Paul Roberts
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., Boston

The End of Food

This hasn’t been a good year for the global food system. Foodborne illnesses such as E. coli and salmonella are creating havoc in North America. Contaminants have been detected in foods imported from China. Rising oil costs are hurting a global trade system built for cheap energy, while soaring population, bad weather and farm production problems have pushed up the price of rice and other grain, sparking riots in the poorest nations and raising the specter of the first truly global shortages in decades.
Many experts say these problems are temporary. Grain shortages are being caused by new demand from bio-fuel refineries—demand that will fade as political support for this controversial program is eliminated.
Yet other observers say the crisis is also being driven by deeper, more fundamental trends that won’t be as easily solved. Although short-term factors, like biofuels, are indeed pushing food prices higher, there are other, longer term factors, such as growing population and changing diets, that are playing a bigger role—and will be much harder to solve. Or consider food safety. Many of the food safety problems in our meat and fresh produce supply, for example, are associated with our move toward industrial agriculture, with its heavy focus on maximum-volume and cost cutting. Fixing these problems will not only be technically difficult, but will probably result in higher prices for food—not an encouraging prospect with today’s already high prices.
Nearly half a century after famine threatened Africa and Asia, the world confronts a new kind of food crisis—and must come up with a fundamentally different kind of solution.

An old story, but new actors

What makes today’s crisis unique? Why won’t the old solutions work this time? After all, we’ve seen high food prices before, and we’ve always found a solution. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, rapid population growth in Asia and Africa led many experts to predicted massive famine and hundreds of millions of deaths. Instead, we were able to boost food supplies dramatically. How? Farmers expanded the number of acres under cultivation—in large part by building irrigation systems to bring water to arid and semi-arid areas, especially in regions of China, India and North Africa.
As important, we used technology to grow more food per acre. We bred new, more productive wheat, corn, rice and other grains, as well as livestock which grew larger and matured faster. We developed industrial methods to cheaply mass-produce farm inputs like nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides, which in turn let us boost our yields. The result, known as the ‘Green Revolution’, was a rapid rise in food production that saved many hungry countries and pushed the world into a state superabundance that many believed was permanent.
Today, however, though we have new farming technologies, we also face new limits that will make it hard to repeat our past successes. Consider how quickly food demand is accelerating. Not only is the world becoming rapidly over-populated, but many poor nations are now wealthy enough to eat resource-intensive foods, notably meat. On average, it takes 8 pounds of grain to produce a single pound of meat. As meat consumption rises—and by 2050, world demand for meat is expected to more than double—the amount of grain we will need will increase by more than half.
Where will all that new grain come from? It’s no longer easy to expand farm acreage. Most of the world's readily farmable acres are already in crops, and what remains is performing other useful functions, such as forests or wetlands. In fact, the world is actively losing farmland—to erosion, overgrazing and development. Even in the United States, the inexorable spread of suburbs, malls and golf courses costs us nearly 2 acres of farmland for each birth or new immigrant.
Nor is it as easy to increase our per-acre yields. Our industrial food system needs lots of ‘inputs,’ most of which are getting very expensive. Crude oil, which is critical for both farm machinery and the transportation of food from farm to factory, was cheap when our food system was built; but in the last five years, it has more than quadrupled in price. Costs are also rising for natural gas, the main ingredient for synthetic fertilizer, which has more than doubled in price in the last two years, and is expected to grow even more expensive in coming decades. Given that 40 percent of the world's total food output, in terms of calories, is generated with synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers, according to Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba, Canada, the fact that we’ll need even more nitrogen in the future isn’t reassuring.
But perhaps the biggest constraint on supply is water. Farmers need as much as a thousand tons of water for every ton of grain they grow, which means we’ll need to find another one trillion tons of water a year by the middle of this century. And yet, in many countries, water supplies are already under pressure. Even today, roughly one-sixth of the population of China and India are fed from farms that use more water than can be replenished naturally. Some nations have even resorted to importing grain and soybeans rather than growing it themselves to save water. But this stopgap approach cannot help hold off inevitable shortages. According to the International Water Management Institute, future farmers will need 17 percent more water than the world now has available. Just as nations compete now for oil, a global race for water may not be that far off.
Lastly, we must consider how a changing climate will affect food production. Most research suggests that in places such as Africa, where food production is already falling, changes in temperature, rainfall and disease frequency could make key crops such as wheat impossible to grow. But we must also be concerned by the likely impacts in big producers like North America and Europe. Many climate experts predict that the United States will suffer an increase in extreme weather events, such as drought and flooding that will hurt crop yields. The heavy flooding that swept the American Midwest this spring—and which will likely hurt harvests this fall—is an example of the kind of climate that may become routine over the coming century. If these forecasts are correct, the United States may lose its capacity to export surplus food, just as ‘basket cases’ like Africa are desperate for imports.

