Global Food Disaster At Hand?

Lester Brown, founder of the WorldWatch Institute and a noted environmentalist, spoke in Boulder on February 17. He was promoting his latest book, "Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble" (which I highly recommend, by the way). He wasted no time in getting to the point: many people have been warning of various dire consequences of "business as usual" on the environment, and that sooner or later something of major environmental significance would disrupt human society. The only question is, when will disaster hit, and what form will it take?

Many various answers have been given, usually safely dated many years in the future. But Brown has made the most specific and stark predictions to date: a major disruption will occur this year or next, and it will occur in the realm of food shortages. 

Brown's concern is propelled by the fall in grain production. We've all known that grain production has been growing more slowly than population for several decades, resulting in a relative drop in grain availability per capita. But for the past four years, we have seen an absolute drop in grain production, and grain reserves have fallen to their lowest point in three decades -- grain production now cannot even keep up with existing population, let alone population growth.

The most important immediate factor in this decline, according to Brown, is global warming. Of course there are other underlying reasons such as soil erosion, groundwater depletion, and so forth, but global warming has now become a very significant factor. On very hot days, crop growth slows down or stops, so a lot of intensely hot summer days will affect grain production, as the record heat in Europe did last year. Brown cites statistics that for each 1 degree Celsius (almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit) that the average temperature of growing season increases, there is a 10% drop in grain production. 

All of this, of course, is very much related to meat consumption. Meat is Ahigh on the food chain@ and very inefficient in terms of the use of natural resources to produce food. Plant foods give 3, 5, 10, or 20 times more Areturn@ on the natural resource investment of land, water, or energy than does animal products -- it varies depending on the type of animal food, the type of plant food, and the mode of production. 

Ironically, just as grain production has been falling, meat consumption has been climbing worldwide! This trend is not so much evident in the United States, where meat consumption is stable, as it is in countries such as China which have sought to increase their consumption of animal products dramatically. Groundwater tables are falling in China, India, and the United States to cultivate land needed to feed all of the livestock required for increased meat production. Moreover, deforestation to clear lands for cattle, as well as the expansion of deserts due to overgrazing, have contributed directly to global warming as well as to soil erosion. 


China has been experiencing serious soil erosion problems, a result of overcultivation and overgrazing. There is now a Adust bowl@ in Western China, and in 2001 winds blew these sands eastward with measurable amounts of dust reaching Boulder, Colorado. In February 2004, the Chinese government increased its agricultural budget by 25%, mostly to raise support prices for wheat and rice. The Chinese are well equipped to import the grain they need: their trade surplus with the United States would buy the entire U. S. grain harvest several times over. So when China is unable to get all the grain it needs to feed its growing meat habit, we may be looking at dramatic rises in food prices not only in China, but in the United States as well. 

In a world in which meat production is so wasteful, doesn't this have obviously vegetarian implications? Why does Brown not fully embrace vegetarianism, as others at the WorldWatch Institute which he founded have done? When asked a question about vegetarianism, Brown said that eating low on the food chain clearly is helpful, even though he is evidently not yet vegetarian. But he then gave a complicated argument that in terms of protein return, plant foods are not that much better than animal foods. 

The argument goes something like this: it's true that when you feed corn to animals, it is a less efficient use of protein. But corn is a poor protein source for humans. If we switch from corn to soybeans -- a better protein source -- we also lose protein production (because you can grow more corn per acre than you can grow soybeans). Therefore, growing corn and then feeding corn to chickens or catfish and then eating the meat isn't so bad after all. When I pointed out afterwards that corn has 15% of calories as protein, and the human requirement is about 8% on a diet with adequate calories, he responded, "but it's deficient in lysine." Brown still buys the idea of protein complementarity! 

Some might say that this is not Brown's real reason for avoiding vegetarianism, but is just an excuse. However, I'm inclined to accept him at his word. His reluctance to embrace vegetarianism is wrapped up in issues concerning protein nutrition. By focusing on protein -- the one nutrient which meat provides in abundance, though still less efficiently than plant foods -- he minimizes the importance of vegetarianism. It is ironic that Brown (as well as others in the environmental movement) are being held back by primitive ideas about protein. Being protein deficient on an otherwise adequate diet is almost impossible to do.

It is also ironic that the vegetarian community is largely oblivious to environmental issues. The average environmentalist's grasp of protein nutrition may be primitive, but no more so than the average vegetarian's grasp of environmental issues. The environment is an issue which is not going to go away, and which in the coming decades will probably sweep away all others, as food shortages, global warming, species extinction, and all the other nasty effects of a lifestyle which promotes overconsumption of everything become more evident. We as vegetarians need to have greater understanding of environmental issues, and need to promote environmentalism within our movement as well as elsewhere.