The End of Food by Paul Roberts

This book shows how food habits in Western society are critically dependent on low energy prices. According to Paul Roberts, the biggest profit margins and the most marketing spending relate to foods whose production absorbs the most energy. The amount of energy needed to make a pound of breakfast cereal is 32 times that needed to produce a pound of flour from the same wheat.

Corn yields may be six times what they were in the 1930s but this increase has depended on artificial fertilizer, much of which is produced using natural gas. Fertilizer production now competes for the natural gas with home heating. So, as energy prices rise, fertilizer and corn prices will rise too.

The beef, chicken, and pork that is such a big part of the world’s diet is fed almost entirely on corn. Roberts claims it takes 20lbs of grain to produce 1lb of beef. It is about half that amount to produce a pound of pork or chicken.

If US meat consumption of 217lbs per year were to be replicated worldwide, the world could only support 2.6 billion people, as against the 6 billion now living and the 9 billion predicted to be living by 2050. By highlighting the inefficiency of corn-fed beef, the author points to an opportunity for Irish grass-fed beef.

He argues that if the earth, whose arable acreage can only be increased by cutting down rainforest, is to feed the billions of extra people in Asia and Latin America who are now aspiring to Western standards of prosperity, Europeans and Americans will have to change their tastes in food.

Our tastes have developed as if food was produced in supermarkets, and not on farms. Certain beef cuts are not popular in some countries so they are exported long distances to other markets. Some countries like white chicken meat, others like brown, so parts of the same bird may be consumed thousands of miles apart. All this consumes energy in transportation.

Food must always “look good” on supermarket shelves, so vast quantities of perfectly edible and safe food is dumped, just because it has lost the pristine appearance consumers have come to expect.

Heavy use wears out some soils. Too much irrigation using underground water (as against rain water) can make soils too salty to remain fertile. 75% of all freshwater used by humans is used in agriculture. Water stocks in some countries, like Spain, are being depleted.

Our globally interdependent food system, based on “just in time” delivery, is inherently fragile. It is vulnerable to disruption by a failure of crops in one place, but can also transmit infections more quickly than localized systems would.

Reliance on take-out meals also increases the risk of food poisoning. The average hamburger contains meat from 55 different animals. If just one of those sources is infected and the burger is not properly cooked, a problem will arise.

Roberts’ most hopeful comment is about the possibility of developing aquaculture. Fish are far more efficient than cattle, chickens or pigs are in converting vegetable matter into meat. The challenge, he says, is to find a way of fish farming on the high seas, where the effluent associated with coastal fish farming can more easily be dispersed.

Paul Roberts’ book is both timely and alarming. It shows us that the food problem is like the climate change problem. The full cost of what we consume is not reflected in the price we pay. A meat-rich diet for the few uses up acres that might feed the many, but on a different diet. But there is no globally accepted rule-maker to ensure that prices reflect our long-term global interests as well as short-term personal tastes.

This book is well-written, with authorities quoted to support its often controversial conclusions. But, apart from what is says about fish farming, it contains few ready-to-use solutions.

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire

This is a book of history on a global scale – encompassing the destinies of dozens of now independent countries, once part of the British Empire. The title of the book is misleading. The British Empire did not decline after its defeat by the Americans at Yorktown in 1781. It expanded, especially in India and Africa. It was the two world wars that changed the trend.

In 1945, 700 million lived in British colonies. By 1965 that number had fallen to a mere 5 million. But, in many respects, the British Empire in 1945 was already dead, but still standing.

In 1914, Britain could confidently declare war on Germany and Austria without consulting its Dominions, and correctly anticipate that they would all follow loyally. But by 1922 Canada was confident enough to refuse to join a deeply indebted Britain’s military adventures in Turkey.

In the First World War, India paid for and equipped out of its own resources the 200,000 troops it put into the field along side the British. By the Second World War, even the Indian colonial administration insisted that Britain itself meet many of the bills. In the interwar years, British exports were undercut by Japanese goods even in its own colonies.

India was the heart of the imperial enterprise. It provided vast profits and markets for Britain. The defence of its route to India explained why Britain felt it needed to dominate Southern Africa, Egypt, and the Mediterranean as well.

Many sincerely felt that the Empire was a benefit to humanity. Joseph Chamberlain believed the Anglo Saxons were “the greatest governing race the world has ever seen”. The Conservative Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury calculated that allowing European powers to divide up Africa kept them distracted, and thus preserved peace in Europe between 1870 and 1914. He may have been right.

