| By Julian Cribb Growing scarcities of water, land, oil and nutrients will combine with climate change to create a serious threat to global food
security in coming decades. These could result in major regional famines, wars and refugee crises, Julian Cribb warns.
Most of us have by now heard the forecast there will be 9.2 billion people in the world of 2050. But current projections suggest human numbers will not stop there – but will keep on climbing, to at least 11.4 billion, by the mid 2060s.
Equally, the world economy will continue to grow – and China, India and other advancing economies will require more protein food.
Thus, global demand for food will more than double over the coming half-century, as we add another 4.7 billion people. By then we will eat around 600 quadrillion calories a day, which is the equivalent of feeding 14 billion people at today’s nutritional levels.
The central issue in the human destiny in the coming half century is not climate change or the global financial crisis.
It is whether humanity can achieve and sustain such an enormous harvest.
The world food production system today faces critical constraints. Not just one or two, but a whole constellation of them, playing into one another – and serious ones. This is the great difference from the global food scarcity of the 1960s. Then the constraints were around skills and technology – and the generous sharing of modern agricultural knowledge and technology in the Green Revolution was able to overcome them.
 Today the world faces looming scarcities of just about everything necessary to produce high yields of food – water, land, nutrients, oil, technology, skills, fish and stable climates, each one playing into and compounding the others.
So this isn’t a simple problem, susceptible to technofixes or national policy changes.
It is a wicked problem. The first of these issues is the looming global scarcity of fresh water.
By 2050, 7-8 billion people will inhabit the world’s cities. They will use about 2800 cubic kilometres of fresh water – more than the whole of irrigation agriculture uses worldwide today. Desalination may supply some but for most cities, it will be cheaper and simpler to grab the farmer’s water. This is already happening, around the world.
Then there is the slice of farm water that climate change is already stealing, whether it is rainfall over the great grainbowls, evaporation from storages, shrinking rivers and groundwater or the loss of meltwater from mountain regions. The Himalayan glaciers are disappearing – the only debate is how fast. And the North China Plain is running out of water. These two regions feed 1.7 billion people now and must feed twice that many in future. If they fail, the consequences will affect everyone.
Worldwide, groundwater levels and rivers are dropping as they are pumped dry. Immense waterbodies like Lake Chad (left) are simply vanishing. Australia has emptied its vast Murray-Darling basin. The world is becoming dotted with dried up Aral Seas, like aquatic tombstones.
IWMI director general Colin Chartres says “Current estimates indicate that we will not have enough water to feed ourselves in 25 years time, by when the current food crisis may turn into a perpetual crisis.” (IWMI)
Today almost a quarter of the world’s farm land is affected by serious degradation (FAO 2008), up from 15% two decades ago.
Though no-one has done an accurate assessment, it appears the world may currently be losing about one per cent (50,000 sq kms) of its farmland annually – due to a combination of degradation, urban sprawl, mining, recreation, toxic pollution and rising sea levels.
If we’ve already lost 24% and we lose around 1% a year from here on in, you can figure out for yourself how much land our grandchildren will have left to double their food supply double their food supply. That the world may be close to ‘peak land’ is suggested by the UNEP graph at left.
 In 1900 every human had 8 hectares of land to sustain them – today the number is 1.63 and falling. Put another way, between 1990 and 2005, world demand for food grew 15 times faster than the area of land being farmed.
By 2050 the total area of farm land buried under cities may exceed the total landmass of China, and the total area of land diverted to recreation and other non-food activities may rival that of the United States. This is nearly all prime farm land in river valleys and on coastal plains.
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Many of these cities will have 20, 30 and even 40 million inhabitants – yet little or no internal food production capacity. They will be in huge jeopardy from any disruption to food supplies.
The world is haemorrhaging nutrients at every link in the chain between farm and fork. On farm it appears anything up to half of applied nutrients can be lost into soil, water and the environment.
