If we ate more of what we grow we could feed another 4 billion people – which would go a long way, in the short term to deal with global food poverty. Many of these gains would be achieved in a few countries.
The major gains would be from eating less meat (and more plant material) and from not using food-producing land to grow biofuels. None of this is new but it bears repeating.
This repetition is in Nature although the original paper was in Science.
The message is that the major gains will not come from increased food production (even though that might well help – and will put money in agro-business pockets) but in using much more food as food for humans rather than food for livestock or food for cars (biofuels). The world puts enough food into non-food uses to feed 4 billion people. Four billion! that’s more than half of the world population.
If the USA, Western Europe, Brazil and China got their act together it would free up enough food to feed 2.4bn folk.
Eliminating food waste in the USA, China and India (well, that’ll be easy – obviously!) would feed another 400 million people.
These are big impacts. Even though elimination of food waste sounds difficult – it’s not impossible and the first steps are probably easy and effective (not that I know what they are – but it’s almost always true).
You’ll hear the NFU talking a lot about feeding the world (or at least, we used to – they have gone a bit quiet recently which is very very nice) but saying nothing about reducing food waste. Farmers earn no money from reducing food waste. In fact, they would earn more money if we wasted even more food if that meant we bought more too. And the NFU has always supported its members using land to grow biofuels too.
There is quite a lot that the individual can do on this agenda. Eat less meat, and particularly less beef which has a high calorific intake of plant food for every calorie of meat produced. As regular readers may remember, I have four meat-free days each week. Sometimes, these days, I go for a week without eating meat, and yet, I can enjoy a bison burger at the Game Fair and a well-cooked steak in a restaurant, and a bacon sandwich on Wellingborough railway station. It’s not difficult.
What is more difficult is to persuade governments to move away from encouraging biofuel production. You cannot buy biofuel-free petrol or diesel in the UK (as far as I know – if you can, then please let me know). There we need politicians to act quickly.
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Clearing rainforest to produce biofuels or growing them on good agricultural land that could produce food are sad absurdities (also highlighted last night on BBC4’s somewhat depressing ‘Earth from the Air’ programme) but I would speak out in support of biofuels derived from food wastes including used cooking oil and tallow from rendering animal wastes. Quite a lot of this goes into biodiesel, I believe, and I think that should be supported. The problem is that on the fuel station forecourt the consumer has no choice and could not, even if s/he wished, select waste derived biofuel in preference to palm-oil derived biofuel. The only way this can change is through changes in the rules on biofuels brought about by pressure on politicians nationally and in Europe.
Jonathan – I agree. I don’t think a very high proportion of the biofuel you get at the pump is from waste – do you know the figure?
I don’t have a figure but would agree with you that it is probably a small proportion. I did find a figure though in the Defra report “UK consumption of sustainable palm oil. Annual review. November 2013” which states that the proportion of palm oil in British biofuels has fallen over the past five years from about 10% of the total to about 0.1%. It also claims that the proportion of this palm oil that is ‘sustainable’ has increased to 100%. I am not sure how it is determined that the oil is ‘sustainable’ and of course many people may well dispute just how sustainable it really is but the fall in the total amount is interesting. It does not indicate the make up of the 99.9% of biofuels that are not palm oil but they no doubt include fuel crops that have displaced food production here or abroad as well as various waste products.
be better to use any land we free-up for nature, rather than for adding more people to this poor groaning planet. We should certainly reduce waste and eat less meat however. If you ask Oxfam they will tell you there IS enough food in the world, it’s just poor people can’t get their hands on it: the problem is food access not food availability, to use the jargon.
Eat less meat, and particularly less beef – except for Geltsdale Beef which is where animals are used as management tools.
I think that (esp. John’s comment) needs to be shouted from the rooftops with regard to the source of your meat. The problem is that the issue always seems to be laid out as a very clear either/or in the media – eat meat=bad; eat beef=bad; go veggie=good. It’s not that simple!
This simplicity of thought, or of presentation, fails to recognise that there are important biodiversity, landscape, water-management and carbon sequestration benefits that can be realised through low intensity, low input grassland management. If we consumed less meat, less frequently, but made sure we were eating better quality meat, there are potential benefits to be had all over the shop, including for our own health and the health & welfare of the animals being farmed. Perhaps if we all ate less, but better quality meat, the pastoral farms out there might even make a better income AND provide wildlife.
However, as Mark posted a while back, I dare say that the assumption that progress=economic growth will forever hinder any attempt to make farming produce anything more than a monetary profit.
