Feeding The Planet: Beyond The £250,000 Hamburger

The creation of the world’s most expensive fast food is proving to be a distraction from the real problem facing global menus Share 17 Email Editorial The Guardian , Sunday 11 August 2013 By creating the world’s most expensive hamburger last week , Professor Mark Post and his team also engineered a savoury distraction from the real problem on the planetary menu: how to feed a population fast closing in on 10 billion. It is an issue that gets ever more serious. Consider: Britain, France and Germany produce 12% of the world’s wheat harvest, yet yields per hectare, which have almost trebled in one human lifetime, are no longer rising . These three countries are blessed with rich soil, good rainfall, long summer days, sophisticated agricultural science and all the fertiliser they need, so if yields are no longer increasing, then crops may be reaching their biological limit. In Japan and South Korea, rice yields may also be reaching a plateau. In the Middle East, where agriculture and civilisation began in symbiosis 10,000 years ago, grain yields have started to fall because water supplies have begun to dwindle: Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia have all seen wells dry, and aquifers depleted. India, China and the United States rely on irrigation to sustain high crop yields but may be depleting groundwater faster than it can be replenished. Altogether, 18 countries may not have enough water to go on growing more and more grain: around 3.6 billion people live in these countries. That is about half the population of the planet . By 2050, the number of mouths to feed will have increased by 2 billion. As food supplies dwindle, and demand increases, food prices will rise: that is how markets work. But 2 billion people already survive on an income of less than $2 a day: almost a billion people go to bed hungry each night right now; 2 billion are, according to UN calculations, in some way malnourished. As food prices rise, so will political discontent. The Arab spring began with unprecedented rises in food prices; riots followed in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya . It is this chronology that enables some to argue that citizens can bear governmental incompetence, corruption and even oppression, as long as they can be sure of their supper. Add to this several other ominous trends. One is climate change: analysts who looked at 21 studies of civil war, ethnic conflict and street violence in modern societies found a consistent link with drought and high temperature in all 21 cases . Since many climate change projections forecast a 2C rise in average global temperatures some time near mid-century, and since crop yields tend to fall with extremes of temperature, this is not good news, for food security or for civilisation. There are other problems. One is waste. About 2m tons of food are lost every year: the crop never gets to the market in the poorest countries, or it is scraped off the plate and into the bins in the richest nations . Another is the switch from food crops to biofuel: in 2011 as gasoline prices rose, 127m tons – a third of the US grain harvest – were diverted to the production of ethanol. For the US farmers, it looked like a bargain: a $2 bushel of corn could be turned into 2.8 gallons of ethanol at $3 a gallon . But the grain to fill the tank of an American sports car just once would be enough to feed someone for a whole year: this is the market economy at its most grotesque. As incomes rise for the middle classes in the developing nations, so does global demand for meat and milk . The switch from staple crops to cheeseburgers signals both a soaring obesity epidemic and higher prices for grain: two disasters for the price of one, three if you chuck in the burning of the tropical forests, the settlement of the savannahs and the extinction of wild species to make new space for livestock. There is a clear need for concerted political action at an international level: to change the direction of agriculture, produce more food more sustainably and distribute it more fairly. That way, everybody is better off. Governments know this, because they see food security as one of the grand challenges of the century. Yet what, actually, are they doing about it? And are they doing enough? Sadly, we already know the answer. Taylor Scott International