But the price paid by the colonial peoples was very high. Brendon claims that genocide was committed in Tasmania. China was forced to open its markets to Indian opium to the detriment of its people. He calculates that Bengal alone contributed £1 billion to the British Treasury in the years before Waterloo.

The best land was seized for the White settlers in Kenya. Discriminatory tax systems were put in place to force locals to work for the colonists, and as late as 1930, a Land Apportionment Act in Southern Rhodesia restricted 1 million Africans to 28 million acres, while granting 0.05 million Whites 48 million acres. This inequity led to starvation, and has poisoned attitudes in Zimbabwe for generations.

As one Kikuyu elder told Fenner Brockway MP in the 1950s “When someone steals your land, especially if it is near, you can never forget”. This emotional reality, familiar in Irish history, explains the present difficulties making peace between Palestinians and Israelis – in a territory that was also once a British mandate. Practicality and common sense go out the window once the sense of loss is deep enough.

What modern eyes would see as racist attitudes were present. A political rival said of Winston Churchill’s view of Indian independence that “any form of self Government for coloured peoples raises in him a wholly uncontrollable complex”. If Churchill had won the 1945 General Election, India would not have gained its independence by 1947. He would have resisted it, and the consequences would probably have been worse than what happened.

Once India did gain its independence, the strategic logic for retaining expensive colonial outposts on the route to India disappeared. Yet Britain struggled to keep the Suez Canal, Cyprus and Aden because, as Piers Brendon points out, “the Empire had gone, but the emotions associated with it survived, like phantom feelings after an amputation”.

On the other hand, there was always a strong sense that the empire was a trust. Real efforts were made to spread democratic values. The first Asian country to enjoy adult suffrage was Ceylon, as a result of recommendations of a commission chaired by an Irish man, Lord Donoughmore.

The Irish were deeply involved in Britain’s imperial story. A quarter of the officers and half the European troops in the Indian army were Irish. The Governor who justified the Amritsar massacre was a Catholic from Solohead in Tipperary, and the last Governor of Burma was from Cootehill.

This book greatly helps us to understand the modern world. But it is also entertaining and full of colourful anecdotes and embarrassing quotations.

Twice as Good - Condolezza Rice and her Path to Power

It is an interesting commentary on the differences of attitudes across of the Atlantic that the subtitle for Marcus Mabry’s book for sale in Europe is “Naked Ambition”, whereas that on the American edition is “Twice as Good”. “Naked Ambition” is unfair and is not justified by the content of the book, but was presumably chosen to attract readers among European critics of US policy, whereas the title “Twice as Good” suggests to American readers that to succeed, as Condoleezza Rice undoubtedly has done, an African American woman had to be twice as good as her competition.

Mabry’s book is a psychological portrait, delving deeply into the subject’s family background, in particular her status as the only child of protective, upwardly mobile, middle class parents in segregationist Alabama. Mabry was given access to her family, some of whom spoke very freely indeed.

What comes through is that Condoleezza Rice has consistently believed that individual effort, particularly educational effort, would enable anybody who wanted to do so, to succeed as she has done.

She accepted no excuses for herself, and would not concede them to others. This was a philosophy imbued in her by her father, a clergyman who knew Martin Luther King well, but avoided joining the Civil Rights agitation raging all around him in Birmingham, Alabama.

Mabry portrays Dr. Rice as exceptionally disciplined and always well prepared. But Kessler claims that she has “failed to provide him (President Bush) with a coherent foreign policy vision. The President appears to be the idea generator. After all, he shifted Rice from her roots in foreign policy realism and infused her with a desire to spread democracy”, Kessler says.

Many of the problems that Dr. Rice is now tackling as Secretary of State arose, or became more difficult, during her time as National Security Advisor up to 2004 – Iraq, the Iranian nuclear issue, Darfur, North Korea, Afghanistan and the Israel/Palestine conflict. The huge focus on Iraq squeezed out the other issues.

In the US system, the National Security Advisor has a dual rôle – advising the President on foreign policy, and coordinating the major Departments of Government as chairperson of the National Security Council. Between 2000 and 2004, both authors suggest that Dr. Rice concentrated on the first part of the job. Mabry says she is “far better suited to running a department than trying to coordinate many”.

