Did you know that four years ago some scientists announced that their model was projecting how “society will collapse by 2040 due to catastrophic food shortages” – unless humanity suddenly changed course?
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No, me neither. And I’m a Professor of Sustainability Leadership. The scientists were from Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute. The fact such warnings slip us by is why activists from Extinction Rebellion are demanding our media and politicians pay attention. Because climate change is not just about being nice to nature or to people on the other side of the world. Rather, it means more of us won’t be able to afford to feed ourselves or our families. Which means even worse, as a hungry country is an ungovernable one.
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How alarmist or sensible is this shift in focus from climate to calories and the threat of chaos? It is a shift I have been promoting within the environmental movement since last year when I concluded we have entered a period of rapid climate change. Urgently we need to discuss emergency measures from national and local government, philanthropists and the private sector to help people to be fed and watered in situ for as long as possible. These measures can be informed by some of the very latest analyses from organizations like the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) but could also arise from a precautionary approach that recognizes how recent crop-damaging weather may not actually be anomalous and instead represent a new best-case scenario within a rapidly altering climate.
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I am not an expert on food security, and so to write these notes on hunger and collapse means I am venturing in to areas that I am new to. There are many professionals in the food security sector who know far more than I about both the science of agronomy or the politics and economics of food distribution. But I know that some of them are sounding alarm bells within their organizations, questioning whether the models used to inform previous reviews of worst-case scenarios might not be fit for purpose. I am not going to try and become an expert in the field of food security and intend this to be both the first and last article I write on it. Rather, I am sharing ideas here to encourage those internal debates within research organisations and government agencies, that need to be had so that those of us in wider society can have honest conversations about how we reduce harm in the face of climate-induced disruption to our way of life.
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In these notes on hunger and collapse, I will summarise some of what I have learned about the current situation with food security and why I think climate change now threatens food security in the West. My view doesn’t mean we can’t do anything to help. Instead, I mention a few areas where policies might be useful. I am not confident they will be adopted at scale in time, and so I still believe that a societal collapse is on the horizon. But I write these notes in the hope I might be proved wrong.
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An Overview on Food Insecurity
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First, as an astute reader you could already be thinking that I’m ignoring how millions of people are starving already. While enough food is produced today for all of humanity to eat sufficiently, great numbers of people face crisis levels of food insecurity, requiring immediate emergency action to safeguard their lives. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO, 2018a) estimated that 80 million people in 2015 were going hungry in that way, 108 million people in 2016 and 124 million people in 2017. Therefore, for increasing numbers of people, a collapse or breakdown in their way of life is a present reality, not something to anticipate or debate. Last year the FAO identified climate change as one of the main factors for this situation of increasing hunger worldwide, although the politics and economics of distribution remain key. The bombing of Yemen can and should be stopped. But climate is not something we can fix with a peace summit, and so those FAO findings on the trends in malnutrition are deeply worrying.
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Last year was an unusually hot and dry year in the Northern hemisphere. It showed clearly how grain and vegetable production is negatively impacted by climate change. Most Northern and Central European countries reported important end-of-summer declines in cereal production, with losses estimated to reach between 23.6% and 33% in the Baltic states and Finland, and between 14% and 20% in Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark and Sweden (European Commission 2018a, 2018b, 2018c; EDO, 2018). Although a 20% decline across the whole of Europe was being predicted by some farmers’ organisations at the end of the summer, the reported fall of grain output over the past year has since been calculated as 7.2% (FAO, 2018b). Several Northern European countries were more severely affected (Masante et al, 2018), experiencing declines up to 50% in some crops (Feed Navigator, 2018). The potato harvest in Germany, the biggest European producer, was down 25%-30% compared with usual quantities (Pieterse 2018). The Lithuanian government declared a state of emergency, and Latvia acknowledged the harvest as a natural disaster (Food Ingredients First, 2018).
