u didn't like eating anyways

[Guest guest]

Feeding the world

 

Gwynne Dyer

 

Friday, October 13th 2006

We are still living off the proceeds of the Green Revolution, but that hit

diminishing returns 20 years ago. Now we live in a finely balanced situation

where world food supply just about meets demand, with no reserve to cover

further population growth. But the population will grow anyway, and the world's

existing grain supply for human consumption is being eroded by three different

factors: meat, heat and biofuels.

 

For the sixth time in the past seven years, the human race will grow less food

than it eats this year. We closed the gap by eating into food stocks accumulated

in better times, but there is no doubt that the situation is getting serious.

The world's food stocks have shrunk by half since 1999, from a reserve big

enough to feed the entire world for 116 days then to a predicted low of only 57

days by the end of this year.

 

That is well below the official safety level, and there is no sign that the

downward trend is going to reverse. If it doesn't, then at some point not too

far down the road we will reach the point of absolute food shortages, and

rationing by price kicks in. In other words, grain prices soar, and the poorest

start to starve.

 

The miracle that has fed us for a whole generation now was the Green Revolution:

higher-yielding crops that enabled us to almost triple world food production

between 1950 and 1990 while increasing the area of farmland by no more than ten

per cent. The global population more than doubled in that time, so we are now

living on less than half the land per person than our grandparents needed. But

that was a one-time miracle, and it's over. Since the beginning of the 1990s,

crop yields have essentially stopped rising.

 

The world's population continues to grow, of course, though more slowly than in

the previous generation. We will have to find food for the equivalent of another

India and another China in the next 50 years, and nobody has a clue how we are

going to do that. But the more immediate problem is that the world's existing

grain supply is under threat.

 

One reason we are getting closer to the edge is the diversion of grain for meat

production. As incomes rise, so does the consumption of meat, and feeding

animals for meat is a very inefficient way of using grain. It takes between 11

and 17 calories of food (almost all grain) to produce one calorie of beef, pork

or chicken, and the world's production of meat has increased fivefold since

1950. We now get through five billion hoofed animals and 14 billion poultry a

year, and it takes slightly over a third of all our grain to feed them.

 

Then there's the heat. The most visible cause of the fall in world grain

production - from 2.68 billion tonnes in 2004 to 2.38 billion tonnes last year

and a predicted 1.98 billion tonnes this year -is droughts, but there are strong

suspicions that these droughts are related to climate change.

 

Moreover, beyond a certain point hotter temperatures directly reduce grain

yields. Current estimates suggest that the yield of the main grain crops drops

ten per cent, on average, for every one degree Celsius that the mean temperature

exceeds the optimum for that crop during the growing season. Which may be why

the average corn yield in the US reached a record 8.4 tonnes per hectare in

1994, and has since fallen back significantly.

 

Finally, biofuels. The idea is elegant: the carbon dioxide absorbed when the

crops are grown exactly equals the carbon dioxide released when the fuel refined

from those crops is burned, so the whole process is carbon-neutral. And it would

be fine if the land used to grow this biomass was land that had no alternative

use, but that is rarely the case.

 

In South-East Asia, the main source of biofuels is oil palms, which are mostly

grown on cleared rainforest. In the United States, a " corn rush " has been

unleashed by government subsidies for ethanol, and so many ethanol plants are

planned or already in existence in Iowa that they could absorb the state's

entire crop of corn (maize, mealies). In effect, food is being turned into fuel

- and the amount of ethanol needed to fill a big four-wheel-drive SUV just once

uses enough grain to feed one person for an entire year.

 

There is a hidden buffer in the system, in the sense that some of the grain now

fed to animals could be diverted to feed people directly in an emergency. On the

other hand, the downward trend in grain production will only accelerate if it is

directly related to global warming. And the fashion for biofuels is making a bad

situation worse.

 

It's only in the past couple of centuries that a growing number of countries

have been able to stop worrying about whether there will be enough food at the

end of the harvest to make it through to next year. The Golden Age may not last

much longer.

 

- Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are

published in 45 countries.

 

 

 

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances,

there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in

such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest

we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

William O. Douglas