 Our resources of mineral nutrients are starting to fail. When Canadian Patrick Dery applied Hubbert’s peak theorem to phosphorus (below) he found, to his dismay, we had passed it in 1989. According to the International Energy Agency peak oil and gas are due in the coming decade. These spell scarcity and soaring prices in the primary nutrients – N, P and K – that sustain all advanced farming systems worldwide.
At the other end of this equation we are ruining our rivers, lakes, seas and oceans in ways that prevent our getting more food from them. Each year we pump around 150 million tonnes more nitrogen and 9 million tonnes more phosphorus into the biosphere than the earth’s natural systems did before humans appeared: we have utterly modified the planet’s nutrient cycle, more radically even than the atmosphere or fresh water cycle. That we may double our release of nutrients to the environment as we seek to redouble food output is alarming. According to Nature this is one of the safe planetary boundaries the human race has already crossed.
Then there’s waste. In developed countries we throw away from a third to half of all food produced, in developing countries we lose similar amounts post-harvest. All told, the Stockholm Institute (below) calculates we waste 2600 out of every 4600 kilocalories of food harvested.
Put another way, half the achievements of world agricultural scientists and farmers of the past 50 years are going to landfill.
While a billion starve, we waste food enough to feed 3 billion.
Peak oil (below, right) has already happened in the United States, in Australia, Britain and in 49 out of 65 of the world’s oil producing regions. Yet 51 million new cars continue to hit the world’s roads every year.
 Just as farmers have little control over who snatches their land, water and other assets, they have little control over who takes their fuel. By 2040 dwindling reserves of fossil oil may well be reserved for the military and everyone else will have to get by as they can, including food producers.
The average citizen of a developed country today consumes the diesel distillate from 66 barrels of oil a year, such is the dependency of our modern food systems on fossil fuels. The high-yielding crops we pin our hopes on will be of little use if there is not enough fuel to sow, harvest or transport them.
One of the most pressing questions is where the energy to power the world’s tractors, trucks, trains and ships that move the food will come from in future. It cannot come from the farm: to do that would reduce world food output by 10 - 30 per cent, at the same time as we need to double it.
Optimistically, we may have until 2030 to solve this problem and convert the whole of the world’s advanced farming systems to another energy source, algal biodiesel maybe. Or hydrogen. Or solar-electrics. But there seems little sense of urgency about this issue from governments.
Natural gas will also peak shortly and since it helps make 97 per cent of the world’s nitrogenous fertilizer, an N scarcity is also on the cards. Using coal to make fertiliser does not seem smart, as its contribution to climate change is to create more drought and hence lower crop yields.
By the 2040s it is unlikely we will be using fossil fuels in agriculture. There needs to be a crash global research effort to head off a farm energy crisis. For the following reason:
 Consumers may be more than a little annoyed if asked to pay $30 for a loaf of bread. Yet compare how much real food prices increased in the recent oil price surge (right end of graph) – with how much they went up under the major oil shock of the 70s. The risk of soaring global food prices in the event of a world energy shortage is real.
Lying in wait for us is a marine timebomb. 29 per cent of world fisheries are in a state of collapse according to Canadian scientist Boris Worm and colleagues (2007). The majority could be gone by the 2040s they warn. Plagues of jellyfish in the world’s oceans signal the impact of overfishing and nutrient pollution, while carbon emissions are turning them acidic, imperilling the entire marine food chain.
 FAO (right, 2008) says “the maximum wild capture fishery potential from the world’s oceans has probably been reached” and the same applies to freshwater.
If we cannot double fish production as food demand doubles, then we will have to get the additional 100 million tonnes of meat from land animals. This will require a billion tonnes more grain and 1000 cubic kms of extra fresh water.
FAO’s projected increase in world meat demand by 2050 is 185 million tonnes. Add this to the fish deficit and we would need to discover three more North Americas to grow sufficient grain to feed all these animals. This gives some impression of the scale of the challenge of meeting global protein demand by the mid-century.
