Greg Bourne, CEO of WWF Australia, has predicted that we will run out of food in 40 years as we run out of water. Aaron Edmonds, a wheat farmer in Western Australia, elaborating on a recent prediction from Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute, thinks it will be much sooner:
“This year’s world grain harvest is projected to fall short of consumption by 61 million tons, marking the sixth time in the last seven years that production has failed to satisfy demand. As a result of these shortfalls, world carryover stocks at the end of this crop year are projected to drop to 57 days of consumption, the shortest buffer since the 56-day-low in 1972 that triggered a doubling of grain prices.” Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute.
This is assuming Australia pulls in a 36 million tonne grain harvest which at the moment looks unlikely to crack 10 million with Western Australia, Victoria and Queensland in dire trouble. NSW has recently received rains but has no subsoil moisture and South Australia has had a good start but will be needing rains very soon.
We know that India has had problems with its wheat crop this year importing 3.5 million tonnes, the first time it has imported any grain since 1999. China has just become a net importer of corn despite prediction this would not occur until next year.
There will be food shortages within 5 years in affluent countries. The question society needs to ask itself is this. Just how do we propose to reinvigorate the rural sector now we have almost brought it to its knees by bankrupting social and intellectual capital, discouraging investment, and offering meager reward for the great spoils of a rich culinary rersource base. Pigs eating out of a trough rarely give thought to where the next meal will come from. Are humans any different?”
Aaron Edmonds
I’m not so pessimistic. Here’s a graph from the Lester Brown report:
[Graph from World Food Stocks Fall to 57 Days of Consumption, Earth Policy Institute, click here]
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Where will that leave our feedlot animals? Maybe we’ll see animals return to pastures, where they belong.
Maybe, like with oil, we’ll also see a bit less waste… Sounds great, bring it on!
“There will be food shortages within 5 years in affluent countries.”
First thought on reading this – who’s scaremongering now? It would seem wheat farmers are taking a leaf from the Green’s mo ie Highlight a few facts or a trend and predict catastrophe to get some attention.
the little graph shown makes no mention of grain stockpiled or what can be substituted for grain. Anyhow I would have thought it would mean an increase in price paid to farmers.
As for Michael’s comment – it’s not going to be affluent countries which suffer if it does happen. It will be the poorest citizens of the poorest nations who go hungry first and for the longest period so lets not bring it on.
To be consistent than the WWF should condemn organisations like Greenpeace, Genethics, and even Oxfam who either try and sabotage improvements to farm productivity, or say (incorrectly) that improvent’s in crop yield from the water and land we already have is unnecessary, as food availability is not related to technology, but decided by politics and bad food distibution.
If that were so, why doesnt WWF fix the 40 year problem by taking Greenpeaces advice seriously?
Of course if we are predicted to run out of food in 40 years, what we do now in terms of better production capability really does matter, as it takes years to accumulated better output capability, in the same way as it takes years of steady savings to accumulate a retirement asset.
Reads like over boiled clap trap to me, with food prices returning little to farmers you would think there was a surplus of commodity not a shortage. The message is, get big or get out.
Much of the restrictions are due to political embargoes, food degrades on ships whilst political groups battle out their respective ideologies. If food goes to waste, what is the incentive to produce another crop?
Oh and all this as the demand base for food explodes because we just had a new buyer enter the market for grain – the combustible engine. The get big or get out model worked with cheap oil. Now the big boys, these sons of the cost price squeeze, have the most to lose purely on opportunity cost alone. Who would plow $5-$10 million dollars into a commodity producing operation for a 5% return on investment in an environment where money works very hard these days? And if you think the pain starts when the shortages do I would advise all to look at the oil price.
In the US around 200,000 bushells of corn is burnt a day in the cooler months in corn fired heating stoves for Midwest home because it is a third the cost of using natural gas or heating oil. This figure is like to increase to over 500,000 bushells this winter as new stoves are manufactured. We are wasting like there is no tommorrow and still the market dares to undervalue food commodities.
There is a fundamental confusion in this argument.
The graph shows actual consumption, not how much people need or desire to eat. Consumption tracks production because of the price mechanism. When consumption outstrips production, food stocks fall, prices rise and production rises so as to meet consumption. The two lines on the graph will never significantly diverge. How can they, when they are measuring the same thing – the volume of food – at different stages?
The problem of hunger has nothing to do with the gap between global food production and consumption: it results from poverty. Poor people have no “effective demand” and their hunger has no effect on food production. Their plight does not enter the economic dynamic that determines the total quantity of food.