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It is no wonder that food prices to the consumer have risen more than usual in many Western countries. But most of us aren’t malnourished. Because we buy so much food from around the world. We are dependent on a complex global industrial consumer economy. In 2018 the rest of the world helped out the West more than usual, as global food production was only down 2.4% (FAO 2018b). Most of the world’s cereals comes from a few net exporting countries like Russia, Canada, US and France and Thailand. If harvests fail, then countries often respond by imposing export bans which block the usual trade flows of food, leading to a ‘domino effect’ of price rises. Until now the hardest impacts have always been felt within import-dependent low-income countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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It would take an even wider experience of disruptive weather than 2018 to affect global food availability. How likely is that? I have been asked this question a lot since I released my paper on Deep Adaptation last year. So I decided to have a look at what food security researchers have been saying and how they develop their views.
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Food security research reports that sudden losses of food production have become increasingly frequent over the past 50 years. While some of these shocks take place due to geopolitical crises, extreme weather events are also dominant drivers – over half of all shocks to crop production systems were a result of extreme weather events. Besides, these shocks also increasingly affect crops, livestock and aquaculture simultaneously (Cottrell et al., 2019). One expert in the FAO explains “The problem is variability. Extreme weather events – cyclones, hurricanes, rainfall, hail fall, high temperatures in August in northern Europe. The unpredictability is the hardest element, and it seems that unpredictability is here to stay.”
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One major influence on weather is El Niño, a climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean which happens with varying magnitude every 2-7 years. Increases in the strength or frequency of El Niño are a cause for concern over future food security. The 2015–2016 El Niño was one of the strongest events of the past 100 years, leading to drought in large areas of Africa, parts of Central America, Brazil and the Caribbean, as well as Australia and parts of the Near East (FAO 2018a). In August 2016, 61.6 percent of all Vietnamese crops were very severely damaged or lost (FAO 2016a). However, that year saw plentiful monsoon rains in SE Asia which offset those Vietnamese losses. An El Niño event seems likely in 2019, but not such a strong one (FAO 2018d). If it coincides with damaging weather in the key breadbasket countries in the Northern Hemisphere, then we could see significant impacts on food supplies.Here I am describing worst-case scenarios, where many key food producing regions are hit in the same year. Current simulations of worst-case scenarios use historic lows. For instance, one was run by Global Food Security in 2015, where the worst-case scenario combined drought-related impacts on yields of maize and soybean (which happened in 1988/89) and on wheat and rice (which happened in Europe, Russia, India and China in 2002/03). The report indicated that consumers in large industrialised countries such as the US and EU, where food represents a small share of household expenditures, would be relatively unaffected (GFS, 2015a).
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Like me, you may have noticed a problem with basing analyses on what has happened in the past. If we are now in the early stages of non-linear changes in our climate due to heat-reinforcing feedback loops, then it isn’t sufficient to assess future scenarios based on historic worst-case instances combined into one global event. The problem with current food security work is a reliance on existing climate modelling. From that basis the weather of 2018 is seen as an anomaly. So we are told reassurances that “weather isn’t climate” and that we can expect future years to be better. Never mind that 2019 is already more volatile. Given that temperature records are being broken every year, 2018 could become the new normal, or even a good year.
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It is clear that our food system is going to be under weather pressure like never before. On top of the direct impacts of extreme temperatures, droughts and floods, there is also the secondary impact of adverse weather making plants more susceptible to disease. Crop pests pose a greater threat in an era of rapid climate change, given that more than 75% of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and five animal species (World Economic Forum 2018). Then there is the problem of climate impacting on the biodiversity essential to our agriculture. On land, the collapse of insects presents a challenge for pollination. In the seas, the acidification from dissolved CO2 is going to reduce fish stocks. Earlier this year the FAO (2019) issued a severe warning about the threat to our future agriculture from our collapsing biodiversity, in part due to climate change.
