The Guardian today has a lengthy piece by John Vidal on “the looming food crisis”:
A “perfect storm” of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering force, threatening vast numbers of people with food shortages and price rises. Even as the world’s big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals [in order to grow crops for biofuels instead], the global population is rising by 87 million people a year; developing countries such as China and India are switching to meat-based diets that need more land; and climate change is starting to hit food producers hard. Recent reports in the journals Science and Nature suggest that one-third of ocean fisheries are in collapse, two-thirds will be in collapse by 2025, and all major ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. “Global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record this year. Outside of wartime, they have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer,” says the US Department of Agriculture.
We first posted on this subject on Global Dashboard back in March, and Vidal’s right to be worried. Here’s a link to the one page table we published a few months back showing how the major scarcity trends reinforce one another – and how it’s absolutely the issue of food security we really need to be worrying about.
What’s alarming isn’t just the scale of the challenge, but the extent to which managing it requires a degree of policy coherence both within and between governments that just isn’t there.
