by Al Gore
China, India, the Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, and other countries, along with multinational corporations and even hedge funds investing money from U.S. universities, are buying up large amounts of land in Africa to produce wheat and other crops for their own consumption and for sale in global markets. “It’s a new colonialism, it’s like the scramble of Africa in [the] 19th century whereby our resources were exploited to develop the Western world,” said Makambo Lotorobo, an official with a Kenyan NGO, Friends of Lake Turkana.
“There is no doubt that this is not just about land, this is about water,” said Philip Woodhouse from the University of Manchester. Devlin Kuyek, a researcher with GRAIN, an NGO specializing in food and agriculture issues, added, “Rich countries are eyeing Africa not just for a healthy return on capital, but also as an insurance policy.”
This has led to an agricultural real estate boom in Africa. More than one third of Liberia’s land, for example, has been sold to private investors. According to an analysis by the Rights and Resources Initiative, a Washington-based international coalition of NGOs, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has signed deals with foreign owners for 48.8 percent of its agricultural land; Mozambique has signed deals with foreign growers for 21.1 percent of its land. Almost 10 percent of the land in South Sudan (according to Norwegian analysts)—and 25 percent of the best acreage around its capital—was sold to investors after the country won its independence in 2011. China reached an agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo to grow palm oil for biofuel on 2.8 million hectares of land. There is disagreement among experts on how much of the land involved in these massive African purchases is being used for biofuels. The World Bank calculated that in 2009, 21 percent were for biofuels; the International Land Coalition calculated that 44 percent was dedicated to biofuels.
The South Korean multinational corporation Daewoo attempted to purchase almost half of the arable land in Madagascar, though public riots led to a cancellation of the contract (South Korean companies purchased 700,000 hectares in northern Sudan for wheat, according to a study by The Guardian, and the United Arab Emirates purchased slightly more—750,000 hectares).
In Ethiopia, where 8.2 percent of agricultural land has been signed over to foreigners, Nyikaw Ochalla, originally from the Gambella region and who is now living in the United Kingdom, told The Guardian, “The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the indigenous population. The deals are done secretly. The only thing the local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their lands. All the land round my family village of Illia has been taken over and is being cleared. People now have to work for an Indian company. Their land has been compulsorily taken and they have been given no compensation. People cannot believe what is happening. Thousands of people will be affected and people will go hungry.”
The World Bank analyzed reports of international agricultural property deals between 2008 and 2009 and concluded that during that two-year period, foreign nations and corporations purchased almost 80 million hectares of land—approximately the area of the nation of Pakistan—and that two thirds of the deals were in Africa. In addition to the sheer scale of the international land purchases and long-term leases in Africa, other concerns highlighted by African and international NGOs include problems with the use of water, soil management, and the impact on local farmers whose precolonial tenure rights are often unenforceable. In Uganda, where 14.6 percent of agricultural lands have been signed over to foreign growers, 20,000 people have claimed they were unjustly evicted from their own land; the case is pending in Ugandan courts.
After examining more than thirty studies of this issue, the International Institute for Environment and Development concluded that many of the large-scale foreign investments have already failed because of miscalculations concerning difficulties in financing the projects or unrealistic business plans. Part of the underlying problem is a gross imbalance in political power, with elites in nondemocratic governments dealing with multinational corporations and foreign countries to make short-term profits at the expense of the sustainability of their nations’ food production capability and often at the expense of poor farmers who are evicted from the land when ownership is transferred.
Several nations suffering from loss of topsoil, sharply declining crop yields, and shortages of freshwater have been forced to increase food imports. Saudi Arabia may have its last wheat harvest in 2013; it previously announced that it will rely entirely on wheat imports by 2016. In the 1970s, fearful that its central role in organizing the OPEC oil embargo might make it vulnerable to a counterembargo on the grain imports it relied upon heavily to feed its people, Saudi Arabia launched a crash program to subsidize (at almost $1,000 per ton) the growing of wheat irrigated with water from a deep nonrenewable aquifer underneath the Arabian Peninsula. However, years later, it belatedly realized that it was rapidly depleting the aquifer and announced cancellation of the program. “The decision to import is to preserve water,” said Saudi deputy minister of agriculture for research and development Abdullah al-Obaid. Agriculture absorbs 85 to 90 percent of Saudi Arabia’s water, and 80 to 85 percent of that water comes from underground aquifers. (Elsewhere in the region, Israel banned the irrigation of wheat in 2000.)
THE OCEANS
The need to meet increasing demand for freshwater and food, especially protein, has led many to look to the oceans for relief. Saudi Arabia is among many nations that have long dreamed that a logical solution to our water problems will eventually involve desalination of seawater. After all, 97.5 percent of all of the water on Earth is saltwater, and most plans to deal with the current and projected shortages of freshwater involve the use and allocation of the other 2.5 percent of Earth’s water resources—70 percent of which is locked up in the ice and snow of Antarctica and Greenland.