As Secretary of State, she is now pulling all the pieces together. She has recognized that progress and momentum on the Arab-Israeli dispute is a sine que non for international cooperation on a lot of other issues. The recent Annapolis Conference and its commitment to intensive US support for timelined negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis is very much Condoleezza’s Rice’s personal achievement and a recognition by her of this fundamental reality.

These two books complement one another. Whereas Mabry deals with his subject’s whole life up to the beginning of this year, Glenn Kessler concentrates on the two first years of her service as Secretary of State – 2005 and 2006.

Neither book allows the reader to reach a final conclusion about her record. Kessler’s book has come out too soon. Most of the subjects he covers are still works in progress. Mabry’s book has the greater human interest, but it is rather repetitive and seems to dwell overlong on Dr. Rice’s supposed attitudes towards her African American heritage.

Captain and the King

He put down parliamentary questions about a possible Channel Tunnel linking Britain and France …. in 1882! He made a £5.00 donation to the Kilrush (Co. Clare) Brass Band and the local Land League, because they did not like him, organized a boycott of the Band for accepting it. He was bankrupt twice and his election and living expenses continued to be met by his wife’s aunt, long after his wife herself had started living with another man. He developed close links with the Fenians and fought for prisoner releases, but failed to vote for the second Home Rule Bill because it would have meant the end of Irish representation at Westminster. He was repeatedly elected to Parliament as a Home Rule MP with the support of Charles Stewart Parnell, but refused to sit on Parnell’s party benches in the House of Commons, preferring to sit with the Liberals, and refused to sign the party loyalty pledge accepted by all the other Irish party MPs.

This is the record of Captain William O’Shea, MP for Clare and later for Galway, son of a Catholic Limerick solicitor and reputedly one of the best dressed men in the House of Commons.

Myles Dungan’s book is the first ever biography of Captain O’Shea, although his wife Katherine has been the subject of three biographies, and her lover Charles Stewart Parnell of many more.

This is a scholarly work containing much new material. Myles Dungan has trawled through O’Shea’s own papers and those of many other figures of the time. He had a lot to work on. O’Shea did not live with his wife, probably because Parnell was living with her, but he continued to write many friendly letters to her, most of which survived. Interestingly his wife’s letters back to him have disappeared!

She, in turn, worked to advance his career. She importuned the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone to get him a government job. She encouraged her lover Parnell to take huge political risks to help O’Shea keep his Irish party seat in the House of Commons, even though he had an appalling voting record in support of Parnell’s party positions.

This book is also, in a sense, a new biography of Parnell incorporated in a biography of his nemesis, O’Shea. The Parnell that emerges from these pages is more complex than the figure of Nationalist hagiography who “set no boundary to the march of a nation”. Parnell was a man of his times and a landlord. He favoured special representation for landlords in County administration. Although otherwise an autocratic leader, Parnell continually allowed himself to be politically blackmailed by O’Shea.

William O’Shea himself served in the House of Commons for a total of six years. He was a moderately active as an MP. Myles Dungan has calculated that he intervened 200 times in the House in that period. But he was very busy in his constituency. Unlike many Irish party MPs, who had no links at all with their constituency other than being endorsed to represent it by Parnell, O’Shea had land in East Clare which he visited frequently. As an MP he cultivated the Catholic clergy in the county, was a promoter of the building of the West Clare railway, and obtained more Government grants to build piers in the fishing villages of West Clare, than were received by any other counties along the west coast.

His strength lay in his influence with British Administration, a characteristic that was going out of fashion with the Irish party of the time, which was turning toward a policy of parliamentary obstruction, boycotts and no rent campaigns to secure their basic demands – Home Rule and the overthrow of the Irish landlord interest.

In this sense, O’Shea was the last of his kind, a nineteenth century Irish “Whig” MP, who wanted to work with English parties to obtain modest incremental improvements for Ireland, rather than to embark on a path of confrontation to achieve longer term and more ambitious goals. Apart from his other less attractive qualities, O’Shea turned out to be on the wrong side of the history of his time.

Myles Dungan deals extensively with Parnell’s affair with O’Shea’s wife. The conclusion one reaches is that O’Shea knew of the affair. Not only did he turn a blind eye to it, but continued to have sexual relations with his wife long after the affair had started. He was, as one might put it nowadays, “sexually active”, and his wife had compiled a list of 17 different affairs he was supposed to have had when she was contemplating opposing his divorce petition on the grounds of her adultery with Parnell. She and Parnell were also set to claim that O’Shea connived in their affair, but they never did make that claim in court because it would have meant that the divorce petition would have failed. Parnell, for one, did not want that because he wanted to marry Katherine himself.

