Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession which is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch.
You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%(1). There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices(2). But I bet you have missed the most telling statistic. At 2.1bn tonnes, last year’s global grain harvest broke all records(3). It beat the previous year’s by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?
There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), will feed people(4).
I am sorely tempted to write another column about biofuels. From this morning all sellers of transport fuel in the United Kingdom will be obliged to mix it with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. The World Bank points out that "the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol … could feed one person for a year"(5). This year global stockpiles of cereals will decline by around 53m tonnes(6); this gives you a rough idea of the size of the hunger gap. The production of biofuels will consume almost 100m tonnes(7), which suggests that they are directly responsible for the current crisis. In the Guardian yesterday the transport secretary Ruth Kelly promised that "if we need to adjust policy in the light of new evidence, we will."(8) What new evidence does she require? In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate.
But I have been saying this for four years and I am boring myself. Of course we must demand that our governments scrap the rules which turn grain into the fastest food of all. But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals(9). This could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.
While meat consumption is booming in Asia and Latin America, in the United Kingdom it has scarcely changed since the government started gathering data in 1974. At just over 1kg per person per week(10), it’s still about 40% above the global average(11), though less than half the amount consumed in the United States(12). We eat less beef and more chicken than we did 30 years ago, which means a smaller total impact. Beef cattle eat about 8kg of grain or meal for every kilogramme of flesh they produce; a kilogramme of chicken needs just 2kg of feed. Even so, our consumption rate is plainly unsustainable.
In his magazine The Land, Simon Fairlie has updated the figures produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby’s book Can Britain Feed Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet grown by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half the current total)(13). Even if we reduced our consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4m hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture. A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food stocks.
But I cannot advocate a diet I am incapable of following. I tried it for about 18 months, lost two stone, went as white as bone and felt that I was losing my mind. I know a few healthy-looking vegans and I admire them immensely. But after almost every talk I give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey.
What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? One approach is to work out how great a cut would be needed to accommodate the growth in human numbers. The UN expects the population to rise to 9bn by 2050. These extra people will require another 325m tonnes of grain(14). Let us assume, perhaps generously, that politicians like Ms Kelly are able to "adjust policy in the light of new evidence" and stop turning food into fuel. Let us pretend that improvements in plant breeding can keep pace with the deficits caused by climate change. We would need to find an extra 225m tonnes of grain. This leaves 531m tonnes for livestock production, which suggests a sustainable consumption level for meat and milk some 30% below the current world rate. This means 420g of meat per person per week, or about 40% of the UK’s average consumption.
This estimate is complicated by several factors. If we eat less meat we must eat more plant protein, which means taking more land away from animals. On the other hand, some livestock is raised on pasture, so it doesn’t contribute to the grain deficit. Simon Fairlie estimates that if animals were kept only on land that’s unsuitable for arable farming, and given scraps and waste from food processing, the world could produce between a third and two thirds of its current milk and meat supply(15). But this system then runs into a different problem. The FAO calculates that animal keeping is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impacts are especially grave in places where livestock graze freely(16). The only reasonable answer to the question of how much meat we should eat is as little as possible. Let’s reserve it – as most societies have done until recently – for special occasions.
For both environmental and humanitarian reasons, beef is out. Pigs and chickens feed more efficiently, but unless they are free range you encounter another ethical issue: the monstrous conditions in which they are kept. I would like to encourage people to start eating tilapia instead of meat. It’s a freshwater fish which can be raised entirely on vegetable matter and has the best conversion efficiency – about 1.6kg of feed for 1kg of meat – of any farmed animal(17). Until meat can be grown in flasks, this is about as close as we are likely to come to sustainable flesh-eating.
Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.
References:
1. Eg http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7284196.stm
2. World Bank, 14th April 2008. Food Price Crisis Imperils 100 Million in Poor Countries, Zoellick Says. Press release.http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21729143~menuPK:51062075~pagePK:34370~piPK:34424~theSitePK:4607,00.html
3. Food and Agriculture Organisation, April 2008. Crop Prospects and Food Situation. http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ai465e/ai465e01.htm
4. ibid.
