World Food Security, a growing health issue

The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, today warned Western nations such as Australia to populate or perish.This warning became a headline in the northern hemisphere, where I am at the moment--Editor

The day before, July 13, in the Wall Street Journal there was detail of the mechanisms being used by rich Western countries (and China) to secure their food supplies by buying up productive land in poor countries. Surely a sign that the wheelers and dealers believe there is a significant crisis? Below are two articles, the first a government perspective on the food crisis as seen by the European Community and the other a summary of the situation as seen by Tony McMichael (presented at the AMSA Global Health Conference, July Melbourne).

The common denominator in world problems is the growing world population. It is hoped that Cardinal Pell will explain his thinking

 
Challenges Growing for Food Security
Reprinted from ‘Science for Environment Policy', Issue 115: A service from the European Commission

Despite international efforts to reduce global food insecurity and malnutrition, the realisation of food security in the world has fallen short of promises made at the World Food Summit1 in 1996, and the Millennium Development Goals 2 target to halve world hunger by 2015 is also unlikely to be met. In a recently released report, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) identified three major challenges that threaten improved food security and nutrition: climate change, using food crops as a fuel source and rising food prices.

The report predicts that climate change and variability will adversely affect food security and nutrition. More frequent and intense extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones, intense rainfall or droughts are likely to reduce food production and to increase water scarcity, especially in regions presently vulnerable to food insecurity. Declining output is expected from the agricultural, forestry, livestock and fisheries sectors. Vulnerable populations, particularly the poor, those dependent on subsistence agriculture and fisheries, and traditional societies, will potentially suffer food insecurity, malnutrition and ill health. Probable migrations of people from rural to urban areas will further strain health and food resources.

Producing food crops for use as bioenergy, to replace fossil fuels, remains controversial. Conversion of land from food to fuel production has contributed to increasing food prices and will reduce availability of food crops. This has had a negative impact on human nutrition at a time when the world's population continues to grow. Rising prices can compromise the quantity and nutritional value of food consumed by poor people, leading to malnutrition and subsequent health problems. Diverting water resources from already depleted aquifers to biofuel crops in areas requiring additional irrigation could exacerbate water scarcity, lead to water pollution and impact aquatic ecosystems.

Opportunities exist to put policies in place that will enable poorer regions to take advantage of biofuel developments. These include strategies to implement environmentally sustainable and poverty-reducing practices, adapted to meet global demands for bioenergy, whilst ensuring the production of food is not compromised.

A number of recommendations in the report suggest ways to address the underlying social, economic, environmental, cultural and political issues that cause food insecurity and malnutrition. These include: the creation of integrated, large-scale programmes to support policies to reduce poverty, promote fair trade, encourage sustainable food production, improve access to safe food, prevent infectious diseases, directly assist vulnerable people and develop anti-hunger alliances. Integration of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies in sustainable development programmes will contribute to reducing vulnerability to food insecurity and increasing resilience.

In particular, the report suggests using a 'twin-track' approach to tackle hunger and poverty, by strengthening measures to boost productivity and incomes of the poor, especially in rural areas, while ensuring those in need receive immediate food aid and are supported by the assistance of social safety nets. The report suggests that placing people, human rights and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals at the centre of strategies to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change can enhance the development of sustainable environment policies.

http://www.fao.org/WFS/index_en.htm  World Food Summit (1996) Rome
http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/  The UN Millennium Development Goals

Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations-International Food Policy Research Institute report. (2008). Impact of climate change and bioenergy on nutrition. Download from: http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/cp/cohenetal2008climate.asp

Editor’s notes.
(1) It must be of concern that  within Papua there is a proposal to clear one million hectares of forest for biofuel and food production. This will be financed by Saudi Arabia
(2) For further information on biofuels, go to the Gallagher Review  http://www.dft.gov.uk/rfa/_db/_documents/Report_of_the_Gallagher_review.pdf 
The Friends of the Earth response to Gallagher is as follows

Responding to the Government commissioned Gallagher Review into the indirect impacts of biofuels, published today (7 July 2008), Friends of the Earth warned Ministers against tinkering at the margins and urged the Government to reconsider its biofuels obligation altogether.

Friends of the Earth biofuels campaigner Kenneth Richter said:

"Feeding cars instead of people pushes up food prices and fuels deforestation.

"If we want to quit our expensive and damaging fossil fuel habit we need a new direction in transport - not a quick fix from biofuels.

