*[Enwl-eng] How to stop a climate famine
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No images? Click here  Food shortages stemming from extreme weather caused by climate change could provoke civil unrest in the UK within 50 years according to a survey of 58 leading experts. "Shortages of staple carbohydrates like wheat, bread, pasta and cereal appear to be the most likely triggers of such unrest," say Sarah Bridle (University of York) and Aled Jones (Anglia Ruskin University) who led the research. Scientific innovation, in the form of new crop varieties and chemicals, has been credited with averting food shortages in the past. Could something similar save us today? You're reading the Imagine newsletter – a weekly synthesis of academic insight on solutions to climate change, brought to you by The Conversation. I'm Jack Marley, energy and environment editor. This week, we're discussing the precariousness of food production on an overheating planet. At the end of the 1960s, experts who studied international development warned that growing populations in drought-prone countries like India faced starvation in the following decade. Mercifully, "the population bomb" predicted by US biologist Paul R. Ehrlich and others never materialised. The supposed saviour was the "Green Revolution": the introduction of new varieties and high fertiliser doses which brought record Indian wheat harvests from 1968. Today, the problem of feeding a growing world population is made more urgent by mounting floods, heatwaves and droughts. To guarantee yields in an increasingly erratic climate, some organisations have suggested a second green revolution, this time centred on sub-Saharan Africa where the first one had little influence. Glenn Davis Stone, a research professor of environmental science at Sweet Briar College, is sceptical. "The Green Revolution does hold lessons for food production today," he says. "But not the ones that are commonly heard." Stone argues that the Green Revolution did not prevent a food crisis in India. The Indian government paid farmers more money to grow wheat and so they planted more of it. While wheat production sped up, the cultivation of rice, maize and pulses slowed down, and net food production increased at about the same rate as before. Grain production actually became less predictable over time, and India resumed importing food by the mid-1970s. Nor did miracle seeds pioneered by Rockefeller Foundation biologist Norman Borlaug produce more productive crops, he says. New varieties of wheat offered by the US simply responded more vigorously to chemical fertilisers – a commodity which India made very little of. The result was Indian farmers becoming dramatically more dependent on foreign chemical companies. "According to data from Indian economic and agricultural organisations, on the eve of the Green Revolution in 1965, Indian farmers needed 17 pounds (8 kilograms) of fertiliser to grow an average ton of food. By 1980, it took 96 pounds (44 kilograms)," says Stone. "So, India replaced imports of wheat, which were virtually free food aid, with imports of fossil fuel-based fertiliser, paid for with precious international currency." Fossil-fuelled food Not only is agriculture a hostage to global heating, it's also a big contributor to it. A study published in 2020 warned that greenhouse gas emissions from the global food system alone threaten to raise Earth's temperature 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average. Fertiliser factories emit these gases by burning fossil fuels, and their products continue to heat the atmosphere when they are spread on farm fields. In New Zealand, where half of all emissions come from agriculture, dairy farmers have managed to raise yields by using more fertiliser. But this has come at an ultimate cost to their profit margins, not to mention the climate. "The reason why there hasn’t been more progress may be in part because farmers are 'locked in' to the current systems through what economists call path dependency," say Wanglin Ma, Alan Renwick and Kathryn Blackman Bicknell, agricultural economists at Lincoln University, New Zealand. "Investments have been made in both human and physical capital, and for many farms, debts have to be serviced." Stone's revised history of the Green Revolution is a warning about the consequences of making food producers reliant on remote, profit-seeking industries to maintain crop yields. That's relevant today, as farmers are faced with having to transform their operations to limit climate change. "[Food] supply chains – from providing ingredients, to processing and retailing – are mainly controlled by a handful of large companies," says Albert Boaitey, a lecturer in agriculture and economics at Newcastle University. "In the US, Walmart holds a quarter of the grocery market share, while Tesco commands 27% of the UK’s food retail sector." When multinational corporations like these devise measures to decarbonise the supply networks that deliver food to their supermarkets, they pass down obligations that smaller and poorer producers may struggle to fulfil, Boaitey says. For instance, selective breeding of cattle could produce herds which eat less feed and so produce less greenhouse gas. "Still, a modelling study my colleagues and I conducted in 2016, found that farmers are unlikely to adopt this practice if beef processors – primarily large companies downstream in the supply chain – do not pay for feed-efficient cows. Even though our results were published a few years ago, the situation remains largely unchanged," Boaitey says. If more independence is the answer, researchers may have some good news. A study published this year made a startling discovery that could ultimately break the dependency of wheat and other cereals on fertiliser. Giles Oldroyd, a professor of crop science at the University of Cambridge, says that during their evolution, cereals diverged from legumes. These are plants which make pulses like beans, lentils and chickpeas and can turn abundant nitrogen in the air into fertiliser with the help of symbiotic bacteria. But cereals have enough shared heritage with these plants that they could be retrained to seek out such beneficial bacteria and fungi, Oldroyd says: "While still in early discovery, research suggests it may be possible to grow crops without huge amounts of chemical fertiliser in the future. This [could] benefit smallholder farmers in low-income countries who lack access to fertilisers, and could also provide much needed reductions of agriculture’s pollution and greenhouse gas emissions." - Jack Marley, Environment commissioning editor Was this email forwarded to you? Join the 20,000 people who get one email every week about the most important issue of our time. Subscribe to Imagine.  The Green Revolution is a warning, not a blueprint for feeding a hungry planet Did the Green Revolution, which brought high-tech agriculture to developing nations in the 1960s, prevent famine? Recent research takes a much more sceptical view.  Farmers are bearing the brunt of big food companies’ decarbonisation efforts – here’s why Big name food brands are pursuing decarbonisation – but they are squeezing farmers in the process.  How dormant plant traits could be reawakened to unlock fertiliser-free farming Farming has made crop plants reliant on synthetic fertilisers, but we can reactivate their ability to engage with beneficial microorganisms and make them more independent.  Dairy farming in New Zealand has intensified by using more supplementary feed. While this boosts production, costs also rise and this ultimately cuts profits - and it adds more harm to the climate.  Global food system emissions alone threaten warming beyond 1.5°C – but we can act now to stop it Modern agriculture releases lots of different greenhouse gas emissions, each with complex effects on the global climate.  Climate change could lead to food-related civil unrest in UK within 50 years, say experts Our study shows the UK must prepare for, and respond to, the risks associated with future food shortages. Reader comment of the week 💬
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Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2023 10:02 PM
Subject: How to stop a climate famine |
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