will also require dramatic changes on the supply side, like higher crop and livestock yields, more resilience to a warmer world, fewer emissions from fertilizer and manure, and less chemical and mechanical degradation of soils.

Pongamia checks a bunch of those boxes, but not at a large enough scale to matter much yet. One lesson of its miracles is that it will take a lot more miracles to transform global agriculture.

Factory food?

 From a thread by George Monbiot

People object to precision fermentation on the grounds that it would take production of protein-rich foods out of the countryside and into factories. It would. But please remember that almost all the meat you eat has already been taken out of the countryside and into factories.

 

So-called free range chickens

The horror of factory pigs

These factories are places of horror, both astonishingly cruel and highly polluting. We are in massive denial about them. We like to imagine that our meat and eggs are produced in fields. Only a tiny proportion is.

And this tiny proportion tends to be even more damaging than factory farming, which, for all its horrors, is more efficient in its use of land and other resources. Never forget those two great neglected issues: ecological opportunity cost and carbon opportunity cost.

Anyway, even “pasture-fed” and “free range” animals end up in the factory: the slaughterhouse and the packing plant. In life, they are seldom detached from the factory, requiring equipment, materials and often supplementary feed produced there.

I want us to recognise the reality of where our food comes from, and the huge burden of cruelty, destruction and brutalisation required to produce and eat it. I want us to see past the bucolic myths and comforting falsehoods that surround this industry.

The factory is the logical outcome of any drive towards efficiency. Labour efficiency, land efficiency, resource efficiency. No form of efficiency is in all respects good, but the same goes for inefficiencies, which tend to be particularly problematic in environmental terms.

We can harness the efficiencies of the factory while shedding the cruelty and destruction, by *brewing* protein-rich foods instead of raising them in the form of animal flesh and animal secretions.

The potential savings in terms of land, water and nutrients of the switch from farming animals to farming microbes are so enormous that they could make the difference between the collapse of our life support systems and their perpetuation.

Ukraine war causes biggest price shock in 50 years

From the BBC

The war in Ukraine is set to cause the "largest commodity shock" since the 1970s, the World Bank has warned.

In a new forecast, it said disruption caused by the conflict would contribute to huge price rises for goods ranging from natural gas to wheat and cotton.

The increase in prices "is starting to have very large economic and humanitarian effects", Peter Nagle, a co-author of the report, told the BBC.

He said "households across the world are feeling the cost of living crisis".

"We're particularly worried about the poorest households since they spend a larger share of income on food and energy, so they're particularly vulnerable to this price spike," the senior economist at the World Bank added.

Energy prices are set to increase more than 50%, pushing up bills for households and businesses, the World Bank says.

The biggest rise will be in the price of natural gas in Europe, which is set to more than double in cost. Prices are forecast to fall next year and in 2024, but even then will remain 15% higher than they were last year.

The World Bank said this means that from the lows of April 2020 until the highs of March this year we have seen "the largest 23-month increase in energy prices since the 1973 oil price hike", when tensions in the Middle East sent prices soaring.

Similarly oil prices are expected to remain elevated into 2024 with a barrel of the benchmark measure, Brent Crude, projected to average $100 this year, something which will lead to widespread inflation.

Russia produces about 11% of the world's oil, the third biggest share, but the report said "disruptions resulting from the war are expected to having a lasting negative effect" as sanctions mean that foreign companies leave and access to technology is reduced.

Russia currently provides 40% of the EU's gas and 27% of its oil, but European governments are moving to wean their countries off of supplies from Russia. That has helped push up global prices by creating more demand for supplies from elsewhere.

The World Bank commodity outlook also warned many foods are set to see steep rises in their costs. The UN food prices index already shows they are at their highest since records began 60 years ago.

Wheat is forecast to increase 42.7% and reach new record highs in dollar terms. Other notable increases will be 33.3% for barley, 20% for soybeans and 29.8% for oils and 41.8% for chicken. These increases reflect the fact that exports from Ukraine and Russia have fallen drastically.

Before the war the two countries accounted for 28.9% of global wheat exports according to JP Morgan, and 60% of global sunflower supplies - a key ingredient in many processed foods - according to S&P Global.

Prices for other raw materials including fertilisers, metals and minerals are also predicted to go up. The costs of timber, tea and rice are amongst the few expected to fall.

"Wheat is one of the hardest agriculture exports to replace," according to a research note from the Bank of America. It points out that poor weather conditions in North America and China are likely to exacerbate the impact of Ukrainian supplies being reduced, something which will continue because the war has disrupted the spring planting season.