"Instead of chasing the pipe dream of alternative fuels, the Government must ditch these targets and start helping Britons save petrol and cut emissions now."

Notes
The Gallagher review has confirmed that the pressure to clear new land for biofuel production is likely lead to an overall increase in greenhouse gas emissions rather than a reduction. But Friends of the Earth believes the recommendations fall short of the findings. Lowering the EU target to 8 per cent, as Gallagher suggests, will not put a brake on food price rises or halt rainforest destruction. Friends of the Earth is calling on the EU to scrap its target for 10 per cent of all road transport fuel to come from biofuels and strengthen fuel efficiency standards in new vehicles instead.

The report's release coincides with a vote today (7 July 2008) in Strasbourg on biofuel targets by the Environment Committee of the European Parliament, which is currently debating a proposal to force all EU countries to use at least 10 per cent renewable energy sources, mostly biofuels, in transport by 2020.

There has been an 82 percent rise in food commodity prices since 2006. Last Friday a leaked report from the World Bank put the blame for 75 per cent of the global food price rises on biofuels. The study, produced by Don Mitchell a senior economist at the institution, analysed food price rises between 2002 and February 2008. It reportedly found that biofuels policies had caused prices to rise in three ways - by diverting grain from food to fuel; by encouraging farmers to set aside land for biofuel production; and through speculation in grains.

A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Septermber 2007 also questioned whether second generation biofuels would become economically viable before 2017, if ever. OECD: Biofuels is the cure worse than the disease? Sep 2007

There are increasing calls for Government caution on biofuels, The King Review of Low Carbon Cars, commissioned by the UK Government and published on 12 March 2008, urged the EU to shift the focus of its policy from biofuels to cleaner automotive technology. It also recommended adopting a target of 100 grammes of carbon dioxide emissions for each kilometre a car travels. Friends of the Earth is calling for European governments to go even further and make vehicle manufacturers double the average fuel efficiency on new cars by 2020 - something supported by the vast majority of the public according to research we published in April. New cars sold in the UK in 2007 emitted 164.9 grammes of carbon dioxide per kilometre (g/km CO2). The latest figures for the EU as a whole showed that average emissions of new cars sold in 2006 were 160g.km CO2. Doubling average fuel efficiency would reduce average emissions to 80g/km CO2

Behind the World Food and Nutrition Crisis: A Long History of Pushing Nature Beyond Limits

Tony McMichael, NHMRC Australia Fellow, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health
The Australian National University

Most public and policy discussion about food production and marketing is in relation to economic and commercial issues, and consumer safety issues. We otherwise take our food supplies for granted. Yet to live in an era of relative food abundance is, in long historical terms, an extraordinary experience. As for all other animal species, the basic hunter-gatherer Homo sapiens is a species that understands food as sustenance and survival, not as commodity.

Food shortages, nutrient deficiencies and periodic famines have long been widespread experiences for humans. Indeed, many of our behavioural and metabolic tendencies – to relish sugar and fat, to overeat in response to visual cues, and to store surplus food energy as adipose tissue – reflect survival-enhancing selection pressures from ancestral experiences in a world of precarious and variable food supplies.1 Those same tendencies, in modern wealthy societies, have become the source of much of the non-communicable chronic diseases that now prevail. Thus, the health risk, for many, has become easy access to too much energy-dense food, in place of earlier situations of too little food. 

Yet there is no guaranteed continuation of this abundance. The year 2008 brought widespread surprise and shock at the looming food shortage for the world’s still-growing and higher-consuming population.  World food prices (especially of rice and other cereal grains) have risen dramatically, recently, as production levels and global stocks have declined.

This global food crisis may well indicate that, for the first time, humankind faces limits to food security at the global level. The UN’s World Food Program anticipates a growing inability to maintain current feeding levels and an increase in the number of under-nourished and hungry people.2  That number has already crept up over the past ten years, from around 800 million to around 820 million.3 This remains a huge, global, public health challenge – and the current crisis is an ominous signal of non-sustainability.

At the time that the ‘food crisis’ was unfolding, the World Bank and the UN released coincidentally a comprehensive report of the International Assessment of Agricultural, Science and Technology for Development.4 This massive report concluded that radical reform of the world’s food production methods is needed; while our production methods barely match population growth, they are doing increasing environmental damage. That is, those methods are not sustainable – and would almost certainly become even more widespread and damaging as world population grows.

