Food & drink

Three meals away from a riot

In the next forty years, the global population is forecast to rise by a third, demand for agricultural goods will increase by 7%, and demand for meat will double. Governments are being galvanized to put right the last 25 years’ slump in investment in agriculture or see their people starve. Agriculture and food security are hot topics.

Some of the poorest people live in rural areas but merely giving handouts to farmers may not go far enough – they need markets for their produce, good roads to deliver it, and fertile land and sufficient water to be able to grow more. One agency, USAID is helping farmers harvest, store, and sell their own food and has found that many barriers to this are not related to food itself, but to the way markets are organised, credit is offered, and laws are enforced. For example, in Senegal, life is hard for farmers because of police interference and on-the-road shakedowns so, even though 75% of people are employed in the food business, it still has to import 70% of its food supply. It is estimated that sending a metric ton of US corn to Africa costs $US812, compared to giving African farmers seed, fertilizer and support for about $US135.

Food prices rocketed up in 2007-2008 and some of the imbalances that caused this, like rising food demand, rising incomes, and biofuels taking up land for food, are still present. Goldman Sachs claims that agriculture is already at full capacity and there is little fallow land left. Even so, the G8 are spending $US20 billion in the next three years and developing countries are spending even more. African governments have earmarked 10% of their budgets for agriculture, the Philippines has set up a seed bank, Brazil has a safety net in place for farmers to sell $US800 worth of food to the government annually, and India guarantees 100 days of minimum-wage public work for any rural household.

In response to the threat of food insecurity, many state companies and governments are indulging in “land grabs” to grow food so they can become self-sufficient. Farmers are being encouraged to grow for local consumption rather than for export. However, self-sufficiency may not make sense when each country has its own attributes, geography, and response to climate change, and it may be more efficient to foster trade among them.

For example, soil in the Amazon contains a fertile mix of dirt and charred organic matter, years ago termed “dark earth”, which could be used to transform fragile soil in other areas. The Ukraine has similar “black earth” and, given better transport systems and trade policies, could become the breadbasket of Europe again. Finally, the Gates Foundation is funding the creation of a digital soil map of Africa, helping farmers to optimise their use of fertilizer and water and increase yields. When people say, “give us the dirt”, they may well mean something much more crucial to our future.

The unnatural rise of natural food

It is ironic that the rise of “natural” foods comes at a time when many foods don’t look or taste anything like nature intended. Even so, it is a very successful marketing ploy to offer so-called “functional foods”, “wholefoods” and “organic foods” to the wealthy middle classes. PricewaterhouseCoopers expects the global market for functional foods to reach $US128 billion in 2013, from $US78 billion in 2007. People have never been more concerned about, nor able to pay for, their health.

Functional food processes include enrichment of eggs with omega-3 fatty acids, adding sterols to margarines to stop cholesterol absorption, and enriching yoghurts with bacteria. It started in Asia with a bioactive yoghurt drink for the Japanese, who spend twice as much per person on functional foods as Americans and three times more than Europeans. America has taken up with the trend with a coalition called “Smart Choices”, designed to support and define the functional food industry.

The trend has its consumer and regulatory skeptics, not helped by shady examples, such as Coca-Cola’s Vitamin Water and General Mills’ cholesterol-fighting Cheerios. Regulators like the FDA don’t want to see a host of companies jumping on the bandwagon with spurious offerings. The question is really whether this is a fad. I suspect women are most drawn to “healthy” foods, either for themselves or their partners, and it will be difficult to sustain the habit of purchase if they don’t see a clear link between these expensive additions to their diets and better health.

Precision farming via satellite

You’ve heard about satellite TV; now there’s satellite farming. It’s not what it sounds, but satellites are being used to measure electromagnetic radiation reflected from farmland. In this way, farmers discover the properties of the soil, the amount of crop grown, and levels of chlorophyll or minerals or moisture within it. Adding detailed weather maps, current and forecast, then creates a detailed picture of how and when crops should be grown, all for less than $US15 per hectare.

The good news is it can increase yields by 10%, hence its name, “precision farming”. The service is already in use in France, currently the precision farming leader, to help optimise fertiliser formulae. Canada is also using satellite data to diagnose the reasons for falling productivity in Saskatchewan: partly because of use of nitrates. Finally, Nairobi is calculating the radiation signature of some 100,000 samples of soils in the whole of Africa, which will help build a database called the Digital Soil Map.

It may take a while to convince tech-shy farmers of the value of this technology but it certainly gives agricultural authorities information to work with when they are designing strategies for feeding the hungry. Given the urgency of the problem, it sounds like a relatively cheap way to enhance their ability to solve it.

New openings for closed pubs

Many an ex-pat will tell you they miss the wonderful English pubs and, as pubs continue to close at a rate of about 50 a week, resident Brits might be wondering what’s next. There are many reasons for the decline, including the banning of “tied houses” (only selling certain brands), the spate of entrepreneurial PubCos that overborrowed, and now smoke-free legislation. At the same time, keen drinkers can buy cheap alcohol in the supermarkets, to drink at home. As the physical landscape has changed, many old pubs are no longer in the most convenient positions for access or parking.

What is the upside? First of all, 24-hour licensing keeps up with the looser laws that many holidaymakers already enjoyed in Europe. Second, pubs have an opportunity to find out what they are good at and stick to it. This may be superior gastronomy, a good selection of niche beers, or regular communal activities like darts and karaoke. There is no reason why a pub cannot be like post offices or libraries – a centre of community life. In this way, the pub can survive by doing well what they always did – meeting a simple need.

Why overpopulation isn’t a problem

Since time began, there have been doom-mongers who have forecast various terrible catastrophic events. Few of them ever materialise, simply because we lack the imagination to consider what else might happen that ultimately prevents them. Thomas Malthus, for example, claimed in the early 1800s that, if there were too many more births, we would face “epidemics, pestilence and plagues” and “premature death would visit mankind”. At his time, there were 980 million people. There are now 6.7 billion.

The same story is being told in relation to climate change, with fears that the planet cannot sustain a continued growth in population. Yet history seems to demonstrate that, the more people there are, the more minds and bodies there are to create cities, resources, ideas and objects, which further their existence. In fact, there are three reasons why population scaremongers are wrong.

Detractors forget that society changes in all kinds of ways to accommodate more people and population is only one of the variables. They overlook the fact that resources continually change and grow, so what might have seemed important at one time becomes less important later on. Last, they underestimate human genius. This seems to be the crucial point – necessity is the mother of invention – and sometimes we invent things even when we don’t yet know what they are for. Ideas, it seems, are infinite, so there is no need to worry about too many people. And even this article is just another idea.