A couple of days ago I posted an item about global footprints and World Overshoot Day, the point each year at which man has used up the entire year's renewable resources. In Canada we live in bounty and that sometimes obscures the reality of what's happening elsewhere. Yet dwindling or exhausted resources along with weather extremes and climate change are going to trigger dangerous conflicts, wars for survival, and mass population migrations. We are going to be effected by those events. The Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defence are planning for it.
We're going to have to make some hard, possibly even brutal decisions, about how to deal with these eventualities and to do that we need to understand the problems. Here are some excerpts from Dyer's latest column about the state of the world's food supply:
"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.
"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 fifty 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 eleven and seventeen 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 fourteen billion poultry a year, and it takes slightly over a third of all our grain to feed them.
We're going to have to make some hard, possibly even brutal decisions, about how to deal with these eventualities and to do that we need to understand the problems. Here are some excerpts from Dyer's latest column about the state of the world's food supply:
"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.
"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 fifty 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 eleven and seventeen 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 fourteen 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 percent, 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.
U.S. ethanol plant withgrain cars full of corn
"In South-East Asia, the main source of biofuels is oil palms, which are mostly grown on cleared rainforest. In the United States, a "cornrush" 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 bigfour-wheel-drive SUV just once uses enough grain to feed one person for an entire year.
"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."
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