The note also suggests grain and oilseed shipments from Ukraine have fallen more than 80% because of the fighting and these lost exports, over the course of a year, "equate to about 10 days of world food supply".

Ukraine is a major exporter of crops such as sunflower oil but the war has reduced supplies
Source: BBC/Getty Images

This is very bad news for the world's poor.  And it is likely to lead to a deep recession as well as adding to already surging inflation.

Emissions: beef is like coal

 From The Economist

The impact of food on greenhouse-gas (ghg) emissions can slip under the radar. In a survey in Britain last year, the share of respondents saying that “producing plants and meat on farms” was a “significant contributor” to climate change was the lowest among ten listed activities. Yet two papers published this year in Nature Food find that food, especially beef, creates more ghgs than previously thought. Forgoing steaks may be one of the most efficient ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

In 2019 the un’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that the global food system was responsible for 21-37% of ghg emissions. This March researchers from the European Commission and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Office released a study with a central estimate near the top of this range. It attributed 34% of ghgs produced in 2015 to food.

This elevated share stems in part from accounting choices. The paper assigns the full impact of deforestation to the agriculture that results from it; includes emissions after food is sold (such as from waste and cooking); and counts non-food crops like cotton. But even when the authors excluded embedded emissions from sources like transport and packaging, they still found that agriculture generated 24% of ghgs. According to the World Resources Institute, a research group, cars, trains, ships and planes produce a total of 16%.

Another recent paper, by Xiaoming Xu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and eight co-authors, allocates this impact among 171 crops and 16 animal products. It finds that animal-based foods account for 57% of agricultural ghgs, versus 29% for food from plants. Beef and cow’s milk alone made up 34%. Combined with the earlier study’s results, this implies that cattle produce 12% of ghg emissions.

Relative to other food sources, beef is uniquely carbon-intensive. Because cattle emit methane and need large pastures that are often created via deforestation, they produce seven times as many ghgs per calorie of meat as pigs do, and around 40% more than farmed prawns do. This makes beef a bigger outlier among foods than coal is among sources of electricity: burning coal generates just 14% more ghgs than burning oil, another common fuel.

These figures may understate the environmental benefits of shrinking the cattle population. Methane dissipates relatively fast, meaning that past bovine emissions soon stop warming the planet if those animals are not replaced. Such a change could also raise output of plant-based foods, by making land now used to grow animal feed available for other crops. It takes 33 plant calories to produce one calorie of beef.

The simplest way to cut beef output is for people to eat other animals instead, or become vegetarians. But convincing carnivores to give up their burgers is a tall order. Fortunately, lab-grown meats are moving from Petri dishes to high-end restaurants (see Technology Quarterly). Doing without beef from live cattle is hard to imagine, but the same was true of coal 100 years ago. Cultured meat could play an essential role in staving off a climate catastrophe.

There are 4 things you can do to slash your personal emissions:

1.  Become vegetarian
2.  Buy your electricity from a green electricity retailer.  (Make sure they're not fake green, using offsets to 'sanitise' their generation from fossil fuel sources.)
3. If you can, put solar panels on your roof
4. Switch your car to a plug-in hybrid, or if you can afford it, a full-electric.

Rapid global heating hurting farm productivity

A wheat farm in Dixon, Illinois. With the global population set to rise to more than 9bn by 2050, the UN estimates food production will have to increase by about 70%. Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters

 

From The Guardian

The climate crisis is already eating into the output of the world’s agricultural systems, with productivity much lower than it would have been if humans hadn’t rapidly heated the planet, new research has found.

Advances in technology, fertilizer use and global trade have allowed food production to keep pace with a booming global population since the 1960s, albeit with gross inequities that still leave millions of people suffering from malnutrition.

But rising temperatures in this time have acted as a handbrake on farming productivity of crops and livestock, according to the new research, published in Nature Climate Change. Productivity has actually slumped by 21% since 1961, compared to if the world hadn’t been subjected to human-induced heating.

With the global population set to rise to more than 9 billion by 2050, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that food production will have to increase by about 70%, with annual crop production increasing by almost one 1bn tonnes and meat production soaring by more than 200m tonnes a year by this point.

Meanwhile, global temperatures are rising at a rate that scientists warn is extremely dangerous for human civilization.

“The impact already is larger than I thought it would be,” said Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, an economist at Cornell University who led the research.

“It was a big surprise to me. The worry I have is that research and development in agriculture takes decades to translate into higher productivity. The projected temperature increase is so fast I don’t know if we are going to keep pace with that.”

