Paul Roberts, author of the forthcoming The End of Food, says we are entering an age of scarcity
The small group of would-be food gardeners (seven people, one Muscovy duckling tucked into a fleece) had gathered in a corner of the Dunbar Community Centre in Vancouver. As we discussed how to plant a potato, the edibility of an arugula flower and how to avoid tomato blight, one of the women warned us there was a local seed shortage.
"You see," said another, referring to the daily headlines about food shortages, price increases, and riots. "We're all getting ready."
Perhaps some of us are. This spring, certain seeds were simply unavailable in British Columbia.
"I am exhausted from trying to keep up with it every day" said Dan Jason of Salt Spring Seeds. "I'm getting a million e-mails, a million letters, and a million calls about how to start a garden and what crops to use, and it's just totally over the top."
"All of a sudden it just got out of hand, and where do you find more of everything at that point and how long will it last?" said owner Jeannette McCall.
From Idaho beans to lettuce, the company was short some 30 seed varieties, disappointing customers across the province.
'Everyone has to be asking themselves, what am I going to do, not if the system breaks down, but when.'— Paul Roberts
"People are aware now, from the news, thinking, well yeah, I've got my backyard and got my balcony," said McCall. "I can try to grow something."
For Paul Roberts, the author of the forthcoming The End of Food (Thomas Allen Publishing), people like McCall's customers offer one of the few reasons to hope some in the world can avoid a food calamity. Or calamities.
"Everyone has to be asking themselves, what am I going to do, not if the system breaks down, but when," Roberts said in an interview. "We should at least begin by asking, how confident do I feel in the system."
Roberts, who authored The End of Oil, the 2005 bestseller that foretold the end of cheap, accessible oil, has done something even more alarming with food.
Not that food will literally end, according to Roberts, although the news that the animal rights group PETA is offering a million-dollar prize to the person who first grows chicken in a dish — an in vitro dish, that is — makes one wonder.
Food in a tube
Nor are his descriptions of the "post-industrial pig" (pale pink and homogenous), or the manufactured chicken (pale, soft, exudative meat) perhaps that far from what lab-grown meat might resemble.
But Roberts scope is far wider - and bleaker - than the taste, flavour and integrity of our food.
From viruses in the chickens to bacteria in the spinach, from industrial farms to organic ones co-opted by industry, from the radical disruptions of a changing climate to depleting and polluted water, the message to meat-eaters, vegetarians and vegans alike is that the global food system is one major disruption away from calamity.
What, for example, would $200 oil do to agriculture?
Roberts says some forecasts suggest food and oil are so tightly linked that "a peak in oil output, and the subsequent decline in food supplies, would shrink the global population by several billion over the next two decades."
Writing about the impact of increasing droughts, bad government, poor soils, the rising price of fertilizer and a deteriorating climate in Africa, where malnutrition already kills more than 10 million people a year, Roberts suggests we can imagine in it a vision our own food future.
After painting a scenario chilling in its ordinariness - it begins with Ugandan wheat rust and ends in decimated forests, massive famine, and human avian flu - the author is pessimistic that the world will adopt the solutions he offers.
'A scenario chilling in its ordinariness … begins with Ugandan wheat rust and ends in decimated forests, massive famine, and human avian flu.'
The de-industrialization of our food, a transition to a regional rather than a global food economy, perhaps the development of transgenic seafood and deep water aquaculture, and yes, widespread urban farming in backyards and balconies, are "waiting for the crisis" he writes. In The End of Food, Roberts explains how we got to where the headlines tell us we are and where he fears it is leading. The book is packed, disconcertingly believable, and urgent.
The following are edited excerpts from an interview with Paul Roberts.
The end of abundance
CBC News: What do you mean by "the end of food"?
Paul Roberts: We are coming to what may be the end of the period, a golden era or a golden time in food where we could count on food becoming more abundant, of higher quality, safer, more convenient, more interesting, more varied.
The system[s] that we built to provide this increasing abundance, variety, quality and safety - those systems are under a huge amount of strain, and they are beginning to break down.
You say in your prologue, "We need to be asking what's happening to our food." What did you find out?
Nearly all of the problems that we're confronting now have a profound connection to the economics of food.
As a people, as a culture, as a society, we've gotten fantastic at producing great gobs of food for low cost…. Whenever the population appeared to be catching up and surpassing our ability to produce food we figured out how to produce more calories and do it more cheaply. We seem to do that every 50 years or so.
We got so good at it we just assumed there would never be an end point. And again, what we are finding here is that there are limits to that model.