The high costs of cheap food

Ironically, many of the problems we are confronting in the food system began as solutions—well intended efforts to respond to earlier food crisis that have had unintended, often unwelcome, consequences. The widespread use of nitrogen fertilizers, for example, boosted yields tremendously. Unfortunately, much of the fertilizers farmers apply on their fields leach out of the soils and contaminate rivers and streams and drinking water systems.
Similarly, advances in food processing made food much more convenient, and liberated consumers from spending many hours each day in the kitchen. In many cases, however, processing and packaging hurts the quality of the food—not to mention its flavor! Perhaps most notably, although there have been many benefits from the industrialization of food, processing food in large batches at huge centralized facilities and distributing it rapidly to consumers has created numerous safety and environmental problems.
This is especially the case in the meat sector. For example, the so-called ‘factory farm’ method for mass-producing meat—in huge feedlots containing tens of thousands of cattle, hogs, and poultry—has helped drive down the cost of meat, but has also created many threats to public. According to a recent report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, these huge feedlots, or ‘confined animal feeding operations’ (CAFOs) produce huge volumes of sewage, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Worse, because animals are crowded closely together, CAFOs also promote diseases, which has led to the overuse of antibiotics. This overuse, in turn, has produced bacteria that are now resistant to those same antibiotics. At the same time, the corn-based diet that is fed to many CAFO animals results in meat of poorer quality and higher fat content. And because livestock consumes so much grain—remember, 8 pounds for every pound of meat—we’re converting more and more of our forests into grain farms in order to feed livestock.
These impacts are known as ‘external costs,’ because they are not included in the prices we pay for meat at the grocery store—but instead must be paid by the public. For example, governments must spend hundreds of millions of tax dollars to clean water systems contaminated by CAFO sewage. Health insurance companies must pay more to treat foodborne illnesses, obesity and heart disease and the extra costs of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. According to a study by the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists, the external costs of the US meat industry may cost taxpayers as much as $39 billion a year.
The good news is that many meat companies are now considering replacing the CAFOstyle operations with operations that provide more space for animals, and which manage feed, sewage disposal, and medical treatment in healthier and more sustainable ways.
The bad news is that change won’t be cheap. Many of the ‘bad practices’ the industry now must eliminate were the same practices that helped make meat so inexpensive. For example, returning to a system where cattle were fed only on pasture grass would reduce disease and the need for antibiotics, and would result in leaner meat (as well as happier cows). Unfortunately, grass-fed cattle take longer to grow and are smaller, which means the price per pound is substantially higher. Similarly, using little or no antibiotics, while it might make better meat, will also be expensive. Because antibiotics keep animals healthier, they grow faster—up to 25 percent faster—on the same intake of feed. Antibiotics are one of the main reasons the price of meat has fallen so dramatically since the 1950s (in the United States, for example, the inflation-adjusted price for chicken and other poultry has dropped by two thirds since 1960.)
So it’s no surprise that meat produced ‘sustainably’, without antibiotics or other ‘factory’ methods, will be more expensive. For example, ground beef from grass-fed cattle sells for about a US$1 more per pound than hamburger from a CAFO cow, while grass-fed beefsteaks are US$7 more. Sustainably raised poultry and pork, meanwhile, are also more expensive than their factory-farmed counterparts.

Getting what you pay for

The higher costs of sustainable meat illustrate just how challenging it will be to solve the problems plaguing the food system. Though we have long known how to produce food sustainably, with methods such as the organic one, these alternatives come at a cost. For example, many food advocates believe industrial agriculture should be replaced by organic farming, which avoids all synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. But going organic would hardly be easy. To replace synthetic fertilizers with organic alternatives farmer would need to replenish soil nutrients either by adding animal manure or by rotating their commercial crops with cover crops, such as clover or beans, which restore soil nitrogen. Unfortunately, both methods would require millions of acres of additional farmland. According to Vaclav Smil, using organic methods to feed the ten billion people we expect on the planet by 2050 would require a doubling or even tripling of global farm acreage to produce enough manure or cover crops—which would result in huge new losses to forests and other lands.
Further, while organic farming does reduce the environmental damage caused by synthetic chemicals, it is not without its own environmental costs. Because organic farmers cannot use chemical herbicides, they often control weeds mechanically—that is, tilling their fields repeatedly—which can disrupt soil structure so severely that it causes erosion.
Or consider the paradox of local food. Many consumers assume that locally grown foods are not only healthier but better for the environment—and countries like Italy and France have worked hard to restore many local producers and products. But in fact, while local foods may be fresher, more nutritious, much better tasting than imported food, they aren’t necessarily more sustainable. For example, because local farmers often run small operations, getting the food from the farm to the market in a city often requires many trips in small trucks, which in turn burns more petrol and emits more carbon dioxide than shipping the same amount of food from a single industrial farm.
And in terms of energy use and emissions, transportation is a fairly small part of the environmental footprint of a particular food. It takes far more energy to grow, process, and package the food than it does to transport it, which means that in some cases, locally produced food may actually be less sustainable than imported food. Scientists in the UK, for example, found it was more environmentally efficient to import produce from Spain than to grow it locally in huge, energy-intensive greenhouses.

