As with every topic covered in Not the End of the World, there is vast misinformation about food, agriculture, soils, chemicals…We saw some of it last week, about palm oil, for example. Here is another bit of nonsense.
How Not to Eat the Planet
Only 60 Years of Farming Left if Soil Degradation Continues
Scientific American 2014
Such claims run from 30 years to a hundred.
One thing the claims have in common is that they are nonsense.
Firstly, they depend on the bogus idea that we will do nothing about soil degradation, when in fact we are reclaiming even deserts, as in the Great Green Walls of Africa and China.
Google “harvests left” and you’ll get hundreds of thousands of results.
This turns out not to be the case. Google does not give a specific number, but it seems to be only in the hundreds, and there are nearly as many debunking that claim.
New Scientist: The idea that there are only 100 harvests left is just a fantasy
Despite dozens of headlines quoting these predictions, surprisingly only one peer-reviewed paper from a scientific journal is ever cited as evidence to back them up. This 2014 study from the University of Sheffield compared the soil quality of a range of sites in the English city, including agricultural, garden and allotment soils.
Now, before we question whether the results of this single, small study can be extrapolated to represent all of England, let alone the whole UK or even the whole world, let us take a look at their findings: basically, some urban soils in Sheffield are higher in carbon and nitrogen than some nearby agricultural ones. OK, but where is the 100-year statistic? It turns out that nowhere in the study was there any calculation, prediction or even passing reference to the claim. None whatsoever. Perhaps not so much shaky evidence to support this assertion as much as non-existent.
Most people believe that starvation on the global scale is inevitable. The truth is far otherwise.
This was my Hans Rosling moment. ‘If we split the world’s food production equally between everyone we could each have at least 5,000 calories a day. More than twice what we need.
The problem is not soil degradation or scarcity. The problem is political will to end grinding poverty. Nearly 1 in 10 of us don’t get enough calories amid all of this abundance, because of stupid wars, Global Warming, authoritarian governments, corporate malfeasance, and the insistence of some rich countries on counting weaponry as foreign aid ahead of food.
Much of Hannah Ritchie’s chapter on food is about the various food cultures of our distant ancestors, from hunter-gatherers to settled agriculture with natural sources of nitrogen—peas and beans, or manure. The modern era in agriculture began with the Haber-Bosch process for making ammonia, which gets a bad rap in spite of the multitude of lives it has saved. Similarly for the Green Revolution, new, more productive strains of staple crops containing more nutrients.
Organic farming, it turns out, costs too much for its benefits. Sure, we needed to get rid of DDT and several other pesticides and herbicides, but not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The reality is that the world cannot go organic. Too many of us depend on fertilizers to survive. As we’ll see later, many countries can reduce the amount of fertilizer they use without sacrificing food production, but we can’t do this everywhere.
Norman Borlaug is the hero of the Green Revolution, testing thousands of varieties and crosses of wheat to find one resistant to rust, a fungal infection that drastically reduced yields.
In 1960, Mexican farmers could expect a wheat yield of 1.5 tonnes per hectare. Today, with the improved varieties of wheat that Borlaug unlocked, they can get 5.5 tonnes per hectare. Mexico went from being a net importer of wheat to a net exporter.
Similarly in India and Pakistan, improved varieties of rice increased yields from 1 tonne per hectare to 3.
Norman Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
Overpopulation is another bogus moral panic, leading to proposals for draconian depopulation measures. Relax. We can feed everyone there ever will be. Peak humanity is coming in a few decades, and then the panic will be about depopulation, as though we don’t know how to support families with education, food, health care, good jobs, and the rest.
What we can look forward to:
Countries across sub-Saharan Africa don’t simply grow enough to feed themselves; they are also large exporters to the rest of the world. Rich countries have rolled back their aggressive and stifling trade policies, and rely on them for their cocoa, coffee, and tropical fruits. High returns on agriculture mean that not everyone needs to work on the farm now. Kids instead go to school, then university, and become teachers or start businesses in the city.
