Food will decide the human future
THE fate of civilisation in the mid-21st Century turns critically to food. Success in overcoming the intersecting challenges of climate and resource scarcity will bring peace, plenty and a chance to repair the planet. Failure will bring war.
Worldwide, compelling evidence is amassing that we must urgently re- think the present global food system - or face the risk of spreading conflict and mass migration triggered by disputes over food, land and water. In short, we have a choice before us - food or war. Humans have been fighting over food and the resources to produce it for over 17,000 years. Famine accompanied most of the major conflicts of recent history, as cause, effect or both.
Insatiable demands
Today, up to a dozen conflicts are being fought worldwide - mainly in Africa, but increasingly in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America - fuelled by food, land and water insecurity. There are now seven ‘powderkeg regions’ of the Earth, places which harbour most of the human population, where water and soil are running out and food supplies are increasingly stressed in the face of insatiable demands.
More than a third of a billion people now leave their homes each year, either as refugees or ‘economic migrants’, seeking a safer future elsewhere. If food continues to be neglected, this could rise to a billion or more by the midcentury, overwhelming national borders and toppling governments.
The same global food system that fed 2.5 billion humans in the mid-20th Century, one based largely on broadacre farming pumped up with chemistry, technology and fossil fuels, cannot meet the needs of 10 billion people living on a hot planet in the mid-21st. It is unsustainable.
We are consuming the Earth to feed ourselves - an act that is both unwise and bound to end badly. Besides this, industrial agriculture produces 30 per cent of the world’s climate-destroying carbon. It releases substances that kill bees, beneficial insects, rivers, lakes and wildlife. It is unhealthy: around three-quarters of all people living in the developed world now die from diet-related disease.
These facts make an irrefutable argument to change our old food system in favour of one that can withstand climate change, which uses vastly less land, water and toxic chemicals, which constantly recycles all nutrients and which repairs the soils and landscapes in which it functions.
A global food system capable of achieving a safe human future will have three main pillars:
• Regenerative farming, which replaces current systems and repairs soil and water, provides clean healthy food, locks up carbon and re-wilds almost a third of our present farmed area to end the sixth extinction.
• Climate-proof urban food production, based on intensive systems that recapture and recycle all urban water and nutrients, currently lost, back into sustainable, healthy food.
• Deep ocean aquaculture to replace the failing wild harvest of sea fish. Algae culture to provide basic feedstock for both aquatic and land-based livestock, using recycled nutrients.
We must act now
Though much of the world is complacent and supermarkets appear to bulge with food, it is neither healthy nor sustainable. It could vanish in days if its ‘just-in- time’ system was to be disrupted by war, energy crisis or climate. No megacity on Earth can feed itself. We are far closer to hunger than most of us imagine.
Finally, we should all be aware that our modern food supply consists of less than one per cent of the edible plants on our planet. There are over 30,000 new food plants still awaiting discovery and domestication. The new food and farming opportunities are, literally, vast.
Just as a clean, green energy revolution is sweeping the planet, we now need a clean, green, sustainable food revolution. The ideas, technology and resources to achieve it already exist - and are exemplified in Acres Australia. The task is urgent. Time is running out. We must set to work, together, to build it.