Monbiot - The Earth Beneath Our Feet

 

Forget flat screen TVs and broken supply chains. How secure is the global food supply?

Hint: it's not secure, not at all.

If you haven't got enough to eat, biblical floods and drought and searing heat may not be your worst problems.

Remember the Arab Spring a few years ago? That wasn't just about a yearning for democracy. Food shortages, soaring costs of flour and hunger were a huge factor. The House of Saud, fearing for their own future, implemented a six month supply of essential foodstuffs at no charge to the population.  In Syria, Assad favoured his own tribe, the Allowites, and left the majority Sunni population to their fate. Civil war ensued.

Just two weeks ago the United Nations issued a warning that intensive, industrial agriculture was degrading global farmland at an increasing rate. Some 40 per cent of arable land is now significantly degraded resulting in steadily declining crop yields. It's unsustainable. Something has to give.

Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, recently dealt with our growing predicament.

Plants release into the soil between 11% and 40% of all the sugars they make through photosynthesis. They don’t leak them accidentally. They deliberately pump them into the ground. Stranger still, before releasing them, they turn some of these sugars into compounds of tremendous complexity.

Making such chemicals requires energy and resources, so this looks like pouring money down the drain. Why do they do it? The answer unlocks the gate to a secret garden.

These complex chemicals are pumped into the zone immediately surrounding the plant’s roots, which is called the rhizosphere. They are released to create and manage its relationships.

...We face what could be the greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered: feeding the world without devouring the planet. Already, farming is the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It’s responsible for about 80% of the deforestation that’s happened this century. Of 28,000 species known to be at imminent risk of extinction, 24,000 are threatened by farming. Only 29% of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species: the rest is poultry. Just 4% of the world’s mammals, by weight, are wild; humans account for 36%, and livestock for the remaining 60%.

Unless something changes, all this is likely to get worse – much worse. In principle, there is plenty of food, even for a rising population. But roughly half the calories farmers grow are now fed to livestock, and the demand for animal products is rising fast. Without a radical change in the way we eat, by 2050 the world will need to grow around 50% more grain. How could we do it without wiping out much of the rest of life on Earth?

This is not some revelation. We've known about this problem for decades, watched as it took hold and worsened, doing almost nothing to arrest it.  It may be that today's global order is too moribund to deal with these challenges. 

In case you missed it, last week a NASA research scientist, Cynthis Rosenzweig, was awarded the 2022 World Food Prize for her work in modeling the impact of climate change on food production.

“We basically cannot solve climate change unless we address the issues of the greenhouse gas emissions from the food system, and we cannot provide food security for all unless we work really hard to develop resilient systems”

Comment Response -

We are incredibly wasteful, TB. I know of no one, myself included, who is not a sinner.  I have tried to mend my ways, reverting to the pattern I learned in London in the 60s. As you came out of our local train station you came down a flight of stairs and there, esconced below, were a green grocer and a butcher. You had a look, decided what you wanted and bought only what you needed. Having no refrigerator in my flat, I had to be quite disciplined - and frugal. Today I do something similar. No need to buy a bag of carrots when I need just two or three, that sort of thing. When I do buy perishables in bulk, on sale,  I portion it out, put it in bags and run it through the FoodSaver. Then it's straight into the freezer.