In this post I reminded people of Gwynne Dyer’s warning that:
“…the first and most important impact on human civilisation will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply.”
He reckons that food supply issues will become acute after the the temperature rises by 1C.
I also relayed Hans Joachim Schellnhuber’s warning that under business as usual by 2100 “the carrying capacity of the planet [could reduce to] below 1 billion people”.
The Global Humanitarian Forum (Kofi Annan’s new gig) released a human impact report on climate change, The anatomy of a silent crisis, identifying increasing hunger and malnutrition as a major impact of climate change, jeopardising the achievement of the
Millenium Goals.
Caritas International along with the U.N. World Food Program and U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, the International Federation of the Red Cross, Oxfam, World Vision and Save the Children have issued a statement entitled Climate change, food insecurity and hunger warning that “global warming will have a disastrous effect on the world’s poor and hungry”:
Undernutrition is already the single largest contributor to the global burden of disease, killing 3.5 million people every year, almost all of them children in developing countries. Unless urgent action is taken, it will not be possible to ensure the food security of a growing world population under a changing climate.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) have each released reports saying that “climate change will reduce agriculture production and raise food prices in the developing world.”
Our own Julian Cribb has thought long and hard about the future of food. He sees the issue through a different prism from climate change and actually rates it as a bigger problem. With a burgeoning population he estimates that world food production will need to increase by 110% by 2050.
Broadly there are three reasons for this increase. First, the increase in population to about 9.2 billion. Second, around a billion people now are hungry, malnourished or food insecure. About 800 million are actually hungry. We need to feed these people adequately. Third, there are billions more who aspire to eat ‘better’ than they are now, eg. more meat or just more. Some of this involves the use of feedgrains to produce meat.
Here are four links to what he is saying:
a) Food crisis, a segment on LifeMatters from 14 October 2009.
b) A hot and hungry world, from ABC Unleashed of 4 May 2009.
These two give an overview, cover much the same material with some differences.
c) Tackling the global food challenge, from Online Opinion 11 September 2008.
A comprehensive listing of the issues and his suggested solutions.
d) The coming famine, a paper from January 2008, ostensibly an expanded version with some excellent graphics, but misses some of the points made on the Online Opinion article.
FOREWARNINGS
Food security
Cribb points out that the world has consistently been eating more grain than it has been growing. In mid-2007 grain supplies were down to 53 days, half what they were in 2002.
The reasons include: sharply rising demand due to economic growth, drought in key growing regions; water shortages; the collapse of marine fisheries transferring demand to meat products and hence to feedgrains; fertiliser shortages; soil degradation; and the expansion in biofuels production.
Food and war
This is already a problem.
Since the early 1990s two thirds of all conflicts occurring round the world have had, as one of their drivers, a shortage of food, land or water.
Refugees
Again, already a problem but projected to get a whole lot worse – up to hundreds of millions, when major regional food shortages appear in decades to come, probably from the 2020s.
CHALLENGES, in addition to population growth
1. Land availability
Cities chew up land, often prime agricultural land. Right now the cities of the world cover an area equivalent to half of China. By 2050 there may be 7 billion people living in cities covering the equivalent of China plus another China for recreational facilities.
Land is increasingly locked up for conservation reserves.
2. Soil degradation
A quarter of the world’s arable and grazing land is so degraded it can scarcely produce and the current loss – about one per cent a year – spells disaster by mid-century unless reversed. 80% is degraded in some way.
(A one per cent loss every year would more than halve land availability by 2050.)
3. Loss of soil nutrients
About 150 million tonnes of fertilizer are applied every year. However, we lose 1.1 billion tonnes of essential nutrients, mainly through erosion.
4. Water crisis
45% of food is produced by irrigation. Groundwater levels are falling in places like China, India, the USA, Libya and Australia.
Cities will use half the world’s available fresh water by 2050, reducing water available for food production by a third.
7 Billion people will face chronic-to-critical water shortages by 2050.
5. Biofuels
Farmers could use 10% of their land to produce the fuel to grow food. By 2020 we could be burning 400 million tonnes of grain a year – equal to the entire world rice harvest.
6. Waste
Up to half of farm produce is wasted during processing. Up to half the food in shops, restaurants and homes is thrown away. Almost all of the nutrients in our sewage systems are wasted.
7. Cost of inputs
There is currently massive farm inflation in the prices of fuel, fertiliser and chemicals, pricing these out of the reach of poor and medium farmers.
8. Knowledge drought
There has been a decline in global scientific research to lift food production, in both developing and developed countries (including Australia) for 20 years.