5. World Bank, 2008. Biofuels: The Promise and the Risks.http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTWDRS/EXTWDR2008/0,,contentMDK:21501336~pagePK:64167689~piPK:64167673~theSitePK:2795143,00.html
6. Gerrit Buntrock, 6th December 2007. Cheap no more. The Economist.
7. Food and Agriculture Organisation, April 2008, ibid.
8. Ruth Kelly, 14th April 2008. Biofuels: a blueprint for the future? The Guardian.
9. Food and Agriculture Organisation, April 2008, ibid.
10. The British government gives a total meat purchase figure of 1042g/person/week for 2006. http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/publications/efs/datasets/UKHHcons.xls
11. There’s a discussion of global average figures here: http://envirostats.info/2007/09/18/0406/
12. See Food and Agriculture Organisation, 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow. Figure 1.4, p9. ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e.pdf
13. Simon Fairlie, Winter 2007-8. Can Britain Feed Itself? The Land.
14. Based on the current population of 6.8bn consuming 1006mt of grain.
15. Simon Fairlie, forthcoming. Default livestock farming. The Land, Summer 2008.
16. Food and Agriculture Organisation, 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow. ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e.pdf
17. The FAO (ibid) gives 1.6-1.8. On April 12th, I spoke to Francis Murray of the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, who suggested 1.5.
Published in the Guardian 15th April 2008
1 Comment
This thesis is based on a variety of myths-gone-viral. It comes out on the wrong side of anumber of important issues. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
1. 80% of the “undernourished” are rural, as are 70% of Least Developed Country Populaiton. They’re mostly farmers. They’re hungry because they’re poor. They’re poor because farmers aren’t paid fairly, which also hurts the rural others in these regional rural economies. Part of the reason for low farm prices, for many decades, has been overproduction. For a few years a few farm prices have been above the cost of production (US) for a few crops (corn, soybeans, rice, but NOT wheat, cotton, barley, oats and sorghum), however, which also happened 3 times, (briefly,) during the 20th century. A “feed the world” mentality has been a push to return to overproduction. It’s an agribusiness exploitation strategy, a colonization strategy. “How can we feed the world?” is the wrong question. The needed solution is “pay the world’s” farmers fairly.
2. Monbiot gives some relative statistics. “the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%.” That means that they rose above what they were previously. What’s missing are absolute terms, including context. What were these prices previous to the rises? Were they “normal,” “ok?” That’s what Monbiot (and the others, as these myths have gone viral in mainstream media,) assumes here. In fact, however, prior the 75% or 130% rice and wheat had multiple years of the lowest prices in history, (rice, 8 of the 12 lowest, 1999-2006, & 3 of the others were 1990, 92, 94; wheat: the 6 lowest, 1998-2005 & 9 of the 15 lowest, (most others recent,) as did corn and soybeans (8 of the 9 lowest, 1997-2007) cotton (14/17 lowest 1998-2012, & 2 of the others were 1992 & 1993), oats, barley, grain sorghum and sugar. Compared to the traditional fair price standard of parity, (which Africa surely needs,) in September 2005 percents of parity were: rice 26%, corn 25%, cotton 26%, Sorghum grain 27%, peanuts 27%, so the need was for something like a 4-fold increase, not 130%. For Wheat: 32%, soybeans 32%, Barley and o ats, 27%, basically in need of tripling to pay LDCs fairly. Prior to 2007, many hunger sources demonstrated knowledge of export dumping as a context, but that was forgotten, starting in 2007. US family farmers, La Via Campesina and the WTO Africa group called for adequate supply reductions and price floors, (similar to previous US policies of living wage price floors), which eliminates the need for any subsidies. As it turned out, wheat, corn and rice prices, 2007-2009, averaged just below the 25% mark (with 1 exception out of 9) on the list all prices (as listed by USDeptAg-ERS).
3. Western elites like to say Africa would be better off without (value added) meat, but that’s a call for even greater poverty, as meat provides 40% of global farm income, and it would foster even greater oversupply of grains and other crops. Meat can be raised sustainably, keeping fragile lands covered to capture large amounts of carbon out of the air.
4. These are savage dilemmas caused by 60 years of lower and lower farm prices. This is what has so devastated farming countries that, yes, suddenly coming closer to the fair trade, living wage prices that the hungry need ALSO causes problems. But the root cause is NOT paying farmers of 3-4 crops somewhat more fairly (corn, soybeans, rice, peanuts) over 7 years (through 2013). (+ higher wheat prices that have still been below full costs (USDA-ERS). The root cause is cheaper and cheaper prices, 1953-2016, and projected ahead to 2026 (US Congressional Budget Office).