Conventional food production hides environmental costs. The cost accounting system doesn't take nature into account. It relentlessly destroys natural resources. You pay for these externalized costs, but not at the cash register.

Spirulina has no hidden environmental costs and offers more nutrition per acre than any other food. It conserves land and soil and uses water and energy more efficiently per kilo of protein than other foods. As global algae production expands using non-fertile land and brackish water, more cropland can be returned to forest. As more people eat lower on the food chain, we can halt pressure to destroy wilderness for cropland, and help regreen our planet.

• The hidden costs of food production.
• Spirulina prices reflect true costs.
• Spirulina resource advantages.
• Land and soil are conserved.
• More efficient water use.
• More efficient energy use.
• A big oxygen producer.
• Three problems facing global food production.
• Agricultural: Limits of the green revolution.
• Political: Food is not evenly distributed.
• Environmental: Food growing area are declining.
• Advantages of spirulina production.

To gain perspective on the cost of spirulina relative to other foods, let's look at assumptions about the price of our food. Most people assume the store price reflects the real cost of producing food. Nothing could be farther from reality.

Agribusiness farming practices have externalized many production costs, and relentlessly destroy natural resources. You still pay for these costs, but not at the checkout counter. If you calculate these hidden costs of food you pay indirectly, and add these to the cash price, food prices would be much higher.

What are these hidden costs and how did they arise?

1. Medical costs from poisoned, unhealthy food.
Pesticides, fungicides, animal antibiotics, preservatives, chemical food additives, genetically modified organisms, and fatty, salty foods all create long term health risks. The over processed foods promoted in advertising campaigns represent a very unhealthy diet. When the U.S. Surgeon General links two-thirds of all deaths to diet, this translates into higher medical bills, higher medical insurance, and higher taxes to support government health programs. Medical health care costs are the fastest growing sector of the U.S. economy.

2. Farm subsidies.
Taxes used for government farm subsidies support agribusiness and encourage wasteful consumption of water and soil. In some irrigation areas, the value of the crops grown with federal water is less than the cost of the water to grow these crops. At one water project, the full cost of water delivered was estimated to be $54 per acre foot, even though farmers were charged only $0.07 per acre foot.1 In 1989, Farmers Home Administration bad loans were estimated at over $20 billion. These hidden subsidies and bad loan policies encourage waste and make food appear to be cheaper to produce and cheaper to buy.

3. Toxic cleanup costs.
Pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers pollute our water and land. How much will these poisons hurt us, how long will they last, and what are the cleanup costs? We will pay much more tomorrow for cheap food today.

4. High global military costs.
Food choices made in the U.S. set the style for consumption across the entire world. To emulate the American meat-centered diet, developing world elites alter land use patterns in those countries. American green revolution agriculture and grain-fed beef farming methods tend to favor large, wealthy farmers. Because developing countries need cash to pay interest on their debt to our banks, they produce food to export, taking land away from local food production and displacing local farmers. This pattern creates food insecurity and chronically hungry people. One response to this human misery has been global militarization to maintain security in the face of exploitation.

5. Government debt and interest costs.
The hidden costs of food production in increased health services, military spending and farm subsidies have been gobbling up government revenues. The building budget deficit up until the late '90s and interest cost pulls money away from investment in productive assets, blocking meaningful toxic cleanup and environmental restoration.

Cheap food is another aspect of our illusionary prosperity, pumped by a galloping national debt. When the U.S. devalues its currency and sells Treasury Bills to fund the national debt, it is selling and consuming real assets much too cheaply today in exchange for debt which must be paid tomorrow.

6. Environment and resource destruction.
Agribusiness treats fertile soil and precious fresh water like factory assets to be depreciated. The natural wealth is extracted, and not replaced. It accounts for rapid soil demineralization, salinization and erosion, the shocking drawdown of water aquifers, and the astounding loss of forests all over the world.

For example, does a fast food quarter pound hamburger cost only $2.49?

One quarter pound burger may come from U.S. grain fed beef. It takes 16 times as much corn to get protein from beef than from corn directly, and each pound of corn produced causes 2 pounds of topsoil erosion. An inch of topsoil takes 200 to 1000 years to form. Each 1/4 pound hamburger costs 8 pounds of irreplaceable American topsoil.2 Soil and water alone may exceed the $2.49 price tag!

Or, burgers may come from imported beef. The U.S. imports 90% of all Central American beef exports for burgers, 138 million pounds of beef each year. Each burger really takes 55 square feet of tropical forest permanently cleared for grazing land. The burned vegetation emits 500 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, aggravating the greenhouse effect.3 That's not $2.49 either!

7.2. "The burger that ate a rain forest" - London Times, Feb 26. 1989.

According to the Rainforest Action Network,4 over half of the 5 billion acres of rainforest is gone. If present trends continue, it will be all gone in less than 40 years. In the Amazon, 6,000 rainforest clearing fires were burning out of control in 1988. Expanding cattle ranches have caused 72% of rainforest destruction in Brazil. Deforestation releases about a billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. This represents one sixth of the total carbon release by human activity, adding to the greenhouse effect.

How much does this "burger that ate a rainforest" really cost? A fast food burger could cost $100, depending on how one values the Earth's resources. If everyone had the American appetite for beef, the entire planet would have to become one giant beef farm. A further discussion on these subjects is found in two books worth reading: Diet For a Small Planet5 by Frances Moore Lappe, and Diet for a New America6 by John Robbins.

7. The accounting system ignores resource costs.
It doesn't take nature into account.
We do not know what a fast food burger really costs because the economic accounting system simply ignores natural resource depletion and the concept of sustainable development. Gross National Product (GNP) figures and company balance sheets show man-made capital depreciation, but amazingly, not the consumption of precious soil, water, trees, minerals, fisheries or wildlife.

Accounting methods evolved many years ago when natural resources were considered free and unlimited. We need to begin "taking nature into account," asserts the World Wildlife Fund. Only when the world economy shifts to natural resource accounting, such as the system developed by the World Resources Institute in Wasting Assets, Natural Resources in the National Income Accounts,7 will we be able to measure the true cost of our food and all other products.

Like growing organic food, growing spirulina does not hide costs. Eating spirulina and organic foods will improve your health and lower your medical bills, compared to a diet rich in meat and conventionally grown foods. There are no big government subsidies for spirulina. Ecological cultivation does not cause pollution, soil erosion, water contamination or forest destruction.

Production costs range from $10 to $20 per kilo for commercial farms, depending on size and location. Farms with resource advantages like those in alkaline lakes may have lower production costs, ranging from $5 to $15 per kilo. Farms with year-round tropical growing seasons, energy and nutrient advantages, and extraction facilities for high-value products, may be able to produce a protein byproduct for a few dollars per kilo. This will become more price competitive with conventional proteins when the hidden costs of food production are taken into account. Whether or not the hidden costs are added in, spirulina production has resource advantages over conventional foods.