  The UK’s Hadley Centre projects that drought could regularly affect 40 per cent of the planet’s land area by the end of this century.
Their soil moisture projection (below) suggests that regions once thought to have big farming potential, like Brazil, southern Africa and the Indian grain bowl, may prove unreliable.
 The International Food Policy Research Institute has warned of a potential 30% drop in irrigated wheat production in Asia and 15% in rice, due to climate factors. The World Bank fears African productivity could halve and India’s drop by as much as 30 per cent, unless urgent steps are taken.
Ecological overshoot is the term used by the Global Footprint Network to describe how humanity now withdraws more resources from the planet than it is able to replace in a year. The GFN estimates we consume the total productivity of 1.3 Earths in food, water, energy and other resources (below). If the trend continues, they say, we will be using 2 planets’ worth of production by 2050.
If the GFN is even partly correct, then today’s diet and agricultural systems are not sustainable in the longer term.
We must reinvent them.
This challenge facing the coming generation of farmers is to double the global food supply:
- using half the water
- on far less land and with increasingly depleted soils,
- without fossil fuels,
- with increasingly scarce and costly fertiliser and chemicals
- under the hammer of climate change.
Furthermore, farmers are going to have to accomplish this miracle using less science and technology.
On top of the scarcities of land, water, energy and nutrients the world’s farmers are driving into a huge technology pothole.
This is the result of decisions by national and regional governments worldwide, by aid donors and academic institutions, to slash resources for agricultural research and extension over four decades.
This has happened in the US, Germany, Britain, France, Japan, Australia and China. In the year 2000 the rich countries spent just 1.8 cents in every research dollar on agricultural research, so unimportant has the issue of sustaining food production become to them.
Between 1980 and 2006 the proportion of the world’s aid budget devoted to raising food output fell from 17 to just three per cent.
The cost is high. In local research stations, in national agriculture departments, in universities, colleges, research agencies and in the international agricultural research enterprise, support has been cut or allowed to erode, hundreds of labs and field stations have been shut, and thousands of vital research programs terminated.
Of the scientists who fed the world in the past 40 years most have quit - in anger, sorrow, or disappointment – have been fired, or have retired.
The dilapidation in the enterprise that feeds the Earth has disheartened a generation of young would-be agricultural scientists, especially in developed countries where many universities and colleges of agriculture cannot find enough students to fill the places they offer. Disciplines vital to reinventing agriculture, like soil science, are languishing.
Global funding for agricultural research, public and private, is estimated to total around $40 billion.
There is a stark contrast with the $1500 billion the world now spends on weapons.
There has been almost no real increase in funding of the international ag science effort since the 1970s – although the human population has doubled.
 The effects of all this are evident in the declining growth in world crop yields (left). The gains are now below 1 per cent a year - less than half what is needed to keep us fed.
Generally speaking, it takes around 20 years for a piece of research to be completed, turned into technology or advice, commercialised and adopted by millions of farmers worldwide. Often far longer.
The global decline in agricultural R&D in the past four decades means less new technology will be available to farmers between now and 2030 than in the past two generations. Also, by its nature, much of the existing new technology will not help to raise global food output because it is geared more to the needs of agribusiness corporations than it is to the needs of farmers or consumers.
Much of this technology is quite unsuitable for use in the developing world or in smallholder agriculture, and will do nothing to overcome hunger and unsustainability as it is highly dependent on costly and increasingly scarce inputs. So the rate of technology diffusion from the developed to the developing world is also going to fall.
There is an urgent need, not only to redouble the agricultural research effort worldwide but to develop a new ‘eco-agriculture’ that is sustainable and less dependent on heavy use of energy, water, nutrients and other increasingly scarce industrial inputs.
Creating it is humanity’s most pressing scientific challenge.
