Kirschenmann: The food and agriculture landscape of our future

By FRED KIRSCHENMANN, Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow

“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.” — Philosopher Ayn Rand (quoted in Julian Cribb, The Coming Famine)

Predicting future scenarios is, of course, always tricky. Both nature and human intelligence are brimming with emergent properties and therefore constant change is to be expected. Accordingly both challenges and opportunities, which we may have thought impossible just a few months ago, may now become realities.

Ecologists constantly remind us, however, that there are limits. While systems can absorb shocks and disturbances and have the capacity to recover and adapt, they also can cross thresholds to very different kinds of functioning that can present us with irreversible circumstances. At the same time, preparing for possible future changes always is wise.

A recent book by science writer Julian Cribb, The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do To Avoid It, anticipates a rather daunting list of challenges that could cause our current food system to cross some forbidding thresholds. On his list are land scarcity, depletion of fertilizer stocks and fresh water resources, the end of cheap energy, increasing human population and consumer demand, climate change, the collapse of ocean fish catch, the underfunding of agricultural research, and geopolitical tensions arising from many of the dwindling resources. I think we also should add to his list the depletion of soils and soil health, as well as a dwindling population of farmers.

As Cribb suggests, many of these challenges can be averted if we invest in changes that could redesign our food and agriculture system. That will require, among other things, commissioning significant agricultural research. It also would mean investing in research that explores alternatives to some of the practices that produced the unintended consequences that present us with some of the challenges we now face.

Probably our biggest challenge is that most of us don’t care to think about any of this, let alone commit to doing anything about it. Not surprisingly, most of us prefer to keep doing what we already have invested in, what has been successful in the past and what we know best, rather than exploring something unfamiliar. But, as Ayn Rand put it, while “we can evade reality we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.”

A good example of the potential consequences of evading reality, as well as the uncertainty surrounding that reality, is our energy future. The uncertainty surrounding this issue is highlighted in an article published in the New York Times on November 16, 2010. That author suggested that peak oil prophets-of-doom apparently had it wrong. Given the dramatic new quantities of oil and natural gas extracted through deep-water drilling, fracturing and other new technologies, we likely now will have adequate fossil fuels for the next 100 years, despite the dramatic increase in demand. In the article, Edward Morse of Credit Suisse notes that this new situation gets us to “something that very closely approximates energy independence.”

Clifford Krauss, who wrote the article, fails to mention the fact that our country’s first oil well started producing in 1859 in Pennsylvania, just 150 years ago. Consequently, even if we accept his optimistic assessment that we now may have another 100 years of energy supplies, it is still an extremely short span of time (250 years) in the history of human food production.

Moreover, nowhere does Krauss contemplate what we will do to produce our food 100 years from now. Since our modern food system is very dependent on fossil fuels, how will we produce our food once fossil fuels no longer are available? A hundred years (let alone 40 or 50, which may be more likely) is not a long period to redesign a system as important as food. If we decide now that we no longer need to worry about a post-fossil-fuel era, will we do the research necessary to create a new food system for the future?

Another issue that Krauss fails to address is what another 100 years of burning fossil fuels will do to the atmosphere and global climate.

Cribb suggests that we might consider reordering some of our priorities to prepare for our uncertain food future. He notes that “at the turn of the millennium, public investment by all governments worldwide in improving food production totaled just $23 billion . . . [annually, something that] contrasts eerily with humanity’s total spending of $1.5 trillion on armaments …”

He proposes that if we were to invest our brain-power in addressing future challenges we might avoid a possible global famine. “… it must be said that, if water, land, nutrients, energy and stable climates are all increasingly scarce, the one thing not in short supply is brains. It is high time we used them more: now is the moment when Homo gets to earn the tag sapiens.”

References:

Julian Cribb, 2010. The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Co To Avoid It. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Clifford Krauss, 2010. “There Will be Fuel,” The New York Times, November 16. Cribb, Op Cit. 116.

News

Kirschenmann: The food and agriculture landscape of our future