Food production adjusts to food demand, and the idea that we are reaching the limits of the earth’s food production capacity is ludicrous. The EU has spent the last 20 years paying farmers to reduce their production towards what might be economically viable, while yields per hectare in developing countries could be increased many times over with better seeds (including through GM), fertilisers, pesticides and more reliable water supply.
The percentage of world population suffering from food shortages has more than halved since 1960, because the growth rates of both production and consumption of food have not declined as fast as the rate of population growth. Indeed, the graph shows the rate of food consumption accelerating in recent years, as hundreds of millions of people have risen out of poverty in Asia. But there are still an estimated 800 hundred million hungry people in the world. If we are serious about relieve this suffering, we must support wealth creation and technological advance in developing countries, and not prate about fictitious limits to increased food production, or non-existent threats from fluctuations in grain stocks.
thank you David – that makes sense.
It’s all about mounting a sustainable argument. Edwards is arguning for better treatment of the nation’s farming community and quotes Lester Brown’s doomsday predictions and graph.
So what is Lester Brown’s agenda and qualifications that he makes such a prediction? I notice his organisation has a superhero complex ie saving the world but it would seem he is predicting a price rise in grain futures based on two factors – 1. increasing consumption ie rising living standards amongst poor people, use of grain for biofuel etc 2. environmental constraints on production ie lack of water, rising temp etc
It is true that land is ‘set aside’ in Europe and the US. In fact in the US alone the figure is around 30 million acres. This land is taken out of production and government payments are in place to encourage this to occur. It is generally a percentage of the farmer’s land holding and this varies from year to year. What David Brewer fails to acknowledge is that farmers simply ‘set aside’ their poorest soils which would generally be marginal in fertility and hence profitability. So the arguement that all this land in set aside programs can be mobilized to ramp up food production when we need it, is a poorly understood assumption clearly constructed by those who have little comprehension of the agronomic constraints that exist in food production. These areas are more likely to be planted down to switchgrass in the US and Miscanthus in the UK, both of which I have seen growing and show amazing potential for the cellulosic ethanol market.
Secondly there is also a widely held belief that large swags of land in Brazil will be developed in the future to provide even more food to a burgeoning global population. Once again this is at best hopeful. The cerrado soils of Brazil are highly acidic and not amenable to corn production (the only cereal suited to the climate of that area), one of the main reasons Brazil is a minor producer of corn. (Brazil is also a net importer of wheat for those interested – around 6 million tonnes a year). Developed soils in these areas are really only suited to soybean production but in the future the deficiency in food markets will be carbohydrates – the fossil fuel food component.
Thirdly each year large areas of land are gobbled by urban sprawl and road construction and generally on the world’s most fertile soils and most reliable rainfall climate zones. So we are in fact losing agricultural and horticultural production capability.
And finally David you would no doubt have no idea that input use (where productivity is derived) is likely to be reduced this year and into the future since hyperinflation has been observed in this cost base as weather risk has also increased. Irrigation levels in high production areas are also likely to be backed off to sub optimal levels to manage the fuel costs associated with pumping from deep depleting aquifers in namely China and the Midwest of the US, and as regulatory constraints are imposed as water is hived towards urban markets. Farmers around the world are backing the system off to reduce risk (grain production is the most risky of land uses).
So on your closing remark:
“we must … not prate about fictitious limits to increased food production, or non-existent threats from fluctuations in grain stocks”
I would just say this. There were many not less than two to three years back who were keen to point out that the Peak Oil proponents were perporting ‘fictitious limits’ to increased oil production and grain stock capacity building. Where has the excess capacity come from in the face of brugeoning demand? I wonder where those guys are now?
If you want to get your hands dirty one day, you are more than welcome to come help me on the farm! You may gain more than just the $25 an hour I would be willing to pay you. 😉
http://www.australinuts.com – the future of dryland food production in Australia!
I recall, somewhere in a Kurt Vonnegut book, a struggling left wing writer being completely destroyed by a millionaire who, when challenged by the wannabe on the impact “the truth” would have on his life of luxury, paid him a large sum to write exactly that. But instead of a magnum opus, the plodder descended into turpitude and could do no better than porn laced with misogyny.
And I am warming to the view that the best way to completely destroy the credibility of the green movement, as we know it, is to give them free reign. It has certainly worked a treat for the left in North Korea. But that would require an extraordinary indifference to the suffering and ecological damage they would do along the way.
One thing is certain. A world where hunger is a constant companion would certainly have zero tolerance for a community that thinks it can create a new frontier by driving farmers off the Australian landscape.
Ian Mott suggests that the best way to destroy the credibility of the green movement might be to give them full reign.
