FOOD IN 2030: Eight billion mouths

It’s no coincidence that our atmosphere happens to have the right amount of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide for us to survive in: we, and all the living things on Earth, evolved jointly with the geological development of the planet.

Humanity has, however, now reached the point where we, as a single species, are having a dramatic impact on those ecosystems. We are using resources, including food, much faster than natural processes can replenish them, and – I fear – faster than we can find alternatives for them. This is the biggest challenge that our civilisation has had to face up to, and as a global species, doing things the way we’ve always done them is no longer an option.

Let me take you back to central China around 1400 during the Han Dynasty. The area that the Han came from – Loess Plateau – was originally a verdant area with high rainfall and what is now the Yellow River supplying it. Because of the Han’s success, but also their lack of understanding of good agricultural practices, they soon over-farmed this area and the soil began to wash away.

Even today, the Yellow River still has desert sand blowing into it and blocking it – there are even places where you can walk across the river, and it’s like walking over a mattress.

After realising that the Loess Plateau could no longer provide food for his people, the Chinese Emperor had the luxury of moving the population East to what is now Beijing, and starting a new economy.

Humans have often done this in the past. But today, if we destroy a piece of the planet, there’s nowhere else for us to move. We have, in effect, ploughed the last furrow and become a global population.

Our challenge last century was to improve human wellbeing and we did that extraordinarily well. The enormous advantages that arose from science, medicine, agriculture and technology in the 20th century allowed the human lifespan to double. We entered the century with 1.5 billion people and left with six billion.

Now, our challenge is to manage a single planet with a population that, if you take the median projection forward, will be eight billion by 2030 and nine billion by 2050. We need to start planning for these eight billion people, because even with our current six billion, our resources are being depleted at a remarkably rapid rate. And there is a carousel of challenges on the way, which will probably hit us all at once: food and water shortages being two significant ones.

There are several major areas of the planet today where water is being mined faster than it is being replenished.

Take South Australia or the state of Victoria: water aquifers have been mined far faster than rainfall can replenish them. Victoria has now faced eight successive years of drought. Further water shortages and even desertification is likely to occur in these areas over the next few decades as a result of climate change, while other regions face more frequent flooding.

Desalination has been suggested as one solution to water shortages. But desalination is energy intensive and in Australia the process is powered by burning coal, which puts more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and furthers the carbon problem.

Even if we stop producing carbon dioxide now, for at least the next 30 years we will experience rising temperatures as a result of the emissions we’ve already put in the atmosphere.

We are already at the point where temperatures have risen 0.8˚C above pre-industrial levels. There are actually two timelines for food over the next decades: one for the northern regions that are cooler today, such as Russia, where we will see improved agricultural conditions as time goes by, and one for the mid-tropics where rising temperatures are already damaging crop yields. However, if the temperature increases by 1-3˚C, the entire planet’s ability to grow food will become severely challenged.

Food supplies on land aren’t the only ones that are struggling. A good part of our feedstock comes from the oceans, and we have actually reduced the fishing capacity of the oceans by 70%.

Even though technology is continually improving and attempts to improve catch are increasing, fish stocks are falling. Only in the western Indian Ocean is the fish catch not falling behind the peaks of the past. We are losing large fish at such a rate that, before 2050, we will have effectively depleted the oceans of large fish.

The United Nations estimates that by 2030, with current growth in demand, we will need to increase current crop yield by 50%. But how can we double our food output in 20 years, when changing climate threatens to disrupt crop growth and we are already struggling to feed our population?

There are some lessons about food production that we can learn from the very severe price rise that occurred, particularly for rice, in 2007 and 2008. Prices doubled or tripled over a short period of time – for the more than one billon people on this planet who live on less than 50 cents a day, this price increase spelled disaster and starvation.

Analysis indicates that roughly 70% of this price rise was attributed to a U.S. policy that subsidised farmers who converted grain into alcohol, which is used to fuel cars. Therefore, any excess food produced in the U.S. disappeared from the global market.

What we saw was conversion of food into fuel – by solving an energy problem we created a food problem.

The other 30% of the price rise was due to flooding of rice regions soon after planting. The rice we like to consume doesn’t survive more than two or three days in a flooded region, and there was an exceptionally large loss of these crops that year.

Both of these causes of price rise and crop loss could have been avoided.

First, we don’t solve any problems by converting corn into alcohol. Our analysis indicates the CO₂ generated in the process of turning sugarcane into alcohol is roughly the same as making petrol. While we need to find substitutes for oil, the impacts of alternative fuel sources need to be studied carefully.

