Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist.
We don't want to focus politics on a notion that involves the rejection of principles around which a large majority of our fellow citizens or organisms live.
We are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think.
Well, food prices have been in the news a lot over the last few years.
Prices effectively doubled between 2006 and 2008.
There's a bit of a dip in 2009 with the financial crisis, but since then they've risen right back up again and stayed high since.
This has an effect on all of us, probably when you go shopping you notice a difference on the bills.
But the real impact has been felt not in rich countries but in poor developing countries where it's led to increase in hunger for about 13 million extra malnourished people in Africa in 2009.
It's led to riots, it's led to protests in the overthrow of governments.
As a result of the last few years you've seen a lot more talk about Robert Malthus and Malthusian theories of population over stretch and imminent food collapse.
And so what I want to talk about today is really the question of can we feed a world of 9 billion?
And at what cost? Environmental cost and the cost of our prosperity and also in terms of our peace and security.
When we look at the causes of the food crisis and the recent rise in food prices, there isn't just one cause.
It's been called a concatenation of events.
However, I think it is possible to separate proximate causes from root causes.
And I'd point to four things I think are going on which are driving changes in the global food system.
One is around rising demand by Asian consumers from meat.
Even as soon ago as 2000, the Asian growing economies and it's excluding Japan and South Korea were effectively self-sufficient when it came to grains and oil seas and major food staples.
But that's begun to change and we see it most prominently in the case of soybeans.
Chinese government made a strategic decision to back the domestic pig industry by importing soybeans from abroad.
And now China imports about 56 million tons of soybeans a year.
In the old days, if you had the increase in global demand for food, what happened was the U.S. tended to fill the gap.
That hasn't happened over the last five years.
U.S. food exports have barely budged, although at the same time domestic food production in the U.S. has grown massively.
So what's going on? The answer is biofuels in that more and more of the U.S. grains are being converted into ethanol,
blend of a gasoline and any other car engines.
I think the latest statistics show that four out of ten bushels of corn or maize are now converted to ethanol.
Over the last few years, we've seen prices doubling.
This is the FAO food price index.
Bit of a dip and then coming back up again.
And then this chart shows two things. When the black line is the amount of U.S. maize converted to biofuels,
and you'll see going back to 2000, a fairly minimal amount,
and that's now creased to about 120 million tons of maize each year.
Similarly, if you look at Chinese net imports of grains and oil seeds,
and the most important oil seed being soybeans,
you'll see that China was effectively self-sufficient up until the turn of the century,
and now we've had this dramatic increase of imports.
So that's on the supply side.
It explains why, sorry, on the demand side, why we've had increasing demand for foods.
On the supply side, we're also seeing problems.
And in a way, you could say that nature is kicking back against mankind's abuses.
We're seeing this with climate, more extreme weather events.
In the summer of 2010, Russia was hit by a massive heat wave,
led to fires, destruction of crops. The harvest fell from 100 million tons of wheat to 60.
Russia banned wheat exports, and the price of wheat rose by 60% in a few months.
But it's not just in Russia. We've seen drought in Australia.
We've seen floods in Pakistan.
The U.S. had the highest temperatures ever in July 2012,
which decimated crops there as well.
All the evidence and the science are showing that this is consistent with climate change.
We're likely to see more extreme weather events. This trend is already starting.
But there are other ways in which food production is hitting up against ecological limits.
Water scarcity, soil erosion, development resistance to pests and diseases, plant breeding,
the ecological and biological limits of how much you can get out of a plant.
And so far, technologies like genetic modification may have simplified farming operations for some,
but haven't really led to yield increases yet.
One of my favorite stories actually from Saudi Arabia of an example of these ecological limits.
Saudi Arabia is known as a dry country. It's mostly desert.
But in the 1980s, the government decided they're going to develop a domestic wheat production industry.
And they did this by pumping water out of aquifers underground.
And these green circles are the lines created by center pivot irrigation
as it turns around a central bore going down underneath.
It's very successful. Saudi Arabia produced lots of wheat.
At one point in the 1990s, Saudi Arabia was the sixth largest wheat exporter in the world.
But it came at a huge price because these are fossilized aquifers.
The water levels began dropping dramatically.
And in 2008, the Saudi government realized that they had to stop this.
Not only was it going to affect agriculture productivity,
but there's going to be no water left for cities either.
And so they decided to phase that wheat production completely by 2016,
and Saudi Arabia is now buying lots of wheat from the global market.
So I think what we're seeing is a mixture of factors on the demand side and the supply side.
And in a way, although the mechanism is complex, the end result is simple.
For seven out of eight years in 2000 and 2008, the food production fell behind food consumption.
So we're effectively living offering our reserves.
And that's one of the big reasons why food prices have left.
So what does this mean for the future?
The world population is 7 billion now is going to grow to 9 billion by 2050.
The UN Food and Agricultural Organization says we need to increase food production by 70% in the next 40 years.
Can we do this?
