First Glance
Last week BBC Radio 4’s podcast Farming Today ran a story on the rising price of cooking oil, triggered by the abandonment of Ukrainian sunflower crops and wartime trade disruption. In the piece, agricultural commodity expert Dr. James Fry explains that pressures on Ukraine are only one factor in a network of events that have increased pressure on oilseeds: Indonesia, which grows 35% of the world’s palm oil, has banned exports to stabilize domestic prices; drought in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay is threatening South American soybean exports; and Canada, normally the largest canola grower, suffered a drought last year that destroyed half of Saskatchewan’s crop. This scarcity has been a boon to Irish and UK farmers whose bright yellow fields are suddenly worth a lot more, but it has also increased the financial pressures on food establishments and eaters. At first glance, cooking oil price hikes are just a tiny piece of wartime trivia, but doubling back to look closer shows just how tangled the web of global commodities gets.
Double Take
A commodity is an abstraction of a good or service that can be sold. There is actual sunflower oil that came from seeds pressed in a particular factory and grown in a particular field with the aid of particular people, and then there is the commodity of sunflower oil which is undifferentiated and universal, making it easy to move around an international market. Canadian canola and Irish canola probably have some differences in taste or color, even plants in different parts of a field vary, but when their oil becomes a commodity all that variation is ignored and the determiner of value is reduced to how scarce canola is on a global scale. Certain crops like vegetables or flowers are harder to commodify given how difficult they are to move long distances and how variable and distinctive they can be. By contrast, plant oils are the ultimate commodity. As a liquid, they can be poured into shippable shapes and even piped over large distances. As a bunch of isolated plant lipids, they’re fairly interchangeable and can even be mixed together into products like your grocery store’s “vegetable oil,” a variable blend of corn, soy, canola, or sunflower oil, depending on what is cheapest at the time.
These material qualities of make vegetable oils similar to another kind of oil: petroleum, the primary commodity in the global market. Like vegetable oil, the petroleum market has been profoundly disrupted by the war in Ukraine, causing price hikes to home heating oil, gasoline, and other petroleum-based products like fertilizers. According to a Bloomberg article by Elizabeth Elkin and Samuel Grebe (thank you Travis for sending), this jump in fertilizer prices is a threat to global food security, disrupting Filipino and Kenyan rice farmers, Brazilian soy growers, and Kansas farmers that grow wheat and corn for export. Elkin and Grebe’s analysis relies on the International Rice Research Institute and the International Fertilizer Development Center, showcasing how the agricultural systems most impacted by fertilizer prices are the fossil-fuel intensive Green Revolution projects instituted in the global South by those exact institutions. The threats to farmers and eaters in these places are very real, but they are ultimately the bitter fruit of the Green Revolution’s attempt to tie “food security” in the South to petroleum profits in the North.
When the price of something goes up, like gasoline or vegetable oil, governments can pull certain levers through subsidies and tariffs to keep things affordable. Indonesia cutting palm oil exports to subdue domestic prices is one example of this, as are the Green Marshall Plan calls to export American heat pumps to Germany and releases of oil from strategic reserves. But as with fertilizer, global commodities are often tied to one another by industrial processes. Governments could pull the fertilizer lever to bring down vegetable oil prices, urging farmers to intensify production to grow more canola, but while petroleum is driving fertilizer prices up that fertilizer comes at significant cost to the farm, resulting in still higher crop prices.
The Biden administration is currently trying this kind of leverage to lower gas prices by investing in biofuels. Biden’s EPA has waived regulations on the use of ethanol in summer, regulations intended to limit ethanol’s tendency to create smog, and the USDA is giving cash to ethanol and biodiesel producers to expand infrastructure. On the surface this sounds like a win-win, reducing fuel prices by switching out petroleum for friendly carbon-sucking plants. But these commodities are closely connected: biofuel production relies on the intensive production of crops like corn and soy, intensive agriculture relies on heavy fertilizer inputs, and those fertilizer inputs rely on a steady and abundant supply of petroleum. It’s a feedback loop that converts energy to profit with every intermediate processing step; an effective way to concentrate profits when commodities are abundant but a poison pill when used as an attempt to address scarcity.
Hindsight
To recap: war in Ukraine has made everything from sunflower oil to fertilizer to gasoline more expensive and governments can’t solve it through market manipulation because all these things are tied together by petroleum, which is also more expensive. But beneath the wasteful cycles of fossil industry and the abstraction of commodities there is a tangible material reality: plants and soil and air and human bodies. With canola or corn oil commodified as they are, giving them emotional and cultural weight feels awkward but these complex fats are what build your body and supply its energy. Plant lipids form the very base of virtually any dish, before the garlic and onion, before salt and pepper. When soybean oil is converted to biodiesel as Biden would have it, that food is removed from the ecological cycle of soil ➡️ plant ➡️ animal ➡️ soil to an industrial cycle of extraction ➡️ exchange ➡️ combustion ➡️ emission.
The base of the globalized economy today is also oil. Petroleum, its extraction, and its consumption ultimately drive prices, production, scarcity, and inflation. But in the midst of this climate catastrophe we can see that petroleum disrupts its own attempt at infinite growth. Petroleum creates the climate that causes the North & South American droughts currently derailing agricultural commodity production. The cycle of fossil industry doesn’t spiral infinitely upwards; it gets in its own way, feeds back, and crashes. Thankfully, our global dependence on petroleum is a fiction. Our bodies don’t need to accumulate profit to survive—we need to eat. And before Green Revolution boosters broke the Brazilian cerrado for soybeans and burned Indonesian rainforest for oil palm there were other cycles, positive feedbacks and ways of growing food and abundance that didn’t rely on strategic stocks of fossil energy. Those ways are still there, in memory and in the relationships we see between plants and animals and air and soil.