We recognize that many groups are actively working to develop alternative indicators for sustainability. We embark on this study to see if calibrating biocapacity may offer the kind of impact valuation for agriculture which does not exist in the market economy and its system of metrics.

Essentially, Biocapacity is the dynamic balance point between the number of organisms within a given area and the amount of resources that are needed to support them within this area. Thus, agricultural biocapacity indicates the degree to which the population of a bioregion is greater or lesser than the food that is available from the bioregion to feed it.

By combining scientific reason with place-based knowledge, culture and history, biocapacity provides a baseline for sustainability by showing how different interventions will effect different outcomes. This allows communities to develop evidence-based guidelines for organizing their own resource sufficiency while regenerating the ecology of their life-places.

Excerpts

On Bioregionalism in the Bay Area

Gradually, this eclectic group of naturalists began to call their field “bioregionalism” (bio is the Greek word for life; regere is the Latin word for a place to be managed). So, bioregionalism is essentially the idea of lifeplace — a way of extending the life of a community to the life of the biosphere through the ecological renewal of a particular area. The new bioregionalists wanted to combine local knowledge, beliefs and values with the unique characteristics of the climate and topography, the soils and plants, and the animals and habitats where they lived.

These ideas spread across the United States, but San Francisco was the epicenter for this people’s movement. They called on citizens to stop running away from the problems of industrial economy to better understand the land around them, the limits to its resources, and how this could help meet the needs of the diverse species who live there, including homo sapiens. Their vision was the development of new social and cultural relationships within the context of geographical communities.

Bioregionalism was a unique perspective for addressing major environmental challenges on a human scale. It acknowledged that solving large ecological problems by ‘thinking globally’ is much too disempowering for the average person. Although ‘acting locally’ is clearly the practical first step, it operates on too small a scale to impact environmental governance. The activities of localization simply don’t generate enough political power within small communities to stop centralized governments and markets from exploiting these decentralized life-places for their own ends.

The bioregionalists explained why there are so few decision-making organizations or networks at regional levels, where harmful ecological problems could be most effectively addressed. They showed how history and economics had prompted leaders to draw artificial local, state and national borders that seldom conformed to the ecological zones which overlap with them. Hence, natural boundaries have little correlation with our present political, economic and social boundaries and their institutions. To be sure, many ecological problems — involving personal and collective choices and action, as well as their cumulative effects on human lives — cannot be resolved within existing political jurisdictions. Ultimately, we become inhabitants separated from our own habitats.

How is cooperation over resources even possible if our geographical borders cannot be redrawn to protect and manage the environment? An engaged movement for a more ecological society cannot succeed without some kind of graphic image of the bioregional boundaries which are hidden from view. Such a map would focus on a region’s hydrology, geology and physiography, but also reflect its culture, history, present land-use patterns and climate.

From the Conclusion

Based on our research, most of the region will exceed its biocapacity to produce food for its growing population within two or three decades.

Industrial pollution, climate change, sea level rise, invasive species, water diversions and loss of wetlands are threatening enormous swaths of human habitat. Before 2050, the prodigious agricultural production of the San Francisco Bay Watershed will fail to produce sufficient quantities of agriculture for its population due to uncertain rainfall, flooded coasts and inlets, depletion of aquifers, topsoil loss, an export-led business model and a lack of cooperative dialogue among its political subdivisions.

Our study indicates that locally-produced calories have more monetary and ecological value when consumed in the same life-places where they are produced. Yet as long as the San Francisco/Oakland/Hayward MSA continues to import agriculture from elsewhere, the community will be impacted by rising food prices. Importing food into the dense population of the Bay Area will be possible until its food suppliers — foreign, domestic and regional — face their own supply limits for finite energy and raw materials and the breakdown of their own their fragile infrastructures.

When the Bay Area becomes too severe a strain on the bioregion itself, the reversal will be rapid. The external dependency on food will collapse and the capacity of the entire San Francisco Bay Watershed to sustain itself will be overtaken by extreme costs in food, water, energy and housing.

Why do we exploit our ecosystems instead of restoring them as life-places for habitation? This was the basic question raised in 1968. Now, ironically, San Francisco’s ‘back to the land’ diaspora could turn into a mass evacuation from the region as its resources continue to decline and its self-sufficiency falters. How this existential crisis is addressed in the San Francisco Bay Watershed — and in bioregions everywhere — will determine the ecological future of all life-places and our sustainability as a species. The question then will be, not how sustainable but how inhabitable is my own bioregion?

Still, if there’s any area that can break down the barriers between people and their land-place, integrating the human community with the ecological community, it’s the Bay Area — the spot where modern bioregionalism began and remains a vital part of the cultural memory. Community members are the very organisms that depend on environmental resources for support.

