Mass starvation is humanity’s fate if we keep flogging the land to death. By George Monbiot
Brexit; the crushing
of democracy by billionaires; the next financial crash; a rogue US president:
none of them keeps me awake at night. This is not because I don’t care –
I care very much. It’s only because I have a bigger question on my
mind. Where is all the food going to come from? By the middle of this
century there will be two or three billion more people on Earth. Any one of the
issues I am about to list could help precipitate mass starvation. And this is
before you consider how they might interact. The trouble begins
where everything begins: with soil. The UN’s famous projection that, at current
rates of soil loss, the world has 60 years of harvests left, appears to be supported by a new set of figures. Partly as a result of soil degradation, yields
are already declining on 20% of the world’s croplands.
Now consider water
loss. In places such as the North China Plain, the central United States,
California and north-western India – among the world’s critical growing regions
– levels of the groundwater used to irrigate crops are already reaching crisis
point. Water in the Upper Ganges aquifer, for example, is being withdrawn
at 50 times
its recharge rate. But, to keep pace with food demand, farmers in south
Asia expect
to use between 80 and 200% more water by the year 2050. Where
will it come from?
The next constraint is
temperature. One
study suggests that, all else being equal, with each degree celsius of
warming the global yield of rice drops by 3%, wheat by 6% and maize by 7%.
These predictions could be optimistic. Research
published in the journal Agricultural & Environmental Letters finds
that 4C of warming in the US corn belt could reduce maize yields by between 84
and 100%. The reason is that
high temperatures at night disrupt the pollination process. But this describes
just one component of the likely pollination crisis. Insectageddon, caused by the global deployment of scarcely tested
pesticides, will account for the rest. Already, in some parts of the world,
workers are now pollinating plants by hand. But that’s viable only for the most expensive
crops.
Then there are the
structural factors. Because they tend to use more labour, grow a wider range of
crops and work the land more carefully, small farmers, as a rule, grow more
food per hectare than large ones. In the poorer regions of the world, people
with fewer than five hectares own 30% of the farmland but produce 70% of the food. Since 2000, an area of fertile ground
roughly twice the size of the UK has been seized by land grabbers and consolidated
into large farms, generally growing crops for export rather than the food
needed by the poor.
While these multiple
disasters unfold on land, the seas are being sieved of everything but
plastic. Despite a massive increase in effort (bigger boats, bigger
engines, more gear), the worldwide fish catch is declining by roughly 1% a
year, as populations collapse. The global land grab is mirrored by a global
sea grab: small fishers are displaced by big corporations, exporting fish to
those who need it less but pay more. About
3 billion people depend to a large extent on fish and shellfish
protein. Where will it come from?
All this would be hard
enough. But as people’s incomes increase, their diet tends to shift from plant
protein to animal protein. World meat production has quadrupled in 50 years, but global average consumption is still only half that of the UK – where we eat roughly our
bodyweight in meat every year – and just over a third of the US level. Because
of the way we eat, the UK’s farmland footprint (the land required to meet our
demand) is 2.4 times the size of its agricultural area. If everyone aspires to
this diet, how exactly do we accommodate it?.. read more:
