Commentary

Gwynne Dyer: A finite food supply

by Gwynne Dyer on July 15th, 2013 at 1:06 PM
    1 of 1 2 of 1

      If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, so they say, it will hop right out again. Frogs aren’t stupid. Well, okay, but they’re not that stupid.

      However, if you put a frog in a pot of cool water, and gradually turn the heat up under it, the frog will not notice what’s happening. It will happily sit there until the water boils, and it dies.

      Now, I have never carried out this experiment personally—I prefer my frogs’ legs fried—so I can’t vouch for the truth of it. It’s just a story the environmentalists like to tell. Besides, I already knew that human beings have trouble in detecting slow-moving threats. You can watch us failing to do it every day: we persistently ignore the fact that we are running into trouble at a civilizational level, even though the evidence is all around us.

      The foundation of every civilization is an adequate food supply: human beings simply cannot live at the density of population that civilization implies without a reliable agriculture. But the supply of good agricultural land is limited, and the number of human beings is not.

      You can postpone the problem for a while by increasing the yield of the available land: irrigate it, plant higher-yielding crops, fertilise the soil artificially, use pesticides and herbicides to protect the crops as they grow. But even these techniques have limits, and in many cases we have reached or exceeded them. So we are running into trouble. Why isn’t anybody taking action?

      Governments everywhere are well aware of the problem: we are now 7 billion people, heading for an estimated 11 billion by the end of this century, and the food situation is already getting tight. So tight, in fact, that the average price of the major food grains has doubled in the past ten years. But everybody finds local reasons to ignore that fact.

      The developing countries know that they are under the gun, because the standard predictions of global warming suggest that it is the tropics and the sub-tropics where the warming will hit food production first and hardest.

      A (still unpublished) study carried out by the World Bank some years ago concluded that India (all of which is in the tropics or sub-tropics) would lose 25 percent of its food production when the average global temperature is only 2 degrees C higher. China would lose an astounding 38 percent, even though most of it is in the temperate zone. And all that is before their underground water sources are pumped dry.

      Most governments in the developing countries know the facts, but the short-term political imperative to raise living standards takes precedence over the longer-term imperative to curb the warming. So headlong industrialisation wins the policy debate every time, and we’ll worry about the food supply later.

      The developed world’s governments do nothing, because until recently they secretly believed that the catastrophe would mostly hit countries in the former Third World. That would unleash waves of climate refugees, plus local wars and a proliferation of failed states, but the rich countries reckoned that they would still be able to feed themselves—and their military could hold the other problems at bay.

      But what is becoming clear, just in the past few years, is that the developed countries will also have trouble feeding themselves. Part of the problem is that many of them depend heavily on underground aquifers for irrigation, and the water is running out.

      It’s running out even faster in China, India and the Middle East: for example, grain production has dropped by a third in Iraq and Syria in the past ten years. But it is hitting the big producers in the developed countries, too, and especially the United States.

      For example, the amount of irrigated land in Texas has dropped by 37 percent since 1975. The amount in Kansas has fallen by nearly 30 percent in the past three years. And now it is becoming clear that the impact of warming will also be much greater than anticipated in the developed countries.

      In these countries, the problem is extreme weather causing massive floods and prolonged droughts—like the heat wave that hit grain production in the US Midwest last summer, or the coldest spring in 50 years in England, which has cut wheat yields by a third.

      Combine the steep fall in irrigation, the crop losses to wild weather, and the diversion of large amounts of cropland to grow “biofuels” instead of food, and it is not at all certain that the developed world will be able to grow enough food for its own citizens in five or 10 years time. So are the leaders of these countries launching crash programmes to stop the warming, cut down on water losses and end the lunacy of biofuels?

      Of course not. The smarter ones just reckon that since their countries will still be rich, they will buy up whatever food is available elsewhere and feed their own people that way. It will be other people, in other countries, who go hungry.

      And the slower ones? They’re just frogs.

      Comments

      16 Comments

      peter aardvark

      Jul 15, 2013 at 3:51pm

      with personal nanofactories:
      if it is made up of molecules (and what isn't) we will be able to manufacture our own food, bottle of chardonnay, mona lisa gold, whatever. It is not so star trek as folks may think - we are heading there in about 30 years. Richard Feynman long ago speculated as much in his essay Plenty of room at the bottom.

      H2O

      Jul 15, 2013 at 4:57pm

      Water Wars coming to a place near you and me.

      Canada has a lot of Water the recent China Trade Deal gives Communist China rights over Canadian natural Resources including Water...