Re-engineering our food?

Many food experts argue that the real solution here is not to go back to pre-industrial farming, but to genetically re-engineer our food crops so that they require less energy, water, and fertilizers. By manipulating the genetic codes, or DNA, of crops, GM companies say they can not only dramatically boost yields, but also design crops to use fewer resources.
Many environmental groups say GM technology poses risks to human health and the environment. But even if the technology is proven safe, the larger obstacles may be economic and technical. For example, although many GM companies claim they can boost yields by 50 percent, this has proven very difficult—in large part because the factors affecting yield are so complex. Yield is essentially a reflection of a plant's ability to reproduce itself, and reproduction is a very complex function that requires nearly all a plant's survival traits, from its ability to survive changing temperatures to its capacity to fight off bugs. In other words, to increase yields, GM companies must manipulate thousands of plant traits—and so far, they've had limited success, according to Kendall Lamkey, a crop breeding expert who chairs Iowa State University’s Department of Agronomy. In fact, thus far, the biggest GM successes have come from simple products, such as corn and soybeans that have been bred to tolerate the pesticide, Roundup— products that involved the manipulation of a single gene trait. Lamkey says GM companies may indeed master the complexities of

Complex problems need complex solutions

What becomes clear is that this crisis cannot be addressed by a single solution. Rather, we need to develop many solutions, often using elements from different technologies and disciplines, some old, some new, in order to confront the complexity of the challenge we face. We clearly need a mix of production models—small farms, but also large farms—as well as a mix of sources: local, regional, but also global. We’ll also need to adapt new methods to old problems and to mix old and new technologies. For example, many plant breeders want GM technology not to re-engineer the plants themselves, but as a tool to accelerate more conventional breeding methods. With so-called trait mapping, breeders can more easily identify the traits they want to improve, which can shorten the time needed to improve crop yields.
Other researchers are reviving the obsolete model of the multi-purpose farm. Where industrial farming broke up the traditional farm into separate functions (crop production, livestock, orchards etc.) on different farms, researchers are finding ways to re-integrate these functions into a single farming operation that recycles nutrients and feed stock. But going back to an older model does not mean going backward. By using the latest science and computer management, this new generation of old-fashioned farms can produce just as much food per acre as their industrial counterparts, but with far less synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. Still, these farms do require more labor, which could pose problems in an increasingly urbanized society. Interestingly, while much of the research focus has been on changing the way we produce food, consumers will also need to change the kinds and quantities of food they buy. For example, rising energy and transportation costs will likely make it harder for grocery retailers to import fresh fish, fruit and vegetables from distant countries. Consumers may have to reacquaint themselves with the concept of seasonality and buy foods only when they are locally in season. Likewise, if sustainable meat is more expensive, those higher prices might also encourage consumers to eat less meat.
And while some consumers might find a lower-meat diet intolerable, eating less meat could have many positive effects. A lower meat diet could be better for our health. But it would also be better for the planet’s health—by lowering pollution and other external costs of livestock production, but also by reducing demand for the grain needed to feed the animals. Today, meat-loving countries like the United States, where per capita consumption of meat tops 200 pounds a year, account for a disproportionate share of grain supplies. If that level of consumption were suddenly duplicated worldwide, current global grain production could support just 2.6 billion people—or less than 40 percent of the existing population, and barely a quarter of the 9.5 billion expected by 2070. Even if we consider a more modest level of meat consumption, such as that in Italy, where per capita grain consumption is half of that in the United States, world grain supplies would still be adequate for just 5 billion people.
In the coming years, as we gain a better understanding of the problems affecting our food supply and food systems, we’ll see more ideas for surmounting these challenges. Some will work, some won’t. But two things are clear. First, we must recognize that today’s crisis is not some temporary problem, or the result of a single factor, such as biofuels or bad weather. Rather, it is the culmination of decades of decisions and policies—and, as result, will take decades of careful thought to be solved.
Second, as we debate the best ways to solve this crisis, we must be careful about the kinds of solutions we employ—and remember that many of the problems we now face today in the food system were themselves a solution. Synthetic fertilizers, antibiotics and other additives, mechanization powered by cheap oil—all of these ‘solutions’ were once seen as ways to solve the problems of the food system, as ways to produce more food for more people. Thus, as we study today’s challenges and develop a new generation of solutions, we must ensure that today’s miracles don’t become tomorrow’s crises.

References

Borlaug, N., ‘Feeding a World of 10 Billion People: the Miracle Ahead’, lecture delivered at the formal designation of the De Montfort University—Norman Borlaug Institute for Plant Science Research (Leicester, UK) on May 6 1997, www.nbipsr.org/nb_lect.html

Gurian-Sherman, D., Report ‘CAFOs Uncovered’, April 2008.
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/food_and_agricolture/cafos-uncovered-executivesummary.pdf

Pew Charitable Trusts, ‘Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America’, April 29 2008. http://www.pewtrusts.org/

Smil, V., Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century, The MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass., USA) 2001.

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