The global human population has increased from one billion in the 1820s to 6.7 billion today. A total of nine billion by 2050 is projected. All readily farmed land has been pressed into use, and much of it has been degraded. There are no major new regions to occupy. Freshwater supplies are over-exploited and declining in many regions – and, in a warming world, the loss of mountain glaciers and snow-fall will further reduce river flows. Meanwhile, the replacement of small farm-holdings and crop diversity with broad-acre monoculture farming has diminished the genetic versatility and resilience of world agriculture.4,5

This stretching of environmental resources beyond limits is part of a longer narrative. Throughout the ages humans everywhere have exploited the local food-producing environment to the limit of its carrying capacity (i.e., the population size sustainable over, at least, the near term). With advances in culture and increases in environmental intervention, food systems have become increasingly intensified and productive – and the duly expanded populations have then become dependent on that level of continued production. Often, however, those systems have failed.1,5

The taming of fire over half a million years ago enabled meat and fibrous tubers to be cooked, chewed and digested. This increased the carrying capacity of the local environment – and yielded more hunters. Gains in tool-making and hunting skills, greater numbers of hunters, and wasteful exploitation of food sources wiped out many large edible species during the later millennia of the Old Stone Age (around 15-40,000 years ago).

Those species losses, along with environmental changes as Earth warmed at the end of the last glaciation (from around 15,000 years ago), necessitated intensive harvesting of local plant foods and the domestication of amenable animal species. Farming thus evolved in many regions from around 10,000 years ago, and human numbers began their next upwards surge. This surge was further amplified by the emergence of large, socially stratified, urban populations, able to exploit the rural peasantry. The development of food trade between early city-states allowed yet further regional population increases. In many regions farm yields were inherently precarious, vulnerable to weather reversals and to eventual exhaustion from over-exploitation of forest, soil and water.1

The greatest population surge of all, in absolute terms, resulted from the second agricultural revolution beginning in late eighteenth century, via mechanization and, then, the huge one-off bonus of fossil carbon energy. Our immediate forebears, not needing to account for the units of energy input required nor for the longer-term environmental and climatic consequences, have created a modern bonanza of food – and human numbers have increased around eight-fold since around 1800.

Now, however, there is growing world-wide evidence that we face limits to future gains.3 There are several generally recognised component causes: the rising costs of fuel-energy and (hence) fertilizers, the diversion of arable land from food to biofuel production, the impacts of climate change in some regions as drying trends emerge, the rapid increases in meat consumption as consumer preferences change in developing countries, and speculation and hoarding via international futures markets. And, in the background, the ongoing increase in population numbers.

Those various causal factors are interconnected – and climate change is playing an increasing contributory role. The looming oil shortage, the switch into biofuels, and changes in regional rainfall patterns are part of the climate change narrative. That, in turn, is a consequence of the now widely-shared expansionary drive to generate wealth, nurture national population growth, clear land, intensify trade, foster larger consumer markets, and achieve gains (for some, if not yet for all) in material comfort and convenience.

The related rapid rise in levels of meat production presents a major environmental and climatic threat – the latter via the very large volume of greenhouse gas emissions from that sector.6 The UN Food and Agricultural Organization, in 2006, labelled this problem as Livestock's Long Shadow.7 The oft excessive consumption of meat also requires a great diversion of plant-based food energy (especially grains) from humans to livestock; much caloric energy is lost in converting feed to edible meat. Indeed, much of the world’s grain production is now fuelling either the tanks of cars or the stomachs of ruminant livestock.

Global climate change, with its manifest risks to human health and survival, stands out as the world’s most clearly defined and recognized large environmental issue.8 Meanwhile, the world’s growing difficulties in maintaining food security underscore the wider systemic challenge that we all face, globally, in seeking a sustainable way to live, with sustainable numbers.

References

1.  McMichael AJ. Human Frontiers and Disease: Past Patterns, Future Uncertainties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
2.  Sheeran J. The challenge of hunger. The Lancet 2008; 371: 180-81.
3.  Food and Agricultural Organization. The State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2006. Rome: FAO, 2007. http://www.fao.org/SOF/sofi
4.  World Bank and UN World Food Program. IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural, Science and Technology for Development) Report. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008. http://www.agassessment.org/
5.  Wright R. A Short History of Progress.
6.  McMichael AJ, Powles J, Butler CD, Uauy R. Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health. The Lancet 2007; 370: 1253-63
7.  Food and Agricultural Organization. Livestock’s Long Shadow. Rome: FAO, 2006.  http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm
8.  World Health Organization. World Health Day, 2008: “Protecting Health Against Climate Change”. http://www.who.int/world-health-day/en/