Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Bill McKibben, the skeptics best friend, can always be depended on to provide interesting claims. Never one to let a good crisis go to waste, he opines on the tsunami and our “shrinking margins” over at the Guardian. A number of people have highlighted various of his ideas, not all of them favorably. One claim of his that I have not seen discussed is the following:
We’re seeing record temperatures that depress harvests – the amount of grain per capita on the planet has been falling for years.
Figure 1. Food and Protein per capita. The LDCs are the “Least Developed Countries”, the poorest of the world’s countries. Red and orange are total food supply (right scale). Dark and light blue are protein (left scale). DATA SOURCE
Let’s start by considering the real issue. People eat a host of things, not just grains. So the issue is not the number of kilogrammes of grain produced per person. That’s only part of the story. The real issue is, how well are we feeding the ~ 7 billion people of the world?
The first thing that Figure 1 shows is that after years of making little gain, since the early 1990s the food supply in the LDCs has been improving (orange line). There’s still a ways to go, but the trend is upwards.
The next thing is quite surprising. In the year 2007 (the last year for which we have data), the people in the poorest countries (orange line) were getting almost as many daily calories as the global average in 1961 (red line). To me, this is an amazing accomplishment. Remember that during this time, the population of the planet more than doubled. Despite that, both the poorest of the poor, and the global population as a whole, are better fed than at any time in history.
Finally, globally there is no sign of any recent decrease in nutrition levels. Nor do nutrition levels appear to be connected in any way to the temperature.
However, to be fair, that wasn’t McKibben’s claim. He said that grain production per capita on the planet has been “falling for years”, so let’s check that. Figure 2 shows those numbers, with the data again from FAOSTAT.
Figure 2. Production per capita for all cereal grains. Figures for the LDCs represent domestic cereal production divided by domestic population.
Has global grain production per capita been “falling for years” as McKibben claims? The observations say no. Globally, it peaked at just above 350 kg per person around 1980 and has dipped less than 10% and come back up since then.
For the LDCs, on the other hand, their domestic cereal grain production was unable to keep up with their domestic population growth until the early 1990s. Since then, due in part to decreasing population growth rates, LDC grain production per capita has been rising steadily. There’s no sign of any recent change in that rising trend. Anything is possible tomorrow, of course. But there’s no sign of falling grain production as McKibben claims, from temperature or any other cause.
So, what’s the current score in the battle of the farmers of the planet to feed the ever-increasing masses?
Farmers: 1 … Malthus: 0.
Oh, and McKibben’s score? … -1 for truth content, but high marks for entertainment value.
w.
PS – The continued ability of the world to feed itself, despite adding a total of four billion people to the planet in the last fifty years, is an unparalleled and largely unrecognized success for humanity. I am so tired of people like McKibben not only not acknowledging that, but going so far as to claim that the trend has reversed and that things are getting worse. That’s nonsense. In terms of world nutrition, things are better than they have ever been, even for the poorest countries. Not only that, but they continue to improve. That’s a huge success.
So rather than incessant whining about how terrible things are, how about we take some pride in that success, and think about what it is we’ve done right to achieve that, and how to do more of whatever that was that got us here?
[UPDATE TWO WEEKS LATER] Here’s the latest of Bill McKibben’s “depressed harvests”, from the WSJ … India has so much grain from several years of record harvests that it has run out of warehouse space to store it.
India Foodgrain Output to Hit Record High
By BANIKINKAR PATTANAYAK
NEW DELHI –India’s foodgrains output is set to rise to a record 235.88 million metric tons this crop year, according to government estimates, a figure which is likely to pave the way to lifting the export ban on wheat and common rice varieties.
Citing the government’s latest crop estimates, Farm Minister Sharad Pawar said wheat output during the year through June is likely to rise to 84.27 million tons from 80.8 million tons last year, while rice output will increase to 94.11 million tons from 89.09 million tons over the same period.
“The government should now give serious thought about storage, allocation to states and export of rice and wheat,” Mr. Pawar told a news conference.
