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Mouths to Feed

“A hungry man is not a free man.”

—Adlai Stevenson

Living in a small coastal community in Connecticut, I understand the meaning of the phrase “It takes a village.” The quality of life for everyone is enhanced by the interests and actions of their neighbors; the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. Located on a densely populated peninsula, my quaint New England village is almost like a small college campus where everyone eventually gets to know one another.

Let’s imagine that our village of 1,000 residents has 1,000 acres of arable land within walking distance. The citizens and their leaders must decide what to produce on that land: grain, cows, vegetables, chickens, fruit, and/or pigs? If they proceed according to the model in the world of today, they will use over 900 acres to produce lots of meat and dairy products for the 300 wealthiest residents. That will leave fewer than 100 acres to provide food for the remaining 700 people—clearly not enough land to survive, no matter what kind of food they are eating. Sounds absurd, right? But that is the direction we are headed in the early part of the twenty-first century.

The world’s model for feeding all her people has sprung a few leaks. As with oil and with fresh water, we are beginning to find that arable land is a finite resource. This problem, combined with the crises discussed in the previous two chapters on the environment and energy, points to the likelihood of much more world hunger in our future, not less. To summarize:

Something has to give. With the world’s population projected to reach 9 billion by 2050, we’re in for some serious price hikes in food unless the balance in what we eat changes soon. Clearly, the path we’re taking is not going to work in the future. The obvious solution would be a planned, systematic shift in the direction of consuming primarily plant-based food, but the reverse is happening. Millions of people in the developing world who grew up eating plants are now rushing to buy animal-based foods as soon as they can afford them.

As Julian Cribb explains in The Coming Famine, “The first thing people do as they climb out of poverty is to improve their diet. Demand for protein foods such as meat, milk, fish, and eggs from consumers with better incomes, mainly in India and China but also in Southeast Asia and Latin America, is rising rapidly. This in turn requires vastly more grain to feed the animals and fish.”[186] As a person comes out of poverty, he naturally feels that “improving” his diet means copying what the wealthier people have been eating for a long time. Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation provides another reason for the adoption of this new diet: “The anthropologist Yunxiang Yan has noted that in the eyes of Beijing consumers, McDonald’s represents ‘Americana and the promise of modernization.’”[187] Little do they know that while they may begin to crave the calorie-dense foods, “improvement” in terms of their health is not part of the bargain, and neither is their continued ability to be able to afford the “rich” foods they have recently learned to love.

The Poor Won’t Go Quietly

The problem of food shortages is not just a hypothetical threat looming in the hazy future. Already the rich Western diet has negatively affected the poor. While the developed world was focused on the financial crisis that struck in 2008, many starving people of the world were stirred by a more basic fear: how to put food on the table.

World farm commodity prices skyrocketed almost 70 percent during 2007 and the first half of 2008. According to a February 2008 article in the Guardian, the UN’s World Food Programme officials say “the extraordinary increases in the global price of basic foods were caused by a ‘perfect storm’ of factors: a rise in demand for animal feed from increasingly prosperous populations in India and China, the use of more land and agricultural produce for biofuels, and climate change. The impact has been felt around the world. Food riots have broken out in Morocco, Yemen, Mexico, Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan.”[188] Note that Mexico, a prime beneficiary of the farming technology initiatives of the Green Revolution, is included in that list.

And the economic downturn of 2008 was hardly the only event to trigger a food crisis. The effect that one bad harvest for a major food exporter can have on the world’s food supply was amply shown after an unprecedented number of forest fires reduced Russia’s 2010 harvest so much that it shut off all food exports. The New York Times reported one immediate repercussion: “Food prices rose 5 percent globally during August, according to the United Nations, spurred mostly by the higher cost of wheat, and the first signs of unrest erupted as 10 people died in Mozambique during clashes ignited partly by a 30 percent leap in the cost of bread.”[189] The world is a village indeed. As you can see from the headlines in the box, world hunger is nothing new, and the leaders of our global village have been talking about this topic for a long time. Even when there has been plenty of land, water, and energy available for growing food, hunger has been an issue for the poorest people in the world. But if the leaders of the past couldn’t solve the problem without the shortage of natural resources that we face today, how can we expect today’s leaders to solve it now?

