Chris Haskins knows a bit about food. He’s the former chairman of Northern Foods and Express Dairies, acted as Tony Blair’s ‘rural tsar’, and he used to run the government’s Better Regulation Task Force. So it’s rather arresting to find him in the pages of this month’s edition of Prospect asking if we’re seeing the return of Malthus (full article only available to subscribers, unfortunately):
Over 200 years ago, Thomas Malthus argued that population would outrun food supply, and that without stern limits on reproduction the world was heading for disaster. So far, he has proved utterly mistaken; the world’s population has increased tenfold and there is less starvation than in his day. But the global population will probably rise from 6.5bn to 9bn by 2050, which will require the world’s farmers to produce more food in the next 40 years than in the past 200. The Malthusian predictions were wrong for 200 years, but might prove right in the next 50.
So what, Haskins goes on, must be done to avoid a “Malthusian catastrophe”? Three things. First, science and technology must be harnessed to improve the output of existing land – and yes, that includes GM crops. Second, we should take a long hard look at policies designed to promote biofuels. And third,
…we, as individuals, must stop using energy at the rate we do, and wasting food to the extent that we do. At present we waste nearly half of the food we produce, throwing perfectly good food away in our kitchens, restaurants and shops. The most virtuous and responsible step of all would be to become vegetarian. About three quarters of the world’s wheat, maize and soya is fed to animals who then convert this, very inefficiently, into meat for us to eat. Something else to bear in mind is that our consumption of milk products maintains demand for millions of cows, each of which, through its burping and farting, does more environmental damage than the average family car.
Just as with climate change, where there’s a heated debate about the difference between ‘luxury’ emissions (trips to St Lucia) versus ‘essential’ emissions (methane from rice paddies), the issue of equity is starting to emerge with food. Water will be next, as scarcity worsens and the concept of virtual water becomes more widely understood. It’s about fair shares, stupid.
