The bosses of Nestle, the world's biggest packaged foods company (Gerber, Perrier, Stouffer's, Nescafe, LeanCuisine, Butterfinger), have always been masters, in their typically reserved Swiss-German manner, of saying little. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe has been the exception. He had strong opinions about food and the environment before he stepped down as CEO in April. Since then, as chairman, he has become even more vocal.
He's a complicated man, though, possibly reflecting the food giant's varied interests. Earlier this week, he urged the European Union to drop its opposition to genetically modified crops – the EU has not approved a GM seed in a decade.
But Mr. Brabeck doesn't like all GM products. Most of the corn grown in the United States is GM, and fully one-third of that crop is devoted to biofuel production. In a comment piece carried earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal and other papers around the world, he said: “Biofuels are economic nonsense, ecologically useless and ethically indefensible.”
Strong language indeed. He doesn't buy the U.S. line, oft promoted by agriculture secretary Edward Schafer, that biofuel production has raised prices by only about 3 per cent (other estimates put the figure at 30 per cent or more). He doesn't buy the line that biofuel production is environmentally benign. He notes that the U.S. Department of Energy calculates that 10,000 litres of water are required to produce 5 litres of ethanol or 1 to 2 litres of biodiesel. “The biofuel madness is contributing to water shortages that are already endemic,” he wrote. “Great aquifers, whether in the Sahara or in the southwestern U.S., are being depleted rapidly. This is water that dates from thousands of years ago. Like oil, once gone, it is lost forever.”
Mr. Brabeck's love-GM-food but hate-GM-corn message is not hard to figure out. The big food companies would love to seem more GM food crops. If GM crops become ubiquitous and are deemed ethically correct because they potentially raise yields in a suddenly food-short world, the organic food companies that have eaten into their market might politely wither and die. At the same time, the end of GM crops used to make biofuels would free up millions of acres of land for food production. Prices would fall. Lower input costs would translate into higher profit margins for Nestle and its rivals.
Whatever you think about Mr. Brabeck's GM food stance, there is no doubt he's on point when he says the prolific use of water is a global catastrophe in the making.
A few years ago, he said the idea of water as a basic human right was “extreme” – it should have a market value like any food product. He has since modified his view somewhat. In a recent interview with the Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag, he agreed that water was human right, but only to sustain life and for hygiene. “But water is not a human right if I use it to fill the swimming pool,” he said.
Or, he might add, make ethanol to fill your SUV tank.
