85
remain after the oil is extracted are fed to cattle, pigs, chickens,
and fish. Combining soybean meal with grain in roughly one
part meal to four parts grain dramatically boosts the efficiency
with which grain is converted into animal protein, sometimes
nearly doubling it. The world’s three largest meat producers—
China, the United States, and Brazil—now all rely heavily on
soybean meal as a protein supplement in feed rations.50
The heavy use of soybean meal to boost the efficiency of feed
use helps explain why the share of the world grain harvest used
for feed has not increased over the last 20 years even though pro-
duction of meat, milk, eggs, and farmed fish has climbed. It also
explains why world soybean production has increased 13-fold
since 1950.51
Mounting pressures on land and water resources have led to
the evolution of some promising new animal protein produc-
tion systems that are based on roughage rather than grain, such
as milk production in India. Since 1970, India’s milk production
has increased fivefold, jumping from 21 million to 106 million
tons. In 1997 India overtook the United States to become the
world’s leading producer of milk and other dairy products.
52
The spark for this explosive growth came in 1965 when an
enterprising young Indian, Verghese Kurien, organized the
National Dairy Development Board, an umbrella organization
of dairy cooperatives. The dairy co-op’s principal purpose was
to market the milk from tiny herds that typically averaged two
to three cows each, thus providing the link between the growing
market for dairy products and the millions of village families
who each had only a small marketable surplus.53
Creating the market for milk spurred the fivefold growth in
output. In a country where protein shortages stunt the growth
of so many children, expanding the milk supply from less than
half a cup per person a day 30 years ago to nearly one cup today
represents a major advance.54
What is so remarkable is that India has built the world’s
largest dairy industry almost entirely on crop residues—wheat
straw, rice straw, and corn stalks—and grass gathered from the
roadside. Even so, the value of the milk produced each year now
exceeds that of the rice harvest.55
Asecond new protein production model, one that also relies
on ruminants and roughage, has evolved in four provinces in
Feeding Eight Billion People Well
229
ing a particular niche. This multi-species system, which converts
feed into high-quality protein with remarkable efficiency, allowed
China to produce some 14 million tons of carp in 2007.44
While poultry production has grown rapidly in China, as in
other developing countries, it has been dwarfed by the phenom-
enal growth of aquaculture. Today aquacultural output in
China—at 31 million tons—is double that of poultry, making it
the first large country where fish farming has eclipsed poultry
farming.45
China’s aquaculture is often integrated with agriculture,
enabling farmers to use agricultural wastes, such as pig or duck
manure, to fertilize ponds, thus stimulating the growth of
plankton on which the fish feed. Fish polyculture, which com-
monly boosts pond productivity over that of monocultures by
at least half, is widely practiced in both China and India.46
With incomes now rising in densely populated Asia, other
countries are following China’s aquacultural lead. Among them
are Thailand and Viet Nam. Viet Nam, for example, devised a
plan in 2001 of developing 700,000 hectares of land in the
Mekong Delta for aquaculture, which now produces more than
1million tons of fish and shrimp.47
In the United States, catfish are the leading aquacultural
product. U.S. annual catfish production of 515 million pounds
(1.6 pounds per person) is concentrated in the South. Mississip-
pi, with half the country’s output, is the U.S. catfish capital.48
When we want high-quality protein, we typically look to
soybeans, as either tofu, veggie burgers, or other meat substi-
tutes. But most of the world’s fast-growing soybean harvest is
consumed indirectly in the beef, pork, poultry, milk, eggs, and
farmed fish that we eat. Although not a visible part of our diets,
the incorporation of soybean meal into feed rations has revolu-
tionized the world feed industry.