A SAMPLING OF HISTORICAL HEADLINES

New York Times, October 14, 1945

WORLD HUNGER PUT AS CAUSE OF WARS

Secretary Anderson Hopes the Coming Meeting of UNFAO Will Solve Food Problems

New York Times, November 11, 1958

Eisenhower Asks Crusade on World Hunger, Disease

Outlines a Program to Colombo Meeting for Expansion of Trade With and Aid to the Under-Developed Lands

New York Times, February 4, 1978

Administration Plans to Set Up Commission on World Hunger

President Carter intends to establish a Commission on World Hunger

To be sure, the prospect of solving this problem anytime soon with current methods seems more remote than ever. The situation has become urgent and requires immediate action. Jean Ziegler, vice president of the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee, made the following appeal to world leaders in January 2010: “In a world overflowing with riches, it is an outrageous scandal that more than 1 billion people suffer from hunger and malnutrition and that every year over 6 million children die of starvation and related causes. We must take urgent action now.”[190]

A Little Background

Hunger is more than simply not getting enough calories; it also involves nutrient deficiencies, which take many lives. Providing the hard numbers, Ziegler reported in 2006 that mortality from malnutrition accounted for 58 percent of the world’s total mortality. “In the world, approximately 62 million people, all causes of death combined, die each year . . . In 2006, more than 36 million died of hunger or diseases due to deficiencies in micronutrients.”[191] That computes to almost 100,000 people per day—that’s two people for every word in this book every day. Further, the World Health Organization reports that 3.7 billion people of the world’s current total of 6.7 billion are malnourished—the largest number of malnourished people in history.[192]

The need for more food production was recognized as far back as the end of World War II. Even then, agricultural experts realized that the amount of arable land could not be increased dramatically, so scientists concentrated on improving crop yield instead. This movement led to what is known as the Green Revolution. A jump in production occurred after new hybrid strains were developed for such major crops as wheat, rice, and corn. These hardier varieties were introduced into developing countries during the 1960s and 1970s, along with a new emphasis on chemical fertilizers and irrigation.

The first major leap was the breeding of a dwarf strain of wheat by U.S. agronomist Norman Borlaug, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. When this strain was introduced into Mexico, it resulted in a doubling of the country’s wheat crop. When famine threatened in India and Pakistan in the 1960s, Borlaug’s new methods nearly doubled Pakistan’s wheat yield between 1965 and 1970 and increased India’s “from 12.3 million tons of wheat in 1965 to 20 million tons in 1970.”[193] Equally revolutionary was the development by the International Rice Research Institute of a new variety of rice that would grow even when submerged in three feet of water. After it was introduced in the Philippines, the new hybrid produced five times as much rice as the country was producing before. In addition, its hardiness meant many new acres prone to seasonal flooding could be used for crop production.

These kinds of gains were encouraging at the time but have proven to be too little too late as the world’s population continues to skyrocket. Since the 1970s, many of the initial gains of the Green Revolution have leveled off—dramatically in some cases. “For example, rice yields per acre in South Korea grew nearly 60 percent from 1961 to 1977, but only 1 percent from 1977 to 2000. Rice production in Asia as a whole grew an average of 3.2 percent per year from 1967 to 1984 but only 1.5 percent per year from 1984 to 1996.”[194] The problem is that the population is growing at a much higher rate, and the percentage of those eating a meat-based diet is expected to rise from 33 to 40 percent by 2050. Where is the difference going to be made up? The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many farmers in developing countries have depleted their water resources in irrigating their crops, as noted in Chapter 4. This means that dramatic new improvements will likely not be found within the same amount of acreage.

An Unsustainable Model for Feeding People

No matter what level of humanitarian concern for the world’s poorest people exists, with the dynamics in place today, the situation is likely to get much worse before it gets better. The combination of more people, higher energy costs, and a shortage of arable land points to the fact that our feeding model is not going to get the job done in the future.

Let’s take a look at our current model for the Western world—the same one that’s rapidly being adopted in the developing world. By cycling our grain through livestock, we waste 90 percent of its protein, 96 percent of its calories, 100 percent of its fiber, and 100 percent of its carbohydrates.[195] Further, to feed a single person the typical Western diet (heavy with animal products) for a year requires 3.25 acres of arable land. To feed one vegan requires about one-sixth of an acre.[196] Thus, with the vegan diet, you can feed about twenty people with the same amount of land that is required to feed one person with the typical Western diet. As of July 2010, the U.S. Census reports that the total world population is 6.85 billion people;[197] the FAO reports that there are 7.9 billion acres of arable land.[198] This means there are 1.15 acres theoretically available to grow food for each human being on the planet today. What’s wrong with this picture? If we have just over one acre of available arable land per person, it is obvious that everyone cannot eat the rich Western diet. There simply isn’t enough land.

