Photograph by Islay McLeod
If you were to imagine that the Scottish population represents the world population, then everyone in Scotland aged between 20 and 30 would be suffering from hunger or malnutrition, despite enough food being produced for everyone.
That enough food is produced at all is remarkable: for over 200 years people have predicted that we would not produce enough food for the ever increasing number of people on earth, but so far despite the odds, they have been wrong. Although there are now twice as many people on earth as half a century ago, on average each of us has more to eat.
Indeed, the success of the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ resulted in faster growing plants that were more resistant to disease allowing more food to be produced. Much of this is due to increased use of fertilisers, but even pigs now produce twice as much meat, and cows twice as much milk. However, despite this apparent abundance of food, poor distribution networks mean that it is not always in the right place. There is large-scale food waste in some parts, whilst elsewhere people are left starving.
If solving food distribution problems was not challenging enough, we are expecting the world’s population to grow even further. Even ignoring the compounding factor of climate change, estimates suggest that we may need twice as much food by 2050. This presents us with a very real problem: to increase food we either expand the area dedicated to producing it, or we need to increase the production from our farms and our seas.
This is where we need to consider the environment, and the long-term ecological cost of producing food. Expanding our agricultural footprint is not an acceptable solution. This is not only because of competing demands for other uses of the land, but also because of the higher value of protecting biodiversity (for example for its role in providing carbon storage) rather than expanding agriculture further. There is also little available room to expand on land, whilst at sea there are no new major fishing grounds, with most already fully exploited. So the alternative is to find ways of increasing food production as sustainably as possible, and tying it into reducing food waste.
Reducing food waste may be difficult, but it is not controversial. There have been a number of laudable campaigns recently and we can expect awareness to lead to action. In some areas it already has – European ministers have now agreed to eliminate the practice of throwing dead fish into the sea, rather than landing them to market. Food waste is therefore being tackled.
Where there is controversy is over increasing the amount of food produced. News articles abound with the environmental risks of doing so to such an extent that many practices that could increase our yields have been banned in the European Union. Whilst we should, undoubtedly, be concerned with the wider impact of our actions, this ‘concern’ is increasingly becoming an issue of first-world arrogance.
We are nervous about the long-term impacts of genetically modified food, so none are grown commercially in Europe. However we still import genetically modified food that has been grown elsewhere. We have also banned a whole host of fertilisers and pesticides that are thought might reduce bee numbers or pollute our streams. But again, we import food from elsewhere that has been treated with these chemicals.
We are reducing fishing in our waters, but are seemingly content to import fish from distant over-exploited seas by paying fishermen more than the locals would. In other words, we are exporting our environmental concerns, but importing what they produce: we are getting the benefit without the cost.
If avoiding the environmental cost were not bad enough, we are also doing our trade on the cheap. Such is first-world demand for cheap food that we are offering hard cash to traditional farmers in Africa and Asia to grow crops for us rather than growing food for their own people. Essentially we are paying others to produce cheap food for us, using practices we deem too environmentally damaging to have in our backyard, and without regard for those left hungry.
So what should we be doing to solve this threefold challenge of reducing world hunger, increasing food production, and doing so in an environmentally sustainable way? We first need to reduce the gap between what is currently being produced, and what could be produced if we were to maximise our use of available practices and technologies. This might, for example, include using different varieties of seeds or a particular type of machinery. In other words if we are importing food from elsewhere, we should make sure doing so can support both the needs of the local populations and our needs.
The funding is significant, but given that we are calling the shots on price, quantity and environmental impact, then we should foot the bill to allow this to happen without aggravating the world hunger situation and without damaging agricultural and fishing practices taking place out of sight, and therefore out of mind.
Louise Cunningham, who presented this paper at the International Young Scotland Programme, was an independent delegate who works for the Scottish Government. She is expressing here her personal views
