ISSUES
: Our Changing Population
Chapter 2: Global population issues
31
the years. But sometimes that can
exacerbate the barrier of pride; and
that to me suggests we need rescuers
as well as persecutors!
In response to the other issue you
raise, namelywhether and howwe can
feed the eventual peak population, I
agree strongly with you on the points
you make about waste. But even if
we sorted this out, without making
fundamental changes to agricultural
practices, we will only push soils, the
finite resource upon which almost all
food production depends, towards
collapse at an even faster rate than we
are doing already.
As I know you are aware, from a report
you wrote back in the 1980s, farmers
have been mining soil fertility with
continuous crop production fuelled
by chemical fertilisers and pesticides
across the globe. This has already
created a situation where more than
half of all soils are moderately or
severely degraded. For every adult
and child on the planet three and a
half tonnes of soil is irrevocably lost
each year. Inevitably, degraded and
eroded soils will produce less not
more food in future.
Some people might assume that
farmers could just stop using
these chemicals and still maintain
continuous crop production, but
that simply isn’t the case; it needs
a complete change of approach.
Of most significance, is the loss of
organic matter, and with it the release
of yet more carbon and nitrogen from
the soil to the atmosphere, which is
both contributing to climate change
and making soils far less resilient to
the increasing extremes of weather
already being experienced in many
parts of the world. Soils with low
organic matter levels rapidly suffer
from drought during dry periods, and
are also more vulnerable to erosion
during both drought and heavy rain.
To address this and feed what
will hopefully be a reduced peak
population as a result of your
advocacy, we have need to reverse
this decline in soil organic matter. To
do that we need to return all theworld’s
arable soils to more diverse forms
of farming, including crop rotations
with a fertility building phase, which
will normally include grazed grasses
and forage legumes, in other words
cellulose plant material which can
only be digested by ruminants.
This brings me to a vitally important
clarification relating to what you
have said about reducing meat
consumption. It is of course true that
with a population of eight, nine, ten
or 11.5 billion, the last of which is one
prediction for the end of the century,
we will not all be able to eat meat in
the prodigious amounts currently
consumed in most developed
countries. But while most attention is
now focused on reducing the number
of ruminants on the planet due to their
methane emissions, which of course
do contribute to global warming,
though to a much smaller extent than
most people have been led to believe,
it is actually only grass, the one crop
we humans cannot eat, which has the
capacity to restore soils to productivity
by rebuilding both organic matter and
structure. And the only way to get
human edible food from grass is to
stock it with grazing animals.
And that, I have to say, presents a
problem for those who argue that if
we halved the number of ruminants,
agriculture
would
miraculously
become sustainable. Sadly the
exact opposite is true. Yes, we must
reduce meat consumption, and in
many cases stocking density, but
grass also needs to be reintroduced
onto prime arable land. Grass and
grazing livestock are also essential
for biodiversity. As such, the greatest
reductions are needed in relation to
animals that predominantly consume
grain. This is most notably chickens,
despite the fact that the birds produce
only minimal amounts of methane, but
also intensive pigs and grain fed beef.
Rachel Carson, of course, pointed out
the damage being done to wildlife by
agrochemicals, but the response of
the environmental and conservation
movements has been to agree to the
separation of nature conservation
from food production, land sparing
instead of land sharing, with
unrestricted use of agrochemicals on
all but small pockets of land taken out
of food production. Yet this approach
has clearly not worked, with dramatic
declines in wildlife and species
diversity still continuing to occur.
This isn’t to say that all cattle and
sheep production is currently benign,
far from it. However, if managed in the
right way all pasture-based livestock
production systems have the potential
to be sustainable, whereas continuous
arable cropping does not. In the UK,
for example, a large number of birds
and pollinators coexist in harmony
with grazing animals and one of the
many reasons for their decline is that
species-rich grassland has become
entirely absent from some areas, as
the mono-cropping of vast areas of
wheat and oilseed rape have come to
predominate.
So in summary, what I’m saying is that
hand in hand with the need to control
population growth, in order to feed a
peak world population sustainably,
the reintegration of crop and livestock
production in the form of more mixed
farming systems will be an absolute
necessity. Ideally, we should also
strive to match food production and
population in the UK more closely
by reducing the amount of livestock
feed we import and eating more of
the foods we can naturally produce
ourselves.
It’s taken me a long time to move on
from my former recalcitrant stance
on organic farming and develop a
broader position, without changing
my fundamental beliefs. In relation
to over-population it’s taken a long
time for my eyes to be opened to the
urgent need for further action. But, if
I can swallow my pride and change,
as I believe I have done, then maybe
we can help other, more important,
figures to broaden their positions too.
30 July 2015
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The above information is
reprinted with kind permission
from the Sustainable Food
Trust. Please visit www.
sustainablefoodtrust.org
for
further information.
© Sustainable Food Trust 2015
