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April 18, 2008

FACE IT, WE ALL AREN'T GOING TO BECOME VEGETARIANS

By George Monbiot

Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent
threat: the great food recession that is sweeping the world faster
than the credit crunch.

You have probably seen the figures by now: The price of rice has risen
by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130 percent.
There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people,
according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by
the high prices. But I'll bet you have missed the most telling
statistic. At 2.1 billion tons, last year's global grain harvest broke
all records. It beat the previous year's by almost 5 percent. The
crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit
by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if
harvests decline? There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching
human stomachs. Of the 2.13 billion tons likely to be consumed this
year, only 1.01 billion, according to the United Nations' Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO), will feed people. I am sorely tempted
to write another column about biofuels. From this morning all sellers
of transport fuel in the United Kingdom will be obliged to mix it with
ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. The World Bank points out that
"the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with
ethanol... could feed one person for a year."

Last year global stockpiles of cereals declined by around 53 million
tons; this gives you a rough idea of the size of the hunger gap. The
production of biofuels this year will consume almost 100 million tons,
which suggests that they are directly responsible for the current
crisis. In the Guardian yesterday, British Transport Secretary Ruth
Kelly promised that "if we need to adjust policy in the light of new
evidence, we will." What new evidence does she require? In the midst
of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged
to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every
driver in this country has been forced to participate. But I have been
saying this for four years, and I am boring myself. Of course we must
demand that our governments scrap the rules that turn grain into the
fastest food of all. But there is a bigger reason for global hunger,
which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for
longer. While 100 million tons of food will be diverted this year to
feed cars, 760 million tons will be snatched from the mouths of humans
to feed animals. This could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If
you care about hunger, eat less meat.

While meat consumption is booming in Asia and Latin America, in the
United Kingdom it has scarcely changed since the government started
gathering data in 1974. At just over 1 kilogram per person per week,
it's still about 40 percent above the global average, though less than
half the amount consumed in the United States. We eat less beef and
more chicken than we did 30 years ago, which means a smaller total
impact. Beef cattle eat about 8 kilograms of grain or meal for every
kilogram of flesh they produce; a kilogram of chicken needs just 2
kilograms of feed. Even so, our consumption rate is plainly
unsustainable.

In his magazine The Land, Simon Fairlie has updated the figures
produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby's book Can Britain Feed
Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet grown by means of conventional
agriculture would require only 3 million hectares of arable land
(around half the current total). Even if the United Kingdom reduced
its consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4
million hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture.
A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food
stocks. But I cannot advocate a diet I am incapable of following. I
tried it for about 18 months, lost about 28 pounds, went as white as
bone, and felt that I was losing my mind. I know a few healthy-looking
vegans, and I admire them immensely. But after almost every talk I
give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their
lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has
turned a fascinating pearl grey. What level of meat eating would be
sustainable? One approach is to work out how great a cut would be
needed to accommodate the growth in human numbers. The United Nations
expects the population to rise to 9 billion by 2050. These extra
people will require another 325 million tonnes of grain. Let us
assume, perhaps generously, that politicians like Ms. Kelly are able
to "adjust policy in the light of new evidence" and stop turning food
into fuel. Let us pretend that improvements in plant breeding can keep
pace with the deficits caused by climate change. We would need to find
an extra 225 million tons of grain. This leaves 531 million tons for
livestock production, which suggests a sustainable consumption level
for meat and milk, some 30 percent below the current world rate. This
means 420 grams of meat per person per week, or about 40 percent of
the United Kingdom's average consumption.

This estimate is complicated by several factors. If we eat less meat,
we must eat more plant protein, which means taking more land away from
animals. On the other hand, some livestock is raised on pasture, so it
doesn't contribute to the grain deficit. Simon Fairlie estimates that
if animals were kept only on land that's unsuitable for arable
farming, and given scraps and waste from food processing, the world
could produce between a third and two-thirds of its current milk and
meat supply. But this system then runs into a different problem. The
FAO calculates that animal keeping is responsible for 18 percent of
greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impacts are especially
grave in places where livestock graze freely. The only reasonable
answer to the question of how much meat we should eat is: as little as
possible. Let's reserve it -- as most societies have done until
recently -- for special occasions. For both environmental and
humanitarian reasons, beef is out. Pigs and chickens feed more
efficiently, but unless they are free range you encounter another
ethical issue: the monstrous conditions in which they are kept. I
would like to encourage people to start eating tilapia instead of
meat. It's a freshwater fish that can be raised entirely on vegetable
matter and has the best conversion efficiency -- about 1.6 kilograms
of feed for 1 kilogram of meat -- of any farmed animal. Until meat can
be grown in flasks, this is about as close as we are likely to come to
sustainable flesh eating.

Rereading this article, I see that there is something surreal about
it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am
pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price
of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever
before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is
hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy
the same planet, until you realize that they feed off each other.