In 2008, the world’s farmers produced 213 million tons of
soybeans—1 ton for every 10 tons of grain produced. Of this,
some 20 million tons were consumed directly as tofu or meat
substitutes. The bulk of the remaining 193 million tons, after
some was saved for seed, was crushed in order to extract 36 mil-
lion tons of soybean oil, separating it from the highly valued,
high-protein meal.49
The 150 million or so tons of protein-rich soybean meal that
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PLAN B 4.0
86
becoming more locally shaped and more seasonal. In a typical
supermarket in an industrial country today it is often difficult to
tell what season it is because the store tries to make everything
available on a year-round basis. As oil prices rise, this will
become less common. In essence, a reduction in the use of oil to
transport food over long distances—whether by plane, truck, or
ship—will also localize the food economy.
This trend toward localization is reflected in the recent rise in
the number of farms in the United States, which may be the
reversal of a century-long trend of farm consolidation. Between
the agricultural census of 2002 and that of 2007, the number of
farms in the United States increased by 4 percent to roughly 2.2
million. The new farms were mostly small, many of them oper-
ated by women, whose numbers in farming jumped from
238,000 in 2002 to 306,000 in 2007, a rise of nearly 30 percent.61
Many of the new farms cater to local markets. Some produce
fresh fruits and vegetables exclusively for farmers’ markets or
for their own roadside stands. Others produce specialized prod-
ucts, such as the goat farms that produce milk, cheese, and meat
or the farms that grow flowers or wood for fireplaces. Others
specialize in organic food. The number of organic farms in the
United States jumped from 12,000 in 2002 to 18,200 in 2007,
increasing by half in five years.62
Gardening was given a big boost in the spring of 2009 when
U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama worked with children from a
local school to dig up a piece of lawn by the White House to
start a vegetable garden. There was a precedent. Eleanor Roo-
sevelt planted a White House victory garden during World War
II. Her initiative encouraged millions of victory gardens that
eventually grew 40 percent of the nation’s fresh produce.63
Although it was much easier to expand home gardening dur-
ing World War II, when the United States was largely a rural
society, there is still a huge gardening potential—given that the
grass lawns surrounding U.S. residences collectively cover some
18 million acres. Converting even a small share of this to fresh
vegetables and fruit trees could make an important contribution
to improving nutrition.64
Many cities and small towns in the United States and Eng-
land are creating community gardens that can be used by those
who would otherwise not have access to land for gardening.
Feeding Eight Billion People Well
231
eastern China—Hebei, Shangdong, Henan, and Anhui—where
double cropping of winter wheat and corn is common.
Although wheat straw and cornstalks are often used as fuel for
cooking, villagers are shifting to other sources of energy for
this, which lets them feed the straw and cornstalks to cattle.
56
These four crop-producing provinces in China, dubbed the
Beef Belt by officials, use crop residues to produce much more
beef than the vast grazing provinces in the northwest do. The
use of crop residues to produce milk in India and beef in China
lets farmers reap a second harvest from the original grain crop,
thus boosting both land and water productivity. Similar systems
can be adopted in other countries as population pressures inten-
sify, as demand for meat and milk increases, and as farmers seek
new ways to convert plant products into animal protein.57
The world desperately needs new more-efficient protein pro-
duction techniques such as these. Meat consumption is growing
almost twice as fast as population, egg consumption is growing
more than twice as fast, and growth in the demand for fish—
both from the oceans and from fish farms—is also outpacing
that of population.
58
While the world has had decades of experience in feeding an
additional 70 million people each year, it has no experience with
some 3 billion people striving to move up the food chain. For a
sense of what this translates into, consider what has happened
in China, where record economic growth has in effect tele-
scoped history, showing how rapidly diets change when incomes
rise. As recently as 1978, meat consumption in China consisted
mostly of modest amounts of pork. Since then, consumption of
meat, including pork, beef, poultry, and mutton, has climbed
severalfold, pushing China’s total meat consumption far above
that of the United States.