The research measured productivity by inputs – such as labor, fertilizer and equipment – and the output in food they produce, using a model to determine how climate change has influenced this relationship.

While farming has generally become far more efficient in recent decades, it is increasingly menaced by heatwaves that exhaust farm workers and wither certain crops. Extreme weather events and drought can also affect the output of a farm, particularly smaller operations in poorer countries.

In 2019, scientists who analyzed the top 10 global crops that provide the majority of our food calories found that climate change is reducing the worldwide production of staples such as rice and wheat. Again, less affluent countries are suffering worst from this situation.

The intensification of farming to boost output has in itself caused major environmental damage, through the deforestation of grazing land, loss of valuable topsoil, pollution from pesticides and the release of vast amounts of greenhouse gases that contribute to global heating.

“Ultimately we want to increase productivity in a changing climate but a bad way to do that is by increasing inputs such as land and water,” said Ortiz-Bobea. “If we were more productive we could produce more with less of an environmental footprint.”

Weston Anderson, a researcher of food security and climate at Columbia University who was not involved in the study, said the new research provides fresh insight into the magnitude of the impact upon agriculture.

“The regions that this paper highlights as experiencing the largest reductions in agricultural productivity – Central America and the Sahel – contain some of the least food secure countries in the world, which is a real concern,” he said.

“It means that populations that were already food insecure are shouldering the heaviest burden of climate change, and highlights the importance of doing all that we can to improve agricultural production in these vulnerable regions immediately.”

Lab-grown food will save the planet

We know that we can transition electricity generation to renewables, and that process is now well under way.  By 2030, there won't be that many coal power stations left, because they will simply be too expensive compared to renewables plus storage. 

We know that, at some point quite soon, EVs will start to outsell petrol(gasoline)/diesel cars (ICEVs, which stands for 'internal combustion engined vehicles'), again because their up-front costs will fall below those of ICEVs as battery costs fall.  By 2030 at the latest, it is likely that EVs will make up 90%+ of total car/lorry/bus sales.  

We can produce carbon-free cement and iron/steel.  We will prolly, by 2030, have carbon-free sea and air transport.

What will be left then is agriculture. Agriculture is responsible for something between 24% and 30% of greenhouse gases emitted across the world.  And most of that comes from producing meat and milk.  Most people won't give these up, and in developing countries, rising meat consumption as living standards increase is likely to blow our carbon budget out of the water.  

Source: The Guardian, Illustration: Matt Kenyon

Here's an extremely interesting piece by George Monbiot in The Guardian bout how lab-grown food will save the climate and the world.  

It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.

This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake.

But pancakes are not the intended product. Such flours are likely soon to become the feedstock for almost everything. In their raw state, they can replace the fillers now used in thousands of food products. When the bacteria are modified they will create the specific proteins needed for lab-grown meat, milk and eggs. Other tweaks will produce lauric acid – goodbye palm oil – and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids – hello lab-grown fish. The carbohydrates that remain when proteins and fats have been extracted could replace everything from pasta flour to potato crisps. The first commercial factory built by Solar Foods should be running next year.

The hydrogen pathway used by Solar Foods is about 10 times as efficient as photosynthesis. But because only part of a plant can be eaten, while the bacterial flour is mangetout, you can multiply that efficiency several times. And because it will be brewed in giant vats the land efficiency, the company estimates, is roughly 20,000 times greater. Everyone on Earth could be handsomely fed, and using a tiny fraction of its surface. If, as the company intends, the water used in the process (which is much less than required by farming) is electrolysed with solar power, the best places to build these plants will be deserts.

We are on the cusp of the biggest economic transformation, of any kind, for 200 years. While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life. After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation. This means multiplying particular micro-organisms, to produce particular products, in factories.I know some people will be horrified by this prospect. I can see some drawbacks. But I believe it comes in the nick of time.

Several impending disasters are converging on our food supply, any of which could be catastrophic. Climate breakdown threatens to cause what scientists call “multiple breadbasket failures”, through synchronous heatwaves and other impacts. The UN forecasts that by 2050 feeding the world will require a 20% expansion in agriculture’s global water use. But water use is already maxed out in many places: aquifers are vanishing, rivers are failing to reach the sea. The glaciers that supply half the population of Asia are rapidly retreating. Inevitable global heating – due to greenhouse gases already released – is likely to reduce dry season rainfall in critical areas, turning fertile plains into dustbowls.