India imposed a ban on the export of wheat and common grades of rice three years ago to curb prices, and since then the government’s grain stocks have swelled to more than double its requirement.
Consequently, state-run warehouses ran out of space last year and the government was forced to store some of the grain in the open. The storage crunch may worsen this year because of the record output. The government is expected to make a decision next month on lifting the export ban on wheat and common rice grades.
Heya, Willis. =)
I’ll try to go point by point and keep it brief. My brevity alarm may be broken, though (that’s your fair warning). I’m also keeping my fingers crossed that I got all the HTML brackets right…
The point there was that the food we give them is (typically) genetically modified. As of 2010, GMO corn made up (at least) 63% of US production. We try to ship that to starving countries (like Zimbabwe, who, last year, refused GMO food aid).
They have been engineered to be more nutritious, but it’s not just the GMOs that are less nutritious. And the plants, even when engineered, have to get some of the nutrients from somewhere, namely, the soil. Our produce is getting less nutrient dense as we overwork the soil – even the government admits that key nutrients in the soil are being lost in the industrial process. (This article goes into more specific and concrete detail than the government one).
Proteins…there’s more to nutrition than proteins. Plants have, historically, been excellent sources of most vitamins and minerals. See above for why they are not.
Odd, since scurvy will kill you even if you’re fed.
The feigned shock was a good touch. =) If you would, for a moment, consider the fact that there’s a global epidemic of obesity (even among the poor), diabetes and heart disease, to name a few, that coincide with a widespread adoption of food products we humans didn’t eat in appreciable quantities for nearly nearly the entirety of our evolution…but, that is wildly off topic, and probably best saved for a different (more lengthy) debate.
Putting aside the arguments on whether or not these are appropriate foods for humans, cereal grains are not complete proteins and do not supply an appreciable source of dietary fats. Both of these are not necessarily immediately detrimental to adults (the long-term effects may take years or decades to show up, so we’ll skip that), but have catostrophic effects on developing brains. Missing proteins can lead to a staggering number of growth abnormalities. Vitamin D deficiency – which can present due to insufficient dietary cholesterol – leads to rickets and bone malformations. Dietary fats are essential for brain development – this includes prenatally – and a deficiency before and/or after birth can lead to anything from mild mood disorders to severe mental retardation or nervous system dysfunction.
Arguing food production in terms of cereal grains misses the point. The kids are getting sufficient calories, but they still can’t grow properly. Is it really OK for a child to not die of starvation, yet live a life with bone deformities? Or mental retardation? Or neurological defects? I’m not trying to make the old feminista “quality over quantity” argument – I’m just sayin’, we can do better, and to leave out that part of the equation degrades the problem.
You need a citation. There’s a reason poor farmers burn GM seeds. There’s a reason the suicide rate among Indian farmers has skyrocketed. They “chose” the seeds because the companies producing them made big promises they couldn’t deliver on.
What you’re failing to admit here is GM crops are resistant to insects/molds/disease now but that’s not guaranteed to continue. We’re already seeing Round-Up Ready super-weeds in the US (look, we need more chemicals). We already know monocultures run the risk of significant crop loss. BT cotton has already been hit hard by new insects and pathogens. Although further GM-ing could solve it, it will result in a constant game of cat and mouse – something bad happens, a year’s worth of crops are destroyed, and then the companies produce something resistant to whatever caused the die-off. (Think of how well this after-the-fact strategy is working for the TSA.)
Mooloo says
There was no doom in my post. I was pointing out a fundamental flaw in the argument about food supply – grain per capita is not a valid measure of how well the world is fed. If you had bothered to read to the end, you’d also take note that I put the blame for this inadequacy on the AGW advocates. Tracking grain is simple, as its production is recorded by several international organizations. If the argument were framed in a different way – ie, how are people in Zambia doing at supporting themselves with local production – they couldn’t make silly claims like “Climate change linked to global rise in food prices”.
