Why it matters

Food Security is a term which is much in use these days.  If you haven’t come across it already, you almost certainly will become and sick and tired of hearing it before too much longer.

Food Security refers to the availability of food without resort to emergency food supplies, scavenging, stealing etc.  The UN’s Food& Agriculture Organisation (FAO) states that “food security exists when all people, at all times, have… access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs…for an active and healthy life.”   By this standard the FAO estimates that roughly half the world’s 6 billion people lack basic food security some or all of the time due to varying degrees of poverty.

But Food Security is an issue that is today concerning the whole world and not just the poor parts.

The global population is forecast to rise to 9 billion by 2050, a roughly 50% increase in the first half of this century.  Meanwhile, according to ABIC (The Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference Foundation) just 18% of the land mass of our planet is used for agricultural production, and this percentage cannot be significantly increased.   Meanwhile around 70,000 km² of agricultural land (an area almost twice the size of The Netherlands) is lost annually to the growth of cities and other non-agricultural uses.

Sir David King, the British government’s Chief Scientific Adviser under Tony Blair, says that whereas the twentieth century was all about improving the lives of the population, the challenge facing science in the twenty-first century will be all about feeding them. That would require not only new technologies but a big change in human behaviour. He is, I think, an optimist.

The task is made considerably harder by a number of parallel challenges which face us today including: climate change, which is reducing the area of productive land; deforestation; energy shortages; depletion of the oceans; and access to fresh water.  All of these issues are inextricably linked. To address one, we need to address them all systematically.

Meanwhile strong economic growth in developing countries such as China and India means that increasing numbers of people in those countries expect and demand a richer, more interesting diet, including more meat and less of the boring subsistence foods.  But it takes many more resources: energy, water and land,  to produce meat than it does to grow cereals.

In the past few years we have seen food riots on three continents and dramatic rises in prices of staple foods such as rice or wheat.  Hungry populations in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have toppled long-standing and apparently secure regimes.  In 2006, following severe floods across much of Asia, several countries: Thailand, Vietnam, India among them, stopped exporting rice completely.   Although some of these price rises have fallen back lately the long term trend is undoubtedly upwards.  No wonder even the rich nations are now seriously reviewing their own food security.

Already this has led to a new ‘scramble for Africa’. Rich companies and governments have been buying huge tracts of land in some of the world’s poorest countries to grow rice, wheat, vegetables, biofuels and even flowers for consumers back home.  Indigenous peoples all over Africa have found themselves dispossessed by their own governments anxious to attract inward investment.  Their water has been appropriated by foreign businesses.  Today, tens of thousands are dying as East Africa struggles with yet another disastrous famine, while farms in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and elsewhere are exporting food to Europe, the Middle East and China.

Meanwhile rich countries in Europe, North America and Australia battle to turn back a rising tide of increasingly desperate illegal economic migrants.

Today’s Guardian publishes a fascinating map depicting global food security.  Among other things it shows an inverse correlation between food security and conflict, which it describes as a symbiotic relationship.

I take no pleasure in predicting:

-          More conflicts will ensue from shortages of food and water, mainly in the poor world

-          Environmental degradation will be an inevitable consequence of food shortages as people take more virgin land into cultivation and hunt wild species to extinction.

-          Famine, drought and starvation are all set to increase from today’s horrific levels

-          Immigration levels in western countries are set to rise further, causing ethnic tension

-          Rising levels of civil dissatisfaction will put pressure on liberal societies everywhere to become more authoritarian

Wheat for bread or cattle food?

So can anything be done?  Well we can try.

Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at London’s City University, is the man who coined the term “food miles” to highlight the hidden ecological, social and economic consequences of food production. He argues that we need an holistic approach to food taking all the hidden costs and environmental impact into account when pricing food. This will mean lowering the carbon footprint of our food, lowering the embedded water, the energy consumed in everything from production to shopping expeditions. We will by necessity have to eat more seasonal food and eat local food. In any case, market forces are likely to mean that we [in the rich countries] eat more fruit and veg and less meat. All, not coincidentally, guiding tenets of this blog.