Or should we all buy a shotgun, stock up the bunker, and prepare for the Malthusian collapse?
The good news is I think all the science shows that we can increase food production.
At the moment about 1.6 billion hectares of land is used for crop production all around the world.
And a group in Austria called EASA have a lot of time modeling soils, terrain, and climate
and working out what new lands could be brought into production, excluding all forests and protected areas.
And what they found is there's about 1.3 billion hectares of extra land which could be brought into production.
About 60% is in Africa and South America,
but there's also still quite big reserves left in Central Asia, North America, and Russia.
In a way this doesn't even matter because we can massively increase production on currently cultivated land without even touching this.
What this shows is current yields versus what could be achieved given the natural conditions.
And you'll see anywhere where it's dark green means countries, regions achieving 80, 90% of the biological maximum,
which is probably as much as you can go, and countries in yellow about 50% and red well below.
Parts of Western Europe, Eastern China already very productive per hectare,
but if you look at parts of Africa they might be producing a quarter of the yields that could be achieved
given soils, terrain, and climate.
And even North America, South America probably still has room to grow.
That's under current climate.
And what about climate change and global warming in the next 50 years?
And while this is an absolutely huge threat for the future,
we're likely to only see about a one degree of warming in the next 40 years.
Globally, net, net, climate isn't going to stop us producing enough food if we adapt properly.
Later in the century, things get a lot scarier.
If we get four or five degrees of warming, it gets more complicated.
But for the next 50 years, we can do it.
And similarly, some of the arguments around peak water, peak oil, peak nitrogen,
finite resources running out, some of these have been exaggerated.
There's a lot more resources than people think.
But really more importantly, there are more ecological farming systems,
which make a lot more efficient use of resources,
which actually can be very beneficial for the environment.
We can produce more food.
We can produce 70% more.
But there's another reason, because even if we produce not one extra bushel of grain,
we can still feed 9 billion people.
Why? Because the way we use food now is so inefficient and so wasteful.
So we waste about a third of all the food that's produced.
And similarly, we feed about half of all the grains to animals,
which is an inefficient way to produce meat.
So the simple fact is, we already produce enough food to feed 10 billion people.
It's actually a question of how the food is distributed, accessed and priced.
So that's the good news.
The high food prices, which we've seen over the last years, are probably here to stay.
More volatile prices, we're going to see that too.
So more peaks, as well as a few troughs along the way.
But I think also what we're going to see is a much more imbalanced global food system.
Because the figures I gave before about the ability of the world to produce food at the global level
mask some very big regional differences.
So the places where we can grow food is not necessarily where food is going to be most needed.
What you see is a certain parts of the world, like Australia, Russia, South America, parts of Africa,
where there's actually a lot of arable land per person.
But you get down to the bottom in some of the very density populated areas,
and the situation is very different.
The one region which jumps out is South Asia.
That's India, it's Pakistan, it's Bangladesh, Afghanistan.
At the moment, that region has about 1.7 billion people.
The population is expected to go to 2.4 billion in the next 40 years.
Already there's very little land per person, and there's not much room to grow.
So a more imbalanced food system, what's the answer to that?
Well, obviously it's trade.
It's the exchange of food between regions of plenty with regions of scarcity.
And that's the conclusion all the economists come to.
We need to open up trade, take away tariffs,
allow food to spread out efficiently across the world.
But I think if you look at what happened as a result of higher food prices,
the food crisis over the last few years, you'll see the very opposite has happened.
But by far the most striking phenomenon to come out of the food crisis
is the large scale acquisition of farmland in developing countries,
particularly in Africa, so what people have called land grabs.
And this really is something new.
We probably haven't seen it since the 19th century.
We've had investments in commercial cash crops in the 20th century,
but investments in basic grain production in large scale in African countries
is something we haven't seen since the colonial era.
Who's behind it? China gets blamed.
It's actually probably doing a lot less than people think, especially in Africa.
Middle Eastern countries are very active, South Korea, Indian companies,
and a number of purely financial players out of Europe and North America.
Where are they most active? Probably in Africa.
Sudan and Ethiopia have been the focus of a lot of activity,
but it's scattered in a way all over Africa.
You add it all up, all these deals cover about 50 million hectares,
which is about the total size of Tunisia.
So it's a big area of land.
So if this is the new geopolitics of food, there's actually plenty to worry about,
because if small local farmers have pushed off the land,
they'll be less able to grow food for themselves and their families.
If big corporations have more dominance over the food system,
they'll be able to store prices, potentially reduce tax burdens around the world.
And if food insecure countries from the Middle East and from Asia
are able to create captive supply chains, there'll be less food left for the rest of the world.
And so global food markets will become even thinner and even more volatile.
And the people who will suffer in this world will be the poor developing countries
who don't have the wealth or the geopolitical clout
to be able to create their own supply chains for food.
On the pessimistic side, these trends are probably intensifying
and they've only begun and could lead us in a very worrying direction.