59
The Localization of Agriculture
In the United States, there has been a surge of interest in eating
fresh local foods, corresponding with mounting concerns about
the climate effects of consuming food from distant places and
about the obesity and other health problems associated with
junk food diets. This is reflected in the rise in urban gardening,
school gardening, and farmers’ markets.60
With the fast-growing local foods movement, diets are
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PLAN B 4.0
85
security in a long-distance food economy. This trend has led to
anew term: locavore, complementing the better known terms
herbivore, carnivore, and omnivore.69
Concerns about the climate effects of consuming food trans-
ported from distant locations has also led Tesco, the leading
U.K. supermarket chain, to label products with their carbon
footprint—indicating the greenhouse gas contribution of food
items from the farm to supermarket shelf.70
The shift from factory farm production of milk, meat, and
eggs by returning to mixed crop-livestock operations also facil-
itates nutrient recycling as local farmers return livestock manure
to the land. The combination of high prices of natural gas,
which is used to make nitrogen fertilizer, and of phosphate, as
reserves are depleted, suggests a much greater future emphasis
on nutrient recycling—an area where small farmers producing
for local markets have a distinct advantage over massive feeding
operations.71
Strategic Reductions in Demand
Despite impressivelocal advances, the global loss of momentum
in expanding food production is forcing us to think more seri-
ously about reducing demand by stabilizing population, moving
down the food chain, and reducing the use of grain to fuel cars.
The Plan B goal is to halt world population growth at no
more than 8 billion by 2040. This will require an all-out popu-
lation education effort to help people everywhere understand
how fast the relationship between us and our natural support
systems is deteriorating. It also means that we need a crash pro-
gram to get reproductive health care and birth control services
to the 201 million women today who want to plan their families
but lack access to the means to do so.
72
While the effect of population growth on the demand for
grain is rather clear, that of rising affluence is much less so. One
of the questions I am often asked is, “How many people can the
earth support?” I answer with another question: “At what level
of food consumption?” Using round numbers, at the U.S. level
of 800 kilograms of grain per person annually for food and
feed, the 2-billion-ton annual world harvest of grain would sup-
port 2.5 billion people. At the Italian level of consumption of
close to 400 kilograms, the current harvest would support 5 bil-
Feeding Eight Billion People Well
233
Providing space for community gardens is seen by many local
governments as an essential service, like providing playgrounds
for children or tennis courts and other sport facilities.65
Many market outlets are opening up for local produce. Per-
haps the best known of these are the farmers’ markets where
local farmers bring their produce for sale. In the United States,
the number of these markets increased from 1,755 in 1994 to
more than 4,700 in mid-2009, nearly tripling over 15 years.
Farmers’ markets reestablish personal ties between producers
and consumers that do not exist in the impersonal confines of
the supermarket. Many farmers’ markets also now take food
stamps, giving low-income consumers access to fresh produce
that they might not otherwise be able to afford. With so many
trends now boosting interest in these markets, their numbers
may grow even faster in the future.66
In school gardens, children learn how food is produced, a
skill often lacking in urban settings, and they may get their first
taste of freshly picked peas or vine-ripened tomatoes. School
gardens also provide fresh produce for school lunches. Califor-
nia, a leader in this area, has 6,000 school gardens.
67
Many schools and universities are now making a point of
buying local food because it is fresher, tastier, and more nutri-
tious and it fits into new campus greening programs. Some uni-
versities compost kitchen and cafeteria food waste and make the
compost available to the farmers who supply them with fresh
produce.
Supermarkets are increasingly contracting with local farmers
during the season when locally grown produce is available.
Upscale restaurants emphasize locally grown food on their menus.
