Book Report: OUTGROWING THE EARTH: THE FOOD SECURITY CHALLENGE IN AN AGE OF FALLING WATER TABLES AND RISING TEMPERATURES
Book Report: OUTGROWING THE EARTH: THE FOOD SECURITY CHALLENGE IN AN AGE OF FALLING WATER TABLES AND RISING TEMPERATURES
From Charles Dixon: New book by Lester Brown, author of “Who Will Feed China?” Coming this February …
OUTGROWING THE EARTH: THE FOOD SECURITY CHALLENGE IN AN AGE OF FALLING WATER TABLES AND RISING TEMPERATURES
by Lester R. Brown (W.W. Norton & Co.)
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Out/Contents.htm
Order your copy today and get free shipping (U.S. and Canada only) or call 202.496.9290 x 13.
OUTGROWING THE EARTH: Preface
On hearing his political opponent described as a modest chap, Winston Churchill reputedly responded that “he has much to be modest about.” Having just completed a book dealing with the increasingly complex issue of world food security, I too feel that I have a lot to be modest about.
Assessing the world food prospect was once rather straightforward, largely a matter of extrapolating, with minor adjustments, historically recent agricultural supply and demand trends. Now suddenly that is all changing. It is no longer just a matter of trends slowing or accelerating; in some cases they are reversing direction.
Grain harvests that were once rising everywhere are now falling in some countries. Fish catches that were once rising are now falling. Irrigated area, once expanding almost everywhere, is now shrinking in some key food-producing regions.
Beyond this, some of the measures that are used to expand food production today, such as overpumping aquifers, almost guarantee a decline in food production tomorrow when the aquifers are depleted and the wells go dry. The same can be said for overplowing and overgrazing. We have entered an era of discontinuity on the food front, an era where making reliable projections is ever more difficult.
New research shows that a 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature leads to a decline in wheat, rice, and corn yields of 10 percent. In a century where temperatures could rise by several degrees Celsius, harvests could be devastated.
Although climate change is widely discussed, we are slow to grasp its full meaning. Everyone knows the earth’s temperature is rising, but commodity analysts often condition their projections on weather returning to “normal,” failing to realize that with climate now in flux, there is no normal to return to.
Falling water tables are also undermining food security. Water tables are now falling in countries that contain more than half the world’s people. While there is a broad realization that we are facing a future of water shortages, not everyone has connected the dots to see that a future of water shortages will be a future of food shortages.
Perhaps the biggest agricultural reversal in recent times has been the precipitous decline in China’s grain production since 1998. Ten years ago in “Who Will Feed China?” I projected that China’s grain production would soon peak and begin to decline. But I did not anticipate that it would drop by 50 million tons between 1998 and 2004. Since 1998 China has covered this decline by drawing down its once massive stocks of grain. Now stocks are largely depleted and China is turning to the world market. Its purchase of 8 million tons of wheat to import in 2004 could signal the beginning of a shift from a world food economy dominated by surpluses to one dominated by scarcity.
Overnight, China has become the world’s largest wheat importer. Yet it will almost certainly import even more wheat in the future, not to mention vast quantities of rice and corn. It is this potential need to import 30, 40, or 50 million tons of grain a year within the next year or two and the associated emergence of a politics of food scarcity that is likely to put food security on the front page of newspapers.
At the other end of the spectrum is Brazil, the only country with the potential to expand world cropland area measurably. But what will the environmental consequences be of continuing to clear and plow Brazil’s vast interior? Will the soils sustain cultivation over the longer term? Will the deforestation in the Amazon disrupt the recycling of rainfall from the Atlantic Ocean to the country’s interior? And how many plant and animal species will Brazil sacrifice to expand its exports of soybeans?
Food security, which was once the near-exclusive province of ministries of agriculture, now directly involves several departments of government. In the past, ministries of transportation did not need to think about food security when formulating transport policies. But in densely populated developing countries today, the idea of having a car in every garage one day means paving over a large share of their cropland. Many countries simply do not have enough cropland to pave for cars and to grow food for their people.
Or consider energy. Energy ministers do not attend international conferences on food security. But they should. The decisions they make in deciding which energy sources to develop will directly affect atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and future changes in temperature. In fact, the decisions made in ministries of energy may have a greater effect on long-term food security than those made in ministries of agriculture.
Future food security now depends on the combined efforts of the ministries of agriculture, energy, transportation, health and family planning, and water resources. It also depends on strong leadership—leadership that is far better informed on the complex set of interacting forces affecting food security than most political leaders are today.
Take a look at the Table of Contents and read Chapter 1, “Pushing Beyond the Earth’s Limits” (online now in Adobe format). http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Out/Contents.htm
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The following is a section from Chapter 3, Moving Up the Food Chain Efficiently, from "Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures" by Lester R. Brown, which will be published February 3, 2005.
OUTGROWING THE EARTH: THE SOYBEAN FACTOR
When we think of soybeans in our daily diet, it is typically as tofu, veggie burgers, or other meat substitutes. But most of the world's fast-growing soybean harvest is consumed indirectly in the beef, pork, poultry, milk, eggs, and farmed fish that we eat. Although not a visible part of our diets, the incorporation of soybean meal into feed rations has revolutionized the world feed industry, greatly increasing the efficiency with which grain is converted into animal protein.
