The world contains more than 50,000 edible plants, but only
three – wheat, rice and corn – directly or indirectly (through livestock feed)
provide 80-90 per cent of all the calories that humans consume. What is more, there are only three
requirements for growing these plants:
- fertile soil,
- adequate freshwater, and
- a climate that food crops can endure.
You would think that feeding the planet would be a piece a
cake. Yet, we all know it's not.
The first two requirements are finite resources increasingly
pressed by a global population racing towards nine billion. All three are increasingly impacted by
climate change. It was originally
posited that climate change's effect on world agriculture would be
neutral. As arable land became too hot
or dry for crops, it would be offset by land in the colder regions of Russia,
China or Canada becoming warm enough to make farming possible. Therefore, any yield loss from increased heat
stress would be counterbalanced by yield boost from the extra CO2 in
the atmosphere. That hasn't turned out
to be the case.
Consequently, what The
End of Plenty presents, brought brilliantly to life by the agronomist and
former National Geographic editor
Joel Bourne, is a problem of monumental proportions and critical importance. We're struggling to feed ourselves right now,
and we're struggling to live off of the land without ravaging it's fertility
for future generations. How will
population growth and climate change make those challenges harder? And is there a plan to address it?
The Problem
In 1992, an estimated 824 million people were considered
malnourished (the vast majority of which lived in rural areas of South Asia and
sub-Saharan Africa). The problem was so
dire that at the UN World Food Summit of 1996 the developed nations committed to
halving world hunger by 2015. Progress
has been agonisingly slow. With that
deadline now passed, the number of malnourished has fallen by less than 20
million.
After decades of surplus and low food prices, the UN’s Food
and Agriculture Organisation now projects that grain production will need to be
increased by at least 70 per cent by 2050 to enable food to be sufficiently
cheap and ubiquitous.
Those predictions assume that global water supply will be
unaffected, however, the World Bank estimates that 15-35 per cent of global
water withdrawals were unsustainable in 2009.
In 2012, some 2 billion people lived in areas that suffered from water
stress or scarcity. In two decades that number
will rise to 3.6 billion, half the population of Earth.
Faced with such arresting realisations, why is it still
shocking to read that each year famine kills more people around the world than
AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined?
Causes of Famine
Bourne’s examination of the causes of famine reveals a
multifaceted problem.
Firstly: poverty. At
present, the world's farmers produce enough calories to feed 9 billion people a
healthy, 2,700 calories-per-day diet (admittedly it would be a mostly
vegetarian diet; meat is in short supply).
It is the cost of transport (or rather, the poor’s inability to pay for
the cost of transport) that prevents those calories reaching the needy. Despite the constant demand, prices aren’t
driven down due to the perishable nature of food. Considering nearly half of the planet lives
on less than two dollars per day, a small price spike can radically alter a
person's ability to feed himself or his family.
Historically, food reserves have helped to decrease price
volatility. From 1960 to 1999 cereal grain consumption only exceeded production
in 15 of those years (being less than 1 in 2 allows for rebuilding of the
reserves). Since 2000 however, the world
has consumed more grain than it has grown in 12 years out of 15, shaving global
stockpiles to less than 70 days of consumption.
In 2007, during one of the recent food price crises, world grain
reserves fell to a 61-day supply, the second lowest level on record. Consequently, even if poverty levels remained
even, the fact that reserves are diminishing drives up prices and exacerbates
the impact of poverty.
Secondly: population.
This is a simple one; population growth is the base driver of food
demand. It is projected that the world will have nearly 80 million more mouths
to feed each year, and another 2.4 billion people by mid-century.
Thirdly: diet. When
people have more money, they tend to eat more meat and dairy products. Bourne's intense study of the farming and
meat industries reveals that it takes us five times more grain to get the
equivalent amount of calories from pork as it does from simply eating grain
itself. Ten times more in the case of
grain-fattened beef. More than
two-thirds of the world’s agricultural land is used to grow feed for livestock
and world meat consumption is on track to double by 2020. Not to pick on Americans, but if everyone in
the world ate as much meat as they do (176 pounds per person per year), we’d
need to find another planet to raise the feed and fodder for all our livestock.