One of the few useful outcomes of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, 2002 was an initiative by the World bank with a multistakeholder group of organizations to conduct an International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IASTD) (download Agriculture at the crossroads and issues papers from here). 400 experts were involved in the review.
Cribb points out that Australia had almost nothing to contribute, whereas 10 years earlier we were world leaders. Cribb says we refused to support the final document (along with the US and Canada) because it didn’t put the “silver bullet” of GM front and centre in the solutions.
Dr. Angelika Hilbeck, one of the report’s authors, tells in a personal note why GM doesn’t have this distinction. Essentially it has failed to deliver. 98% of the GM story is about 2 traits of 4 crops in 6 countries. Indeed two-thirds of it is about herbicide resistance in soybeans in the US, Brazil and Argentina.
Cribb sees GM as having some potential, but not as a silver bullet. He points out that research typically takes 25 years to flow through to the practice of the world’s 1.9 billion farmers.
8. Marine crisis
More than half of the world’s major fisheries are in decline. Sea fishing is forecast to collapse by 2040, throwing more demand onto land-based food protein.
Alanna Mitchell has a good chapter on this. Broadly the story is that we have been pulling all the big fish out of the sea to eat. Now we are mopping up all the little fish to feed the fish in fish farms. It takes 2.5 kg of ground herring to produce one kg of farmed salmon.
We eat 128 million tonnes of fish each year, compared with 241 of meat. Less fish means more demand for meat.
Not to mention dead zones now proliferating. Or jellyfish.
9. Climate change
Modelling by the Hadley Centre in Britain suggests that up to half the Earth may be in regular drought by the end of the century.
I would suggest that he neglects the effects of sea level rise, an increase in extreme events, the loss regular seasons and problems associated with melting glaciers and ice caps which will increase flooding followed by drastically reduced or dry rivers in the summer.
SOLUTIONS
Cribb thinks the problems are solvable. Goals for the next decade include:
* a 200 per cent increase in water use efficiency in all crops;
* a global effort to put organic farming systems on a scientific footing and exploit still-unknown soil biological processes;
* development of low-input farming systems that rely far less on oil-derived fertilisers, chemicals and energy;
* a global effort to recycle all nutrients on-farm, in the food chain and sewage works;
* a massive effort to raise vegetable production and consumption to replace protein and carbohydrate-based foods, using more than 1,000 species of “new” vegetables currently undeveloped in agriculture – this will also address the obesity pandemic;
* large-scale introduction of “green cities” (urban horticulture on buildings) and vegetable protein biosynthesis using recycled sewage nutrients; and
* development of farming systems, especially for the Third World, that protect native vegetation and biodiversity, cleanse water and sequester soil carbon.
Cribb also sees the need to reduce world population “from 9 billion to 2‐3 billion by 2100 before famine, natural forces or war do it for us.” How is not mentioned. Colin Tudge points out that prosperous people limit their own population.
Gwynne Dyer points out that Ethiopia had a population of 40 million when famine struck in the 1980s. Now just 25 years later, with famine again looming, the population is 80 million. At the present rate of increase it will be 160 million in 32 years.
What applies to Ethiopia applies to many other African countries, including some that do not currently have famines. Uganda, for example, had five million people at independence in 1960. It now has 32 million, and at the current growth rate it will have 130 million by 2050.
Elsewhere he points out that Pakistan has a similar problem.
Cribb has a message that the “green revolution” was achieved through an intensification of inputs, including fertilizer and water. This is failing and we are proceeding back to the 1960s.
To me he doesn’t say as strongly as some others, for example, Hilbeck and Tudge here, here, and here, that industrial farming has failed and top-down solutions won’t work. Tudge reckons that the purpose of industrial farming is not to feed people, it is to make corporations profitable. We need to renew our respect for the craft of traditional farming.
Philip McMichael provides a searching analysis of the effects on traditional farming of corporate neoliberal policies that treat food as just another tradeable commodity. There was a clear warning of what is to come in the price hikes of 2007-2008. Apart from food riots around the world:
governments implemented moratoria on food exports, and in 2008, wheat export bans or restrictions in Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, and Argentina closed off a third of the global market, and for rice, export bans or restrictions from China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, India, and Cambodia left only a few export suppliers, mainly Thailand and the United States, fueling agflation.
Governments are certainly going to have to develop policies to secure access to major commodities, and sufficient variety of produce, to feed their citizens. Certainly we are going to have to pay more. We are also going to have to see farming as more than the production of food. There is also a role in caring for the land.
