Ending Hunger: The Quest to Feed the World Without Destroying It, by Anthony Warner
Rosie Boycott
ROSIE BOYCOTT
Ending Hunger: The Quest to Feed the World Without Destroying It By Anthony Warner One World £16.99
You have to hand it to Anthony Warner; he doesn’t shy away from big subjects.
His last book, The Truth About Fat, was (rightfully, to my mind) lambasted for not tackling the role of the food industry in fostering our obesity epidemic. He is, after all, a former employee of Big Food.
But he did nail many of the idiotic myths and harms done by food fads – many thought he had introduced a breath of fresh air to the debate.
Now he has taken on the biggest subject of all. Ending Hunger is deeply researched and Warner makes a good and compelling case. Agriculture, as we know it today, is responsible for biodiversity loss, soil degradation and the felling of rainforests in order to uncover even greater areas of fertile soil.
This is not new: as Warner points out, civilisations from the Aztecs to the Mayas and the tragic inhabitants of Easter Island all trashed their soil to the point of uselessness and then collapsed. The once great North African town of Leptis Magna, which supported the Roman Empire with three crops of wheat a year, survives as a stony desert. No serious worries then – there were still plenty of new pastures waiting to be colonised.
The same cannot be said today. Soils are weakened and the climate crisis threatens to push much of the world’s farming to the brink. Annually, the conversion of natural habitats to agricultural use releases about 18 per cent of total global emissions. Since the beginning of the agricultural revolution, the clearing of land has released an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to everything produced by burning fossil fuels over the same period.
The trouble started after the war. The American scientist Norman Borlaug, himself a victim of famine in the American Midwest in the Great Depression, decamped to Mexico to begin the world’s first experiments in creating tougher, shorter and more resistant wheat strains.
Wheat used to grow naturally to about three feet; Borlaug produced a strain that topped out at 15 inches. Within a few years, Mexico’s yields had multiplied by six, and in the following decades Borlaug’s wheat swept the world, ushering in a Green Revolution, which allowed populations to soar and prosper.
But, as with so many things that appear to be transformational, no one anticipated the hidden consequences. Borlaug’s methods demanded deep ploughing of soil. Initially seen as a healthy way to bring oxygen into the depths, in fact this was a recipe for disaster, as each turn of the increasingly mechanised plough cut through zillions of tiny life forms, root structures, mycorrhizae and other miracles that live just beneath our feet.
Fertilisers were brought in to help; insecticides and pesticides deployed with military zeal. The result is that crop yields are now in decline and soils are, literally, dying.
Warner gives a graphic illustration of New Zealand mountains being covered in layers of red soil from Australia that has become so dry and lifeless that the wind blows it there.
Warner’s conclusions will, like his refusal to lay any blame for obesity at the door of the food companies, anger some in the food communities. He trashes his way through the organic movement – mostly on the grounds that its origins lie in fascist Germany, meaning its proponents are prone to the delusion that their systems can save the world.
He is similarly scathing about local food, without seeming to understand that, while its actual contribution to the food supply may be limited, the benefits it brings to communities and the effects it can have on encouraging healthy eating habits are immense.
I agree with Warner that changing behaviour is an uphill task. The Government’s vastly funded Eat 5 a Day campaign was an almost complete failure. He makes a strong – and correct – case for eating less meat backed up by compelling statistics about health and climate change.
He makes the vital, often neglected case that the food system itself needs to change if we are to have any hope of reducing our carbon footprint enough to prevent global temperatures from rising more than two degrees.
But he is also alive to what the world loses when children go hungry – not just wide-eyed, swollen-bellied children in Africa or Yemen, but kids here, too. Children – like plants – do not thrive if fed poor diets. In 1985, 19-year-old boys in Britain were, on average, 176.4 cm tall, placing them 28th in the world. Today they are 178.2 cm, placing them 42nd. Researchers put this relatively meagre growth down to the relative poverty of British diets.
Warner has set out to help feed the world; it is also high time we learnt how to feed our own citizens.