Feeding People is Easy Part 1

Book review

In Feeding People is Easy, published in 2007, Colin Tudge points out that: “Food is the most pressing issue and the thing we absolutely have to get right. Get agriculture wrong, and everything else is compromised.” “The world population now stands at 6.4 billion (6400 million), of whom roughly 1 million are chronically undernourished and another billion suffer from the modern phenomenon of over-nourishment. Obesity in many communities is the norm.” “1 billion now live in urban slums. In 2006, the number in cities worldwide equalled the number in the countryside; on present trends by 2050 2/3 of all humanity will live in cities and the number of city-dwellers will exceed the total population of the present world.” “The lack of fresh water is second only to global warming in the league table of threats. Crops and livestock are especially thirsty.” “About 1/3^rd of the world’s land – around 50 million square kilometres – is farmed. Now there are 120 people for every square kilometre of farmland. 40% of all the world’s farmland is already seriously degraded. As global warming bites and sea-levels rise, the world’s coastal strips, where much of the most productive farming is carried out, will disappear.” “The modern food supply chain uses a great deal of oil – 1/5^th of US energy is used for food. Worldwide, 95% of all food production depends on oil.” “We are in for a century of weather extremes due to climate change. Ocean levels will rise as the ice caps melt. A one-metre rise will seriously encroach on the world’s coastal strips where half of all human beings live, and which include much of the world’s productive farmland. Many of the world’s crops will start to fail due to climate change.” “Genetic engineering cannot and will not provide any instant fix. It is just a technique. It is strategy and foresight that counts.” “In times of such uncertainty it is prudent to grow crops everywhere where they can be grown, in the hope and expectation that at least some of them will do well. And it makes sense to grow as many different crops as possible – different species, and different varieties within species – so as to spread the risk.”

FEEDING PEOPLE IS EASY

COLIN TUDGE

PARI PUBLISHING                                    2007

PART I

Why Me – and Why This Book?

• In the early 1970s food technologists, alias food processors, strategically poised between a growing band of nutritionists on the one hand and the newly industrial agriculturalists on the other, seemed to bestride the world. They were the scions and the heralds of science, with all its exactitude; and they were driven by the most unimpeachable principle of morality – nothing less than a desire to feed the human race.
• More than 3 decades later, genetic engineering has come of age and the powers-that-be – government, agribusiness, scientists, and technologists, supported by economists, lawyers, and MBAs – are telling us that we will all starve unless we learn to love GMOs (generically modified organisms, where ‘organisms’ means crops and livestock). It was nonsense then and it is nonsense now.
• The message of this book is that we can feed ourselves to the highest standards of both nutrition and of gastronomy and that we can do so effectively for ever; that we can do this without cruelty to livestock and without wrecking the rest of the world and driving other species to extinction; and that we can create human societies that are truly agreeable, co-operative and at peace, in which all manner of people with all kinds of beliefs and aspirations can be personally fulfilled.
• The approach is to build upon the traditional crafts aided by science: The future lies with ‘science-assisted craft’ – if, that is, we are to have a tolerable future at all.
• To achieve this we, humanity, must by-pass and generally sideline the powers-that-be. The world’s most powerful governments, industries, and their attendant experts and intellectuals have their minds set on quite different goals, and are pulling in quite different directions – to a large extent completely opposite to what is really required.
• The human population will reach 9 billion by 2050 and it won’t be easy to feed everybody to the highest standards. Yet it should be well within our grasp. In this book I will explain how. But the harder task by far is to by-pass the powers-that-be.
• ‘They’ do not know how to run the world, but they do know how to hang on to power. Revolution is not required. Renaissance is what’s needed – and that is very achievable.

 

Chapter 1: Good Food For Everyone Forever – But Only If We take Matters Into Our Own hands

• The message of this book is as positive as anyone could hope for: the future could still be glorious. We, people at large, ordinary citizens, the ‘public’, just have to do things differently. We have to take matters into our own hands.
• The cause of all our troubles has almost nothing to do with difficulties that nature presents us with. The fault lies almost entirely with policy and strategy.
• I focus on the world’s food supply. Food is not the only thing we have to get right, but food is the most pressing issue and the thing we absolutely have to get right. Get agriculture wrong, and everything else is compromised.

The bad news

• The world population now stands at 6.4 billion (6400 million), of whom roughly 1 million are chronically undernourished and another billion suffer from the modern phenomenon of over-nourishment. Obesity in many communities is the norm.
• 1 billion now live in urban slums. In 2006, the number in cities worldwide equaled the number in the countryside; on present trends by 2050 2/3 of all humanity will live in cities and the number of city-dwellers will exceed the total population of the present world.
• A Los Angeles family consumes more than an entire Bangladeshi village. It would require 3 planets Earth to raise everyone to the material standards of the average Brit.
• The lack of fresh water is second only to global warming in the league table of threats. Crops and livestock are especially thirsty.
• About 1/3^rd of the world’s land – around 50m square kilometers – is farmed. Now there are 120 people for every square kilometer of farmland. 40% of all the world’s farmland is already seriously degraded. As global warming bites and sea-levels rise, the world’s coastal strips, where much of the most productive farming is carried out, will disappear.
• The modern food supply chain uses a great deal of oil – 1/5^th of US energy is used for food. Worldwide, 95% of all food production depends on oil.
• Power is shifting from the West to the East – mainly China and India. In the mid-1990s Wal-mart got 94% of its products from within the US but now 80% of its suppliers are Chinese. Chinese workers are demanding better wages and soon their goods will go up in price. We will be obliged to buy their products because we have given up making things for ourselves.
• The Chinese boom is not sustainable as they will suffer from declining oil like everybody else. They are already suffering climate change as the Gobi encroaches on Beijing at 30-50 km a year.
• The rise of the East will not be smooth and the West, particularly the US, will not go quietly. The chances of world conflict as the superpowers scrabble for water, land, and particularly oil and the status of top dog are as great as they were at the height of the Cold War in the late 1950s.
• We are in for a century of weather extremes due to climate change. Ocean levels will rise as the ice caps melt. A one-metre rise will seriously encroach on the world’s coastal strips where half of all human beings live, and which include much of the world’s productive farmland. Many of the world’s crops will start to fail.
• Genetic engineering, for all the hype that has attended it, cannot and will not provide any instant fix. It is just a technique. It is strategy and foresight that counts.
• If there is food to be bought on the world market when global warming starts to bite, who will be able to out-bid the Chinese?
• Common sense suggests that in times of such uncertainty it would be prudent to grow crops everywhere where they can be grown, in the hope and expectation that at least some of them will do well. And it makes sense to grow as many different crops as possible – different species, and different varieties within species – so as to spread the risk.