Unfortunately, even with the best currently available technology, the amount of energy required to remove the salt and other minerals from seawater is so great that even energy-rich Saudi Arabia cannot afford it. It is more beneficial, in their view, to sell the oil they would otherwise have to burn in desalination plants and use the money to purchase the use of water-rich land in Africa. There are, of course, many desalination plants in the world—including in Saudi Arabia. However, the quantities produced are still relatively small and the expense makes wider use of desalination for the world’s growing water needs financially unsustainable.
Nevertheless, there are many scientists and engineers working to invent new, more cost-effective technologies for desalination. Some believe that this challenge is yet another reason why the world should embark on a massive, large-scale global effort to accelerate the cost reductions now under way in solar energy. I have seen many intriguing business plans aimed at solving this problem, but none that yet appears to be close to financial feasibility.
As a measure of the desperation that water shortages can cause, one Saudi prince, Mohammed al-Faisal, provided funding to a French engineer, Georges Mougin, to develop a business plan for lassoing icebergs in the North Atlantic and then towing them to areas experiencing severe droughts. According to their calculations, a 30-million-ton iceberg could supply 500,000 people with freshwater for a year.
The production of food crops, of course, normally requires both freshwater and topsoil. Some techno-optimists, though, have touted the possibility of growing crops without topsoil in hydroponic facilities where the plants are suspended from racks and supplied with ample amounts of water, nutrients, and sunlight. Unfortunately, hydroponics is the food equivalent of desalination: it is prohibitively expensive, largely because it too is so energy-intensive.
Yet there is one source of high-quality protein that does not require topsoil—seafood. Today, more than 4.3 billion people rely on fish for approximately 15 percent of their animal protein consumption. Unfortunately, however, the demand for fish is far outstripping the supply. Consumption of fish has
increased significantly because of two familiar trends: growth in population and growth in per capita consumption. Over the last half century, the average person’s fish consumption globally increased from twenty-two pounds per person per year to almost thirty-eight pounds in 2012. As a result, the majority of the world’s ocean fisheries have been overexploited and almost one third of fish stocks in the oceans, according to the United Nations, are in danger. Stocks of large fish—tuna, swordfish, marlin, cod, halibut, and flounder, for example—have been reduced by 90 percent since the 1960s.
Although other factors play a role—including the destruction of coral reefs and changes in ocean temperature and acidity due to global warming pollution—the overexploitation of the ocean fisheries is the principal cause of the decline. The world reached “peak fish” twenty-five years ago. According to the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, “About 80 percent of the world marine fish stocks for which assessment information is available are fully exploited or overexploited.… The average maximum size of fish caught declined by 22% since 1959 globally for all assessed communities. There is also an increasing trend of stock collapses over time, with 14% of assessed stocks collapsed in 2007.”
The good news is that ocean fisheries that are carefully managed can and do recover. The United States has led the way in such protections, and many of the U.S. fisheries are now improving in their health and abundance. President George W. Bush enacted an excellent system of protection for a large marine area in the Pacific Ocean northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. However, most fishing countries have not yet followed the example of the U.S. restrictions on overfishing, and global fish consumption is continuing to increase steadily.
Most of the continuing increase in fish consumption is now being supplied by farmed fish. However, there are growing concerns about the rapid expansion of aquaculture—61 percent of which will occur in China over the next seven years. Farmed fish do not have the same healthy qualities as wild fish, and often—particularly if they are imported from China or other jurisdictions that lack adequate environmental enforcement—can be tainted by pollution, antibiotics, and antifungals. In addition, most farmed fish are fed large amounts of smaller wild fish processed for formulated fishmeal. Salmon, for example, are fed at a ratio of five pounds of wild fish for each pound of farmed salmon produced. Consequently, the netting of enormous volumes of small fish in the oceans is now causing further disruption to the ocean food chain.
During an expedition to Antarctica in 2012, I talked with scientists who are deeply concerned about the overexploitation of the krill population in the Antarctic Ocean, largely for fishmeal and pet food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has noted that the overexploitation of so-called industrial species that are used for fishmeal instead of direct human consumption will begin to impose limits on the production of fishmeal and fish oil for aquaculture in 2013. Over half of the fish food in agriculture is now made from plant protein, and some operators are trying to increase that percentage, but it is still difficult to provide essential nutrients economically without fishmeal.
In addition, any major expansion of plant protein dedicated to aquaculture would represent yet another diversion of arable land from the production of food that can be directly consumed by people.
The overexploitation of the oceans, like the reckless depletion of the world’s resources of freshwater and topsoil, has increased the amount of attention being paid to the genetic engineering of plants and animals—to give them traits that will enable them to thrive in the new conditions we are creating in the world. Although more than 10 percent of all cropland is now planted with genetically engineered crops, the issues raised are complex, as we shall now see.
