The End of Cheap Food Is it Temporary or Prelude to Global Famine?
“Hadn’t you heard, the age of cheap food is over?”, Ibu Susan retorted tersely one day a couple of years back as I was grumbling to her about the succession of price hikes on a number of staple items. Decent olive oil for example, acceptable soy milk, a nice piece of fresh fish, non-rancid walnuts, even plain old legumes or oatmeal, not to mention fresh blueberries. You know, the every day things that keep us expats happy.
Well, yes actually, I did sort of know but I hadn’t really adjusted to the reality of expensive food. I still haven’t, though I’m forced to acknowledge the sad fact, whatever my grumbles.
The Grocer’s Lot
The provisioning trade for foreign visitors in Bali always was a bit strange and recently got stranger yet. Not just the wine thing (I mean paying US$35.00 for a bottle of local plonk is just plain odd), but also the disappearance of most imported packaged goods from the shelves a while back and the limited re-appearance of some, at vastly increased cost. I can buy a decent French table wine in Hong Kong for $15.00 and a packet of Ryvita or similar for under $3.00. Here in Bali it’s getting on for $8.00. As for soy milk we now get those thin sickly sweet ASEAN imports at pretty much the same price as the old US and Australian brands. Now we can’t go blaming Ibu Susan or Bill Busch at Gourmet Garage or the folks at Bali Deli for all this. It’s not their fault. At least they bring in some of what we want at a fair mark-up. It’s just that in trying to clean up the customs and excise in this great Republic, the expat need for their favourite packaged goods etc. don’t count for very much. Except, perhaps the booze thing, a much more complex issue altogether. Given that it’s not worth going through the regulatory hoops on our account, the trouble with import substitution for us expats, and those with our habits, is that under the current regime it is, one: discouraged by internal taxes; and two, when somebody does bother, the temptation to overcharge seems to be all but irresistible. I mean, why should something that is grown and manufactured here cost just 20% less than a favourite internationally known brand that has been sent half way round the world? I’m not saying the overseas product is better, I’m just saying it shouldn’t be hard to deliver a better product at considerably less cost giving a decent profit without stiffing us. Even the good wholegrain loaves of bread readily available here are rather pricy these days. A bright point is the wonderful vegetables and salads produced in Bali, fresh, cheap and delicious. And of course, the local fruit. Anyone who buys a commercial electrolyte when there’s coconut water so available with a twist of lemon needs their head examined.
In case you think I’m missing the point here, fixating on the minutiae of the expat comestibles while a global food crisis is under way, you’d be wrong. It’s all connected and Bali, fortunate compared to many places, is nonetheless already feeling the effects.
12 billion mouths to feed
Fifty years ago a billion people were starving or undernourished. Today it’s up 500 million. Actually, that’s progress. Back then that was one-third the human race, now it’s one sixth. In 1968 there were some 3 billion people on earth and today there 6.8 billion. If we have more than doubled world population in fifty years how many of us do you think there will be in another fifty? UN projections foresee a 33% increase by 2030 (9.0 billion) and 12 billion by 2060. How in God’s name are we going to feed so many?
Malthusian fears of an overpopulated world unable to feed itself have been with us since the 18th century and have proved ungrounded. More recently the Club of Rome formed in 1968 warned of the limits of growth. In the 1970s Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich scared the bejasus out of us with his population bomb. And yet we seem to have managed, so were these people wrong?
Alas, not really. The timing may have been a bit off, is all. In the 1960s the Green Revolution worked and for two decades world hunger was rolled, back through agricultural advances and the sharing the technology. That lasted until the 1980s but in the last 30 years investment in agricultural research has dwindled.
It’s not just climate change that’s going to make our lives on earth difficult. We now face very real danger of global famine, due to increased population and over-consumption, that is the over-exploitation of the sea and natural resources, overuse of chemical fertilizers, reliance on fossil fuels, protectionism, subsidies, biofuels and waste. The effects of climate change will compound the problem, in which case following famine we can expect her ugly sisters war and pestilence.
The effects are becoming all to clear. Since 2007 food prices overall have risen by 90% but far more ominous the prices for basic staples have risen far more rapidly with no end in sight with grain at 154%, corn 125%, soy 107% and rice doubling in seven months to 122%.
Middle Class but no Burgers please….
Australian Scientific journalist Julian Cribb, is the latest to warn us of our imminent peril in his book “The Coming Famine” subtitled “The Global Famine and What We Can Do to Avoid It”. Mr. Cribb shows how we have ruthlessly exploited the planet’s resources in the last 200 years for the benefit of a small minority. Now the Chinese, the Indians and Brazilians and the rest of the developing world all want a slice of the Euro-American lifestyle, and there simply is not enough to go around.
There are two elephants in the kitchen, says Mr. Cribb, population and over-consumption. With a 33% increase in population by 2030 and to accommodate middle class expectations food production will need to grow by at least 50%. It now grows about 1%, but there is less available agricultural land. Eating meat is a major problem. Grain fed to American animals alone could feed all the world’s hungry today, but not another billion. We are not headed in a good direction. Grain stockpiles are shrinking; water for humans is becoming scarcer, let alone for animals. “We need two more Americas to do it, and yet existing farm land is being degraded, says Mr. Cribb.
And what of the solution? We can do it, Mr. Cribb tells us, but we are going to have to radically alter our approach collectively and individually. We need a new Green Revolution increasing our agri-science research spending to some US$80 billion p.a. and do what’s necessary to get practical results out to farmers; the distortions of subsidies to industrial farming need to be eliminated and the true price of food and its cost to the environment paid. Big Food needs to contribute to this, while small farms get subsidised for earth stewardship. Handling waste is a big part of the problem and a large part of the solution. We need to change our diet to reflect the new realities. It can be as simple as eating less meat, a salad for a cheeseburger or an apple for a bag of chips.
None of this will work even if North Americans halved their meat consumption, Mr. Cribb concedes, if it is to be swamped by demand from 600 million newly affluent Indian and Chinese craving burgers. Yet Mr. Cribb remains hopeful, we will unlock new insights capable of creating profound gains in food production and sustainability on a par with the Green Revolution, he believes. Sustainable farming is perhaps the greatest challenge we face in 10,000 years since agriculture began, he concludes.
Optimism from the Gaia Hypothesis
A last sobering word of qualification and perspective from Prof. James Lovelock. I don’t think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what’s coming up. I’m an optimistic pessimist. There are already too many people on Earth and with global warming at 4°C, which is where we are headed, we could not survive with even one-tenth our current population. We could not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90%. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It’s happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2,000 people left. It’s happening again.
Humans are like the first photosynthesisers, which when they appeared caused enormous damage releasing oxygen - a nasty, poisonous gas. It took a long time, but it turned out to be of enormous benefit. I look on humans in much the same light. For the first time in its 3.5 billion years of existence, the planet has an intelligent, communicating species that can consider the whole system and even do things about it. They are not yet bright enough, they have still to evolve quite a way, but they could become a very positive contributor to planetary welfare.
