Feeding the world: the challenge and what you can do
This post is based on a talk I gave this morning to Creative Mornings/Zurich crowd. I certainly don't have all the answers, but hopefully this helps to get the debate going.
Today, I believe we face three interrelated challenges in agriculture:
First up, the demand challenge.
The UN estimates that by 2050 there will be 9bn people on our planet. That’s 2bn more mouths to feed than today.
That translates into more demand for crops. This chart shows the FAO’s estimates of growth in demand for basic foodstuffs - wheat, corn, soybean, and rice, etc – up to 2025.
They think that 2050 we will need 70% more grain than today. What’s driving this demand?
Three things: feed, food, and fuel.
Feed: rapid economic growth in emerging markets – BRICS, Southeast Asia, etc – is changing diets. People are now consuming more animal protein. Farmers are responding by growing more chickens, cows, and pigs. USDA analysis suggest that 60% of the total demand increase will be for feed.
Food: this is straight forward – more food to feed us. That’s worth about 1/3 of the total demand increase.
Fuel: essentially, biodiesel and ethanol. Despite all the controversy about using grain to power our cars, the total increase in demand for biofuels is estimated at just 10% of the total.
So if demand is going to increase 70% how are we going to supply it?
Well, there are really only two options: (a) put more land into production, or (b) increase yields.
It turns out that most good farmland – with the exception of Brazil – is actually already in production. And with urbanization, a lot of good farmland is disappearing.
That leaves us with increasing yields. The FAO estimates that 80% of the total increase will have to come from higher yields.
This is what yields (for corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice) have done in the past 50 years – almost tripled. Meanwhile the amount of land under production has increased less than 40% - and most of that was in Brazil.
So we should we should be fine, right?
Maybe not. This is the percent change in yields for the same crops since 1970. What you see is that yield improvements are slowing down.
But the reality is that there are two totally different types of farmers: large scale industrial producers, and smallholders.
This is the average yield of a Kenyan, Brazilian, and US corn farmer since 1960.
What you see is a steady increase in US yields following the adoption of hybrid seeds in 1960s, synthetic fertilizers in the 70s, GMOs in the 90s, and precision technologies in 2000s.
Below you see Brazil and Kenya. What’s interesting is that they trend together until about 1990, then diverge. This is when Brazil’s Embrapa really gets to work with ag extension and farms start to consolidate.
Kenya meanwhile has been pretty much flat for the last 50 years. The average Kenyan farmer can easily increase his yields 5x with a bit of investment in technology and know-how.
So ultimately meeting demand comes down to this: should we try to double yields for US corn farmers to 400 bu /acre? Or should we try to get the 500m smallholders in Africa and Asia better inputs and knowhow to leap up the yield curve? Or should we try to do both?
I could talk for the next hour about the pros and cons of each and how we might achieve this. But instead I want to address two other challenges.
If you want to understand how farmers achieve yield, you need to understand this equation.
A farmer produces yield by combining:
Environment: the natural resources a farmer has to work with, for example his soil, his average rainfall, etc
Technology: what inputs – fertilizers, seeds, equipment, etc – he uses on his fields
Practices: how he sets up his farm and the techniques he employs on his fields – tillage system, row spacing, etc
A farm is a complicated system in which each of these three variables working together to deliver the farmer's goal. If you change one part – e.g. introduce hybrid seed – then the other parts will need adjusting too.
The Green Revolution was largely about technology – using more sophisticated inputs (synthetic fertilizers and chemicals, hybrid seeds) and complicated practices (mono-cropping, precision planting) – to boost yields.
But in the end we’ve degraded the environment and are threatening the sustainability of yields.
Simplistically, plant growth - and yield - is determined by four factors: light, temperature, water, and nutrients.
First up, light and temperature.
I like to say that believing in climate change is a bit like believing in God. You can’t prove to me that climate change will ruin our planet, and I can’t prove to you that it won't.
But let's agree that it has the potential to be pretty catastrophic.
Hotter temperatures will change where crops are grown; we’re already seeing Canada producing more corn. More erratic weather – drought and flooding - is going to lead to more crop failures, more diseases and more pest pressures.
In a phrase: crops and farmers face a much more uncertain future.
There are two major problems here: quantity & quality.
Just 3% of the world’s water is fresh. And agriculture currently uses around 70% of the world’s fresh water. Worse still, it’s unevenly distributed. China and India have 1/3 of the world’s population, but less than 10% of the world’s fresh water. Over extraction of ground water for irrigation and competition for water with industry / sanitation mean many of today’s sources are unsustainable. Put simply we need more “more crop per drop”
Finally, with growing salinity and acid rain, the quality of water is deteriorating further limiting yields.