(I’ll ‘fess up to being a confirmed omnivore, by the way, trying to live by those principles – it’s not easy!)
Anony-mouse – thank you. It’s not that simple, I agree. But it’s almost that simple, but not quite.
Very little of the beef we eat comes from those low-intensity, grassland herds – if it did then I’d eat more beef (because I enjoy a good steak). So, as a rule of thumb – eat less meat, and less red meat is quite a good rule.
I do wonder about lamb though. that always seems quite ‘good’ to me. Running around in the hills like wild animals, little extra feed and little of that representing cut-down rainforest, and living in a place where it would be difficult to grow much else (except trees, or deer). But I’m probably wrong – life is complicated.
Thanks Mark,
Lamb’s both good and bad, isn’t it? – a key driver of the ‘grassification’ of our uplands through intensive stocking and a move away from transhumance, but oh, so useful where a short tight sward is desirable. Some gentle sheep-grazing on calcareous grassland or fixed dunes can be pretty useful.
I agree, eat less meat, eat less red meat, is a useful message, but it could be enhanced, made more positive, by promoting what many seem to agree is a fairly desirable form of meat production, rather than just ‘don’t do this’.
Maybe lab-produced meat will become the cheap meat, whilst the ‘real deal’ becomes a status item? We’ll be a step on the way to Iain M Banks’ Culture then. My cynical streak is telling me that there will be an environmental cost though. There seems to be with almost everything!
An important reminder Mark
As you will know NGOs are comfortable campaigning on biofuels but are usually less keen to give the eat less meat message. For wildlife conservation groups like the RSPB this is often because they don’t want to alienate farmers and because of the importance of conservation grazing. This is an understandable concern but it misses the point. The vast majority of meat that people eat is not from geltsdale or any other wonderful conservation scheme and eating less meat is unlikely to be at the expense of quality meat like that. Yet going meat free for a day or 2 a week may well be one of the most effective measures an individual can take to cut the damage their consumption inevitably does to the natural world.
Then there’s the carbon saving. If you’re in any doubt check out this study (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-014-1169-1/fulltext.html) published a few weeks back of actual diets in the UK. It found that a typical high meat diet emits about 7.2 kgCO2e/day, compared to 5.6 for a medium meat diet, 4.7 for low, 3.8 for vegetarian, and 2.9 for vegans. That’s quite an impact….
Anyone got any thoughts as to whether and how conservation NGOs should approach this?
Harry – thanks – that’s very useful.
In other words, by being veggie for four days a week, and low meat (and some fish) for the rest of the week then I have cut my food CO2 emissions by about 30% (assuming I was a moderate meat-eater before). And it doesn’t hurt at all. And it’s cheaper. And it’s nicer to animals on the whole. It might even be healthier.
Conservation NGOs should promote that message to their enormous (in some cases) memberships.
I often wonder why venison isn’t pushed more as an alternative. There are a few deer farms around nowadays but that presumably replicates the same (or similar) argument as beef. Deer as wild harvestable product should in theory go down well and be beneficial to the countryside.
My wife did have one problem when buying venison at a local butchers, being confronted by another shopper arguing ‘How on earth can you buy Bambi’ at the same time as she was buying lamb!
Bob – yes, wild venison is pretty good – provided it is shot with non-toxic shot. You can hardly give it away in parts of Scotland.
The last time I checked it is was illegal to shoot red deer with shot of any description unless the deer is injured or diseased. I’m pretty sure the law states that red deer should be shot with rifles and minimum of .240″ bullets.
Ernest – yes it is – but lead bullets fragment in the deer’s body in just the same way. I wouldn’t eat a lead-shot deer.
” … the NFU has always supported its members using land to grow biofuels”
So did the Dick-Kopfs who introduced the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation under the 2004 Energy Act. Who were they, I wonder? It prompted an immediate increase in the OSR grown for biodiesel – huge increase in nitrate loss into groundwater, increased use of – waahey! – neonicotinoids, and of course, the residual OSR cake is food for … cattle. Treble emissions all round!
I would argue that food waste is a necessary evil.
Yes, we could support another 2.4 billion people at current yields and production. However, if this food is made available, in the long run the population of the world could reach this level.
If this is the case, and then there is a major food crisis (crop failure, etc) there will literally be no more food to feed people, and millions will starve. Also, millions more will resort to hunting wildlife for food, even endangered species (see what happened in zimbabwe).Food waste solves this by always being available.
However – the current situation of people needing food and people wasting food is ridiculous, it is an atrocity in this modern world this still happens. But the argument of “no food waste” could be more harmful in the long run.