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Some professionals in the food security field are waking up to the implications of this new era of volatile weather. In IASSA they have started looking at the potential for multi-breadbasket failure, which rather worryingly now deserves its own acronym – MBBF. Their scientists are looking at how simultaneous climate extremes in our major grain producing regions could have knock-on effects of shocks on other parts of our food, economic and political systems. A famous example of a climate shock leading to food security issues and consequent social unrest, war and migration is the Arab spring.
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As we look at the situation, it is worth remembering that our buffer against MBBF is not huge. Global food reserves would feed all humans for 103 days, if fairly distributed, something we have never done. We would have 249 days in reserve if people were able to east the food currently intended for farm animals (FAO 2018b). The United Nations “Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk” comes out in May this year. Given how food underpins everything, it will be interesting to see how it reports on this most systemic of risks.
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If you are worried, then that is good, as it means you can join conversations about what might be done about it.
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Policies to avert hunger and postpone or soften collapse
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Policy makers need to understand how global food production and distribution systems are likely to cope with declines in yields of staple crops. This requires an understanding of the food storage system and more importantly markets which determine who gets the food.
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Until the past decades of neo-liberal policies, governments kept strategic grain reserves to feed their citizens. Now they prefer the greater efficiency of global markets (with the notable exception of certain countries such as China or India). A troubling aspect of this development is that sometimes the countries most in need of reserves are those least able to pay for them (Fraser et al, 2015). Reserves are controlled by a handful of corporations, which are not averse to manipulating commodity prices if it will increase profits. In the case of a global decline in food production this means that rich and poor will be trying to eat from the same pile. You don’t have to actually own the commodity in order to shift the prices. Financial speculation (in all markets) has the effect of amplifying price movements. For example, World Bank estimates on the 2008 drought reported that “up to 30 percent price increases occurred based on anticipated fallout (from drought impacts and biofuel production on corn crops) rather than the shocks themselves” (GFS, 2015b).
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The global food system is made all the more vulnerable to extreme weather events as global supply chains have been optimized for efficiency, with buffer stocks reduced in line with an understanding of supply volatility that is consistent with a stable natural environment (Dellink et al. 2017). The conclusion is clear. Liberalizing the worlds agriculture and food systems, including their financing, means they are not easily adapted to increasing climate disruption and may make matters worse. So, policy makers need to think again, and fast.
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Radical and detailed alternatives to the free market global food system do exist. In his 2017 book Nourrir l’Europe en temps de crise (“Feeding Europe in Times of Crisis”), the French agronomist and “collapsologue” Pablo Servigne outlined a comprehensive program for food systems around Europe and the world that would be more resilient to potential disruptions with climate and oil supply. These food systems, centered on agroecological principles, would be localized and diversified, decentralized and autonomous, circular and transparent. Servigne also suggests that urban agriculture could act as a means of bringing people together in community.
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Many of Servigne’s recommendations fit with those of the FAO. In a special 2016 report on climate change, agriculture and food security, the organization recommends a focus on sustainable intensification of agricultural production (increasing the efficiency of resource use, conserving and enhancing natural resources); the use of agroecology; more efficient management of water, carbon, and nitrogen cycles; and crop diversification (FAO, 2016b).
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Being new to food security, I am very aware that there are far more trained, experienced and skilful people than I who will be able to develop policy. To help their conversations, I have jotted down some initial thoughts on what they might consider:
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• First, importing countries need to increase domestic production of basic foods, including through irrigation, the use of greenhouses, as well as urban and community-based agriculture.
• Second, importing countries need to geographically diversify sources of food imports rather than rely on whatever is cheapest or habit.
• Third, all countries need to diversify the range of species involved in their domestic agriculture, with a focus on a wider range of resilience to weather stress, and this be done with a holistic agroecological approach, recognizing the threat from collapsing biodiversity.
• Fourth, governments need to re-instate the sovereign management of grain reserves and prepare for requisition of private grain reserves in crisis situations.