This new food producing system has to be science-based. It has to be low input. It has to replenish, not destroy. And it has to work for farmers large and small, everywhere.
If we fail, the consequences will be profound.
Modern wars are often driven by scarcities of food, land and water. Dafour, Rwanda, Eritrea, the Balkans were all destabilized, at root, by squabbles over these resources. Going further back, the French and Russian civil wars both grew out of bread crises. We know that hunger breeds war.
The UK Ministry of Defence (which developed this threat map) America’s CIA, the US Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Oslo Peace Research Institute all identify famine as a potential trigger for conflicts and possibly even for nuclear wars.
The wars of the C21st are less likely to be global conflicts with sharply defined sides and huge armies than a scrappy mass of failed states, rebellions, civil strife, insurgencies, terrorism and genocides sparked by bloody competition over dwindling resources.
However the good news is that many wars can also be prevented – by using science to meet the rising demand for sustenance, despite the constraints described in this paper.
Refugee and internally displaced person numbers (left) have risen sharply in recent years.
Future famines in any significant region – Africa, India, Central Asia, China, Indonesia, Middle East or any of the megacities – will confront the world with tidal waves of tens, even hundreds of millions of refugees.
But the 50m refugees who now flee every year are now preceded by over 200 million legal immigrants – a quarter of a billion people on the move each and every year. These are mostly people smart enough to read the signs in their home countries – and leave before disaster strikes.
Yet such vast movements are as nothing to the movements of the future.
These will dwarf the greatest migrations of history.
Thanks to the universal media, all the world now knows that safety, sustenance and a good life are to be found elsewhere if you have the courage and the means to reach for them.
In future, even places that are physically remote may face refugee tides in the millions or tens of millions, threatening profound change to society.
If we fail to secure the world’s food supply, governments in many countries may collapse under the onrush of people fleeing regional sustenance disasters. Every nation will face heavier aid and tax burdens and soaring food prices as a result.
Solving the challenge of global food insecurity should be the paramount concern of all nations and all people in the coming three generations. The global financial crisis is trivial in comparison. Even climate change, for all its menacing potential, is less immediately pressing.
If we don’t want wars and tidal refugee movements, one way we can prevent many of them is by securing the food supply - everywhere.
So what are the solutions? Here are the four important ones. Others are detailed in my book “The Coming Famine” (UCP, August 2010)
1. Redouble Knowledge
We need to redouble the global investment in agricultural science. In my estimate we should lift the total agrifood R&D spend to at least $80 billion, twice what it is today.
Then, for every research dollar we need to spend another dollar getting the knowledge into the hands of the world’s 1.8 billion farmers and food processors.
Science not applied is science wasted.
We must generate the greatest knowledge sharing effort in history – to reach not only farmers, but also consumers everywhere, because the farmers alone will not be able to solve the challenge.
Using the excellent mass communication and media systems now available and ramifying through the world, this is completely achievable.
It is essential that all national governments understand that agricultural science IS defence spending.
Devoting just a tenth of the world’s current weapons spend to sustainable food production would secure both the food supply and enhance the prospects of world peace.
2. End Waste: re-use
An obvious way to enhance global food security is to reduce the colossal waste of half the food we currently produce. This will also spare water, nutrients, energy, soil and human labour.
However it means extensively redesigning both our diets, our cities and the food production and distribution systems that satisfy them.
It means greening our cities, mining and recycling the vast volumes of water and nutrients they presently collect, purifying them and designing entirely new urban-based food production systems.
These will turn what we now regard as organic waste back into food, fuel and a great many other essential things.
It will involve growing large quantities of fresh vegetables within urban areas by hydroponic, aquaponic and aeroponic methods. We need to design this new urban agriculture or mass permaculture from scratch and incorporate it into the buildings, landscapes and social milieu of our mighty cities.