The good news

• When the world population reaches 9 billion, round about 2050, it should stabilize. It may not be easy to feed 9 billion people but it should be well within our grasp – even with global warming and diminishing oil. We should surely give it a go.
• When human beings are given a chance to live our lives as we would like, we manage our affairs very well. Ordinary human beings are actually rather brilliant. It boils down to democracy: a central task is to make democracy work.
• It is not how a society elects its leaders but whether it can get rid of them when it decides that they no longer serve its interests.
• My proposals for rescuing the world include the idea that democracy is the key; the necessary changes can be brought about only by democratic means. Craft, too, is a vital and related concept. Agriculture as practiced through all but the last few decades of the past 10,000 years has been a craft industry.
• Renaissance Italy built Florence and Siena and all the other great and enviable cities amidst the fields of a peasant economy – but it was only because they left the peasants alone to get on with their work that the glorious civilization that we have inherited was able to rise at all.
• So what in practice do we need to do? First we need to get the moral philosophy right – to work out what we should be trying to do and why; and then we need to address the practicalities. I will look at the underlying philosophy in the next chapter. The practicalities occupy the rest of the book.

 

Chapter 2: Why Should We Give a Damn?

• The task before us is to create a world that is good for 6.4 billion people now and also for 9 billion people by 2050, and for the estimated 5 to 8 million other species with whom we share this earth; and can go on catering for everyone and for other creatures forever.
• We don’t need a majority to agree on what should be done; a critical mass is what’s needed.

 

How could anyone not give a damn?

• Some – only a few perhaps, but they are out there – just don’t give a damn. Others do give a damn but believe that the government has something up its sleeve. Others agree with Voltaire that every man should cultivate his own garden.
• I was brought up in a Christian tradition and Christians take it for granted that where there is moral wrong, then they should take it upon themselves to put it right.
• The road to hell is paved with good intentions so there are all kinds of reasons for standing back, although some are rooted in indifference and selfishness.
• In short: there are many, including some of the world’s most powerful people, who for a whole raft of reasons do not agree that the task before humanity is to take care of all humanity, and of our fellow creatures.

 

How do we know what’s good?

• We cannot hope to discover or to define moral absolutes as if they were scientific laws.
• It is right to cater for the whole human race. It is wrong to write people off, no matter how expedient this may be.
• At the deepest level where morality truly begins, all the great religions are in agreement.
• The 19^th century Hindu mystic, Ramakrishna, summarized all when he suggested that the moral position of all the great religions and their prophets can be encapsulated in three irreducibly simple phrases: personal humility; respect for fellow, sentient creatures; and reverence for God.

 

Game theory, and why nasty people are in charge

• Game theory offers insight into different moral philosophies, the simplest being hawks versus doves. It predicts that societies finish up with a majority of doves because most people are nice, cooperative and pacific. But the hawks will dominate even though they are in the minority, precisely because they are hawks; and the doves don’t want to fight back.
• In any society the nice majority is bound to be ruled by people who simply want to rule. Nice people usually find themselves dominated by nasty people.
• How can we create a democracy in which doves create societies dominated by doves when doves have no taste for domination? That is the central paradox and dilemma of humankind. I will address it in the last chapter.
• Meanwhile, in lieu of true democracy, the powers-that-be are convinced that it is their right and destiny to rule, and the intellectual elite whom they employ are convinced that they alone know how to do things.
• In truth the leaders are liable to be gangsters, while their compliant intellectuals to a significant extant emerge as idiots savants.
• The real genius, moral and practical, lies with humanity at large. The future lies with what the great Enlightenment moralist, Adam Smith, called ‘human sympathy’; and it lies, as philosophers from John Ruskin to Ivan Illich have argued this past few hundred years, with craft; the skills that have evolved among humanity at large. Since food is the thing we absolutely have to get right, the most important crafts are those of farming and cooking.
• I have met many people in high places who definitely are not gangsters but who ardently disagree with my general thesis that the world needs re-thinking from first principles. They say the status quo doesn’t need re-thinking. It just needs to be given a chance.

I take this class of criticism seriously, and do this in later chapters. First I want to present my own thesis: that the task is to make a world that is good for everyone forever; that to do this we need to think again from first principles; and that we must focus, above all, on the food supply chain – which means on farming and cooking.