Lastly: farming practices. Unsustainable farming practices
are quietly stripping the fertile top layer of the Earth’s surface despite
well-known farming techniques designed to protect soil, such as terracing,
strip tillage and no-till farming. Bourne
presents estimates that suggest the amount of farmland lost to degradation each
year amounts to about 30 million hectares – an area roughly the size of the
Philippines.
Malthusian Thinking
All of this thinking harks back to an English philosopher
whose ideas are almost as unpopular now as they were then. For it was Thomas Malthus who first said in
the 1800s:
“The natural inequality in the two powers of population and production
in the earth…form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the
way to the perfectibility of society…I see no way by which man can escape from
the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature. No fancied equality, no agrarian regulations
in their utmost extent, could remove the pressure of it even for a single
country.”
When the British agricultural revolution occurred between
1750 and 1850, it produced so much food that the population of England nearly
tripled from 5.7 to 16.6 million.
Everyone laughed at Malthus's doom-mongering. How foolish to doubt the ingenuity of man.
And the world continued to go from strength to strength,
seemingly in defiance of Malthus’s principle.
In the twentieth century world grain production increased fivefold, from
400 million to 1.9 billion tons (five times more in one century than we were
able to produce in the previous 10,000 years combined) and, in that same time,
the world population nearly quadrupled from 1.6 to 6.1 billion.
In that way, Bourne is another canary in the coal mine just
like all the Neo-Malthusians before him: Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968), Garret Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) and the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth (1972).
Yet, in spite of the world's great successes, Malthus’s
ideas may be reaching maturity.
Consequently, we are seeing an increasing number of examples of
populations that have outgrown their resource base and then been cut back down
by horrific famines (France, Japan, Egypt, India and China to name just a few
of the more recent surprising ones).
Bengal Famine
In support of both the theory that the world is approaching
its limits and in exploration of the understanding of the causes of famine,
Bourne dissects the Bengal Famine of 1943.
It was a horrendous famine in which over 2 million Bengali people
died. From the ashes of such
devastation, however, came two opposing philosophies that have shaped the way in
which the world views food crises.
The first theory came from a Bengal economist named Amartya
Sen. Sen blamed the millions of deaths
on hyperinflation caused by the war boom (WWII) and poor government policies,
especially the overprinting of currency to finance the war effort. Inflation fuelled rampant speculation and
hoarding by traders that quickly drove the price of rice out the reach of the
poor. Sen called this a “boom famine”. Therefore, in Sen's view millions of people died,
not from crop failure, but from the failure of the government and the market to
distribute the crop equitably.
Alternatively, S.Y. Padmanabhan, a Bengal agronomist,
claimed that a plant pathogen epidemic which attacked the rice crop that year
was the cause. The outbreak was said to
be on a scale similar to the blight that caused the Irish potato famine.
It’s hardly surprising that a philosopher-economist saw
political and economic failure, while an agronomist saw blight and crop loss on
a biblical scale. Bourne is even-handed
in asserting that both must play a role.
However, Bourne reserves special praise for Sen as he was the first to
shift world’s focus from natural disasters to famine prevention and the
economic lives of the poor, who still remain the greatest victims of both crop
and market failures. This is a critical
and important distinction: understanding that feeding the world and preventing
famine is both an environmental and an economic problem.
Water
Water is the most precious of agricultural resources and
illustrates perfectly the entwined problems of resource conservation and
economic stimulus.
Bourne highlights that we’ve stored so much water behind
dams, in lakes and reservoirs, that the collective weight has created a
measurable wobble in the spin of the planet.
And, of all freshwater available for human use around the world,
agriculture sucks down nearly 70 per cent of it (or about 2.7 million cubic
metres, enough to fill a canal 100 metres wide, 10 metres deep, circling the
globe 180 times). Consequently, the
problem of water in the context of agriculture is one of scale. That becomes even clearer when you realise it
takes roughly 2,000 tons of water (1,830 cubic metres) to grow a single ton of
wheat.
What causes this great demand for water is the need to
irrigate farmland. It is no
understatement to say that irrigation has fundamentally changed the course of
human history. It has allowed societies
to develop away from the river's basin and provided a great bounty crops in the
process. Even though only 20 per cent of
the world’s farmland is under irrigation, those 300 million hectares put 40 per
cent of the food on the world’s tables each year.