Unfortunately this has already occurred with respect to management of native forests in the mainland States. Our forest management agencies, or what is left of them, are deeply imbued with green ideology, are required to implement policies and management plans prepared by amateur enthusiasts and lead by political appointees with no professional training in forestry and no practical experience in the bush. The result: increasing numbers of large high intensity bushfires causing massive environmental damage, failure to control weeds and feral animals, a decline in research, loss of operational staff in favour of apparatchniks in Head Office,dead and dying trees due to lack of regular mild fire, and a focus of expenditure on glossy publications full of self-congratulation and spin doctoring to ensure no-one knows the full horror story.
Peak Oil heralds the end of the ability to politic on many issues and environmentalism is one of them. There is not one environmental group in this world that to date has come up with a truly sustainable model of agricultural production and by that I mean reducing fossil fuel usage down to a bare minimum. The organic movement is no more sustainable than conventional agriculture because (a) it assumes that consumers will continue to be prepared to pay big premiums for the stuff (as petrol prices and inflation whittle away disposable income), (b) Low crop yields will bring on food shortages even quicker. These green groups also fail to realise that increasing the productivity of already cleared land with technology such as transgenics will reduce the need to clear more of what little remains of our precious native forests. So by constricting global food production capacity they are in fact encouraging deforestation. Talk about a confused movement! All this time the most effective policy the Green movement could have lobbied for was population reduction! But that wouldn’t have got them a cent in membership money.
Aaron,
How will maintainging/increasing the cheap, abundant human food sources, through transgenics (if it indeed would actually do so), help to improve the level of environmental and social responsibility in society that is required for a truly sustainable agriculture system?
Increasing crop yields won’t save the environmentit will do the exact opposite. The classic example would be in the production of more frost or drought tolerant cultivars of cereal crops that would encourage more clearing in what is currently marginal country.
Whatever wiz-bang marvels science comes up with, farmers will over-use and abuse. The green movement (including organic agriculture) promotes the full package; social responsibility and recognition of natural limitations.
Michael,
If it wasn’t for the whiz bang marvels science has produced for the modern world, you’d not be afforded the ability to even form an opinion on this issue. The green movement was hijacked by membership driven sensationalism and short sighted ideology at some point and now geological constraints are removing our ability to live with cheap and abundant oil, these ‘green’ policies have left the world actually far less prepared for the future. The levels of CO2 in the atmosphere today would be significantly lower had the nuclear industry expansion that began in the 80s been allowed to continue. We are now faced with significantly less natural gas and oil also (I just love it when people think of natural gas as a green fuel??). What has this movement actually achieved? The organic model of food production would not exist if it weren’t for cheap fuel and cheap labour in developing nations. Why? Because without cheap fuel you have less to spend, and the cost of flying organic lettuce from South Africa to the UK inflates the value of that commodity to end users. And without cheap labour, I can hardly imagine what an organic lettuce would cost in this country, produced with labour rates defined by Australia’s resource boom and a general lack of interest in people wanting to do that work anyway. And how ‘sustainable’ is it to build organic models that rely of imported labour in the form of backpackers? No cheap oil = no tourists! No organic models exist for staple cereal production that are ‘truly sustainable’ particularly when you consider the constraints closing in from global warming.
But the original issue this thread was based on was impending food shortages. What I would call ‘truly sustainable’ models of food production (much more complex that a branded name like organic) will by their very nature produce far less. What the world must realise is that at some point there won’t be enough to go around and the likely hyperinflated cost of food will be prohibitive to some within our own borders! This is not just a third world issue and a hungry man in Africa behaves exactly the same as a hungry man in Australia! Better to ease into the lower productivity trend than to suddenly confront an empty pantry!
Don’t forget your gardening skills if indeed you ever had any. Might just need to recall them in the future 😉
Looks like those shortages are starting to pan out a lot sooner than even I have anticipated. The wheat market is very tight and of course we assume the quoted stocks of global inventories are in fact correct. I know for a fact that the US corn stocks are lower than quoted. There are some 500,000 corn stoves in the US alone burning 1-2 bushells a day in cooler months instead of natural gas or heating oil (for a third the cost). That is around 20,000 tonnes of corn burnt a DAY. The stocks accounting system cannot possibly be aware of such erosion since most of this would be farmer to consumer sales.
The Ukraine is rumoured to have placed ‘export restrictions’ on all its wheat. The Russians have been buying on speculation that prices are going higher. China has stopped exporting corn as its stocks are the lowest in history. And Australia is going to need to import grains this year as total grain output will be lucky to make 15 million tonnes. Are we listening yet? All key exporting regions have neglible exportable surpluses of STAPLE FOODS barring Canada.