One solution is to stop producing water-hungry crops in areas with no water (e.g. wheat in the Punjab) and start using more technology (e.g. large scale drip irrigation, more water efficient hybrids).
The nutrients available to a plant is largely determined by soil health. Overuse of fertilizers, conventional tillage practices, and intensive cropping have led to soil erosion and a loss of biodiversity.
The UN estimates that 40% of the world’s farmland is seriously degraded due to poor practices. Worse still, it takes 500 years to replace 25mm of top soil. We need to do much more to preserve what we have.
A solution is to adopt more sustainable tillage practices and crop rotations to improve soil quality and structure. We also need more measures to boost biodiversity (beetle breaks, hedge rows, etc).
Now many of you are probably thinking, the answer is organic! Does this look like an organic farm?
Well it is. This is one of Earthbound Farms' fields that I visited in California, It's 100% organic. Earthbound Farms have hundreds of such fields supplying a large chunk of the organic bagged salads in supermarkets across the US.
Here's how production works. They use the same high quality seed as a conventional farm. Instead of synthetic fertilizer they use chicken manure, fish emulsion, and compost trucked in from nearby. Instead of herbicides to control the weeds, they till the fields 5-6 times and they have a crew of migrant workers who weed it by hand. Instead of insecticides they use biological controls – lacewings and syrphic flies to eat the aphids – and other natural insecticidal soaps.
Most organic farms today are what Michael Pollan calls “industrial organic”. And such operations account for less than 1% of the world’s land in production. But if we’re just replacing inputs and then shipping the produce 3,000 miles from California to New York, are we really eating more sustainably?
We can be nostalgic for a pastoral vision of how food should be grown, but if we want to feed the extra 2bn people we need to figure out how to make conventional agriculture more sustainable – not simply long for an idea of how we think agriculture should be.
If we can produce enough to meet demand then that'd be great. If we can do it sustainably, then that’s even better. But it’s really all for nothing if we don’t do it nutritiously.
The final challenge is what I’m calling nutrition. And this challenge is actually two sides of the same coin: hunger and obesity.
The UN estimates almost 900m will go to bed hungry tonight. Even more suffer from malnutrition. As Amartya Sen, the famous economist, observed, hunger is largely about access to food, not the lack of it.
Solving the problem of access for poor people ultimately comes down to three things:
Purchasing power: how do you lift incomes overall so that poor people have more disposable income to buy food?
Shocks: how do you protect the most vulnerable from “shocks” such as a personal health crisis, environmental disasters, etc?
Distribution: how do we build a free-enough system of trade to ensure that Russia is not stockpiling wheat whilst Egyptians riot because there is no bread on the shelves?
The flip side of the coin is obesity.
No one should doubt that we’re facing an obesity epidemic. In the US, 30% of adults are classified as obese – that’s a body mass index of more than 30. And it’s not just in the US. The picture is the same in Mexico, Brazil, Italy, UK, China …
The underlying cause is again access: we’re producing too many cheap calories. Food in rich countries does not reflect its true cost of production in terms of its impact on human health, society, and the environment.
Now it’s easy to blame the food system and agriculture. But I want to ask you four simple questions:
How many of you can truthfully answer this question? If you shopped at the supermarket this week do you know which farm your food came from? And by that I don’t mean “from the region”, but truly which farm and how it was produced?
How many times a day or a week do you eat meat? Or simply animal protein? And now think back to where all that demand is coming from ... 60% of the increase will be used to feed animals.
How many of you have eaten a Mars bar or a Twix in the last month? How many of you enjoyed a frozen pizza in the last few weeks? How was this processed food manufactured? What is in it?
How many of you cook a meal at home and eat with your family, your partner, or a friend at least 2x a week? And by cook I don’t mean put it in the microwave!
Well, the nice thing is, reinventing the food system and the way we eat, starts with you and how you decide to spend the $ in your pocket.
If you want to make our system more sustainable, then I suggest you follow what I call the "buy, eat, cook" principles:
Buy local, seasonal, and from “whole ecosystem” farms
Eat a (mostly) plant-based, whole-food diet
Cook and break bread with others
This approach is not very complicated and it won’t cost you much more. But here’s the bad news: it takes time, and it takes effort to find out where your food comes from.
Ultimately the food system responds to what we want. To date, we’ve asked it to produce cheap calories, and that is exactly what it has done. If we want it to produce more sustainable, more nutritious food, then we have to demand it. And if enough of us dare to eat differently, we’ll change the food system and maybe the world too.
It’s as simple as that. And it’s up to each of us to make the change.