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* At least, it’s noncommunicable by means of pathogens transferred from one person to another; research shows that it is communicable socially in families, communities, and nations in which the people one normally comes into contact with include many who are obese and overweight.
† Obesity is also a major risk factor for osteoarthritis and other musculoskeletal disorders, some cancers—particularly colon, breast, and endometrial—and kidney failure. Health experts estimate that the cost of treating these obesity-related diseases consumes roughly 10 to 20 percent of U.S. health care spending each year. Globally, approximately 6.4 percent of the world’s adult population now has diabetes, and according to the World Health Organization that number is expected to grow to 7.8 percent in the next seventeen years, to a total of 438 million—more than 70 percent of them in low- and middle-income countries.
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5
THE REINVENTION OF LIFE AND DEATH
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY, THE DIGITIZATION OF PEOPLE IS CREATING a new capability to change the being in human being. The convergence of the Digital Revolution and the Life Sciences Revolution is altering not only what we know and how we communicate, not just what we do and how we do it—it is beginning to change who we are.
Already, the outsourcing and robosourcing of the genetic, biochemical, and structural building blocks of life itself are leading to the emergence of new forms of microbes, plants, animals, and humans. We are crossing ancient boundaries: the boundary that separates one species from another, the divide between people and animals, and the distinction between living things and man-made machinery.
In mythology, the lines dividing powers reserved for the gods from those allowed to people were marked by warnings; transgressions were severely punished. Yet no Zeus has forbidden us to introduce human genes into other animals; or to create hybrid creatures by mixing the genes of spiders and goats; or to surgically imbed silicon computer chips into the gray matter of human brains; or to provide a genetic menu of selectable traits for parents who wish to design their own children.
The use of science and technology in an effort to enhance human beings is taking us beyond the outer edges of the moral, ethical, and religious maps bequeathed to us by previous generations. We are now in terra incognita, where the ancient maps sometimes noted, “There Be Monsters.” But those with enough courage to sail into the unknown were often richly rewarded, and in this case, the scientific community tells us with great confidence that in health care and other fields great advances await us, even though great wisdom will be needed in deciding how to proceed.
When humankind takes possession of a new and previously unimaginable power, the experience often creates a mixture of exhilaration and trepidation. In the teachings of the Abrahamic religions, the first man and the first woman were condemned to a life of toil when they seized knowledge that had been forbidden them. When Prometheus stole fire from the gods, he was condemned to eternal suffering. Every day, eagles tore into his flesh and consumed his liver, but every night his liver was regenerated so he could endure the same fate the next morning.
Ironically, scientists at Wake Forest University are now genetically engineering replacement livers in their laboratory bioreactors—and no one doubts that their groundbreaking work is anything but good. The prospects for advances in virtually all forms of health care are creating exhilaration in many fields of medical research—though it is obvious that the culture and practice of medicine, along with all of the health care professions and institutions, will soon be as disruptively reorganized as the typewriter and long-playing record businesses before it.
“PRECISION HEALTH CARE”
With exciting and nearly miraculous potential new cures for deadly diseases and debilitating conditions on the research horizon, many health care experts believe that it is inevitable that the practice of medicine will soon be radically transformed. “Personalized medicine,” or, as some now refer to it, “precision medicine,” is based on digital and molecular models of an individual’s genes, proteins, microbial communities, and other sources of medically relevant information. Most experts believe it will almost certainly become the model for medical care.
The ability
to monitor and continuously update individuals’ health functions and trends will make preventive care much more effective. The new economics of health care driven by this revolution may soon make the traditional insurance model based on large risk pools obsolete because of the huge volume of fine-grained information about every individual that can now be gathered. The role of insurance companies is already being reinvented as these firms begin to adopt digital health models and mine the “big data” being created.
Pharmaceuticals, which are now aimed at large groups of individuals manifesting similar symptoms, will soon be targeted toward genetic and molecular signatures of individual patients. This revolution is already taking place in cancer treatment and in the treatment of “orphan diseases” (those that affect fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S.; the definition varies from country to country). This trend is expected to broaden as our knowledge of diseases improves.
The use of artificial intelligence—like IBM’s Watson system—to assist doctors in making diagnoses and prescribing treatment options promises to reduce medical errors and enhance the skills of physicians. Just as artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the work of lawyers, it will profoundly change the work of doctors. Dr. Eric Topol, in his book The Creative Destruction of Medicine, writes, “This is much bigger than a change; this is the essence of creative destruction as conceptualized by [Austrian economist Joseph] Schumpeter. Not a single aspect of health and medicine today will ultimately be spared or unaffected in some way. Doctors, hospitals, the life science industry, government and its regulatory bodies: all are subject to radical transformation.”