However, the environmental cost of turning free-flowing
rivers into slack-water ponds, has often been overlooked. What irrigation gives with one hand, it takes
away with the other. By way of an
example, 15 million salmon used to return to the Columbia River basin each year
(in the state of Washington, USA), providing an abundant renewable food source
that fed the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest of the US for millennia.
Our success in diverting and stopping those waters has
destroyed the salmon's migratory schedule.
Today, only 100,000-300,000 wild Columbia basin salmon remain – less
than 2 per cent of their historic population.
All over the globe, freshwater animals are going extinct five time
faster than those that live on land or in the sea, primarily through habitat
loss caused by our insatiable demand for water.
Furthermore, now that we have depleted our freshwater
sources, our freshwater sources are depleting us. Where meltwater from the Himalaya, the Tien
Shan and the Rockies used to provide 40 per cent of the world’s irrigated
farmland with a free form of irrigation, the waters are now arriving in smaller
quantities and at the wrong time. A
future with less snow and ice means more runoff in winter and spring, when
crops are small or not yet planted, and less runoff in summer, when they need
it most.
Many people look to the world's oceans as a saviour. In fact, it was apparent to John F. Kennedy
in the 1960s that “If we could ever competitively, at a cheap rate, get
freshwater from seawater that would dwarf any other scientific
accomplishment.” But the science has not
yet reached maturity.
Though the cost of desalination has fallen dramatically in
recent years, to about 50 cents per cubic metre, it still makes no sense to buy
$900 worth of water to produce about $300 worth of wheat. The cost of technologies will certainly
fall. But they will likely only supply
water to entities that can afford to pay such as industries or large coastal
cities. Agriculture, with its high-use
and low-value commodities, offers the lowest economic return per gallon.
Consequently, the world’s top water experts have concluded
that, without significant gains in productivity in the world’s rain-fed fields,
water demand by agriculture will nearly double by 2050.
Green Revolution
To put this increased demand into perspective, I want to
rewind the clock a little.
Whenever I've used the term "Green Revolution"
I've had a pretty vague picture in my head that refers to an idea that started
with people like Rachel Carson and James Lovelock in the 1960s when we started
thinking about how ecosystems interact and how harmful pesticides can be, all
the way up to the present climate change, renewable energy and energy
efficiency movements. To anyone familiar
with the history of food production, the Green Revolution is something quite
different.
It was Norman Borlaug’s work as a plant pathologist in a
small, Mexican wheat field that gave birth to this Green Revolution and changed
the face of food production forever. Working
for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the 1960s, the
Minnesota-native developed a strand of rust-resistant wheat and rice via
genetic cross-breeding. That doesn't
sound like much, but when you consider that rust regularly halved crop yields
each year, the value of a rust-resistant breed of two of the world's most
profligate food sources becomes abundantly clear. Within just a few years, Borlaug's wheat and
rice has swept the global, driving yields up and prices down.
Its effect was such that economists have estimated as much
as 54 per cent of all poverty reduction between 1960 and 1990 came directly
from the Green Revolution yield increases in Asia and Latin America. Another 29 per cent was indirectly attributed
to agriculture, since the increasing yields enabled some labourers to move into
more productive sectors of the economy.
However, fifty years after the Green Revolution transformed
world agriculture, its legacy is still hotly debated. The benefits were substantial, especially in
Asia. The number of calories consumed
per capita increased by nearly 30 per cent, while the price of wheat and rice
dropped and stayed low. Even with lower
prices the higher yields stimulated the rural economy. Real per capita income nearly doubled between
1970 to 1995, while the number of people in poverty was cut in half.
But the vociferous critics of the Green Revolution focus on
the enormous cost it levied on both people and the planet. The rise in the popularity of Borlaug's
rust-resistant wheat and rice led to vast pastures of monoculture crop. Such monocultures greatly reduce a crop's
natural ability to fend off pests.
Consequently, we saw an enormous uptake of pesticides in agriculture and
the associated harmful effects first documented by biologist Rachel Carson in
her 1962 book, Silent Spring.
Borlaug himself was left to lament the duality of his
creation when noting:
“The initiation of explosive agriculture, without a proper understanding of the various consequences of every one of the changes introduced into traditional agriculture, and without first building up a proper scientific and training base to sustain it, may only lead us in the long run into an era of agricultural disaster rather than one of agricultural prosperity.”