There is a difference between waste and surplus
How simple the non farming community make it sound and in my opinion a lot of what they say is wrong.
Lets take the example of eat less beef,why pick on beef which quite a lot of the meat comes from grass or grass silage then the dung provides nutrients for other crops when spread on land or enriches the fields that are grazed.It is probably essential for organic food production.
In comparison poultry and pork are almost exclusively produced from cereals and various protein feeds which include soya meal where I understand rain forest may be cleared to produce it so these two meats seem to me to be the big user of feeds that could go into the human food chain.
“How simple …”
You’re not wrong, Dennis. Our meat consumption peaked in the ’70s and has been declining ever since. The big increase is anticipated in the developing countries as they prosper and their citizens can afford meat. How dare they aspire to a decent plane of nutrition! My advice to the authors of all these doomladen papers is “Don’t tell us, tell them”. In person. See how much notice they take of you. Make sure you have a clear run to the exit.
For us, any self-imposed reduction in meat consumption “to save the Planet” is tokenistic. There may be health benefits from curbing excess consumption – but that’s a matter of individual choice. Anathema, obviously, to proselytising carbonistas.
Although I don’t pretend to be a botanist using basic farming knowledge all plants fall into either C3, C4 or CAM categorises or at least those plants we have breed from the natural world as crops. The argument that you can just convert all the calories from all three plant groups directly into the human food chain is slightly simplistic although I suppose with GM and the modern food industry anything might be possible. C2 crops as far as we are concerned are wheat, barley, rye and oats which grow in temperate climates up to 26 centigrade while C4 crops are sugarcane, maize, millet etc. they tolerate higher temperatures and will not perform to seed in temperate zones i.e. they need a certain number of degree days to reach maturity. As a result in temperate zones they tend to be grown as fodder.
C4 crops have a different cell structure to C3 as they convert one more carbon atom in photosynthesis I seem to remember from college (! Just) and they do not convert to a digestible form easily ( except cornflakes of course ) hence their widespread use in animal rations.
Taking into account that the global climatic conditions are fixed as are those areas of the world which have soils that are geologically young enough to actually grow crops and that crops have to be within a crop rotation of differing species you are left with far fewer options than the animals versus humans argument would suggest.
Just a few thoughts, I’m sure that brighter people than me can add to this.
Considering the amount of sunlight that is turned into cellulose it has always intrigued me that the production of cellulase is so rare in higher animals. Perhaps this is a good thing, as humans have great difficulty knowing when to stop growing, trading and eating carbohydrates.
I grow all my own vegetables
I save a fortune and get healthier, more accessible food in return. And no carbon emissions invloved.
Not everyone has the space or an allotment but if you can, go for it. It makes a real difference.
And stop supporting massive supermarkets – they’re so environmentally unsound it’s unreal.
And stop eating meat and get fit.
“no carbon emissions”
Not on the planet the rest of us live on. I think you may need a cobalamin supplement.
Dennis is right – eat less grain fed beef is right – but let’s go a bit further ‘food security’ as pedalled by NFU is quite simply rubbish – we already have enough food nutritionally in the UK – were we to eat more of the grain we produce , not feed it to cattle. And what undermines the NFU case even further is that any suggestion of reducing food growing is condemed – unless it happens to suit farmers, in which case the switch to energy crops goes without a comment
Roderick – exactly!
Roderick well no not exactly actually !
In the uk we grow four classes of wheat. Class 1 is milling for human consumption; class 2 is low grade milling for inclusion in some flours; class 3 is biscuit wheat for pizza bases, digestives etc; class 4 is feed wheat for animal compounding. The grades are then subdivided into hard for milling into breads and soft wheat types which go to flours ie cakes baking and so on. All these grades are susceptible to adverse weather conditions which lead to sprouting in the ears pre harvest to some degree. This may be as extensive as a visual germination but more often it is just the start of the germination within the seed as sugars are converted from the seeds reserves. As this process continues the grain becomes unusable for any form of milling or human consumption ultimately but along that road there are blending and alternate uses for the grain depending on how bad the harvest conditions have been.
Therefore it is impossible to grow all milling wheat in the uk and be assured that it will all reach the required standard. As such a mix of grades are grown and a premium is paid on milling quality as and when it can be achieved.
Yet again the simplistic argument which is so appealing doesn’t stand up to closer scrutiny. If you got rid of all grain fed livestock in the uk in a bad year you would be left with millions of tons of unusable grains. Not a very bright idea really.