I think on the more positive side, we've seen that the ability to grow food
is not limited by natural constraints, by planetary resources.
Instead, it's caused by human action, so by political and economic systems.
And because of that, it is amenable to human solution.
And so I think there are certain things that we can do that we need to do
to build more just and sustainable food systems.
One of them is helping poor developing countries, in particular in Africa,
to grow more food.
I think Africa is a crucible for a lot of the issues that I've talked about today.
On the one hand, it's got a rapidly expanding population,
it's very dependent on food imports at the moment,
and it could really get squeezed by some of the geopolitical developments.
On the other hand, it actually has lots of good land, water and resources,
and it could use agriculture as a real motor for general economic development.
So I think African countries need to invest and focus on agriculture.
They need to give them the freedom to use tariffs and subsidies
if they need them to grow their sectors
just the way Asian countries have done over the last 40 years.
And this agriculture revolution should be focused on small farmers,
not necessarily big, large commercial players.
Huge opportunities for these countries to grow their productivity,
to satisfy their own needs and also to chip in and fill the needs of the world.
How should they do that?
I think there's also an opportunity to shift to more what we might call
agroecological farming systems,
ones which use less finite resources,
whether that's oil, whether it's fertilizer,
whether it's non-reliable water reserves,
make better use of natural ecological processes,
less pollution in the environment, but also extremely productive.
And I'll give you an example of one such system.
Well, these pictures show our ranches.
So the first is Day Creek, Arizona,
and then next door, within maybe two kilometers,
a different ranch, same soil, same water, same everything, different management.
Similarly in Sonoran Desert, Mexico, there's a ranch on the left,
and a next door ranch, same everything, but different management.
Another example is Zimbabwe, and again next door.
And interesting, the water in that slide in the bottom right,
they didn't get more rain.
The water is there because the healthier soils have soaked up like a sponge,
and are released more slowly.
The problems on the left were caused, many people believe,
overgrazing by too many animals.
But actually, there's twice as many livestock on the examples on the right.
So twice as many cattle, twice as many sheep.
And what this system is, a man called Alan Savry, who's originated it,
called holistic management sometimes,
it's a way of grouping animals in big herds, dividing land up into smaller products,
and using a planned rotational grazing, so they have a lot of impact on the soil,
and then there's time for rest.
And if you manage animals in the correct way,
you can completely transform the health of the soils and ecosystems.
There's a positive role to be played by financial capital.
I think it isn't investing in commodity futures funds,
which I don't think play a particularly useful role in trade or pricing.
And I think there is a role for financial capital to support increases in productivity
in poor countries, and in particular to back more ecological farming systems,
food production systems.
I think those systems are not only more sustainable, but they're less risky
than some of the more conventional industrial models that we see.
And then finally, maybe it's learning to love high food prices.
We talk a lot about high food prices as seen as a very bad thing,
and it is if you're a poor community in poor countries.
But I think if we invest properly in agricultural development in those countries,
then actually higher prices can be the incentive they need to produce more,
and it can create this virtual cycle of development.
I think things like bioenergy can be part of that mix if it's handled the right way.
So I think as we look forward next 40 years, what can you do?
What can we all do?
I think everyone can play a role.
I think we can take food for granted.
We need to pay a lot more attention to how food is produced, how it's traded,
how it's consumed.
We can feed the world of 9 billion.
The question is, will we?
And I think it really comes down to how we manage our political economic systems
to make sure we put the right circumstances in place to allow that to happen.
Thank you.
I wanted to touch base on this issue of waste at the production end.
What's the answer to that?
A lot of the waste that's not happening at the farm is when it leaves the farm,
whether it's refrigeration, storage, grain silos, the whole food supply system.
Largely, it's the symptom of, again, limited economic development
because we don't have the sophisticated companies and systems in place
all across the economy, not just in food, but everything.
And so it needs investment, it needs big organisations,
it needs just more efficient economic sectors in these countries.
I wanted to conclude by just asking you about the role that we as citizens can play
in contributing to positive change,
whether that's be through our investments or our own activities as consumers
or public policy engagement?
Well, I think as consumers we can all play a role in thinking more carefully
about what we buy, where it comes from, how it's produced.
Fundamentally, a lot of these issues do come down to policy,
and it may not be at the global level, and it's very hard,
but the national level, there's lots of changes that can be made
in the UK all over the world.
So I think a lot of it comes down to us being good food citizens in a way
and really pressing governments to take to action.
But then I think the final thing we can all do is get more involved as doers,
in that agriculture and farming and food systems,
they've been quite neglected for many, many years,
and people were mostly getting out of agriculture.
The average age of farmers is close to 60 and most of the developed world
hasn't been seen as a very attractive profession.
I think there's great opportunities now for people to get involved in producing food,
whether it's as a farmer, as an entrepreneur, as an investor,
but I think just finding these systems back and rolling,
improving that they can be profitable, productive and sustainable at the same time.
Please join me in thanking Paul McLean.
