Who is Really Feeding the World?
A recurring theme I've read in discussions of Energy Depletion theory has been that without fossil fuels we won't be able to grow food for the world's population. We use natural gas to make fertilizer and oil to make the diesel fuel that runs the farming machinery. Without those, we are told, people starve.
That argument also figures in the arguments of proponents of organic agriculture, and proponents of more local distribution against the practices of agribusiness agriculture.
But in responding to the agriculture debate, A Nation of Farmers author, Sharon Astyk, offers new information:
The assumption, of course, is that industrial agriculture has always been engaged in the project of "feeding the world" - Cargill, ADM and Monsanto regularly argue that these are their goals, that their research is required to bring new crops that will make it possible to feed two or three more billion people.
The problem, of course, is that there is no evidence whatsoever that industrial agriculture has ever had the objective of feeding the world. I am repeating here something Aaron and I say in much more detail in A Nation of Farmers (and with full citation), but if you track the research, what you find is this. The vast majority of increases in grain yields since the beginning of the Green Revolution didn't feed hungry people - they went to feed livestock, to make meat in the rich world, and then to ethanol - with the help of the same industrial corporations that we plan to rely upon to feed us. The same corporations that are going to "feed the world" by introducing new, drought resistant crops invested heavily in ethanol infrastructure, helping move more of the world's grain harvest into gas tanks, rather than into people's mouths.
So what is really at risk is the meat and fuel that serve our current Western lifestyle.
The UN FAO reports that at this point, two billion people in the world live on the product of low input, small scale, non-industrial agriculture. I often hear people observe that without fossil inputs on a large scale we can feed only half a billion or a billion people - McWilliams puts this figure at 4 billion, which is at least more credible. But we are already feeding 2 billion people that way. Moreover, large scale industrial agriculture is not presently feeding the world - 85% of the world's farms are small farms, smaller than 5 hectares. These farms produce nearly half of the world's total grain, and much more than half (since they are usually diversified) of the world's total food calories. Local food may not be feeding New York City and the I95 corridor, and it never will - I know of no rational thinker who believes so. But local food is already feeding much of the world - the majority of the world's poor don't eat a Caesar salad that travelled 1,500 miles - they don't even eat rice that travelled that distance.