• Fifth, a treaty and systems may be needed to help keep the international food trade going despite any future financial or economic collapse.
• Sixth, national contingency plans may be needed to prepare for food rationing so that any rapid and major price rises are not allowed to lead to malnutrition and civil unrest.
• Seventh, in the absence of significant new forms of government action on food security, local governments need to act, including through partnerships with companies that can manage food distribution.
• Eight, we should undertake controlled experiments with Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) over the Arctic Ocean, to try and reduce the warming in the Arctic and slow down the damaging changes to northern hemisphere weather. That does not mean wider geoengineering makes sense but that MCB is important to try in this limited way, given the catastrophic potential of further Arctic warming.
• Second, importing countries need to geographically diversify sources of food imports rather than rely on whatever is cheapest or habit.
• Third, all countries need to diversify the range of species involved in their domestic agriculture, with a focus on a wider range of resilience to weather stress, and this be done with a holistic agroecological approach, recognizing the threat from collapsing biodiversity.
• Fourth, governments need to re-instate the sovereign management of grain reserves and prepare for requisition of private grain reserves in crisis situations.
• Fifth, a treaty and systems may be needed to help keep the international food trade going despite any future financial or economic collapse.
• Sixth, national contingency plans may be needed to prepare for food rationing so that any rapid and major price rises are not allowed to lead to malnutrition and civil unrest.
• Seventh, in the absence of significant new forms of government action on food security, local governments need to act, including through partnerships with companies that can manage food distribution.
• Eight, we should undertake controlled experiments with Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) over the Arctic Ocean, to try and reduce the warming in the Arctic and slow down the damaging changes to northern hemisphere weather. That does not mean wider geoengineering makes sense but that MCB is important to try in this limited way, given the catastrophic potential of further Arctic warming.
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Will any of these policies, or better ones, be enacted both soon and worldwide? If you think humanity will change production systems quickly to reduce dependence on rain-fed grains, while also change our commercial food system as quickly to help ensure everyone is fed, then I can understand if you think there will not be widespread societal collapse. In my experience and analysis I do not think people in political systems can respond that quickly across the world. Which is why my own conclusion, as sad and shocking as it may be, is that near-term societal collapse is now inevitable.
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Collapse is Underway for the Hungry Millions
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Today’s global food production largely exceeds what is needed to feed the entire world population; hunger is caused by an unequal distribution of food and artificial scarcity (Holt-Giménez et al, 2012). So our current food system that leaves 120m people in acute hunger is already dysfunctional, even murderous. A persistent decline in yields of staple foods would exacerbate those flaws, starving ever greater numbers in countries with weak economies. The global food system is dangerously and increasingly optimized for efficiency and profit rather than ensuring everyone has food. With the political will and time, we could have a much more resilient food system and thus slow down the onset of societal collapse due to widespread hunger. Our problem is that to adapt we will need a paradigm shift in policies on global food supply and distribution, complemented by a revolution in community-level food production. The latter can be developed now but the former is unlikely.
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As the Extinction Rebellion brings this subject into the homes of more people, so journalists will naturally ask questions of the food security experts. What will they say? I know that behind the scenes, concerned staff are being told by their bosses to be less pessimistic. We can understand why. We know senior managers are hampered in their ability to respond to information that challenges what their organization does or how it will be viewed. If new information challenges the cultural norms that someone has been adept as displaying in order to reach the top, then they face an identity disintegration before being able to engage properly with the new agenda.
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If you are someone with a senior role, you probably know what I am talking about. Perhaps you still think you might be a bit of a fraud and so do all you can to prove otherwise. Or perhaps you have gone on a leadership course and been helped to regard your power as your destiny. If either of things are true, and you work in food security, I invite you to step outside that insecurity for a moment and listen to those colleagues trying to look at our situation with fresh eyes, for the good of humanity. And then let them speak to the public, so we can have fresh conversations about deep adaptation to our climate predicament.