It will also involve creating an entirely new food industry that uses waste to produce vegetable, microbial, fungal and animal cells in biocultures and turns them into healthy and novel processed foods - but also into fuel, fertilizer, stockfeed, pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals.
Above all we need a World War on Waste. Let us design farming and food systems that do not waste or, if they do, that then reuse.
3. A New Diet
Recognising that 11 billion people cannot all eat like Americans or Australians and hope to survive on this planet, we need to refashion the world diet.
To one that involves far less energy, land, water, nutrients and pollution.
To one that doesn’t actually kill half the peopleping world or in smallholder agrnt one.
Sounds hard? Not really. It means returning to the sort of balanced nutrient intake our grandmothers would approve.
One way to do this is to double the amount of vegetables in the diet, many produced in these new urban systems using recycled water and nutrients.
There are over a thousand “undiscovered” indigenous vegetables to make this a culinary adventure as well as a global awakening and a health revolution. The richness of nature has scarcely been tapped in this regard and our shops, supermarkets and restaurants are poor in diversity compared with what they will become.
To achieve this we should also embark on the world’s most ambitious educational campaign – to install one full year, a food year, in every junior school on the planet.
A year in which every subject – maths, language, geography, science, society and sport – is taught through the lens of food, how precious it is and how it is produced, where it comes from, how to eat safely, thriftily and healthily. How to help ensure it never fails.
Teaching food is acceptable in all cultures, races and creeds. Teaching respect for food and how it is produced is equally so. The means already exist to share these principles and educational courses universally.
We must enlist the food processing industry, the supermarkets, the cookbook writers and nutritionists, the TV chefs and restaurants and the health departments to promote the same universal messages.
“Eat well but eat less. Eat more vegetables and less energy-intensive foods. Choose foods that spare our soil and water. Be happy to pay more for such good food, so our farmers can protect the precious environment that produces it.”
4. Pay more for food
Today many people enjoy the cheapest food in human history. In rich countries it is one third the price our grandparents used to pay for it.
But it is destroying landscapes, water and farming communities worldwide and causing colossal wastage.
It is too cheap to last.
It is imperative in the coming decade that we do two things – first abolish all trade barriers so food production can go wherever it is most efficient and second, to start paying all farmers a fair price.
The prices that globalised food chains now pay farmers will end up destroying agriculture and its resource base. They will hollow out global food security.
Almost everyone in society now receives fair pay – except farmers. This has to end if we want to eat sustainably in future. There are many ways this can be done, which there is not room here to discuss in detail.
Summary
The coming famines of the mid-21st century cannot be solved by governments, by scientists or by farmers alone. We need a change in behaviour by every person on the planet, especially in rich and urban societies.
This is a challenge at the species level.
It will decide, once and for all, whether or not we are fit to bear the title sapiens.
Farmers not only grow food. Our 1.8 billion farmers – mostly women – also manage half the world’s land, three quarters of its fresh water and a third of its atmosphere. They need our help to do so. And they need fair prices for their produce to do so sustainably.
Farmers, and the scientists who serve them, are today the most important human beings alive.
The world has forgotten this.
It needs to be reminded.
Delivering new farming systems and technology to all the world’s farmers, paying fair prices and changing our eating habits is a matter of both national and global urgency.
It is time that humanity as a whole, and governments in general, awoke to this.
 “The Coming Famine” will be published by the University of California Press and CSIRO Publishing in August 2010.
It was supported by the Crawford Fund and Land & Water Australia. 
New Illuminati comments: The real problem isn't scarcity & 'over'population isn't causing this; waste and greed are the true drivers of global destruction and money is the poison that's turning everything to sh*t. It destroys everything it touches. Most Western farmers and scientists are part of the problem, not the solution. Farmers actively destroy the ecosystem for profit all the time and ‘scientists’ are responsible for most of the toxins we are forced to ingest every day.
Money is not abundance or a 'convenient means of exchange' - it's a parasite that feeds off the abundance of human endeavour.
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