OUTGROWING THE EARTH
THE FOOD SECURITY CHALLENGE IN AN AGE OF FALLING WATER TABLES AND RISING TEMPERATURES
LESTER BROWN
EARTHSCAN 2005
PART V
Chapter 3: Moving Up the Food Chain Efficiently
Throughout most of our 4 million years as a distinct species we lived as hunter-gatherers. The share of our diets that came from hunting or gathering varied with geographic location, skills, and the season of the year. During the northern hemisphere winter, when there was little to gather we depended heavily on hunting for our survival. This long history as hunter-gatherers left us with an appetite for animal protein, one that continues to shape diets today.
In every country where incomes have risen, this appetite for meat, eggs, and seafood has generated an enormous growth in animal protein consumption. The form the animal protein takes depends heavily on geography. Countries that are land-rich with vast grasslands depend heavily on beef – the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and Russia – or on mutton, as in Australia and Kazakhstan. Countries that are more densely populated and lack extensive grazing lands have historically relied much more on pork. Among these are Germany, Poland, and China. Densely populated countries with long shorelines, such as Japan and Norway, have turned to the oceans for their animal protein.
While we typically focus on the food requirements generated by population growth and the pressure this puts on the earth’s land and water resources, moving up the food chain also adds to the pressure. The challenge is to do so as efficiently as possible, minimizing additional demands on land and water. Encouragingly, new approaches to the production of livestock, poultry, and fish are raising the efficiency with which grain is converted into animal protein.
Up the food chain
For those living at subsistence level, 60% or more of calories typically come from a single starchy food staple such as rice, wheat, or corn. Diversifying this diet is everywhere a high personal priority as incomes rise. One of the first additions people make is animal protein in some form – meat, milk, eggs and fish.
Since 1959, world meat production has climbed from 44 million to 253 million tons, more than a five-fold jump. Except for 1959, it has risen every year during this period, becoming one of the world’s most predictable economic trends. (See Figure 3-1.) Worldwide, the average person consumed 41 kilograms of meat in 2003, more than double the figure a half-century ago.
- In a low-income country like India, where annual grain production falls well short of 200 kilograms per person, nearly all grain must be eaten directly to satisfy basic food energy needs.
- Milk, egg, and poultry consumption are beginning to rise, particularly among India’s expanding middle class.
The average American, in contrast, consumes roughly 800 kilograms of grain per year, four-fifths of it indirectly in the form of meat, milk and eggs, and farmed fish. Thus the grain consumption, direct and indirect, of an affluent American is easily four times that of a typical Indian.
- Italians, eating less than 400 kilograms of grain per person annually, have a longer life expectancy than either Indians or Americans.
- Italians benefit from what is commonly described as the Mediterranean diet, considered by many to be the world’s healthiest.
People in some countries live high on the food chain but use relatively little grain to feed animals; Argentina and Brazil, for instance, depend heavily on grass-fed beef. Japanese also live high on the food chain, but use only moderate amounts of feedgrains because their protein intake is dominated by seafood from oceanic fisheries.
Shifting protein sources
- In an effort to minimize waste, village families in China have a long-standing tradition of keeping a pig, which is fed all the kitchen and table waste.
- Four fifths of China’s pork production takes place at family level. Half of the world’s pork is now eaten in China.
- In the United States – where a half-century ago chicken was something special, usually served only at Sunday dinner – its low price now makes chicken the meat of choice for everyday consumption.
A steer in a feedlot requires 7 kilograms of grain for each kilogram of weight gain. For pork, each kilogram of additional live weight requires about 3.5 kilograms. For poultry, it is just over 2. For catfish in the United States and carp in China and India, it is 1-2 kilograms of feed per kilogram of additional weight gain.
- Beginning a century or so ago, Japan needed nearly all of its arable land to produce rice, leaving almost none for producing feed for livestock and poultry. The country now consumes 10 million tons of seafood per year.
- If China’s per capital consumption of seafood reached the Japanese level, the country would need 100 million tons of seafood – more than the world catch.
- China’s aquacultural output, mainly carp and shellfish, totals 28 million tons.
- Vietnam devised a plan in 2001 of developing 700,000 hectares of land in the Mekong Delta for aquaculture, with the goal of producing 1.7 million tons of fish and shrimp by 2005. It now appears likely to exceed this goal.
- World aquacultural output nearly tripled between 1990 and 2002. It will likely overtake beef production world-wide by 2010.