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As I am not specialising in food security and not writing more about it, if you want to engage on these ideas, please consider the Food and Agriculture interest group of the Deep Adaptation Forum. My thanks to Deep Adaptation Forum members Dorian Cave and Matthew Slater for their research support.
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References
Cottrell, R.S., Nash, K.L., Halpern, B.S., Remenyi, T.A., Corney, S.P., Fleming, A., Fulton, E.A., Hornborg, S., Johne, A., Watson, R.A., Blanchard, J.L. (2019) “Food production shocks across land and sea.” Nature Sustainability 2, 130. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0210-1
Denkenberger, D.C., Pearce, J.M. (2015) Feeding Everyone No Matter What: Managing Food Security After Global Catastrophe. Academic Press, London.
European Commission (2018a) “JRC MARS Bulletin – Crop monitoring in Europe. August 2018” JRC MARS Bulletin Vol 26 No 8 (27 August 2018). Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/sites/jrcsh/files/jrc-mars-bulletin-vol26-no08.pdf
European Commission (2018b) “JRC MARS Bulletin – Crop monitoring in Europe. September 2018” JRC MARS Bulletin Vol 26 No 9 (17 September 2018). Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/sites/jrcsh/files/jrc-mars-bulletin-vol26-no09.pdf
European Commission (2018c) “Short-term outlook for EU agricultural markets in 2018 and 2019”. Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development — Short-term outlook No 22. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/info/files/report-eu-agricultural-markets-short-term-outlook-autumn-2018_en
EDO, The Copernicus European Drought Observatory (2018) Drought in Central-Northern Europe – July 2018, JRC European Drought Observatory (EDO) and ERCC Analytical Team. Available at: http://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
FAO (2016a) 2015–2016 El Niño – Early action and response for agriculture, food security and nutrition – UPDATE #10. August 2016. FAO, Rome. Available at: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5855e.pdf
FAO (2016b) Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, The State of Food and Agriculture. FAO, Rome. Available at: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i6030e.pdf
FAO (2018a) Building Climate Resilience For Food Security And Nutrition, The State Of Food Security And Nutrition In The World. FAO, Rome. Available at: http://www.fao.org/state-of-food-security-nutrition/en/
FAO (2018b) Food Outlook: Biannual Report on Global Food Markets, July 2018. FAO, Rome. Available at: http://www.fao.org/3/ca0239en/CA0239EN.pdf
FAO (2018c) 2018/19 El Niño advisory. FAO, Rome. Available at: http://www.fao.org/3/ca2530en/CA2530EN.pdf
FAO (2019) THE STATE OF THE WORLD’s BIODIVERSITY FOR FOOD AND AGRICULTURE, FAO, Rome. Available at: http://www.fao.org/state-of-biodiversity-for-food-agriculture/en
Feednavigator.com (2018) “Reduction in EU grains and oilseed output forecast”. September 20, 2018. Available at: https://www.feednavigator.com/Article/2018/09/20/Reduction-in-EU-grains-and-oilseed-output-forecast (accessed 2.7.19).
Foodingredientsfirst.com (2018) “European drought: Starch supplier Avebe braces for ‘historically low potato harvest’” Available at: https://www.foodingredientsfirst.com/news/european-drought-starch-supplier-avebe-braces-for-historically-low-potato-harvest.html (accessed 2.7.19).