Second, flooding and other extreme weather that will become more common as the effects of climate change kick in, don’t have to lead to disaster. There is a form of rice in India that grows through flooded paddy fields. It’s a wild rice that people don’t like to eat, but with interbreeding we can incorporate its flood-resistant gene into popular rice strains.

Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines have done just this and flood-resistant rice will reach the market sometime in the next year. But the program did not use gene splicing and has taken the team 15 years – if they had used gene splicing it could have been done in two. This means that we could have avoided the price rises and deaths caused by flooding over the past 13 years.

Genetic splicing wasn’t used because farmers in the developing world picked up a fear of genetic modification of crops from Europeans. Yet no one has ever suffered from GM crops, while many, many people have clearly suffered – and starved – from a lack of them.

If we’re going to produce 50% more food in 2030 and meet global demand, there’s a desperate need for us to use biotechnology to our advantage. We need to develop crops that are saline resistant, flood resistant and disease resistant.

Water shortages in the future will mean we also need to produce more crop per drop. Over the next two decades we will need to be more clever with how we irrigate farmland and remind ourselves of the water content of different foodstuffs that arrive on our tables.

As the GDP of a nation grows, consumption of food changes and intensifies the need for water-dense food. For example, in the past, China has been very heavily dependent on food crops, but its population is now consuming more meat products.

We also need to manage these issues globally, so that conflict and terrorism don’t escalate as we run low on fresh water and food. Managing risk for our own nations while ignoring international governance can only lead to conflict. I fear that future historians may well cite the Iraq war as the first of the great resource wars of the 21st century.

I believe solutions are a matter of political leadership and societal planning. We certainly have the technology to understand the problems, and there are examples even today that we can tackle them.

Let’s return to the Loess Plateau that the Hans depleted hundreds of years ago. The area is about the size of France and 12 years ago the Chinese government decided to try and recover it, in what’s become the world’s largest reforestation process.

The people who live there – descendants of the Han people – were paid by the government and given fertiliser and trees to plant. As a result, agricultural productivity in the area is beginning to climb significantly, with the total area recovered being about the size of Belgium.

China plans to complete the restoration of the Loess Plateau by 2020. One of the fascinating things about this is that they’re not returning anything other than today’s living vegetation to the area, and yet it’s getting its biodiversity back.

It’s not only China that’s doing this. Rwanda suffered from a brutal spasm of conflict in 1994 and the recovery since has been remarkable. It’s had GDP growth at an average of 10% annually over the past 12 years.

It was once one of the most fertile regions of the world, but over-farming has had a negative impact: thousands of hills are badly eroded and the soil dust is being blown into the rivers and threatening rice paddy fields in the valleys. Crops of corn and sorghum have been collapsing.

The government has recently introduced water management and cooperative farming. At least 100 farmers form a cooperative, men and women equally involved, and each cooperative elects a council. Each member of the cooperative opens a micro-finance bank account so that they can survive between crops.

They are given an agronomist and free fertiliser and seed for a year, and off they go. It has been remarkably successful. In a very short time, we have seen a remarkable transition in productivity: Rwanda went from total dependency on food imports (apart from tea and coffee), to being self-sufficient and actually beginning to export foodstuffs.

But not everything is heading in the right direction. Take the Amazon rainforest, where continued deforestation occurs.

The state of Mato Grosso was populated largely in the 1970s, when people were enticed to move from the ‘favelas’ or slums of the southern cities, particularly São Paulo, and encouraged to clearfell land from the forest and farm it. A large part of cattle farming occurs in the Mato Grosso today and the deforestation is habitual: loggers come in, pay the farmers for the wood, then the farmers bring cattle in. The density of cattle in Mato Grosso is one of the lowest in the world: one animal per hectare.

However, Brazilians know this is a problem and are attempting to change the local mindset. Brazil and Britain emit about the same amount of carbon dioxide per person: about 11 or 12 tonnes per person annually. But in Brazil, more than half of that is from deforestation.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has now said that all deforestation will cease by 2025, which means they would cut their emissions by 50% some 25 years earlier than the British.

There is a long way to go, but the Brazilian space agency, the AEB, is making all of its Amazon remote sensing data publicly available so that we can all inspect how they are progressing. It appears the Brazilians are happy to have transparency – and that’s what we need to build trust that everyone is doing their bit and contributing to solutions.

It is becoming increasingly clear that many of our problems, such as food and water shortages and climate change, are linked, and it’s apparent that we can no longer take a linear path to a solution. While we work on bioengineering heartier crops and growing plants more efficiently, we also need to tackle climate change and water shortages.

Moving to a low carbon economy is an opportunity, not a threat. Government needs to lead, and both private industry and the economy – and, of course, people – can benefit if we understand the challenges and focus on the solutions.

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