This blog had an embryonic predecessor in 2002 that didn’t last too long, and it was a bot more personal, it was called “Life in Development”, why I’m mentioning this? My friend Andy McKay, linked me with an article of the Guardian where Dr Sylvai Earle says:
“It’s not food security, if’s food choice. Who in the world really needs to eat tuna?” she asked.
“It’s not food security if’s food choice. Who in the world really needs to eat tuna?” she asked. “This is a luxury choice, new for most people on the planet since towards the end of the 20th century when marketing created this appetite for tuna that didn’t exist early in the 20th century. People got along perfectly well and ate well without eating tuna.”
Maybe she needs to come to the pacific… where it is food security and it is the main income earner for many of our countries… so much so that we have world tuna day. Also to imply that can tuna is a luxury seems odd
In any case… it took me back to 2009 and one of my first blogs on that early attempt to put my thoughts in place about fish as food… unfortunately not much has changed other than we became more polarised, way deeper into climate impacts and way more righteous about what people think is right (and their right)
Here is a part of what I wrote then, when I was a senior officer at the UN FAO:
A bit more than a year at the UN, has given me a good inside view of this massive organization and exposed me to the "really big picture". I guess the main impact of this job on my life is to really see things from a “truly” global perspective... I have to deal with technical issues at community, regional and at a maximum country level... but here the job is the world...
And while I can remember there always been “apocalyptic” type challenges that never totally eventuate (a tribute to our environment resilience?), I see through my work here some real challenges...
Without trying to provide a complete account of them, some of the most key challenges in the discussion table are:
The key (for me) is that the world population is projected to grow from 6.5 billion in 2005 to nearly 9.2 billion by 2050... to feed a population of more than 9 billion free from hunger, global food production must nearly double by 2050... today’s figure of people living below 2 USD/day is 58% of the world population...
The entire population growth will take place in developing countries and it will occur wholly in urban areas, which will swell by 3.2 billion people as rural populations contract. That means that a shrinking rural workforce will have to be much more productive and deliver more output from fewer resources.
Higher productivity requires more investment in agriculture, more machinery, more implements, tractors, water pumps, combine harvesters, etc., as well as more skilled and better-trained farmers and better functioning supply chains.
This means that fewer farmers will have to feed a more populous world with fewer resources and minimal access to credit under the present crisis.
One way would be for world agriculture to expand its land basis and use some of the nearly 4.2 billion hectares potentially available for rain-fed crop production (only 1.5 billion ha are currently in use). But that would not be possible without further environmental damage and increased greenhouse gas emission.
Another avenue would be to tap into yet-unused yield-enhancing resources, which could double productivity for many crops in many countries. However, such potential can only be realized if farmers have improved access to inputs, apply better fertilizers in more abundance, make use of better seeds, improve their farming and management skills and expand land under irrigation. These as well are measures that have serious socio-economical and environmental consequences.
In addition to rising resource scarcity, global agriculture will have to cope with the burden of climate change.
The IPCC has documented the likely impact of climate change on agriculture in great detail. If temperatures rise by more than 2C, global food production potential is expected to contract severely and yields of major crops may fall globally. The declines will be particularly pronounced in lower-latitude regions. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, for instance, yields could decline by 20-40%.
In addition, severe weather occurrences such as droughts and floods are likely to intensify and cause greater crop and livestock losses.
Rapidly rising energy prices have created an added challenge for global food supplies. Rising fossil energy prices mean that agriculture will become increasingly important as a supplier to the energy market.
Important here is to understand that the potential demand from the energy market is so large that it has the potential to change the world’s traditional agricultural market systems completely.
However, for me in the short term, even more, critical is likely to be the impact of the financial crisis on the availability of credit, which is widely recognized as one of the major constraints to agriculture development in the developing countries, the rationing of which is likely to be more serious than any interest rate effects.
The combination of falling agricultural prices and reduced access to credit may have a knock off impact on agricultural production, with very serious implications for global food security.
For instance, a cutback in grain plantings against the background of continuing low grain stocks, which have not been rebuilt since the high food price episode, would increase the risk of global food crisis if harvests turn out to be poor, especially if countries cannot access credit for food imports.
As a father, and perhaps just as basically a human... the future kind of scares me... these are not “predictions” of scare far fetched “greenes”... these are people I respect (albeit at different levels).
I guess this basically means that “we all” have a lot of issues to be dealt with ahead of us... but my usual optimism is quite dented... (all the hard data, figures and expansion on these issues can be found here
So yeah… 12 years later… the same problems still stand… not much has happened with the rest of the food productions system, the economic-financial crisis, merged with the COVID one…. the investment needed has not eventuated… and fisheries are relatively stable…. yet they are always evil