Fraser, E.D.G., Legwegoh, A., Krishna, K. (2015) “Food Stocks and Grain Reserves: Evaluating Whether Storing Food Creates Resilient Food Systems.” J Environ Stud Sci 5, 445–458. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-015-0276-2
Global Food Security (2015a) Extreme weather and resilience of the global food system, Final Project Report from the UK-US Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience, The Global Food Security Programme, UK. Available at: http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/assets/pdfs/extreme-weather-resilience-of-global-food-system.pdf
Global Food Security (2015b) Review of Responses to Food Production Shocks. Resilience Taskforce Sub Report, Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Available at: http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/assets/pdfs/review-of-responses-to-food-production-shocks.pdf
Holt-Giménez, E., Shattuck, A., Altieri, M., Herren, H., Gliessman, S. (2012) “We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People … and Still Can’t End Hunger.” Journal of Sustainable Agriculture 36, 595–598. https://doi.org/10.1080/10440046.2012.695331
Masante, D., Barbosa, P., McCormick, N. (2018) Drought in Central-Northern Europe–July 2018. EDO Analytical Report. JRC European Drought Observatory (EDO) and ERCC Analytical Team.
Pieterse, L. (2018) “Germany: Historic low potato harvest seriously impacts seed, processing sectors until 2020.” Potato News Today, November 14, 2018. Available at: https://potatonewstoday.com/2018/11/14/germany-historic-low-potato-harvest-seriously-impacts-retail-seed-and-processing-sectors-until-2020/ (accessed 2.7.19).
Servigne, P. (2017) Nourrir l’Europe en temps de crise. Vers des systèmes alimentaires résilients. Actes Sud, Arles.
Prof Jem Bendell 
Hi Jem. I wrote this about Brampton, best Carlisle when doing my masters. I hope you find it of interest. https://www.academia.edu/10456544/Can_a_small_town_go_off-grid_and_produce_its_own_food_A_modeled_case_study
Great write-up! I think ‘climate and collapse denialists’ alike will be rapidly motivated to transition out of their skepticism once grocery store supply chains begin to deteriorate. Is it wrong to hope that this is sooner than later, so we can collectively react in confidence with each other?
Aside: for those interested in an adjacent, slightly more detailed, holistic analysis of our predicament, supported by endless examples of domestic food shortages and crises, please check out Plan B 4.0 by Lester Brown.
It’s a deep read, and I haven’t gotten through the entire thing myself, but there is some heavy, useful information within:
Click to access pb4book.pdf
Here is the summary. Much easier to digest:
http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb4/pb4_presentation
Jem, Whilst I agree with your premise that builds upon the research I disagreee vehemently with the greentech solutions such as geoengineerinbg that you advocate. There is no doubt that our food and fibre growing practices need to change to increase our availability of quality food and also to remove the high chemical burden that we are imposing upon our ‘holisticselves’. I suggest that a trim tab approach would be to implement proven science an practice that tests all decision against our social system, cultural, and ecological resource needs. This practice exists and is known as Holistic Management! Our present science is inept at handlking complexity. Our emergent holistically oriented science is proven and can handle the complexity. Time to withdraw and implement then act!
I share a deep critique of human techno hubris. But I don’t advocate a type of solution. I advocate testing one specific approach of MCB in the Arctic and only in the Arctic. That has nothing to do with other proposals. I have published critiques of the broader idea that geoengineering will save us.
If you mean Holistic Management as coined by Allan Savory, then it is largely a lie, not accepted by the mainstream ecological community. His claims are fundamentally scientifically-flawed We need to ramp down animal agriculture massively. That is the scientific consensus. Read the following anyone who is interested:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2014/aug/04/eat-more-meat-and-save-the-world-the-latest-implausible-farming-miracle
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2013/04/allan_savory_s_ted_talk_is_wrong_and_the_benefits_of_holistic_grazing_have.html
http://www.thewildlifenews.com/2013/03/18/alan-savory-gives-a-popular-and-very-misleading-ted-talk/
Holistic management and other similar systems aren’t a lie. They’ve been proven to work. In fact, there is no more sustainable farming system other than pasturage and open-range. Ruminants have been grazing for hundreds of millions of years. And there are no more ruminants in North America than in the past. They are a necessary part of maintaining healthy ecosystems. Also, it is far from being limited to Savoy.