      ...Above and over ANY Canadian Law ANY Disputes will be decided in a Secret Tribunal probably in Russia where the Treaty was signed, it has a 15+ Year Cancellation Clause.

      Of course the US is not going to just sit and watch, they are already draining the Great Lakes on their end to support their Industry & People.

      If we don't support and work with the Yanks than we are going to get run over by both Commie China and the US.

      Time to pick a side or get run over.

      Urban Agri

      Jul 15, 2013 at 9:41pm

      I hope you know about rooftop urban agriculture right here in Canada. The one operational in Montreal serves around 5000-10000 people a week. Its coming to Vancouver on a much larger scale soon. When Mohamed Hage a Lebanese-Canadian thought of the idea and set to work on it people thought he was crazy but his immigrant family and college friends believed in him and now the phenomenon has caught on in North America.

      http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/limit+rooftop+farm+project/7465349/s...

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSQm09twKEE

      Ghengis Khan and His Brother Don

      Jul 15, 2013 at 10:39pm

      Urban Agri, I'm all for urban agriculture, but where will the water come from to irrigate a rooftop farm?

      Ilan Hersht - A human's perspective

      Jul 16, 2013 at 6:38am

      Human beings may be bad at acting on slow moving threats. They are also bad at predicting or understanding them. False alarms are as common as no alarm. There have always been people predicting collapse - environmental, population, demographics. So far they have mostly been wrong.

      The world's population has been growing for a long time. In that time the economic, political and technological realities that govern us, and its food production. I'm not saying that population growth, climate change, aquifer depletion or the end of the green revolution aren't real. Even if some turn out to be overblown, one could cause mass starvation in itself.

      That said, who knows what the next generation will bring. At the moment, we have more abundance than ever, even though we have twice as many mouths as before. Maybe in the near future we end our 10,000 year monogamy with cereals. Maybe there is a population collapse. Maybe some new form of economic governance does a better job of distributing nutrition (if we all ate more "efficiently," we could support many more mouths). maybe we learn to farm oceans or ice sheets or the moon. Sounds silly, but so would have a lot of technology before it existed.

      This response sounds flippant. I don't mean to say we shouldn't be worried. We should. I just don't think we have the predictive power to see where this is coming from and prevent it. This article relies on a model of the climate which makes specific predictions that feed into a model of the agricultural economy which then feeds in to a model of the future political system of the world. That's a lot of modeling of hard to model things.

      That said, maybe we can do some meta preparation. Create a sort of global insurance policies against collapse. A global food/grain bank perhaps. Maybe one specifically for poor countries. 1bn metric tons would go a low way. A lot of countries do this individually but those can have all sorts of problematic side effects like causing the 2008 global rice crisis. A world cereal bank would be very susceptible to corruption, special interests and such. And now we get back to the original problem. We aren't good at understanding big complicated slow things like markets or climate or migrations. We aren't good at running big complicated things like giant food banks.

      Maybe I'll just keep a few barrels of wheat and rice in the basement for myself.

      Skeptic #2

      Jul 16, 2013 at 6:57am

      Presenting statements like "the amount of irrigated land in Texas has dropped by 37 percent" as proof water for irrigation is scarce seems disingenuous, the more likely explanation is farming in North America doesn't make money.

      After statements like that I have to take the rest of the article as scaremongering.

      martin

      Jul 16, 2013 at 11:44am

      How is stating a fact disingenuous? Is it because the facts do not line up with your personal ideological position? I mean there is a finite amount of water in aquifers, if you pump them intensely they will eventually run out, haven't you ever drank water with a straw? Its not roket science, a 3 year old could understand this. And what dose the profitability of farming have to do with this at all? Your comment about fear mongering seems a bit disingenuous. Are you an other troll for Harper or the oil industry?

      Alan Layton

      Jul 16, 2013 at 12:07pm

      Skeptic #2 - if you do a little bit of online research you'll find that the groundwater supplies in Texas are decreasing and it's been the subject of a number of studies in the last decade or two. In fact the dramatic decrease in groundwater in the US and Canada have been known for quite some time. Equations used to calculate ground water supplies need to be altered to take in to account global warming. When they do, the situation looks pretty dire.

      NoLeftNutter

      Jul 16, 2013 at 1:13pm

      Gwynne makes the common error that many doomer and gloomers do, that somehow unsustainable population growth jeopardises the future of humanity. He's looking at the equation backwards, if we can't supply enough food, the population won't grow to the levels he's predicting.

      As for water for irrigation, desalination can take care of whatever future needs their might be. Expect the eco-weenies will set their hair of fire at the amount of energy that will need.