In some cases, year-round food markets are evolving that market
just locally produced foods, including not only fruit and vegeta-
bles but also meat, milk, cheese, eggs, and other farm products.68
Food from more distant locations boosts carbon emissions
while losing flavor and nutrition. A survey of food consumed in
Iowa showed conventional produce traveled on average 1,500
miles, not including food imported from other countries. In
contrast, locally grown produce traveled on average 56 miles—
ahuge difference in fuel investment. And a study in Ontario,
Canada, found that 58 imported foods traveled an average of
2,800 miles. Simply put, consumers are worried about food
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PLAN B 4.0
83
grain-fed beef that requires roughly 7 pounds of grain concen-
trate for each additional pound of live weight to poultry or cat-
fish, which require roughly 2 pounds of grain per pound of live
weight, substantially reduces grain use.77
When considering how much animal protein to consume, it
is useful to distinguish between grass-fed and grain-fed prod-
ucts. For example, most of the world’s beef is produced with
grass. Even in the United States, with an abundance of feedlots,
over half of all beef cattle weight gain comes from grass rather
than grain. The global area of grasslands, which is easily dou-
ble the world cropland area and which is usually too steeply
sloping or too arid to plow, can contribute to the food supply
only if it is used for grazing to produce meat, milk, and cheese.78
Beyond the role of grass in providing high-quality protein in
our diets, it is sometimes assumed that we can increase the effi-
ciency of land and water use by shifting from animal protein to
high-quality plant protein, such as that from soybeans. It turns
out, however, that since corn yields in the U.S. Midwest are three
to four times those of soybeans, it may be more resource-effi-
cient to produce corn and convert it into poultry or catfish at a
ratio of two to one than to have everyone heavily reliant on
soy.79
Although population growth has been a source of growing
demand ever since agriculture began, the large-scale conversion
of grain into animal protein emerged only after World War II.
The massive conversion of grain into fuel for cars began just a
few years ago. If we are to reverse the spread of hunger, we will
almost certainly have to reduce the latter use of grain. Remem-
ber, the estimated 104 million tons of grain used to produce
ethanol in 2009 in the United States is the food supply for 340
million people at average world grain consumption levels.
80
Quickly shifting to smaller families, moving down the food
chain either by consuming less animal protein or by turning to
more grain-efficient animal protein sources, and removing the
incentives for converting food into fuel will help ensure that
everyone has enough to eat. It will also lessen the pressures that
lead to overpumping of groundwater and the clearing of tropi-
cal rainforests, helping us to reach the Plan B goals.
Feeding Eight Billion People Well
235
lion people. At the 200 kilograms of grain consumed by the
average Indian, it would support 10 billion.73
Of the roughly 800 kilograms of grain consumed per person
each year in the United States, about 100 kilograms is eaten
directly as bread, pasta, and breakfast cereals, while the bulk of
the grain is consumed indirectly in the form of livestock and
poultry products. By contrast, in India, where people consume
just under 200 kilograms of grain per year, or roughly a pound
per day, nearly all grain is eaten directly to satisfy basic food
energy needs. Little is available for conversion into livestock
products.74
Among the United States, Italy, and India, life expectancy is
highest in Italy even though U.S. medical expenditures per per-
son are much higher. People who live very low or very high on
the food chain do not live as long as those at an intermediate
level. People consuming a Mediterranean-type diet that includes
meat, cheese, and seafood, but all in moderation, are healthier
and live longer. People living high on the food chain can improve
their health by moving down the food chain. For those who live
in low-income countries like India, where a starchy staple such
as rice can supply 60 percent or more of total caloric intake, eat-
ing more protein-rich foods can improve health and raise life
expectancy.75
Although we seldom consider the climate effect of various
dietary options, they are substantial, to say the least. Gidon
Eshel and Pamela A. Martin of the University of Chicago have
studied this issue. They begin by noting that for Americans the
energy used to provide the typical diet and that used for per-
sonal transportation are roughly the same. They calculate that
the range between the more and less carbon-intensive trans-
portation options and dietary options is each about four to one.
The Toyota Prius, for instance, uses roughly one fourth as much
fuel as a Chevrolet Suburban SUV. Similarly with diets, a plant-
based diet requires roughly one fourth as much energy as a diet
rich in red meat. Shifting from the latter to a plant-based diet
cuts greenhouse gas emissions almost as much as shifting from
aSuburban to a Prius would.76
Shifting from the more grain-intensive to the less grain-
intensive forms of animal protein can also reduce pressure on
the earth’s land and water resources. For example, shifting from
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PLAN B 4.0
85
ties now are in increasing efficiency on the demand side, not in
expanding the supply side.