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/carnivore-is-vegan/
Another example is Frank Mitloehner, a professor from UC Davis who specializes in animal science and air quality research. I could list many other experts and researchers in various fields. Such advocates of sustainability aren’t isolated radicals but represent what has been known in mainstream science.
A USDA scientist, R. K. Heitschmidt, stated that, ”when properly managed, rangeland agriculture is fully sustainable, having gone on long before the discovery of fossil fuels, and it will, without doubt, go on long after the depletion of fossil fuels.” And consider what the conclusions of the IPCC report:
https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/blogs/ag-policy-blog/blog-post/2019/08/09/food-security-risk-land-also-climate
“The report actually cited that animal-sourced food produced in resilient, sustainable & low-GHG emission systems present major opportunities for adaptation & mitigation while generating significant co-benefits in terms of human health. The report added that reducing meat consumption may also lower iron and zinc nutritional quality for some vulnerable groups of people. The report cited that in Europe, more than one-fifth of preschoolers and 25% of pregnant women have anemia.”
https://www.planetofplenty.com/blog/is-agriculture-feeding-the-world-or-destroying-it-discussing-climate-change-greenhouse-gases-and-livestock-emissions-with-dr-frank-mitloehner/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/meat-save-planet-regenerative-farming_l_5d261f7ae4b0583e482b0192?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004
http://www.ilse-koehler-rollefson.com/?p=1264
Thank you for venturing into this new area of knowledge to give us an outline and some policy suggestions. I am inspired to return to certain homeless encampments here in Seattle where early experiments in community greenhouse growing failed for lack of organization. With a push, I imagine they could be fruitful, and provide an example to the community of housed people. Thank you for your continuing inspirational work!
@ Jem – You write, “But most of us aren’t malnourished.” Actually, most of us are malnourished. It’s just that we’ve gotten used to it, as it is the only way we’ve known. It is normal to us. Few of us have ever lived in a healthy population.
I’d recommend reading Weston A. Price’s classic, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. PDF versions of it are available online. Check out the photographs he took around the world. It’s shocking what good health looks like when you’ve spent your life around lack of optimal health. The bone structure common in a healthy population is much more well developed than seen in the modern West.
Price was largely focused on the importance of nutrient-dense foods. But the elimination of those foods from the industrialized diet of processed foods is only one part of nutritional deficiencies. Agricultural farming has damaged the health of the soil. There are less nutrients for the plants to absorb.
Creating high yield crops is not the same thing as growing nutritious food. Research has shown the nutrient content of food has declined over the past century. One can have access to abundance and still be malnourished. Gary Taubes makes a compelling argument about how increasing number Americans and other populations are simultaneously overweight and malnourished.
Gary Taubes discusses this from another angle. The high-carb diet specifically appears to a driving factor. It just so happens that most of those carbs are also empty calories. Even fortifying food does little good, if the nutrients aren’t bioavailable (e.g., adding vitamin D to skim milk is pointless since, as it is a fat-soluble vitamin, your body can only absorb vitamin D with fat). In Why We Get Fat, Taubes writes (pp. 33-34):
“If we look in the literature—which the experts have not in this case—we can find numerous populations that experienced levels of obesity similar to those in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere today but with no prosperity and few, if any, of the ingredients of Brownell’s toxic environment: no cheeseburgers, soft drinks, or cheese curls, no drive-in windows, computers, or televisions (sometimes not even books, other than perhaps the Bible), and no overprotective mothers keeping their children from roaming free.
“In these populations, incomes weren’t rising; there were no labor-saving devices, no shifts toward less physically demanding work or more passive leisure pursuits. Rather, some of these populations were poor beyond our ability to imagine today. Dirt poor. These are the populations that the overeating hypothesis tells us should be as lean as can be, and yet they were not.
“Remember Hilde Bruch’s wondering about all those really fat children in the midst of the Great Depression? Well, this kind of observation isn’t nearly as unusual as we might think.”