As the consumption of animal protein has grown, the share of the world grain harvest used for feed has remained constant at roughly 37% for two decades. Of the world’s three leading grains – rice, wheat, and corn – which together account for nearly 90% of the grain harvest, rice is grown almost entirely as a food crop. Wheat is largely a food crop, but one sixth of the wheat harvest is fed to livestock and poultry. In contrast, the world’s huge corn harvest is consumed largely as feed. In recent years, the addition of a protein supplement (typically soybean meal) to feed rations has boosted the efficiency of feed conversion into animal protein. This stabilized the share of the world grain harvest used for feed even while meat, milk, and egg consumption per person were climbing.
Oceans and rangelands
During much of the last half-century, the growth in demand for animal protein was satisfied by the rising output of two natural systems: oceanic fisheries and rangelands. Between 1950 and 1990, the oceanic fish catch climbed from 19 million to 85 million tons, a five-fold gain. (See Figure 3-3.) During this period, seafood consumption per person nearly doubled, climbing from 8 to 15 kilograms.
- Unfortunately, the human appetite for seafood is outgrowing the sustainable yield of oceanic fisheries. Today 70% of fisheries are being fished at or beyond their sustainable capacity.
- A 2003 landmark study, published in Nature, concluded that 90% of the large predatory fish in the oceans had disappeared over the last 50 years.
- Fisheries are collapsing throughout the world. The fabled fishery of Canada failed in the early 1990s.
- Like the Canadian cod fishery, the European fisheries may have been depleted to the point of no return.
Rangelands, like the oceans, are also essentially natural systems. Located mostly in semiarid regions too dry to sustain agriculture, they are vast, covering roughly twice the area planted to crops.
Perhaps 180 million of the world’s people depend entirely on livestock for their livelihood. Most of these are in the pastoral communities of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Mongolia, and northern and western China.
- Since rangelands are typically owned in common, there is no immediate reason for individual families to limit the number of cattle, sheep, or goats. The result is widespread overgrazing, desertification, personal hardship, and slower growth in livestock production.
- Just as the oceanic fisheries are being overfished, the world’s rangelands are being overgrazed. As a result, the grasses on which livestock forage are slowly deteriorating.
The soybean factor
- Experience has shown that 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.
- By 1978, the area planted to soybeans in the United States had eclipsed that planted to wheat, and in some recent years has exceeded that of corn, making it the country’s most widely planted crop.
- The soybean, a nitrogen-fixing legume, and corn, which has a ravenous appetite for nitrogen, fit together nicely on the same piece of land in alternate years.
New protein models
Mounting pressure on the earth’s land and water resources to produce livestock, poultry, and fish feed has led to the evolution of some promising new animal protein models, one of which is milk production in India. Since 1970, India’s milk production has increased more than fourfold, jumping from 21 million to 87 million tons. In 1997, India overtook the United States in dairy production, making it the world’s leading producer of milk and other dairy products (See Figure 3-4.)
- What is new here is that India has built the world’s largest dairy industry almost entirely on roughage – wheat straw, rice straw, corn stalks, and grass collected from the roadside.
- Cows are often stall-fed with crop residues or grass gathered daily and brought to them.
- A second new protein model, which also relies on ruminants, has evolved in China, where double cropping of winter wheat and corn is common.
- Although crop residues are often used by the villagers as fuel for cooking, they are shifting to other sources of energy for cooking, which lets them keep the straw and corn stalks for feed.
- By supplementing this roughage with small amounts of nitrogen, typically in the form of urea, the microflora in the complex four-stomach digestive system of cattle can convert roughage efficiently into animal protein.
- China has evolved a carp polyculture production system in which four species of carp are grown together. One species feeds on phytoplankton. One feeds on zooplankton. A third feeds on grass. And the fourth is a bottom feeder.
- These four species thus form a small ecosystem, with each filling a particular niche.
- This multispecies system, which converts feed into flesh with remarkable efficiency, yielded some 13 million tons of carp in 2002.
- Today aquacultural output in China – at 28 million tons – is double that of poultry, making it the first country where aquaculture has emerged as a leading source of animal protein.
- The great economic and environmental attraction of this system is the efficiency with which it produces animal protein.
- The world desperately needs more new protein production techniques such as these.
- While the world has had many years of experience in feeding an additional 70 million or more people each year, it has no experience with some 5 billion people wanting to move up the food chain at the same time.
- As the fastest-growing economy in the world since 1980, China has in effect telescoped history, showing how diets change when incomes rise rapidly over an extended period.
As incomes rise in other developing countries, people will also want to increase their consumption of animal protein. Considering the demand this will place on the earth’s land and water resources, along with more traditional demand from population growth, provides a better sense of the future pressures on the earth. If world grain supplies tighten in the years ahead, the competition for this basic resource between those living high on the food chain and those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder will become both more visible and a possible source of tension within and among societies.
Data for figures and additional information can be found
at www.earth-policy.org/Books/Out/index.htm.