How will the world feed itself in 40 years’ time?
By | Jul 13, 2010
By 2050, the predicted world population will require the resources of two Earths to sustain it. How can we possibly meet these demands?
From guardian.co.uk
The world is going to get hungrier this century, and on a scale that will make the famines of the 1980s look paltry. The maths are simple and devastating: in 40 years’ time the global population will be 9.2 billion people – a third larger than it is now. But to feed us all, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says, we will need to produce twice as much food.
That’s because, despite the threats of this century, most developing countries will get richer. At present 350m households in the world live on £8,000 a year or more. That figure is projected to increase to 2.1bn by 2030. And the richer they are, the more wastefully people eat. Generally the poor eat vegetables, while the rich eat food that eats vegetables. Lots of it. To produce 1kg of beef takes 10kg of grass or soya-based feed. A farmed fish will have eaten three times its weight in wild fish. And the rate at which the richest consume these things is amazing: Americans consume 120kg of meat each per year; in the developing world they eat 28kg.
If the world develops as economists predict, it is hard to see how we can possibly meet these demands: environmentalists like to say that the 2050 population would require the resources of two earths to sustain it. No wonder the British government’s chief scientific adviser John Beddington says: “Food security represents a greater threat to mankind than climate change itself.”
There lies the other big problem. While we look for ways to produce that extra food, the rapidly changing climate is going to make the earth a less efficient piece of farmland. Large swaths of the tropics and the equatorial regions will get hotter and drier, and while that won’t leave them unable to grow things, what they can grow will change radically. The 2°C increase in average temperatures that is accepted as the likely minimum this century is enough to cause major shifts in the seasons and in what crops work where.
The great irony of this change is that, initially at least, most of us in the richer parts of the world will benefit. It’s in the tropics, where most of the world’s poor live, that climate change is damaging agriculture, and will continue to do so. Essentially, the belt round the centre of the earth will get hotter and drier, while those of us who live in the north of the northern hemisphere will see more warmth but also more rain. This will extend our growing seasons and increase the geographical area where it’s possible to grow crops. Canada and Russia are among the countries expected to do well, as are northern China and northern Europe. But the Mediterranean countries, southern American states and California don’t look comfortable at all. Spain, for one, is painted a nasty red on all the maps showing where water will be short come 2050.
But this is nothing compared with the changes that are happening or imminent in the tropical world. Rice production, the staple food of most of Asia, is already moving northwards, forcing millions of people to change ways of living that have sustained them for centuries. Along the coastal fringes of Asia, people’s lives are changing radically, as a huge increase in storms coupled with a rise in sea levels (which is now predicted to be a metre this century) brings salt to their fields and makes growing rice impossible.
Half of the poorest billion people in the world live in South Asia, as do many of the 5 million children who die every year of diseases caused or exacerbated by malnutrition. According to a report by the Asian Development Bank, 1.6 billion south Asians will find their food security at risk because of climate change.
In Africa and parts of Latin America predictions are just as hair-raising. Maize is one of the world’s four most important food crops and the staple of more than a quarter of a billion east Africans. It’s a hugely important food for animals as well. Maize is vulnerable to water problems and to temperature changes. As Andy Jarvis, an award-winning crop scientist, puts it: “When you look at the graph, under even small average heat rises, the line for maize just goes straight down.” It’s estimated that maize production will drop in sub-Saharan Africa and much of India by 15% in the next 10 years alone. By 2080, according to government scientists in South Africa, the region can expect to see a 50% drop in crops of all the cereals.
Among the luxuries of living in our comfy corner of the world, is the fact that climate change still seems to be a problem of the future, something that we need to worry about less for ourselves than our grandchildren. But for many millions of people the devastation caused by changing seasonal patterns and unpredictable weather is already a clear and present danger. First-person accounts collected by Oxfam from agricultural workers around the world all say the same. Whether they’re in the east African savannahs, the Peruvian altiplano or the fertile coastal wetlands of Indonesia, all complain that the seasons have become less certain, rainfall unpredictable and that their crops or their animals have suffered. There are new pests and diseases.
While it is still not possible to say with certainty that this is caused by human beings burning fossil fuels, it is undeniable that catastrophic changes are going on in the climate system. Filter the news with a climate change alert for a few months, and you watch a stream of worrying official statistics trickle in – all of them bad news. The southern Indian state of Karnataka reports a drop in rainfall of 6-8% since 1990. Tanzania and other east African countries report already an average warming of 1.5°C since 1990. Chinese meteorologists say that parts of their country have experienced the same. These figures may not seem enormous, but their effect is dramatic. According to the research of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, just half a degree of average temperature increase will reduce the yield of India’s wheat crop by 20%. And India is the world’s second largest producer of wheat. …
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Rick Mansell
July 19th, 2010 at 9:30 am
How will we feed ourselves? The answer is obvious – those who can afford it, will eat well while those who are in poverty will starve. It is happening now. We ignore the starving while figuring out how to acquire their weatlh (“they need us to buy their resources so they can survive”); our news media will not caryy news about the starving so we will not overly worry about it; those stories that are brought to our attention will be about some token efforts to bring food to the poor. Our leaders will continue to produce their propoganda to convince us that we are being attack by people of another race, religion or philosophy and that we need to attack them for their own sakes.