This unwillingness to defend his case and counter O’Shea’s evidence in the divorce court did Parnell a lot of damage with English public opinion. This was because of the impact of O’Shea’s testimony on the support base of the Liberal Party. The non-conformist Liberal and Protestant conscience of England, fresh from destroying the career of Charles Dilke MP because of his adulteries, was appalled by O’Shea’s presentation of Parnell’s deceptiveness in pursuing an affair with his friend’s wife under his friend’s own roof. English opinion was then, and probably still is, much less tolerant of sexual pecadillos than Irish opinion.

The Liberal Party had already suffered a major split because of Gladstone’s first unsuccessful attempt to pass Home Rule in the 1880s, and was facing considerable risks to its vote by taking up Home Rule a second time. So, as long as Parnell was leader, the Liberal Party was not inclined to stick its neck out to push Home Rule that would put Ireland under Parnell’s “adulterous” rule. The Liberal belief was that if Home Rule was to be brought forward a second time, Parnell had to go first.

That was the setting for the greatest split in Irish politics of the entire nineteenth century, a split that was only eclipsed in bitterness by the Civil War of the 1920s.

This is a serious work of history. It assembles evidence, which is often incomplete, and attempts to draw conclusions from it. In this respect, demands a high level of attention from the reader, who may find the going hard at times. But it is an original work, dealing with a fascinating subject, and deserves to be widely read.

After Iraq by Gwynne Dyer

Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian journalist based in London. He has a Ph.D. in Military and Middle East history, has served in the navy, and held academic appointments in Oxford and Sandhurst.

His basic thesis is that the United States needs neither a military presence in the Middle East, nor friendly regimes there, in order to secure its essential interest, a free flow of oil. He says that, whatever the regime, the states there will need to sell their oil and will need willing purchasers. He claims that, even in the last month before the United States attacked it in 2003, Saddam’s Iraq sold half its oil to the United States.

He sets his own more relaxed view of US military requirements against those in the then Defence Secretary Dick Cheney’s Planning Guidance of February 1992, which said that the US needed to be the globally dominant power and that that meant preventing “any hostile power dominating a region (the Middle East) whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power”.

Gwynne Dyer interprets the underlying concern here as being about China obtaining privileged access to Middle East oil, and a need for a US military presence in the region to prevent that.

This book was finished before the “surge” and assumes that early US withdrawal is inevitable. That assumption has now changed, but the underlying political problems in Iraq are not resolved.

On the Iranian nuclear question, his thesis is that what Iran mainly wants to do is to join 40 other states that already have the technical capacity to develop nuclear weapons quickly, but have not yet done so. He argues, not very convincingly, that Pakistan’s bomb is threatening to Iran. He draws attention to the failure of the US, Russia, France, UK and China to fulfill their own obligations to reduce nuclear stockpiles, but fails to deal with the risk of an escalating regional nuclear arms race, that might follow Iran getting a nuclear capability.

On the Israeli/Palestinian issue, he claims that by 2015 the number of Palestinian Arabs in the area of former Mandate Palestine will exceed the number of Israeli Jews there. Time is thus running out for an agreed two-state solution that would divide the territory on a basis acceptable to Israel. The 1967 borders already give it much more land per capita.

Israel worries that, if it makes a deal for a Palestinian state and goes to its bottom line to do so, the Arab side will not be able to deliver its side of the bargain – security for Israel. Unelected Arab leaders may lack sufficient popular mandate to stick by such a deal. And if elections do take place, they will produce majorities for parties like Hamas with which Israel refuses to do business. Gwynne Dyer produces no solution to this dilemma.

A solution may be found in the Arab Peace Initiative, launched by the Arab League in Beirut in 2002 and reiterated in 2007, which creates an umbrella under which all Arabs can negotiate with Israel and which explicitly recognizes Israel’s right to exist within its 1967 borders.

Just as the broader three-stranded approach and the involvement of the United States created space for the Northern Irish parties to negotiate successfully, a broader Middle Eastern context may give Israelis and Palestinians a space in which the “blame” for the inevitable compromises can be spread sufficiently widely to allow an agreement to be viable. The Annapolis process, initiated recently by the United States, could be merged into such a regional solution.