Global population reaches 7 billion: can we really feed the world?
With the population now at seven billion, it’s time we turned our attention from fattening animals to feeding people, writes Steve Jones
By Steve Jones | The Telegraph | 25 October 2011
Aerial view of KTC township near Cape Town international airport in South Africa Photo: ALAMY
It’s official: as of next week, the world will have a population of seven billion people. A billion already go hungry. How are we going to feed them, and the billions yet to come?
I went last week to the House of Commons, to a launch of a partnership between the University of Aberystwyth’s eminent group of agricultural biologists and the organisation Africa Harvest, whose director, Florence Wambugu, told us how her native continent hopes to improve its ability to feed itself. Already the Welsh team has had success with increasing the yield of crops such as millet and sorghum, but much more is planned.
To keep up with the numbers, and with shifts in eating habits, world food production will have to double in the next few decades. There is not much room for physical growth, for farms already occupy four-tenths of the Earth’s surface, with, in most places, almost no suitable spare land. Nearly all the recent expansion has been in the tropics. Three Waleses worth of rainforest is lost each year, but the newly cleared soil is of poor quality.
There have been many gains in yield over the past two decades (garlic has done best, with seeds such as rape not far behind, but it’s been a bit of a bust on the potato front) and big shifts in the area planted with particular crops (far more cucumbers, onions doing well, and a collapse in the oat harvest). Some growth has come from new varieties, but a lot more from the increase in the use of fertilisers – up fivefold in the past half-century.
However, the rate of improvement is slowing down. A large part of the problem comes from the global shift to meat. Almost a third of farmland produces animal feed – with big differences from place to place. In Europe and North America, two thirds of what we grow goes to feed chickens, pigs and cattle rather than people, while in Africa, animals consume only a fifth of the harvest. For some places, the figures are shocking: on the Great Plains, just a tenth of the crop feeds people, with the rest swallowed by the mooing hamburgers of tomorrow. Add the globe’s pastures to its prairies, and an amazing three quarters of our farmland is devoted to the interests of animals.
What is to be done? As the Africa Harvest event made clear, part of the answer is already in our hands. To raise African production to European levels would enable the continent to push out half as much food again. It would take a lot more fertiliser – but so much is wasted in the developed world that if it were used more efficiently, the global total would not rise.
The biggest shift, though, will have to come from changes in diet. For some foodstuffs, shifts in demand have been spectacular. In China, meat consumption per head has gone up by 20 times since the Sixties. In the 15th century, England imported 50 tons of sugar a year – about a gram per person, though most saw none of it. The average American now eats two tons in his lifetime – 10,000 times more. Meat and dairy consumption has also shot up, while the dire health effects of the junk food diet mean that famine disguised as feast has spread across the developed world.
A shift in the production of the commonest crops to feed people directly, rather than to use grain to fatten animals, would increase the calories available by half, and more or less solve the joint problems of shortage and glut. The West should go back to its diet of yesterday – and that of many people today. I have happy memories of eating in the student cafeterias of African universities. Plates were piled with what was in effect wallpaper paste – sadza, mashed-up maize meal – with a spoonful of powerfully peppered vegetables on top. The kids were healthy and well-fed, but the amount of energy that went to produce each portion was a fraction of that used to nourish their American equivalents.
A global move to vegetarianism is unlikely, although we could all do with cutting down the animal fat. However, even moving from grain-fed beef to cattle or sheep from open pastures would do quite a lot to help. On the other hand, in spite of the innovations mentioned elsewhere on this page, I do not think that the dinosaur-sized chicken will solve the problem – even if it is free-range.
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