Our changing world - We’d be fools to dismiss food threat

Anyone who has even casually studied how our Great Famine needlessly became the devastating catastrophe in our history cannot but be appalled at how British civil servants and politicians used starvation and the denial of food aid — life — to try to advance inhuman political and social philosophies.

Even at this remove, and even in the light of very welcome new and warm relationships across these islands, that grossly immoral behaviour still stands as a grand crime against humanity.

One of the many reasons that something around one million people died because of hunger or disease is that it took far too long for British officials, especially the cold-hearted champions of the free market in the exchequer, to grasp the gravity of the crisis. Another is that because of crop failures right across Europe alternative foods became scarce and hence very expensive.

It is hard to imagine, in today’s world with pictures from Mars and instant mass communications, that such a catastrophe might recur but about 25,000 people die of hunger or hunger-related causes every day.

And, frighteningly, scientists have warned that that figure will escalate unless we radically change our diet and change the focus of western agriculture. We can turn a deaf ear, as Whitehall did 160 years ago, or we can change our ways and prepare for what seems an inevitable, meat-poor future.

The Stockholm International Water Institute warns that we will have to reduce the world’s meat-based diet from 20% to 5% to cope with water shortages and feed the extra two billion people anticipated in less than 30 years. The report warns that the universal move to a western diet is unsustainable as there is not enough water to produce that kind of food for the expected nine billion population in 2050. Co-written by a dozen experts from SIWI, the United Nations and the International Water Management Institute, the report warns, confirming many earlier warnings, that current methods of food production will not feed the world’s population in 2050.

After the wettest summer in decades, and as a great proportion of this year’s cereal crops lie lodged in fields, this may be a difficult argument to accept but we should surely consider the possibilities.

Report after report has warned about the inefficiency of using plant proteins to produce animal proteins yet our culture clings to a diet that may not be sustainable. Our agriculture policies, as characterised by Food Harvest 2020, place minimal emphasis on developing horticulture as compared with the focus on milk and meat production. In tandem, international fisheries are in dire decline because man’s ability to find and catch fish has far outstripped their ability to reproduce.

Our cultural inclinations lean strongly towards a diet centred on meat but that may be changing and may have to change even more. We may, in time, not be prepared to support the kind of intense, industrial farming needed to mass produce meat either.

Population growth, finite resources, including oil for fuel and fertilisers, may be the catalyst for great change in our farming and diet, but like Queen Victoria’s intransigent civil servants, we have been warned.

Surely we will make better use of those warnings?