We can have this future if we want to.
Instead, we feed half of the calories we grow to livestock and cars.
The world produces 3 billion tonnes of cereals every year. Less than half of this goes toward human food; 41% is fed to livestock, and 11% is used for industrial uses, like biofuels.
Poor countries use nearly all of their cereals for human food.
The amount of maize that the US puts into cars for biofuel is 50% more than the entire African continent produces.
Meat is high-quality protein food, but it requires several times as much protein in the form of grain to produce a kilogram of meat protein. Beef is by far the least efficient. Chicken and fish are much better. The combination of grain and pulses (peas and beans) beats all of them all hollow.
Look at any of the world’s environmental problems, and food lies close to the center. The food system is responsible for one quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
- Fresh water
- Deforestation
- Biodiversity
- Water pollution
The world may already have passed peak agricultural land. We can produce more food from less land.
Furthermore,
The world will soon pass peak fertilizer.
In the US, China, France, and other countries, the growth of fertilizer in recent decades vastly increased food production and saved millions of lives. But fertilizer and food production are decoupled in all of the developed countries
because we were becoming far more effective at using them.
So what should we do? First get the best information.
What I find painful is when people really do care about eating sustainable, but they’re making choices based on poor information, putting effort into all the wrong places. Sometimes, they’re making things worse.
Recommendations:
1) Improve crops yields across the world.
2) Eat less meat, especially beef and lamb (but keep dairy cows).
Meat-substitute products are one of the fastest growing food sectors. Interestingly, it’s mostly meat-eaters that eat them. Ninety-eight percend of people who bought plant-based meats were also buying meat products.
Switch your beefburger for a Beyond Meat or Impossible burger and you’ll cut emissions by 96%.
3) Invest
4) Build a hybrid burger
Blend beef with chicken or soy to build the hybrid burger. In blind taste tests, people tend to prefer blended burgers.
5) Substitute dairy with plant- based alternatives
Cow’s milk generates around three times as much greenhouse gas emissions, uses around 10 times as much land, up to 20 tumes as much fresh water...
6) Waste less food
Around one third of the world’s food goes to waste...Food that literally rots away, without being used for anything...based on the weight of food. On the basis of calories it is less, probably around 20%.
Mike Berners-Lee called this a Tupperware problem.
Not literally tupperware, but plastic crates to prevent damage.
When food is transported in sacks, as much as one fifth of food has to be thrown away. When they used plastic crates instead...they’d lose as little as 3%.
See also
- Refrigeration
- Protective wrappings
- Appropriate storage locations
7) Don’t rely on indoor farming.
Use it where it works, but don’t expect too much.
Things to Stress Less About
- Eating local—the Myth of Eco-Friendly Food
Beef and lamb don’t become low-carbon by being locally produced.
- Eating organic is not always better for the environment
One meta-analysis brought together from 164 published studies...On greenhouse gas emissions, it was a mixed bag...The unanimous result [was] that organic farming was worse for land use and…for pollution of rivers and lakes.
Animal manure is NOT an improvement over industrial ammonia.
In 2021 Sri Lanka banned the import of fertilizers into the country, wanting the country to move to an organic farming system. It has been a disaster. Food production across the country has plummeted and prices have skyrocketed.
If We Do All of This, What Will the World Look Like in 2060?
- Increasing crop yields.
- The end of dire poverty.
- Long after Peak Carbon, we are nearing Carbon Neutrality. We still have to go strongly Carbon Negative to cool the Earth.
- We are closing in on Peak Humanity, and very likely a decrease in global population. We can feed, clothe, and house everyone, and provide for universal health care and education.
- Much more market freedom for agricultural products.
- No biofuels. Electric vehicles of all kinds will be taking over.
- Much less waste of food for livestock.
- Healthier and more abundant forests supporting much more biodiversity, which will be our topic next week.