Meat as a moral issue?
You come back to the meat dilemma again and again [in the book]. What kind of future does meat have?
Most of the four billion extra people that we anticipate [in world population] will be in the developing world, where they are still catching up with the Western diet. And what that means is that as population goes up, the consumption of things like meat goes up even faster.
We just assume that you can eat as much meat as you can afford. If there's a limit it's in terms of your own health. That's sort of the very capitalistic, property rights system: If you can afford it, it's yours. And the counter-argument that's emerging [is], how much meat can we produce sustainably?
The problem with meat is that it's very resource-intensive. You need on average eight pounds of grain for every pound of meat. So as population goes up and as meat intake goes up even steeper, grain demand will go almost straight up if you're looking at a curve on a graph.
Our total demand will be roughly almost triple what it is today. And nobody really knows where all that grain is going to come from.
What will all that mean for those billions of people that we are going to add to the world?
If we are having trouble producing food, if food is more expensive, if food security is reduced, won't that ultimately affect population, and won't that curb population - won't we end up with a smaller population? Well, it depends who you talk to. Some of these more apocalyptic scenarios suggest that we can only support, sustainably, two billion people on the planet.
'Is there massive die-off? Or is it just going to be this gradual accumulation of decisions by families to have fewer children?'
I think that's an extreme, but whatever your number is, the real question is, how long does it take to get to that number and what is the process? Is there massive die-off? Or is it just going to be this gradual accumulation of decisions by families to have fewer children? Or is it something in between?
You write that governments are going to be important in fixing the problems, but that they also played a part in causing them.
We're moving from an era of superabundance to an era of scarcity, and in an era of scarcity all the rules change. And all the arguments change. What sounded good and safe and prudent when there was plenty to go around suddenly seems pretty suspect when there isn't.
'A totally free market when it comes to food means that a wealthy, hungry, populous nation like China is going to buy the food off the table of half the world.'
So the important thing will be not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We can't become a nation or a world of protectionist states again because that doesn't work either. But we're going to have to be very careful to understand that a totally free market when it comes to food means that a wealthy, hungry, populous nation like China is going to buy the food off the table of half the world.
And that's a free market. So we need to understand that government does have a role in the markets. What we need to understand is what that role should be. And we are not there yet.
Many will argue that you are just a gloom seeker, and that science has fixed these problems before, as you yourself point out. Just use more fertilizer, adopt different kinds of agriculture, develop transgenic crops and animals, and so on.
There is some amazing stuff being done, absolutely. But we have to keep in mind we are going to need all those tools and more because today's farmers will face constraints that their predecessors didn't.
The inputs that we have depended on — water, stable climate, cheap energy — all those things are changing.
To just blindly assume that science will solve these problems when that same science has created a lot of the problems is, I think, pretty naïve — and I think it could be fatally naïve.
What are the solutions?
We need to understand that many of the models that we have been using for decades aren't sustainable and depend on the unsustainable use of resources or people, or rely too heavily on practices that are not safe.
Once we allow that awareness to really sink in, then the solutions, the directions that we began moving in, will be different than the ones we are moving in now. They will have to be. We know where we will be under a business-as-usual scenario.
And that will be where?
That will be in far worse shape than we are now. We can't continue. We can see collapse on any number of fronts if we continue to allow our systems to evolve as they are without any changes.
We can pretty much guarantee that if we allow things to continue as they are, if we allow systems in place to continue without fundamental changes to the entire model, that we will have breakdowns, and when you're talking about breakdowns in the system that supports food security, you know by definition you are talking about threats to … economic development, but also political stability.
How has this research affected you? How do you eat? What have you done?
Every time I go to the store now I come back and I look at the things in my shopping bags and I say "What do these imply? What was required to make this? What could I make, were the system to break down? How vulnerable am I? How dependent am I?"
And it's pretty scary when you realize how separated we are, how divorced we are, from the means of production. I don't want to get all Marxist on you but the thing is we are so far, so remote, from the means of production, from the ability to produce our own food, that we are entirely vulnerable, we are entirely dependent on a huge system - a system that is in trouble right now.
'It's pretty scary when you realize how separated we are, how divorced we are, from the means of production.'
So everyone has to be asking themselves, what am I going to do, not if the system breaks down, but when? And I don't mean to suggest that everyone should plow up their backyard into a garden, but we should at least begin by asking, how confident do I feel in the system?
And I think however you decide to take action, whether it is to raise a garden, or start cooking again or get involved in some local group that is trying to create a sort of community-based food system, it's got to start with consumers.