Now we must learn how to restore this dynamic balance. The issue is not if we have the will to do this, but how soon can it be done?

For more information, please contact James Quilligan or Patti Ellis at economicdemocracyadvocates.org

Photo by RhyoR

The post Agricultural Sustainability for Bioregionalism in the San Francisco Bay Watershed appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the shownotes to the video

Sara Menker quit a career in commodities trading to figure out how the global value chain of agriculture works. Her discoveries have led to some startling predictions: “We could have a tipping point in global food and agriculture if surging demand surpasses the agricultural system’s structural capacity to produce food,” she says. “People could starve and governments may fall.” Menker’s models predict that this scenario could happen in a decade — that the world could be short 214 trillion calories per year by 2027. She offers a vision of this impossible world as well as some steps we can take today to avoid it.

Transcript

00:12
Since 2009, the world has been stuck on a single narrative around a coming global food crisis and what we need to do to avoid it. How do we feed nine billion people by 2050? Every conference, podcast and dialogue around global food security starts with this question and goes on to answer it by saying we need to produce 70 percent more food.

00:45
The 2050 narrative started to evolve shortly after global food prices hit all-time highs in 2008. People were suffering and struggling, governments and world leaders needed to show us that they were paying attention and were working to solve it. The thing is, 2050 is so far into the future that we can’t even relate to it, and more importantly, if we keep doing what we’re doing, it’s going to hit us a lot sooner than that.

01:18
I believe we need to ask a different question. The answer to that question needs to be framed differently. If we can reframe the old narrative and replace it with new numbers that tell us a more complete pictures, numbers that everyone can understand and relate to, we can avoid the crisis altogether.

01:48
I was a commodities trader in my past life and one of the things that I learned trading is that every market has a tipping point, the point at which change occurs so rapidly that it impacts the world and things change forever. Think of the last financial crisis, or the dot-com crash.

02:12
So here’s my concern. We could have a tipping point in global food and agriculture if surging demand surpasses the agricultural system’s structural capacity to produce food. This means at this point supply can no longer keep up with demand despite exploding prices, unless we can commit to some type of structural change. This time around, it won’t be about stock markets and money. It’s about people. People could starve and governments may fall. This question of at what point does supply struggle to keep up with surging demand is one that started off as an interest for me while I was trading and became an absolute obsession. It went from interest to obsession when I realized through my research how broken the system was and how very little data was being used to make such critical decisions. That’s the point I decided to walk away from a career on Wall Street and start an entrepreneurial journey to start Gro Intelligence.

03:26
At Gro, we focus on bringing this data and doing the work to make it actionable, to empower decision-makers at every level. But doing this work, we also realized that the world, not just world leaders, but businesses and citizens like every single person in this room, lacked an actionable guide on how we can avoid a coming global food security crisis. And so we built a model, leveraging the petabytes of data we sit on, and we solved for the tipping point.

04:02
Now, no one knows we’ve been working on this problem and this is the first time that I’m sharing what we discovered. We discovered that the tipping point is actually a decade from now. We discovered that the world will be short 214 trillion calories by 2027. The world is not in a position to fill this gap.

04:34
Now, you’ll notice that the way I’m framing this is different from how I started, and that’s intentional, because until now this problem has been quantified using mass: think kilograms, tons, hectograms, whatever your unit of choice is in mass. Why do we talk about food in terms of weight? Because it’s easy. We can look at a photograph and determine tonnage on a ship by using a simple pocket calculator. We can weigh trucks, airplanes and oxcarts. But what we care about in food is nutritional value. Not all foods are created equal, even if they weigh the same. This I learned firsthand when I moved from Ethiopia to the US for university. Upon my return back home, my father, who was so excited to see me, greeted me by asking why I was fat. Now, turns out that eating approximately the same amount of food as I did in Ethiopia, but in America, had actually lent a certain fullness to my figure. This is why we should care about calories, not about mass. It is calories which sustain us.

05:58
So 214 trillion calories is a very large number, and not even the most dedicated of us think in the hundreds of trillions of calories. So let me break this down differently. An alternative way to think about this is to think about it in Big Macs. 214 trillion calories. A single Big Mac has 563 calories. That means the world will be short 379 billion Big Macs in 2027. That is more Big Macs than McDonald’s has ever produced.

