THE COMING FAMINE
The Global Food Crisis And What We Can Do To Avoid It
By Julian Cribb
University of California Press
Julian Cribb’s message is hardly what anyone wants to think about at this time of year. Yet we have to look inside its risks, dangers and potential catastrophes, Cribb says, to find our only real hope.
To survive, he insists, we must see the truth at its fullest, and realize how desperately we need farmers.
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“The food crisis of 2007-08 was not a ‘one-off’ event. It was the first foreshock” says Cribb, whose book has hit best-sellers lists and is ringing up huge global sales.
Cribb, a former director of Australia’s national science agency, has specialized in science journalism and is known as one of the world’s best-connected science writers.
Now he is calling for countries to combine aggressive support for the family farm together with the very best that science can create.
Otherwise, Cribb foresees “an emerging series of events caused by the combination of our insatiable demand for food, with the growing scarcity of the essential resources needed to produce it.”
Cribb, recently in Saskatoon to talk to the world’s top biotechnology scientists, quotes studies and statistics from a wide range of international groups to develop his grim view of what the world’s potential food shortage might look like.
Barring disasters, human numbers are likely to keep on growing and may well reach nine billion by 2050, and 10 or 11 billion in the 2060s. That means world demand for food will more than double over the coming half century.
Feeding this population is the most critical issue confronting humanity, Cribb says.
“Agriculture today faces critical constraints. Not just one or two, but a whole constellation playing into one another,” Cribb says. “This is the big difference from the crisis of the 1970s.”
PEAK EVERYTHING
“The world faces emerging scarcities of just about everything required to produce high yields,” Cribb says. “This isn’t a simple problem, susceptible to quick fixes. It is a wicked problem.”
Cribb points to Colin Chartres, head of the International Water Management Institute, who says it will take another 6,000 cubic kilo-metres of water a year to feed the world at current rates of consumption. The trouble is, that water isn’t on tap. Chartres estimates we won’t have enough water to feed ourselves in 25 years.
The looming global peak in natural gas production also has implications for the supply of nitrogen fertilizers. So as we approach the mid-century, the risk of nutrient scarcities and soaring fertilizer prices will grow. Without fertilizers, Cribb says we cannot double food production. Yet he says, “I personally suspect that by 2040 it’s unlikely fossil fuels will be used in agriculture.”
So should farmers grow their own fuel? “If farmers were to grow their own fuel, it would reduce world food output by between 10 and 30 per cent, right when we need to double it. So whatever the new energy source — biomass fuels, algae biodiesel, hydrogen, solar electric — we have barely two decades to develop it and transfer it to every mechanized farm on earth.”
But perhaps the worst shortage is land. By 2050, Cribb says there will be several dozen cities with populations exceeding 20 million, the largest topping out around 40 million. The global area of good soil buried under tar and concrete will exceed the land mass of China.
“These gigantic cities will produce little or no of their own food. They will rely on a vast river of food reaching them from outside, every day of the year, often from thousands of miles away,” he says.
“Any man-made or natural disaster that disrupts this river of food will place their citizens in extreme jeopardy. Most cities cannot support themselves with food for more than a few days, a fact that billions of inhabitants seem blithely unaware of.”
Accompanying that blithe ignorance is an equally unfounded hope that living conditions will get better around the world. But, says Cribb, if we all consumed and ate like Canadians, Australians or Americans, we would need four planets to support 10 billion of us in 2060.
CAN FARMERS SAVE THE WORLD?
“Today’s food is too cheap to last,” Cribb says. “It is imperative in the coming decades that we do two things — abolish all trade barriers so food production can go wherever it is most efficient, and start paying farmers a fair price.”
Instead, we’re asking farmers to double the global food supply using half the water, less land, more exhausted soils, without fossil fuels, with costly fertilizer, with limited new technologies, and with the spread of pests and diseases, not to mention climate change.
Cribb believes farmers can do the job, but only if the scale of their job is truly recognized.
“The world invests about $40 billion per year in agricultural research to lift the global food supply,” Cribb says. “Then we spend $1,500 billion — 40 times as much — on weapons. We have the money to fix the problem if we want to do it. It’s now time for the world to understand that agricultural science is defense spending.”CG