We also need have a think and establish a code of acceptable practice about the practice by some countries in Asia and the Middle East, (China and South Korea leading the way) securing land in other countries to ensure their own food security. See here, here, here and perhaps more benignly here, for example.
This IAASTD issues paper states that of the worlds 525 million farms (as distinct from farmers) 404 million have less than two hectares and are net food buyers. It is a fair bet that the majority of the farm work is done by women. But much of the world’s food is produced this way and cannot be replaced by industrial farming without major social disruption. I’d expect industrial farming to remain the dominant mode in Australia, but here there is a question as to extent to which the family farm as a unit can survive. It seems fortune favours those who get big and have a presence in multiple climates.
There is also a question, especially in Queensland, as to the interface between farming and conservation. In the recent regrowth legislation another million hectares was taken out of production. The rule of thumb, entrenched in the law, is that 30% of all vegetation types within a subregion must be conserved. This can be a higher percentage for individual farms. There is no economic compensation for this contribution to the public and the planet’s good. I’ll post about this in more detail next year, but the conservation/production dilemma is going to be a factor worldwide.
I suspect “7 million” was meant to be “7 billion”.
The Victorian Government is introducing legislation for Melbourne to expand by another 41,000 hectares , which will take more good quality agricultural land out of production, and the developers and their shills continue to prate about the need to “unlock” land for housing development.
I dunno. There’s no doubt that the adjustment cost – in human lives as well as wealth – to rapid climate change will be large, though maybe not quite as large as some fear (as I keep saying, markets – defined broadly – do miracles in adjusting to new relative prices – again broadly defined – by bringing forth innovation).
But let’s take the long view for a moment. More energy will be retained on earth by greenhouse effects. So more land will be cultivable (there’s a helluva lot of taiga and tundra at the moment) and most existing cultivated land will be more productive because it will be warmer and rainier on average (that SE Australia cops drought because of AGW doesn’t mean that most parts of earth will – many models predict much of the Sahara will become cultivable again, f’rinstance). Warm shallow seas (eg the new Gulf of Decca, the Dutch Shallows or maybe even the Flinders and MacDonnell Archipelagos) ultimately means more fish too. Against this we lose a few rich (if heavily populated) deltas.
So the ultimate “carrying capacity” of the earth should increase. Not that “carrying capacity” is a fixed number anyway – ask any grazier. It depends on lots of things subject to change, like technology and how it’s managed.
Mind you, getting from here to there will be no picnic at all.
Great post, Brian.
Sydney’s last market gardens are to be paved over for McMansions:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/local-food-gobbled-up-by-sydneys-urban-sprawl-20090921-fyln.html
Will Steffen, who’s advising Penny’s Dept, has called for widespread GM cropping to cope with the anticipated shocks.
Ballardian much?
Paul, fixed thanks.
dd, I know there will be winners and losers, but I’m going with what seems to be the majority view. On Sahara, I saw one model out of six saying it would be wetter, but only to the extent of growing a bit of grass.
The issue of shrinking fresh water supplies is huge, as we are over-using groundwater and the problems of sea level rise and the loss of ice caps/glaciers is very significant, especially in the Himalayas.
Most point out that the increase fertility of the air comes unstuck after the temperature goes up more than a couple degrees. Also there was a switch over from C4 to C3 dominant plant species (or the other way around) over 20 million years ago as the planet cooled.
I recall one British study saying that with each extra degree in their patch plants needed 10% extra water. The increased irregularity is also a problem.
In the Southern hemisphere, much of the extra rain falls on the Southern Ocean.
Growing more fresh food will reduce our carbon footprint but means getting more water, making more arable land and improving the supply chain.
Can we do it? Yes We Can.
OT but some information about C3 and C4 grasses.
C3 grasses are thinner walled and have a greater digestability and often higher protein content.Ryegrass is an example.
C4 grasses have much more rapid growth and produce much extra dry matter per Ha.They also have tougher and harder to digest cellular structural material which reduces digestability and increases methane production. The protein content is lower so growth achieved by stock is reduced.Kikuyu is a C4.
In NSW this comparison in performance is available if you look at cattle around the north coast especially the areas not on riverplains. Then travel just inland to the New England area and Dorrigo and the cattle there look like they are suffering from obesity.
C3 grasses dominate pastures across southern Australia and are suited to temperate climates.C4 grasses are widespread on the warmer parts of the coast and northern areas.
The difference in performance is stark and this would be comparing animals under similar input regimes.