In a world where cropland is scarce and becoming more so,
decisions made in ministries of transportation on whether to
develop land-consuming, auto-centered transport systems or
more-diversified systems, including light rail, buses, and bicy-
cles that are much less land-intensive, will directly affect world
food security.
Now in our overpopulated, climate-changing, water-scarce
world, food security is a matter for the entire society and for all
government ministries. Since hunger is almost always the result
of poverty, eradicating hunger depends on eradicating poverty.
And where populations are outrunning their land and water
resources, this depends on stabilizing population.
And finally, if ministries of finance cannot reallocate
resources in a way that recognizes the new threats to security
posed by agriculture’s deteriorating natural support systems,
continuing population growth, human-driven climate change,
and spreading water shortages, then food shortages could
indeed bring down civilization.
Given that a handful of the more affluent grain-importing
countries are reportedly investing some $20–30 billion in land
acquisition, there is no shortage of capital to invest in agricul-
tural development. Why not invest it across the board in helping
low-income countries develop their unrealized potential for
expanding food production, enabling them to export more
grain?
81
One way to quickly reverse this deteriorating political situa-
tion is for the United States to restrict the use of grain to pro-
duce fuel for cars. Given the turmoil in world grain markets over
the last three years, it is time for the U.S. government to abolish
the subsidies and mandates that are driving the conversion of
grain into fuel. That would help stabilize grain prices and set
the stage for relaxing the political tensions that have emerged
within importing countries.
And finally, we have a role to play as individuals. Whether we
bike, bus, or drive to work will affect carbon emissions, climate
change, and food security. The size of the car we drive to the
supermarket and its effect on climate may indirectly affect the
size of the bill at the supermarket checkout counter. If we are
Feeding Eight Billion People Well
237
Action on Many Fronts
In this new food era, ensuring future food security depends on
elevating responsibility for it from the minister of agriculture’s
office to that of the head of state. The minister of agriculture,
no matter how competent, can no longer be expected to secure
food supplies. Policies in the ministry of energy may affect food
security more than those in the ministry of agriculture do.
Efforts by the minister of health and family planning to accel-
erate the shift to smaller families may have a greater effect on
food security than efforts in the ministry of agriculture to raise
crop yields.
If ministries of energy cannot quickly cut carbon emissions,
as outlined earlier, the world will face crop-shrinking heat waves
that can massively and unpredictably reduce harvests. A hotter
world will mean melting ice sheets, rising sea level, and the
inundation of the highly productive rice-growing river deltas of
Asia. Saving the mountain glaciers whose ice melt irrigates
much of the world’s cropland is the responsibility of the min-
istry of energy, not the ministry of agriculture.
If the world’s ministers of energy cannot collectively formu-
late policies to cut carbon emissions quickly, the loss of glaciers
in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau will shrink wheat
and rice harvests in both India and China. If ministries of water
resources cannot quickly raise water productivity and arrest the
depletion of aquifers, grain harvests will shrink not only in
smaller countries like Saudi Arabia and Yemen but also in larg-
er countries, such as India and China. If we continue with busi-
ness as usual, these two countries, the world’s most populous,
will face water shortages driven by both aquifer depletion and
melting glaciers.
If the ministries of forestry and agriculture cannot work
together to restore tree cover and reduce floods and soil erosion,
then we face a situation where grain harvests will shrink not
only in smaller countries like Haiti and Mongolia, but also in
larger countries, such as Russia and Argentina—both wheat
exporters.
And where water is a more serious constraint on expanding
food output than land, it will be up to ministries of water
resources to do everything possible to raise the efficiency of
water use. With water, as with energy, the principal opportuni-
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PLAN B 4.0
5
living high on the food chain, we can move down, improving our
health while helping to stabilize climate. Food security is some-
thing in which we all have a stake—and a responsibility.
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PLAN B 4.0
Documents you may be interested
Documents you may be interested