Mark Bittman emphasizes this point in his New York Times book review of The Coming Famine: “Mr. Cribb is reporting on the fate of a planet whose resources have, in the last 200 years, been carelessly, even ruthlessly exploited for the benefit of the minority. Now that the majority is beginning to demand—or at least crave—the same kind of existence, it’s clear that, population boom or not, there simply isn’t enough of the Euro-American way of life to go around.”[199]

In Why Your World Is about to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, Jeff Rubin reports on World Bank president Robert Zoellick’s 2008 warning of a mounting “human crisis.” He was referring to the millions of the world’s poorest people who have been driven into malnutrition as a result of high food prices. “‘While people in the developed world are focused on the financial crisis,’ Zoellick said, ‘many forget that a human crisis is rapidly unfolding in developing countries. It is pushing poor people to the brink of survival . . . There is only so much arable land on the planet. In fact, climate change may mean there is less of it all the time.’”[200]

The problem is made worse by the steady degradation of the world’s arable land. Each year, the world loses over 24 million acres of arable land.[201] This is an area about the size of South Carolina. Causes are soil erosion, water shortages, climate issues, and deforestation. Most of this loss is attributable to the livestock industry, according to the 2006 UN Report Livestock’s Long Shadow, covered extensively in Chapter 4. This steady loss needs to be evaluated against a steadily growing population. Both UN and U.S. officials now project that our population will continue to grow and will exceed 9 billion by 2050. For the past sixty years, our global population has increased by about 72 million people per year. That’s 197,000 people per day—an amount equal to the entire population of Grand Rapids, Michigan!

And there’s one more problem. Meat-based foods are also notoriously wasted by the wealthy, with up to one-third of the food simply spoiling before use or being thrown out because of expiration dates. One of the biggest problems with a meat-based diet is that meat spoils quickly, meaning that a great deal of this inefficiently produced food is simply thrown away. Julian Cribb points out the scale of the problem in Great Britain:

A former government food advisor, Lord Haskins of Skidby, who worked for one of the nation’s largest food suppliers, had calculated that 60 million Britons were each year wasting around 20 million tonnes [22 million U.S. tons] of food—16 million tonnes in homes, shops, supermarkets, wholesalers, markets, and manufacturing establishments, and around 4 million tonnes on the farm or in transit. The average household could save $1,000 a year on food purchases if even a fifth of this wastage could be eliminated. The chief culprit, it turned out, was the use-by date, which was causing consumers to throw out one-third of all the food they bought.[202]

To summarize, we have more people, less arable land, more land required per person, and excessive spoilage and waste. As more of the world continues to move in the direction of the rich Western diet, the average acreage of land required per person will continue to grow, and that simply can’t be accommodated. We have two choices. We either dramatically reduce the number of people on the planet (not so easy), or we start an immediate movement toward a global feeding model that maximizes the consumable calories from each acre of land. If enough people consumed a land-, water-, and energy-efficient plant-based diet, we could easily feed the world’s future population on far less than half of the 7.9 billion acres of arable land available. As an added bonus, we would free up billions of acres that are currently used for growing food for humans and their animals, and that land could be returned to forests and other natural habitats and put to work restoring the biodiversity and ecological balance that has been slipping away for the past fifty years.

Our Feeding Model Will Change Eventually

In a world where the human population continues to add another Grand Rapids every day, a South Carolina–sized chunk of arable land is lost each year, and the developing countries steadily move toward a highly inefficient meat-based diet, we simply must start addressing the root causes of a rapidly approaching global feeding crisis. The first step is sharing the information with everyone. For many people, world hunger has always been out of sight and out of mind. The average citizen of the Western world has no idea of the global consequences of what he has chosen to put on his plate.

Once enough people understand the “big picture” of how everything we’ve discussed fits together, a take-charge minority will begin making changes in their own lives and will continue to spread the word. They will form the first wave of the grassroots revolution that will inevitably lead to some big changes in the way we feed the human population of the world. Eventually, when a sufficiently large number of people join this movement, the world’s top leaders will have enough political support to make this effort public policy.

But for now, a grassroots mandate for change must be led by people like you and me—the informed minority who understands the gravity of what is at stake. Someone asked me recently, “Will our changing to a plant-based diet really do any good for the hungry? Or is this kind of like your parents saying that you must clean your plate because people are starving in China?” No, it’s not like that at all. Simple math shows that our current food model cannot possibly continue to feed the world. But the good news is that every person who chooses to replace the animal products on his or her plate with plant-based foods will personally free up several acres of arable land—enough land to feed another fifteen or twenty people.

When it comes to taking care of our environment and efficiently feeding our growing human population, our current feeding model is not going to survive for very much longer. As reported in the previously mentioned movie, HOME, “In just the last 50 years, humankind has inflicted more damage on the fragile harmony of nature than all the previous generations of humans combined for the past 200,000 years.” And much of that damage is directly related to how we have chosen to eat in the western world—a harmful, wasteful, and grossly unsustainable diet-style that (per calorie) requires 20 times more land, 20 times more fossil fuel energy, and 20 times more water than does the natural diet for our species—whole, plant-based foods.

Sometimes it’s painful to learn the truth about such a crucial issue. You almost yearn for the carefree days when you were ignorant about the dilemma. But now that you understand the big picture, perhaps the joy of taking action and making a difference in this tragic problem will replace the pleasure of eating the unhealthy foods of your past.

“Human rights rest on human dignity. The dignity of man is an ideal worth fighting for and worth dying for.”

—Robert Maynard