We have salesmen in our area promoting growing C4 grasses and baling them for use as fuel.The economics are a bit sketchy at the moment but it may be a new enterprise for many landowners.
National Geographic ran this story a while back, quoting Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany
Which I think is to a certain extent a broader issue for modelling worldwide. We don’t know for certain (and possibly cannot know) what rising global temperatures will mean other than change, possible big changes. However the rate of change could be hugely important to agriculture as could be any chaotic instabilities. I’m not convinced market philosophy will necessarily generate a miracle solution.
murph #6, I take it C3 and C4 refer to different photosythentic cycles in the different grasses reflecting the different climates in which they’ve evolved.
We vhave some 5 billion hectares of degraded and desertifying grasslands on our planet. The simple truth is that probably half of the current problem has been directly caused by inappropriate, if entirely unintentional, human management of our land.
Changing this management can have an immediate impact as the presentation mentioned below shows. Restoring these degraded lands helps take pressure off the rainforests and our arable lands, and also has a marked positive impact on our planet’s albedo.
Please take a few minutes and look a little more into the massive and positive impact changed grazing management could have. Professor Tim Flannery has stated that sequestering carbon into the soils of our grazing lands is one of the best means we have available to us for dealing with climate change.
There is growing concern for significant action to avoid catastrophic climate change. Please take a few minutes and look through the presentation on Soil Carbon at http://www.soilcarbon.com.au
Not enough people are yet aware of Soil Carbon and the critical role it can play in helping to reverse the impacts of global warming.
Did you know that just a 1% change in soil organic matter across just one-quarter of the World’s land area could sequester 300 billion tonnes of physical CO2?
Recent Australian studies have shown that a 1% change can occur within a few years – and in fact up to 4% changes were measured in some areas. The management changes required to achieve these increases are very readily implemented. I hope you find the presentation of interest.
There are a few too many questionable sneers from Cribb and his ilk – eg “neo-liberal policies … treat food as a tradeable commodity” (er, yes, and a good thing for all of us who live in cities it is that trade in food is well developed) “industrial farming has failed” – for me to regard much of this as much more than a polemic. But supposing, despite their obvious prejudices, they have come to the correct conclusion about the magnitude of the impending problem, then (at the risk of getting on a hobbyhorse I half mounted in the previous thread) they make far too little of the place of GM technology in the solution.
To say that GM has failed to deliver is a simplistic and indeed circular argument. To the extent that the technology has not been adopted as widely as it might have been, this is largely because of hugely over-onerous approval and regulatory systems. So the argument in effect is that GM has failed to deliver because we stopped it doing so by regulating the crap out of it; this proves that we were right to regard it as of limited potential and therefore to regulate it.
And does it not occur to these people that, if the most promising new technology is stymied by regulation, so that after big investments in research and commercialisation products don’t get to market, then the reduction in research and commercialisation effort that they complain about is inevitable and largely brought about by policies that they have themselves urged?
GM in relation to an impending food crisis is the equivalent of nuclear energy in relation to greenhouse emissions. The problem, if there is one, is not going to be solved without it. But over-regulation and disinformation, in both instances ironically often supported by those who are most vocal about the supposedly looming catastrophes, are ensuring that they can’t play such a role.
Wozza, I think you’ve overlooked some major problems with broadacre monoculture in general, and GM crops in particular.
Industrial farming depends on inputs that we are running short of, particularly oil for fuel and herbicides, and various chemical fertilisers. Peak oil and peak phosphorous will cause havoc.
Additionally, the few successful GM crops will certainly reduce biodiversity, just at the time we need greater biodiversity to cope with rapidly changing climate.
I find it strange that nobody has commented on the demand grain biofuels make on global food security. At least six percent of the world’s grain is now being converted to biofuels with this figure rapidly increasing. The 400 million tonnes mentioned is 20 percent of current global grain output.
The world’s farmers will be hard pressed to supply the increasing demand from population growth,increased incomes and so on without the additional unnecessary production of grain biofuels.
How about some comment on the reality of grain biofuels rather than suggesting how the supply might increase sometime in the future.
By the way,with water the limiting factor, crops on dry marginal land may not respond to GM, smarter fertilisers and so on to the same extent where water is not the limiting factor. And there is a lot of this dryer cropping land.
2bob #12, Cribb does go into the effect of biofuels on food security. Go to Brians link, the entire document isn’t too long to read.
Another point that I believe that is important that Cribb makes is the closing of the nutriant cycle; making better use of waste.