That disaster has routinely been personified by the use of
pesticides. Now pesticides have come to
represent the start of the food industry as something that increases inequality
by prioritising profit over the provision of food to the hungriest.
Food for fuel (and
profit)
Bourne argues that at the turn of twenty-first century, two
new factors drastically altered the food industry: food grains became the base
ingredient for new forms of fuel (that many positioned as environmentally
friendly); and commodity markets were deregulated, enabling investment banks
and brokerages to buy and sell billions of bushels with the click of a mouse. Now, no matter how much grain is produced,
poor hungry people around the world must now compete for it with Big Biofuel
and Wall Street.
The US has been called the Saudi Arabia of corn. It produces 36 per cent of the world corn
crop and supplies nearly half of the world’s exports. Nearly 40 per cent of that harvest (which
would feed everyone in Africa for a year) gets converted into biofuel every
year. This is in spite of the fact that
biofuel is more expensive than traditional petroleum fuels, has limited
environmental benefits, and may never significantly reduce the amount of oil we
burn. But most importantly, corn is
food.
When you take a bushel from someone's plate and put it in
someone else's engine, you deprive them of nutrients, you drive the price of
food up and you decrease their ability to purchase sustenance. It is undoubtedly true that we need to find
an alternative to fossil fuels, but food fuels may be an even more disastrous
idea. Only in the First World could we
dream of such a solution.
Another less visible culprit has the potential to drive food
prices even higher: financial investment in commodity baskets via derivative
markets. Essentially people have started
speculating and gambling on the price wheat, rice and corn. And just like the sub-prime mortgage crisis,
speculating and repackaging an asset, increases price volatility and compounds
the resulting effects of a fallout. Food
is not a normal commodity. Either you
buy it for consumption or you buy it as an ingredient to convert it into
something else of value. We should not
encourage middle men who merely drive the price up.
Their combined effect can most easily be observed in the
food crises of 2008 and 2011 where the price of commodity baskets jumped
through the roof. In the lead up to this
period, the IMF stated that biofuels are the predominant factor in a 43
increase in the price of food from 2006 to 2007. Thereafter, modelling every possible cause
and effect for the rising food prices – the drought in Australia, the increased
consumption of the growing middle class in China and India and/or the weak
dollar – the IMF concluded that the cause of the food crises of 2008 and 2011,
and the continued record-high prices, are due almost entirely to the rapid
growth of corn ethanol and the machinations of large institutional
speculators. Consider it a new global
food tax levied on the world’s poorest people.
Far away from Wall Street, where people spend on average
50-70 per cent of their income on food, the price spike of 2007-8 drove an
estimated 100 million people into poverty.
Genetic Modification
(GM)
For those reading with a quiet confidence that science will
save the day, Bourne handles our silver bullet with appropriate care.
Pro-GM lobbyists and advocacy groups often portray their
opponents as well-fed, technophobic food snobs who want to impose pest-ridden
agriculture on a starving world. The
anti-GM argument paints an equally charged picture of unnatural frankenseeds
that put human health and biodiversity at risk so that corporate agriculture
giants can control the world’s seeds and enslave poor farmers. Truth be told, Bourne presents plenty of
evidence for both.
Unlike the Green Revolution, which emerged from foundations
and land-grant universities, the gene revolution was born largely in the labs
of chemical and pharmaceutical industry giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta
and Bayer. These companies rapidly
bought small, family-owned seed companies during the 1980s and 1990s to gain
access to a wide range of genetic material.
By 2008, the four largest seed companies controlled 56 per cent of all
commercially branded seeds. Not
surprisingly, the first products they made were marketed to large-scale,
relatively wealthy farmers who could afford the hefty prices the companies had
to charge to recoup the R&D cost.
The techniques they developed moved beyond the simple cross-breeding
used by our ancestors (unless you are a feral wilderness dweller, virtually
everything you eat has already been genetically modified by the early farmers
who domesticated crops) and away from the exposure of seeds to mutagenic
chemicals or gamma rays as seen in science fiction, to the point where we can now
actually insert slivers of genetic material from one species into another. These hybrids would be unlikely occur in the
wild, yet they can deliver tremendous and targeted benefits. In a world where half of the world’s people
depend on rice to provide the bulk of their daily calories, packing rice full
of vitamins and nutrients (see the Golden Rice
Project) could fundamentally change global health.