A global soil crisis threatens the very basis of our subsistence, as great tracts of arable land lose their fertility through erosion, compaction and contamination. Phosphate supplies, crucial for agriculture, are dwindling fast. Insectageddon threatens catastrophic pollination failures. It is hard to see how farming can feed us all even until 2050, let alone to the end of the century and beyond.

Food production is ripping the living world apart. Fishing and farming are, by a long way, the greatest cause of extinction and loss of the diversity and abundance of wildlife. Farming is a major cause of climate breakdown, the biggest cause of river pollution and a hefty source of air pollution. Across vast tracts of the world’s surface, it has replaced complex wild ecosystems with simplified human food chains. Industrial fishing is driving cascading ecological collapse in seas around the world. Eating is now a moral minefield, as almost everything we put in our mouths – from beef to avocados, cheese to chocolate, almonds to tortilla chips, salmon to peanut butter – has an insupportable environmental cost.

But just as hope appeared to be evaporating, the new technologies I call farmfree food create astonishing possibilities to save both people and planet. Farmfree food will allow us to hand back vast areas of land and sea to nature, permitting rewilding and carbon drawdown on a massive scale. It means an end to the exploitation of animals, an end to most deforestation, a massive reduction in the use of pesticides and fertiliser, the end of trawlers and longliners. It’s our best hope of stopping what some have called the “sixth great extinction”, but I prefer to call the great extermination. And, if it’s done right, it means cheap and abundant food for everyone.

Research by the thinktank RethinkX suggests that proteins from precision fermentation will be around 10 times cheaper than animal protein by 2035. The result, it says, will be the near-complete collapse of the livestock industry. The new food economy will “replace an extravagantly inefficient system that requires enormous quantities of inputs and produces huge amounts of waste with one that is precise, targeted, and tractable”. Using tiny areas of land, with a massively reduced requirement for water and nutrients, it “presents the greatest opportunity for environmental restoration in human history”.

Not only will food be cheaper, it will also be healthier. Because farmfree foods will be built up from simple ingredients, rather than broken down from complex ones, allergens, hard fats and other unhealthy components can be screened out. Meat will still be meat, though it will be grown in factories on collagen scaffolds, rather than in the bodies of animals. Starch will still be starch, fats will still be fats. But food is likely to be better, cheaper and much less damaging to the living planet.

Farmfree production promises a far more stable and reliable food supply that can be grown anywhere, even in countries without farmland. It could be crucial to ending world hunger. But there is a hitch: a clash between consumer and producer interests. Many millions of people, working in farming and food processing, will eventually lose their jobs. Because the new processes are so efficient, the employment they create won’t match the employment they destroy.

RethinkX envisages an extremely rapid “death spiral” in the livestock industry. Only a few components, such as the milk proteins casein and whey, need to be produced through fermentation for profit margins across an entire sector to collapse. Dairy farming in the United States, it claims, will be “all but bankrupt by 2030”. It believes that the American beef industry’s revenues will fall by 90% by 2035. 

[There's more, which you can read here]

For years I have wondered how it would be possible for passengers and crew on space stations and space ships, and on lifeless worlds like Mars or the Moon, to eat meat, fish or dairy.  The space and resources needed are simply impractical.  Lois McMaster Bujold, in her SF novels, talks about vat-meat, vat-chicken and vat-milk, and it is obvious that this is what will happen.  But it's equally likely that this will happen on Earth, too, as Monbiot points out.  Climate change, insectageddon, water shortages—everything points to the inevitable future where our meat and milk doesn't come from cows and pigs and chickens but from proteins grown in labs.  On top of which, it will be cheaper.  An order of magnitude cheaper.  We will be able to end world hunger, permanently.

This trend is starting now—even before we have food grown from bacteria.  I am a vegetarian, and I haven't eaten meat for 40 years.  To be honest, the very idea revolts me, these days.  So when I had one of the new, meat-like vegetarian burgers, which tasted like meat, "bled" like meat, and had a meat-like texture, I was rather put off!  But if you want to stop the horrible cruelty to animals which meat production involves, and if you want to reduce your carbon emissions now, by a good 20%, then you should try them. 

We need to start cutting emissions this year, and ramp up the reductions each year until we get to zero.  We need to stop exterminating insects.  We need to restore the soil.  These are compelling and vital steps, and we cannot dither and phaff any more.  To quote Churchill:  Action this day.

See also:

Imitation & vat meats the norm by 2040

Would giving up meat help the environment?

Agriculture's carbon footprint