In 2004, the world's farmers produced 223 million tons of soybeans, 1 ton for every 9 tons of grain they produced. Of this, some 15 million tons were consumed as tofu or meat substitutes. The remaining 208 million tons were crushed in order to extract 33 million tons of soybean oil, separating it from the more highly valued meal. Soybean oil dominates the world vegetable oil economy, supplying much of the oil used for cooking and to dress salads. Soybean oil production exceeds that of all the other table oils combined--olive, safflower, canola, sunflower, and palm oil.
The 143 million tons of soybean meal that remains after the oil is extracted is fed to cattle, pigs, chicken, and fish, enriching their diets with high-quality protein. Experience in feeding shows that combining soybean meal with grain, in roughly one part meal to four parts grain, dramatically boosts the efficiency with which grain is converted into animal protein, sometimes nearly doubling it.
The world's three largest meat producers--China, the United States, and Brazil--now all rely heavily on soybean meal as a protein supplement in feed rations. The United States has long used soybean meal to upgrade livestock and poultry feed. As early as 1964, 8 percent of feed rations consisted of soybean meal. Over most of the last decade, the meal content of U.S. feeds has fluctuated between 17 and 19 percent.
For Brazil, the shift to soybean meal as a protein supplement began in the late 1980s. From 1986 to 1997, the soymeal share of feed rations jumped from 2 percent to 21 percent. In China, the realization that feed use efficiency could be dramatically boosted with soymeal was translated into reality some six years later. Between 1991 and 2002, the soymeal component of feed jumped from 2 percent to 20 percent. For fish, whose protein demands are particularly high, China incorporated some 5 million tons of soymeal into the 16 million tons of grain-based fish feed used in 2003.
The experience of these three countries simply indicates that the same principles of animal nutrition apply everywhere. The ratio of soybean meal to corn in the feed mix varies somewhat according to the price relationship between the two. Where corn is cheap, as in the United States, the corn share of the feed mix tends to be slightly higher. In Brazil, which has an economic advantage in soybean production, the soy component is higher.
As world grain production was tripling from 1950 to 2004, soybean production was expanding thirteenfold. The growth in this protein source, most of it consumed indirectly in various animal products, is a surrogate for rising affluence, one that measures movement up the food chain.
The soybean was domesticated in central China some 5,000 years ago and made its way to the United States in 1804, when Thomas Jefferson was President. For a century and a half the soybean was grown mostly as a curiosity crop in home gardens. Most farmers outside of China did not even know what a soybean looked like. But after World War II, production exploded as the consumption of livestock and poultry products climbed in North America and Europe.
By 1978, the area planted to soybeans in the United States had eclipsed that planted to wheat. In some recent years, the U.S. harvested area of soybeans has exceeded that of corn, making it the country's most widely planted crop. In the United States, where soybean production is now five times that in China, the soybean has found an ecological and economic niche far larger than in its country of origin.
U.S. soybeans are grown mostly in the Corn Belt, often in rotation with corn. The soybean, a nitrogen-fixing legume, and corn, which has a ravenous appetite for nitrogen, fit together nicely on the same piece of land in alternate years. In fact, if the Corn Belt were being named today, it would be called the Corn/Soybean Belt.
Another chapter in the soybean saga has been unfolding over the past three decades in Latin America. After the collapse in 1972 of the Peruvian anchovy fishery--which accounted for a fifth of the world fish catch and supplied much of the protein meal used in livestock and poultry foods at that time--some countries in Latin America saw an opportunity to produce soybeans. As a result, both Brazil and Argentina began to expand soybean production, slowly at first and then, during the 1990s, at breakneck speed. As of 2004, soybean production exceeds that of all grains combined in both countries. Brazil now exports more soybeans than the United States does. And within the next few years Brazil is likely to overtake the United States in production as well.
While production was increasing thirteenfold over the last half-century, soybean yields have almost tripled, which means that the area in soybeans has increased some fourfold. In contrast to grains, where the growth in output has come largely from raising yields, growth in the harvest of the land-hungry soybean has come more from area expansion.
As a result, in a world with limited cropland resources, the soybean has been expanding partly at the expense of grain. Nonetheless, this expansion so greatly increases the efficiency of grain used for feed that it reduces the cropland area used to produce feedgrains and soybeans together.
# # # Lester R. Brown is President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit environmental research organization focused on providing a vision of an environmentally sustainable economy--an eco-economy--and a road map of how to get from here to there.
Burgeoning SOYBEAN market transforming South American environment
From Grist magazine, 12-04
The global market for soybeans is exploding, largely driven by massive demand from China, and the resulting modern-day agricultural gold rush is transforming the landscape in South America. Farmers are chopping down rainforests, colonizing savannahs, damming rivers, and digging canals, all in an effort to get more land to raise the crop, which has lifted many of them out of poverty in an astonishingly short period of time. Argentinean acreage devoted to soybeans went from about 17 million in 1997 to more than 34 million today, Brazil from 32 million to 57 million. The boom in farming is driving down prices, meaning that American soybean farmers are relying more and more on federal subsidies ($1.6 billion this year) and may soon be driven from the market entirely. South American governments welcome the economic boost and largely look the other way as forests are cleared illegally.
Straight to the source: AZcentral.com, Knight Ridder, Kevin G. Hall, 16 Dec 2004
http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=3880
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