Consequently, I must agree with Bourne that costly and
restrictive regulation of GMOs based on ideology, rather than risks and
benefits, hinders public research on crops geared to the greater good, leaving
the technology in the hands of the wealthy few companies that see no profit in developing
crops for the poor. The continued
opposition to new generations is no longer justifiable. You cannot call yourself a humanitarian and
be opposed to GM crops.
However, GMO critics are right that their increased use has
accelerated the rise of resistant insects and weeds. Furthermore, due to the commercial pressure
of the suppliers and of the expense such seeds, many farmers have abandoned the
most important agronomic practice of crop rotation in favour of planting GMOs
season after season.
It is therefore important to state that not all GMOs are
created equal, and each must be judged on its own merits. Corporate biotech companies, whose annual
agricultural research budgets have swelled 20-fold in the last three decades remain
focused on their bottom line: developing crops that sell more seeds, more
pesticides, and create more profit, while aggressively guarding their patents
and restricting the flow of their genetic material to public researchers. In 2006 the USDA reported that private
companies spent $5 billion on research into food processing and crop
development and effectively zero on research relating to the environment and
natural resources or human nutrition and food safety. These critical issues, along with basic
agricultural research, remain the domain of government-funded research and
land-grant universities.
Organic Agriculture
Lastly, what to make of the organic food movement?
In the First World, where eating organic food has become
more of a fashion statement than a health or environmental choice, it's worth reminding
ourselves exactly defines organic food.
Organic food is that which is grown without chemical fertilizers,
pesticides or GMOs, and livestock raised without hormones, antibiotics or via
the use of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).
Besides being righteous, organic agriculture gets soil
scientists excited because it increases the amount of organic matter in the
soil leading to greater porosity, more water-holding capacity, more gaseous
exchange and more cracks and crevices in which roots can grow. It means more fungi, earthworms, grubs,
bacteria, arachnids, insects and all the other wondrous soil organisms that
help make soil fertile.
But more organic matter in soil excites climate scientists
for a completely different reason: the world’s soil contains roughly 2,500
pentagrams of carbon.
One pentagram equals a billion metric tons. Thus, the world’s soils contain more than
three times the carbon currently floating around in the atmosphere and four
times the amount currently tied up in forests and plants. Global agriculture, in repeatedly churning up
the soil, has released 50-70 per cent of the original carbon stored in soils in
to the atmosphere. And therein lies the real
benefit to organic agriculture. If
farmers could increase soil organic matter (which is almost 60 per cent carbon
by weight) on the world’s farmland, they could sequester as much as a third of
annual global carbon emissions and help grow healthier, more draught-resistant
crops in the bargain.
Conclusion
Malthus’s basic challenge to the world remains. In fact, his predictions appear more
prescient than ever. We are locked in a
never-ending two-step between our numbers and the sustenance we can muster from
the 6 inches of topsoil beneath our feet and to think otherwise is naive in the
extreme. Whether we have reached our
limit is something that will have to be continually monitored, but it's never
too early to devise a plan. To that end,
Bourne has a pretty comprehensive albeit woolly one:
- Stop farmland expansion, especially in the tropical rainforests.
- Use existing agronomy to close yield gaps in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe.
- Reallocate critical inputs like irrigation water, fertilisers, and chemicals from places where they are overused to places where they are scarce.
- Shift our diets away from meat and wean our cars off of biofuels.
- Reduce the amount of food that is discarded, spoiled or eaten by pests, which amounts to fully a third of global agricultural production.
It’s not enough just to increase food production (even
though that will be challenging enough); we have to increase the purchasing
power of the vast underprivileged masses to improve their access to the new
agricultural bounty. It is perhaps the
ultimate irony that Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, the man
most responsible for destroying the credibility of the neo-Malthusians of his
day, was the most ardent Malthusian of them all.
Now we must face the hard reality is that unless we
radically alter the way we live, eat and farm, it’s hard to see how we will be
able to feed than 9 billion people by 2050 without adding hundreds of millions
to the burgeoning ranks of the hungry or ploughing up every acre of potentially
arable rain forest, savannah and prairie in a desperate attempt to make our
agricultural ends meet.
