Peter A Coclanis - There is a simple way to improve the world’s food systems
In recent
decades, the international community has made impressive strides against hunger
and undernourishment, as amply evidenced by the data from the United Nations
(UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Between 1990 and 2014, for example,
the proportion of undernourished people in the world dropped from over 23 per
cent to under 13 per cent, remarkable progress indeed. Still, that leaves almost
800 million undernourished people in the world, mostly in sub-Saharan
Africa and South Asia, and in other areas too.
Ensuring that fewer
and fewer people worldwide are undernourished is clearly a development priority
– ‘Zero Hunger’ is priority number two in the UN Development Programme’s 17
‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (succeeded the MDGs in 2015) – but meeting or
even approaching this goal will not be easy. As I write this in early 2017, the
world’s population is about 7.5 billion. Current estimates suggest that by
2050 it will be around 9.7 billion, with population growing most rapidly
in the areas that are now the least food-secure.
This population
projection is very troubling to scholars and practitioners
interested in questions relating to food security. Simply put, how on earth
will we find a way to feed all these people – and, in so doing, end hunger –
when it is almost certain that we’ll be using an increasingly debased operating
platform (less agricultural water, much of it of lower quality, more degraded
lands, much-diminished natural fisheries), and will need to use fewer
pesticides and less fertiliser, all in the context of climate change?
And that’s not all.
Not only will we likely have more than 2 billion extra people
to feed, but also, as more and more of the world’s inhabitants achieve higher
incomes and living standards, they will almost certainly demand more
resource-intensive protein-rich and dairy-based diets. A tough job, in other
words.
In light of the above
considerations, it seems safe to suggest that there’s no secret nostrum,
no one approach that will feed everyone adequately, much less
rid the world of hunger. Luckily, there are a variety of ways to proceed. We
might be able, for example, to change human diets in ways that reduce
environmental impacts, whether by reducing meatconsumption or, via advances in metabolomics, by
employing personalised/targeted nutrition to reduce caloric intake per capita.
We will also likely see more ‘factory foods’ – based on synthetic biology – that can
contribute to the total food supply while using fewer resources than would be
the case with conventional agriculture.
Certainly, increasing
agricultural output will be part of the picture too, whether through increasing
inputs of land, labour and agricultural capital or by increasing productivity
via precision agriculture, drip irrigation, agricultural analytics and better
breeding practices (whether conventional or involving GMOs or gene editing). To
be sure, through the combined efforts of farmers, researchers, demonstration
agents and policymakers, we’ve witnessed extraordinary growth in world
agricultural production since 1950. In recent decades, though, output growth
has slowed for a variety of reasons, including, perhaps most troublingly, a
slowdown in the growth rate of productive efficiency in agriculture.
Fortunately, there is
more than one way to increase the effective food supply –
whether or not productive efficiency is growing. There are low-hanging fruit
out there, as it were, and the place to find them is in the space generally
subsumed under the rubric ‘food wastage’. Wastage is a broad category,
incorporating problems such as leaving edible output in fields or orchards
after the harvest, post-harvest losses (PHL) occurring between the harvesting
and the marketing of agricultural output (or fish and seafood), losses in the
retail sector as healthy products – imperfect fruits and vegetables, for
example – go unsold, and edible food is thrown away either at restaurants or in
homes.
According to the UN’s
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): ‘Roughly one third of the food in the
world produced for human consumption every year – approximately
1.3 billion tons – gets lost or wasted.’ Broken down by food category, the
FAO estimates that 30 per cent of world production of cereals is lost or
wasted, 20 per cent of dairy production, 35 per cent of ‘harvested’ fish and
seafood, 20 per cent of the world’s meat, 20 per cent of all oilseeds and
pulses, and a staggering 45 per cent of both roots and tubers, and fruits and
vegetables too.
People in developed
countries are much more familiar with the wastage problem associated with
retailers and consumers, ie the part of food that goes unsold or is thrown
away. In much of the world, however, it’s another part of this problem that’s
paramount, and that’s PHL (a large problem even in the developed world). As
suggested, PHL generally refers to avoidable food losses between the harvesting
and marketing of food. Some writers, however, will extend the PHL category all
the way until the time of consumption. In either case, there are lots of ways
for food to be lost, beginning with the harvest itself and then onwards, due to
improper or inadequate handling, threshing, drying, cleaning or processing, or
because of faulty or deficient storage, transporting or packaging of crops,
harvested fish, etc. Taken together, these factors lead to substantial losses
of food, ranging from 5-10 per cent to more than 50 per cent,
depending on output and geographical area. These losses are generally greater
in food products considered perishable (fruits and some vegetables, fish) or
semi-perishable (some vegetables, roots and tubers, oilseeds and pulses) than
in cereal grains. However, losses in cereal grains, though generally less
perishable, are often high too, because of insect or rodent attacks, and poor
storage or transportation infrastructure, etc.
It is quite depressing
to learn that, currently, a third of our food goes to loss and wastage, but
upon closer inspection there are considerable grounds for hope. Unlike the case
with raising crop yields, there is plenty of room to reduce food loss and
wastage through the broader dissemination and employment of existing technology.
All over the world, modern agribusiness and cold-chain equipment, practices and
protocols are coming into use because of the innovative efforts of private
firms, the public sector and NGOs. Moreover, much of the ‘modern’ technology
out there is being reengineered along ‘appropriate technology’ lines, making it
more likely that it will actually be effectively utilised to mitigate food
losses at all stages of the PHL sequence. The new generation of temperature-
and humidity-controlled (and monitored) warehouses and silos for use in the
least developed countries are a case in point, and many of them are powered by
low- and non-carbon energy schemes, solar and wind power among them. When used
correctly, such storage facilities can reduce losses to levels close to those
of developed countries, making for a significant difference in food
availability.
Reducing PHL, then,
can help us achieve the same results as increasing crop yields. And in many
cases it is easier. Food for thought.
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