06:37
So how did we get to these numbers in the first place? They’re not made up. This map shows you where the world was 40 years ago. It shows you net calorie gaps in every country in the world. Now, simply put, this is just calories consumed in that country minus calories produced in that same country. This is not a statement on malnutrition or anything else. It’s simply saying how many calories are consumed in a single year minus how many are produced.Blue countries are net calorie exporters, or self-sufficient. They have some in storage for a rainy day. Red countries are net calorie importers. The deeper, the brighter the red, the more you’re importing. 40 years ago, such few countries were net exporters of calories, I could count them with one hand. Most of the African continent, Europe, most of Asia, South America excluding Argentina, were all net importers of calories. And what’s surprising is that China used to actually be food self-sufficient. India was a big net importer of calories.

07:49
40 years later, this is today. You can see the drastic transformation that’s occurred in the world. Brazil has emerged as an agricultural powerhouse. Europe is dominant in global agriculture. India has actually flipped from red to blue.It’s become food self-sufficient. And China went from that light blue to the brightest red that you see on this map.

08:14
How did we get here? What happened? So this chart shows you India and Africa. Blue line is India, red line is Africa.How is it that two regions that started off so similarly in such similar trajectories take such different paths? India had a green revolution. Not a single African country had a green revolution. The net outcome? India is food self-sufficientand in the past decade has actually been exporting calories. The African continent now imports over 300 trillion calories a year. Then we add China, the green line. Remember the switch from the blue to the bright red? What happened and when did it happen? China seemed to be on a very similar path to India until the start of the 21st century, where it suddenly flipped. A young and growing population combined with significant economic growthmade its mark with a big bang and no one in the markets saw it coming. This flip was everything to global agricultural markets. Luckily now, South America was starting to boom at the same time as China’s rise, and so therefore, supply and demand were still somewhat balanced.

09:38
So the question becomes, where do we go from here? Oddly enough, it’s not a new story, except this time it’s not just a story of China. It’s a continuation of China, an amplification of Africa and a paradigm shift in India. By 2023,Africa’s population is forecasted to overtake that of India’s and China’s. By 2023, these three regions combined will make up over half the world’s population. This crossover point starts to present really interesting challenges for global food security. And a few years later, we’re hit hard with that reality.

10:24
What does the world look like in 10 years? So far, as I mentioned, India has been food self-sufficient. Most forecasters predict that this will continue. We disagree. India will soon become a net importer of calories. This will be driven both by the fact that demand is growing from a population growth standpoint plus economic growth. It will be driven by both. And even if you have optimistic assumptions around production growth, it will make that slight flip.That slight flip can have huge implications.

11:03
Next, Africa will continue to be a net importer of calories, again driven by population growth and economic growth.This is again assuming optimistic production growth assumptions. Then China, where population is flattening out,calorie consumption will explode because the types of calories consumed are also starting to be higher-calorie-content foods. And so therefore, these three regions combined start to present a really interesting challenge for the world.

11:36
Until now, countries with calorie deficits have been able to meet these deficits by importing from surplus regions. By surplus regions, I’m talking about North America, South America and Europe. This line chart over here shows you the growth and the projected growth over the next decade of production from North America, South America and Europe. What it doesn’t show you is that most of this growth is actually going to come from South America. And most of this growth is going to come at the huge cost of deforestation. And so when you look at the combined demand increase coming from India, China and the African continent, and look at it versus the combined increase in production coming from India, China, the African continent, North America, South America and Europe, you are left with a 214-trillion-calorie deficit, one we can’t produce. And this, by the way, is actually assuming we take all the extra calories produced in North America, South America and Europe and export them solely to India, China and Africa.

12:51
What I just presented to you is a vision of an impossible world. We can do something to change that. We can change consumption patterns, we can reduce food waste, or we can make a bold commitment to increasing yields exponentially.

13:09
Now, I’m not going to go into discussing changing consumption patterns or reducing food waste, because those conversations have been going on for some time now. Nothing has happened. Nothing has happened because those arguments ask the surplus regions to change their behavior on behalf of deficit regions. Waiting for others to change their behavior on your behalf, for your survival, is a terrible idea. It’s unproductive.

13:37
So I’d like to suggest an alternative that comes from the red regions. China, India, Africa. China is constrained in terms of how much more land it actually has available for agriculture, and it has massive water resource availability issues. So the answer really lies in India and in Africa. India has some upside in terms of potential yield increases.Now this is the gap between its current yield and the theoretical maximum yield it can achieve. It has some unfarmed arable land remaining, but not much, India is quite land-constrained. Now, the African continent, on the other hand,has vast amounts of arable land remaining and significant upside potential in yields. Somewhat simplified picture here, but if you look at sub-Saharan African yields in corn today, they are where North American yields were in 1940.We don’t have 70-plus years to figure this out, so it means we need to try something new and we need to try something different. The solution starts with reforms. We need to reform and commercialize the agricultural industries in Africa and in India.