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2018/12/05/malnourished-americans/
I would like to add to these thoughts the issue of (neo)colonial exploitation. The EU currently uses 40% more agricultural land than it has (http://www.foeeurope.org/dependence-overseas-agricultural-land-trampling-world-270716) and with declining supply that will probably increase. They also do have the economical and, if needed, military means to ensure supply, similar to US and other countries in the global north.
And I see nothing that indicates that those regions will not use their power to get the food that they need. So in a way this issue will become a moral one. Are we willing to allow our governments to let people elsewhere hunger or even be killed, so that we have enough (or even plenty) to eat? What can we do about this in case we don’t want that?
Cereals, meh. When climate change disrupts the coffee bean crop, then I’ll really get upset. Can’t live without caffeine!
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I have co-founded a nonprofit to work on aspects of this specifically – if interested to support, please message me.
It’s not aimed at an immediate deep transformation, but is more like one of Joanna Macy’s “holding actions”.
We presume that the first major multiple breadbasket failure (MBBF) will not be the worst/The Big One, and is far more likely (in the next 10 years) to be a cooling shock than runaway warming, similar to 1816 (the “Year Without a Summer”) and therefore would be temporary, not permanent…
– after all, it’s always the un-expected that gets you!
A. Taylor – Can’t DM you. Can you message me?
[…] events are disproportionately bringing death, displacement, and crop failure. As a result of this, projections estimate that the economies of poorer, warmer countries will be […]
[…] events are disproportionately bringing death, displacement, and crop failure. As a result of this, projections estimate that the economies of poorer, warmer countries will be […]
[…] events are disproportionately bringing death, displacement, and crop failure. As a result of this, projections estimate that the economies of poorer, warmer countries will be […]
[…] eventos están causando de manera desproporcionada la muerte, el desalojamiento y la pérdida de cosechas. Como resultado de esto, las proyecciones estiman que las economías de los países más pobres y […]
[…] events are disproportionately bringing death, displacement, and crop failure. As a result of this, projections estimate that the economies of poorer, warmer countries will be […]
[…] events are disproportionately bringing death, displacement, and crop failure. As a result of this, projections estimate that the economies of poorer, warmer countries will be […]
[…] more likely and more severe.These events are disproportionately bringing death, displacement, and crop failure. As a result of this, projections estimate that the economies of poorer, warmer countries will be […]
[…] eventos están causando de manera desproporcionada la muerte, el desalojamiento y la pérdida de cosechas. Como resultado de esto, las proyecciones estiman que las economías de los países más pobres y […]
[…] events are disproportionately bringing death, displacement, and crop failure. As a result of this, projections estimate that the economies of poorer, warmer countries will be […]
[…] events are disproportionately bringing death, displacement, and crop failure. As a result of this, projections estimate that the economies of poorer, warmer countries will be […]
[…] collapse. The focus is on agricultural impacts. For instance here. And also my own summary of the food security field. IPPR have started doing work on this as well. UCL are launching a project on it. Meanwhile, UNDRR […]
[…] on nearer term implications for people from rapid climate change. In particular, I have looked at the impacts on agriculture, and how vulnerable our societies because of that. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) already report that globally hunger has been […]
Thank you Jem ❤️
[…] of the fact that you believe in the imminent threat of climate change-induced disruption of our food provision, water supplies, and energy production, I think the conclusions of my analysis are worth […]
[…] Notas sobre el hambre y el colapso. […]
Hi Jem, has this article been updated since the original posting? I remembered it slightly differently. If so it would be interesting to know what changed.
[…] Notes on Hunger and Collapse: a useful overview of the limited info currently available on food impacts of climate change, plus references: click here. […]
[…] his 2019 article, “Notes on Hunger and Collapse,” Jem Bendell explores the interconnected issues of hunger and societal collapse. The […]
[…] Notes on Hunger and Collapse: a useful overview of the limited info currently available on food impacts of climate change, plus references: click here. […]