Paul Norton, C3 and C4 does refer to photosynthetic pathways. Sugar cane is also a C4 grass, as is corn and maize…basically warm weather grasses. But C4 photosynthesis happens in plants other than grasses too. We have both C3 and C4 grasses in native grassy ecosystems here.
There’s a really great chapter on this stuff in the Flora or Australia Volume 43 including a section on the impact of changing atmospheric C02 concentrations. It refers to some studies that are probably worth a read to those that may be considering altering their land management practices, because some of the what I’ve read so far seems quite counter intuitive.
It’s funny this subject should pop up, as I’ve dedicated my “too hot to work week” to doing some reading on this stuff.
The whole “industrialized agriculture” meme needs to be approached very cautiously when thinking about the situation here in Australia. First, the levels of external inputs that go into our broadacre farms – and even our dairy farms – are much, much lower than what a Londoner like Tudge would understand as “industrialized” agriculture. Second, family farms are still well over 90% of the industry (they just don’t get the attention of the Cubby Stations and big pastoral houses), and the craft of farming is alive and well.
“The craft of traditional farming”, though, is a bit of a non-sequitur here in Oz. The tradition is one of continual change. The valley where my mother grew up has gone from Aboriginal landuse, to extensive sheep production, to dairying, to beef+tourism+vines in five generations or so. Methods for growing wheat get shaken up every 20-30 years (the classic graph is here, but doesn’t include the advent of controlled-traffic farming). Come to think of it, it’s a non-sequitur anywhere: traditional farming just isn’t going to feed 9 billion people at +2 degrees.
Re #9: every tonne of carbon tied up in the soil takes 20 kilograms of phosphorus with it. Leave aside the cost of this ($25-50/tonne CO2-e for the P alone); leave aside the immense problems of measuring & monitoring soil carbon. Peak phosphorus is coming, and we need to sequester C without P attached, ’cause they’re not making any more.
“Peak phosphorus is coming, and we need to sequester C without P attached, ’cause they’re not making any more.”
But surely the sea has a lot that we could find a way of using. I’m not suggesting we do, but fossil P is no more the be-all, end-all than fossil C.
With Julian Cribb exploring options,no wonder disaster seems apparent.Why doesn’t he go back to Britain,and start there.These media big shots keep ruining the ground for others.Tell me,does anyone here actually believe I have contributed to agricultural production,in spite of Julian Cribb!?Come on!Answer!
“On Sahara, I saw one model out of six saying it would be wetter, but only to the extent of growing a bit of grass.”
Grasses coincidentally being the single most important plant on the earth in terms of feeding humans.
“Tell me,does anyone here actually believe I have contributed to agricultural production,in spite of Julian Cribb!?Come on!Answer!”
I honestly have no idea Phillip.
Yobbo @ 18, I’m not knocking the value of grass on the Sahara, but dd @ 2 suggested it might become “cultivable”, which I think is rather unlikely.
Cultivation has no redeemable standard compared to something else that has been cultivated,so using that understanding any grass can be cultivated within the limitsof the environment..Don’t forget that there are many flying objects today,and materials that can withstand temperatures and be remotely run!Silicon based materials from a chemical industrial process can elaborate material from deserts.Deserts are in fact,very valuable,if seen in the right light.Carrying payload of flying vehicles may not need to transport water ,but be adaptable to use nightly condensation .That type of thinking with deeply buried below the surface contacts with flying vehicles may mean more moisture could become available.If one looks at forested areas of a landscape creating the conditions for regular rainfall,it isn’t strange to imagine a technological growth under the sands replicating large tree growth,and be made almost entirely of desert made manufactured materials,until and with natural eco-system establishment.Australians should encourage existing mining operations,where underground mining can be done,to experiment with underground mining in very dry areas,without disturbing the surface.Obviously there is the practicality of converting materials to solid walls etc.Living underground,even having a nomadic existence to develop horticultural agricultural pursuits and night condensation,doesn’t seem to me, at least, to have the air of impracticality.Africa generally needs ideas.Saharan type deserts are not strange places of hardship for those already familiar with them,they have developed their own hardness.Ideas need testing by the harder folk to see if living can be low impact and highly productive.Not the swine and pearls reality of academic freeloaders.
We have definitely overshot the carrying capacity of the planet. By drawing down ecological capital, instead living off the returns of that capital, short term growth can be accomplished at the cost of reducing future carrying capacity, with generally disastrous results.
http://www.selfdestructivebastards.com/2009/11/carrying-capacity.html