A billion people in the world are overweight, and another billion go to sleep hungry every night.
In Kenya, a Masai chief was interviewed and showed his herd reduced to 50 skeletal cows (from 900 healthy animals a few years ago), as a result of climate change.
In India, in the Punjab, farmers are borrowing beyond their means to pay for machinery to dig deeper and deeper just to access water to grow their crops. The water table is dropping by one metre every year.
See also Water crisis to hit Asian food
With the world’s population increasing at an alarming rate, experts are forecasting that food production needs to double by 2050 to keep us all fed. Factor in global warming’s disastrous effects on the world’s crops, the ever-declining oil reserves and the fact that the UK currently imports around 50% of its food, and “the party’s over” as George puts it.
I am wondering what it is about exponential growth that we seemingly don’t get.
I think we get it, in theory.
What we don’t get is how to turn off the faucet. We called China’s attempts to limit families to one kid a human rights violation. (and, no doubt, it was in some of the ways it was carried out.)
I think there are very few who really understand the impact of geometric growth of the population. There’s a weekly e-column by Bob Park that mentions the connection between population and climate change frequently. Basically, he argues that we can’t get a handle on energy and water usage till we get the population under control.
I think the comment about the UK importing 50% of its food is representative of the problem in two ways. I read several years ago that 3% of all the energy used in the UK is used moving food around. (I don’t think that includes the energy spent importing food.) That contributes to climate change. The second is that more food is being grown on less land (the Green Revolution). This affects us in at least two ways. First, this food is grown at a cost – we’re not growing three times as much food on less land without using all sorts of chemicals. Runoff of pesticides and fertilizers is a really serious environmental problem, as evidenced by the Chesapeake Bay 30 miles from my house and right in Emm’s back yard. Second, it ALLOWS the population to keep growing, which means we need to grow more food by using more chemicals and more energy.
For those who cannot view the documentary:
As part of the film Alagiah visits Cuba to see what effect it has for a country to come to terms with being cut-off from cheap oil. Cuba demonstrates nicely how a whole country can embrace a new ‘green’ (decentralised organic food growing) revolution out of necessity. It was very hard on them. Alagiah visits a family who grow bananas in the yard, and keep chickens. He ‘savours’ their food for one day: breakfast consists of a cup of strong coffee. That’s it, nothing else. For lunch he had an average workers meal in a cantine on a co-op: a tasty meal of rice and beans mainly. No meat. For supper he was with the family again: they ate a warm meal, mainly rice and beans, supplemented with home grow fried bananas and fried eggs. No meat. Rice and beans is the staple food. To produce meat uses far too much energy.
Alagiah says that we in the UK (and i presume US as well) will have to face such a change from oil-dependent agriculture to labour-intensive (and thereby expensive) organic farming methods, it will be unavoidable. in the process we will become healthier and less fat, but we won’t like the dietary changes.
Meanwhile people in third world countries are trying hard to emulate the western lifestyle, perceived as better, ruining their own traditional ways of farming and healthy diverse diets, and suffering from population explosion and climate changes at the same time.
In theory, achieving western material abundance with improved health systems is the ticket to stabilise the birth rate and avoid over-population. In practice the material resources are not available, and whatever is available will get exploited, with little or no regard for environmental costs and climate change. Access to water will become more and more important, even outstripping the need to access to fertilisers and energy (oil). I don’t see a way out of it, and it makes me angry and depressed at times, because of the colossal stupidity of it all.
Exponential functions: I think we are biologically not equipped to imagine exponential growth. We can think about it and understand it in a linear, step by step kind of way. But I think our brains are not wired to understand it intuitively, as they are in understanding all kinds of spatial problems. So this adds to the problem, but greed is by far the biggest factor.
An individual can imagine exponential growth. We’ve seen bacteria colonies in microbiology class, and we’ve seen computer-generated fractals and whatnot.
But no individual, who comprehends, can transmit by telepathy the importance of this understanding to the population at large in an effective enough way to create a critical mass of understanding.
Seems to me, the base-level efforts which have the most potential are those which aim to educate and empower women globally. Some studies demonstrate that educated women, with means to sustain themselves and children, demonstrate the most incentive to control their own reproduction.
But it’s a slow, ground-up, means of filtering a change through 7 billion humans.
Oil, pesticides and monoculture fields have their drawbacks. Like slash and burn, They will be replaced with other, hopefully better techniques. Oil, for energy will be replaced with other energy sources, energy to make nitrogen fertilizer will be found elsewhere. Pesticides have always been a mixed blessing due to having fields on one kind of crop. I am wondering how the problem of phosphorus shortage will be dealt with.
It all made sense during the industrial revolution when centralization and brute force were the best way of getting things done. Once the infrastructure was in place, it was hard to change. Drip irrigation makes a lot of sense. It pays for its self in both water savings and reducing fertilizer run-off. It isn’t being adopted en-mass because of the initial costs and trying to find a bank to give a loan for it is difficult.
In a similar way, our diets have been changing. I don’t eat the same way I did 25 years ago, and neither do my parents. I haven’t touched a “cream-of-mushroom” soup in years. I still don’t know if meat and dairy reflect their true cost, but eventually I think their prices will make them more of a luxury than a staple. We know what is best for us, but what we know how to cook, and our habits are established, and it takes an investment of time and energy to change.
