Saturday 15 October 2005

Pic of the day: In subarctic climates, like the Japanese island of Hokkaido here (an artist's impression), grass may be a reasonable crop to grow. Although you could probably grow some vegetables too.

Veggies for Africa

As I have said before, in our time all things really are connected, because the people are all connected. So I see no mystical significance in this, that very different publications bring up the same topic around the same time.

One was Scientific American, in its theme issue about humanity at the crossroads. As human population temporarily spikes to somewhere around 10 billion in the middle of the century, feeding everybody won't be as easy as when we were only 6 billion.

Of course, doomsayers have told us for centuries that there cannot possibly be food enough for everyone: Mankind reproduces at an exponential rate, while arable land does not. Still, human ingenuity does indeed seem to increase proportionally with our numbers, and so today there is enough food for all of us. On average. Actually people are still starving, while elsewhere more people die from obesity. Clearly the distribution of food could need some improvement. But the total quantity is plenty enough today. Still... Will it be enough when there are two-thirds more people again?

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The other inspiration was an article in a local newspaper about a report by the Norwegian ecological action group "Fremtiden I Våre Hender" (the future in our hands). They had studied the effect on the environment by the food we shop. How much greenhouse effect does it make if we buy food from far away, for instance? The answer was: It makes next to no difference. Most transport is by ship or rail for most of the distance, and these are fairly energy efficient. The second most important factor is how often you drive to the shop. But the single biggest cause of greenhouse emissions was meat. Raising sheep or cattle is enormously inefficient, and the ruminants themselves release large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Yes, they are actually farting methane. Not that I am holding it against them, but there are rather big amounts and it's fare more effective a greenhouse gas than CO2. Add the fact that animals need the equivalent of 10 kg of grain to make 1 kg of meat - at best - and you can start to believe the shocking truth: When you pick up your dinner at the shop, 99% of the greenhouse effect comes from the meat.

I think I mentioned before an article that said in the USA, the production of meat is so energy-demanding that to save the environment you should use your car. If you bike instead, you will probably get hungry, and the meat you eat will cause more greenhouse effect than your car did.

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Besides the greenhouse effect, which some people may even like if they live in cold areas, there is the problem of resource use. I mentioned how it takes 10 pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat. Of course, you don't need to give the animals grain, though it remains popular. Cattle, sheep and goats can all eat grass, which is cheap and which we can't digest anyway. So why not raise them on grass? Well, grass is very energy-poor compared to grain. So to gain weight, they need to eat a LOT of it. This is fine if you raise your animals in the chilly mountains of Norway, where few other things grow anyway. But in most of the world, the terrain used for grass could be used for grains, vegetables or fruit. And then we are suddenly back to the 10 for 1 exchange again.

Now in all fairness, meat is more energy-dense than grain, let alone vegetables. But still not nearly that much. There is a huge loss in going through the animal. This is usually reflected in the price, and meat tends to be fairly expensive. But most people like it, and it is tradition. In a time when people worked hard with their body for much of the day, eating energy-dense food like meat or cakes made perfect sense if you could afford it. Today people are eating the same stuff for fun, and then they grow fat and unhealthy. And they are paying good money for it, too.

If we manage to lift the remaining poor countries up to western levels of affluence, they are no doubt going to want meat as well. At that point, there may no longer be enough arable land, no matter how efficient our agricultural technology. When this begins to happen, prices will rise. We are used to not needing to pay much for our food. It is an insignificant part of our budget. But all scarce resources will necessarily become costly. Already meat is too expensive for the poor to eat. And as more and more people become rich, as is happening in much of Asia (especially China), they want meat and the animals need grain, so even the grain becomes more expensive. Today more people than ever are starving, even though there is plenty of food. They can't afford it, as their countries are in big trouble (usually due to war or civil war, although AIDS is also starting to decimate the working population in some places, leaving the kids to starve). If we ate less meat, there would be more grain left, and the price would come down so more people could afford to eat their fill.

I am not even mentioning the animals and what they may think about it. There are people who think all animal life is sacred and eating flesh is like eating a human. I am not in that camp. What I am saying is that we don't need that much meat. We do need some protein, but eating meat every day is neither necessary, natural or healthy. And it is expensive to ourselves, and makes food more expensive for the poor of the world. Perhaps you should think about that, the next time you have a big T-bone steak on a Wednesday.