15:02
Now, by commercialization — commercialization is not about commercial farming alone. Commercialization is about leveraging data to craft better policies, to improve infrastructure, to lower the transportation costs and to completely reform banking and insurance industries. Commercialization is about taking agriculture from too risky an endeavor to one where fortunes can be made. Commercialization is not about just farmers. Commercialization is about the entire agricultural system. But commercialization also means confronting the fact that we can no longer place the burden of growth on small-scale farmers alone, and accepting that commercial farms and the introduction of commercial farmscould provide certain economies of scale that even small-scale farmers can leverage. It is not about small-scale farming or commercial agriculture, or big agriculture. We can create the first successful models of the coexistence and success of small-scale farming alongside commercial agriculture. This is because, for the first time ever, the most critical tool for success in the industry — data and knowledge — is becoming cheaper by the day. And very soon, it won’t matter how much money you have or how big you are to make optimal decisions and maximize probability of success in reaching your intended goal. Companies like Gro are working really hard to make this a reality.

16:43
So if we can commit to this new, bold initiative, to this new, bold change, not only can we solve the 214-trillion gap that I talked about, but we can actually set the world on a whole new path. India can remain food self-sufficient and Africa can emerge as the world’s next dark blue region.

17:09
The new question is, how do we produce 214 trillion calories to feed 8.3 billion people by 2027? We have the solution. We just need to act on it.

17:25
Thank you.

17:26
(Applause)

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In their own words:

“Bancor protocol is an initiative of the Bprotocol Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Zug, Switzerland. The Bancor protocol enables anyone to create a new type of cryptocurrency called a smart token, which can hold (and trade) other cryptocurrencies. This allows the smart token’s contract to serve as its own market maker, automatically discovering its own price(s) and providing liquidity to other currencies, thereby removing the need for a second party in cryptocurrency trades. Every smart token is always liquid at some price point.”

But does such crypto-capitalism solve any of our fundamental social and environmental problems?

James Quilligan doesn’t think so, and explained why in a Facebook thread:

“This project looks to me to be on firm ground when it comes to tracking the relative value of commodity currencies. It appears to be determining value mostly outside of the world’s sovereign, political monetary systems and HURRAH for that. Time will tell if this new Bancor is a genuine monetary tool; but in the meantime it is well-situated to being a very *useful guidepost for arbitraging in mainstream commodities markets* — but wait! isn’t that what this new Bancor is (theoretically) determined to prevent? What’s happened to the purported independent valuation which is set apart, uncontaminated from the conventional economy? Or is this just another scheme based on generating surplus value?

What’s happening now in the field of crypto-currencies is that blockchain technologies are becoming increasingly disruptive by staking a bigger claim to citizen/consumer access and representative use-value than the Central Banks of sovereign nation-states. Wow! No contest! Argument conceded! This is why blockchain is indeed the future. HOWEVER, precisely because blockchain is so potentially disruptive to the political status quo and has no international support from the Central Banks, it is bound to remain more of a financial product than a monetary product, at least until the present monetary system breaks down in a geopolitical crisis and a new one is created, which is the emerging reality. (And by the way, Central Banks are actively discussing getting their hands on blockchain technology and using it to devise this new international monetary system under a new sovereign banner.) When this happens, will the new Bancor be a player at the table? Or will the new Bancor survive this chaos purely as a financial investment scheme? Or even survive at all? I’m not optimistic on any of these counts – and here’s why.)

Let’s not forget, Keynes’ Bancor stemmed from his proposal for an International Clearing Union, which adjusted the trade imbalances between sovereign states on an annual basis. Keynes’ Bancor (had it been realized) would have expressed a monetary value between sovereign states that reflected the financial adjustments between those nations with fiscal surpluses and those with fiscal deficits. This was necessary, Keynes believed, so that all people would be guaranteed adequate purchasing capacity to meet their everyday needs, much in the spirit of the commons (except that Keynes conflated human need with effective demand.) Is that what this new Bancor has in mind? Not at all. So it’s quite misleading when these new Bancor folks take Keynes’ terminology, then style it as a monetary device which evolves out of his thinking.

Don’t get me wrong, I am the world’s biggest critic of all things sovereign. The Era of Sovereignty has wrecked the world in every way possible. If world society doesn’t soon evolve beyond sovereign states, the ecosystems of the planet will be in major collapse. This is why I’m fully supportive of initiatives that are aimed at creating independent value on a decentralized basis. Indeed so. Yet supporters of blockchain have yet to see the Duality that they are creating in attempting to supplant the centralized, international monetary system with their own centralized, technologically sovereign system. Is this what we really want, another world founded on Technological Sovereignty? Have the Blockchainers actually discovered a new kind of metaphysical value? Uh, no: it’s just the latest version of ‘supply creates its own demand’, detaching society further away from an ecologically-based and more equitable society.