I think that the “developing” nations will have a chance to skip many less effective technologies. Similar to how some countries skipped land lines and went strait to cell phones (for better or worse) and Japan was able to form an industry that produced things more efficiently than the US. Sadly, I doubt that the “developed” nation has the motivation or foresight to change.
The 50% statistic is interesting, but I’d like to see more detailed figures. What percentage of our food that we grow is exported for example?
There’s also a large amount of food that’s sent out of the country to be processed, packaged then sent back again for sale. A lot of the shellfish caught around Scotland for example is sent to Asia for processing, then packaged up and brought back again to be sold. Which is ridiculous on it’s own, but I wonder if that counts towards that 50% import figure?
“We produce about 60-65% of our own food [and] import about 20% from Europe.
So the [test] for us will be, as the Earth’s climate changes, what will be the challenges not only in the UK but throughout the world?”
I grew up in what was a mainly farming area. All “family” farms of probably 200 acres maximum. No one could afford behemoth tractors (mostly Farm-alls and Internantionals with the ocassional Ford and John Deere). The farm across the street from me used horses for plowing and planting, combine in the fall. Mr. Honerlaw swore he could get straighter rows from his horses than from a tractor.
All but one (Mr. Honerlaw) of those farms is now home to 100+ McMansions. One is an amusment park. One (which was my bus driver’s pig farm) is home to the facility I and another 2000 people work at, that has labs and a huge pilot facility.
When you add all the heating and cooling, numerous cars, buses for all those kids, electricity for computers, TVs, household appliances, and on and on and on - who had the “larger” carbon footprint and effect on the enviroment? Those couple of hundred “black and whites” (Holsteins) or the suburbanites?
On a serious note, for much of man’s existence those that found good nourishing food were more successful than those that did not. Plants and animals that helped us were planted and selected for. Some places that plants can be beneficial to each other, like tomatoes and basil.
The industrial Revolution I think changed this relationship. Food started to be chosen for other reasons. Transportation, uniformity of ripening time, and other profit driven forces became what was selected for nutrition became just something you can use as advertisement. The food doesn’t have to taste good, just look good and get into your cart. Not that profit is all bad, it just changes the relationship.
Now we are getting into genetically modifying organisms. It will be important to follow how large companies use this to change our food supply. There have been things like “golden rice” that showed potential, and then some things that Monsanto is doing that frankly seem like they should be outlawed. Even watching what you eat and voting with your wallet will be difficult. Think of High-fructose corn syrup. Used to make things sweet, it is difficult to avoid. But it is a cheap profit driven ingredient, a liquid that can go through the machines, doesn’t need to be dissolved, so it is in everything.
I read an article in New Scientist several years that said that the UK exports about 50% of the milk it produces and imports about 50% of the milk it consumes. I suspect, as you’ve said, that the raw milk exits and products such as cheese return. If it’s literally true that the UK is exporting milk and importing milk, that’s really disturbing.
in yesterdays broadcast, it was also about how much energy it takes to produce meat.
if we all would turn vegetarian, much of the worldwide food problems would be solved because there would be more food available as there were quotes of about needing 23 kilos grain to produce 1 kilo of meat (!!).
I am not saying this would bring us also the needed protein but we can get protein out of other sources than meat alone.
in vitro meat: nothing new.
some vegetarian products are already made this way : quorn for instance.
and since nowadays much can be done with stemcells (sp?) I wouldn’t know how this couldn’t become possible.
we all could add our 2cents by trying and buy local as much as possible and/ or grow our own as much as possible.
it really is a pity there are farms disappearing as we need them but when you follow that programme “the future of our food” lots of things become clear and really make you think.
it’s a very good programme …going to follow the rest of the series.
berti (part time vegetarian and trying to grow her own organic food)
There was a guy on Science Friday on NPR
who said that if meat eaters would forgo
meat for one day a week, it would have
the same effect on their carbon footprint
as eating completely locally.
That should be comforting to vegetarians. However.. My bananas come from the West Indies, my apples from South Africa, and my rice from the U.S. It’s not good.
Perhaps not, but how much environmental cost
would it require to create greenhouses that could
grow enough bananas within the UK for its citizens?
I have also heard it said that it is more efficient to
ship food over the Atlantic than to truck it from
California (which grows most of our veggies) to the
East Coast. Too bad NC soil has such a hard time
growing much besides tobacco and Muscadine grapes,
else we could make up more of that East Coast devide.
Also, I didn’t know we grew rice in the US. Huh. Looks
like mostly in Louisiana, Mississippi and Missouri.
Interesting.
I remember seeing a newspaper article about a recent president (I think Bush I or Clinton) addressing the West Texas rice-growers association. (No, this wasn’t in The Onion.) For those of you not familiar with US geography, west Texas is pretty much a desert, possibly classified as semi-arid. And they grow rice there.
I think all the rice in Texass is grown in the gulf coast counties. When they talk about rice growing in West Texass I think they are talking about the southwest coast.