The key to making this transition is devolving real monetary power to decentralized political entities, whether that means citizens, or their participatory decision-making units, in order to increase the purchasing capacity and meet the needs of all citizens. Is that what this new Bancor has in mind? No sign of that at all.

When the new Bancor joins or creates an International Confederation of Commons, with metrics for currency value that are based on both the availability and sustainability of the world’s resources in meeting the needs of everyone, now and in the future.

Let me be clear: commodities markets are not a proxy for either the commons or for meeting human need. The sustainable economic measure of human need is the resources that are directly available to a population within a given ecosystem, not in a given market. When I see those metrics on sustainable value emerge from this Bancor group, I will be persuaded that it understands the political and ecological circumstances necessary for creating decentralized monetary power beyond commodity value differentials. And on that day, I will acknowledge that Bancor’s tool has lasting monetary value, rather than simple financial value. Until then, every time I hear the word BANCOR, it will trigger in my brain the classic meme from the Who, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.:

The post James Quilligan on why the Bancor protocol does not solve any fundamental problem appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Peter Barnes, an old colleague of mine who writes about the commons from an economic perspective, recently published an essay about “common wealth trusts” as a structure to be used in transitioning to a new economy.  The essay, on the Great Transition Initiative website, recapitulates and extends an idea that Barnes has written about in the past – how to use stakeholder trusts to manage common assets (minerals, forests, electromagnetic spectrum, groundwater, etc.) while providing dividends to all citizens who are also co-owners of those assets.

Barnes argues that common wealth trusts “address the two greatest flaws in contemporary capitalism—its relentless destruction of nature and widening of inequality—while still keeping the benefits that markets provide.”  Trusts can work because they can provide clear (collective) property rights and formal management systems around resources that are invisible to markets and in many instances threatened with privatization.  He writes:

…..Markets currently do not acknowledge such wealth or recognize its value, much less its common ownership. Because of this enormous market failure, private businesses take, use, or pollute common wealth without limit, generally without paying its right­ful owners for the pri­vi­lege. By so doing, private businesses and their narrow group of owners capture much of the value added by common wealth, exacerbating inequality. If businesses had to pay for the use of common wealth, these things would not happen, or at least would happen much less. What are now unpriced exter­nal­i­ties or straight-out thefts would become costs for businesses that could generate income for everyone.

“Organizing common wealth so that markets respect its co-inheritors and co-beneficiaries requires the creation of common wealth trusts, legally accountable to future generations,” Barnes argues. “These trusts would have authority to limit usage of threatened ecosystems, charge for the use of public resources, and pay per capita dividends. Designing and creating a suite of such trusts would counterbalance profit-seeking activity, slow the destruction of nature, and reduce inequality.”

One of the satisfying features of the Great Transition Initiative’s essay series is the curated commentary on featured essays. In this case, nine commenters offer short but focused responses to Barnes’ proposals.

Development specialist James Quilligan worries about the need to scale common wealth trusts by federating them through innovations such as “bioregional councils, guilds, entrepreneurial hubs, and strategic planning agencies.”

Geographer Neera Singh is concerned about the inequalities that result by declaring that an ecosystem resource belongs to everyone because such “equality” may ignore past inequities in investment in a resource:  “Investment of caring labor by people living in these landscapes cannot be ignored. To treat these natural resources as “common wealth” belonging to “everyone” equally will be to introduce another layer of injustice over past injustices.  It is critical to address issues of redistribution. In the absence of radical redistribution of the “common wealth” generated by the past appropriation of the gifts of nature and of indigenous people, peasants, and pastoralists, starting with treating ‘natural resources’ as common wealth, today, will not be enough.”

Economist Elizabeth Stanton worries that politics will interfere with the establishment of a system of common wealth trusts:  “As tempting as it is to try to write our political system out of the equation, we will likely need to continue to wade through the morass of political mechanisms that shape our decision-making processes.

Barnes offers direct responses to his friendly critics, which helps illuminate the possibilities and limits of common wealth trusts. One virtue of his idea is that it is immediately actionable within contemporary political settings.  The legal models are straight-forward; just add political advocacy. Yet some critics regard the ready-to-go character of common wealth trusts as precisely its shortcoming:  it does not change the fundamental dynamics of markets or politics (although Barnes would note that commons trusts can help establish strict new limits on market exploitation of resources and prevent privatization of resources).

An ongoing, timely debate that is worth continuing….

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