It’s the same type that wants the global “level playing field” and that means everyone grows and eats the same thing. This ensures that when a global staple crop is adversely affected in several areas – Zambia, Nicaragua and Thailand, for instance – it can be swiftly blamed on global climate menopause. Same crop, three different areas, it’s “obviously” not coincidence. However, if Zambian farmers have a bad year for okra, and Nicaraguan farmers have a poor maize crop, and Thai farmers lose their bok choy harvest…how can they spin that to fit the narrative?
Yeah, I know, conspiracies conspiracies, but I thought we’d already established they would do just about anything to fit the square peg into the round hole.
FWIW
@Andy Jones. Watched the video as requested. It is a highly inflexible Malthusian view of the world, sure if the price keeps increasing by 10% for any commodity, and the costs increase at the same rate then there will be doubling of price over a 10 year period. I took his example and of the price of a day ticket at Vail Colorado, when he made the video his prediction was that in 2010 the price would be $320/day based on the observed doubling every ten years. Because it is now 2010 we can test the good Prof’s theories, at least in the case of Vail be checking the price of a day ticket – it’s $94.
http://www.vail.com/plan-your-trip/lift-tickets/lift-tickets-explorer.aspx
In a previous life I spent some time thinking about these issues with relationship to network technologies and analysed a number scenarios including Malthus to try to understand why predictions are invariably wrong, or insignificant. I put together a number of scenarios where people were asked to make predictions by putting themselves back in time and looked at the world from that time’s point of view e.g.
You’re a Hackney cab driver in early twentieth century London and I told you that every family would own a car by 1990 would you believe there would be more, or less Hackney cabs in London in 1990. Quite obviously you’d assume less. There were in fact considerably more.
It’s what I termed “static analysis” and it’s what prevents us telling the future because there are so many “unknown unknowns” in a chaotic system that make the straight line projections that people make from where we are now to some future point highly unlikely.
Here is a little known fact about where to find Saskatchewan. It may be cold now, but with a couple of million more years of global warming it could actually become habitable by humans.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/33550165?slide=15
“It’s what I termed “static analysis” and it’s what prevents us telling the future”
If you projected the growth rate of switchboard operators during the first half of the 20th century, you quickly ended up with every man, woman and child working as a switchboard operator.
There was a very serious concern at the time, with disaster predicted for the future of the telephone due to a lack of operators. Surprisingly, we have relatively few switchboard operators these days and many telephones, the exact opposite of what was projected.
Hey, Willis, I believe my reply comment to you is stuck in the spam filter due to the high number of citation links it contained. 😛
Thank you all most kindly.
fred berple;
That’s not Saskatchewan. That’s Alberta. The mountains in the background are British Columbia. However, with a good telephoto lense, you could take that picture FROM Saskatchewan. Actually, you could take that picture from Manitoba on the other side of Saskatchewan. I am of course exagerating. You’d need to stand on a foot stool.
gringoviejo says:
March 26, 2011 at 8:32 pm
“Peak phosphorus is capable of being a game changer for crop yields.”
I’m aware of the problem. Sources are limited. A huge amount is contained in municipal wastewater and efforts have started to recover it at water treatment plants. But good point there. I’m much more concerned about irrigation water and phosphorus than I am about fossil fuel. Biosynthetic organisms (the dreaded GM stuff he greens love to hate) can solve all mankind’s problems except for hatred. Ecoloons hate people and consider them a blight upon the natural world. Nothing will ever satisfy them except reducing the population of humans (along with agriculture and livestock) to some prehistoric number.
Whoops! Moderator, please replace my preceding comment with the following (to fix an oversight):
Willis,
You just don’t get it! If you admit that things are getting better, you won’t be able to scare the pants off everyone. It has to be gloom, gloom, gloom, followed by doom, doom, doom, to gain control of the earth’s population and force everyone to sacrifice for Gaia!
Andy Jones;
You can argue stats and limits all day long about who has how much food and who doesn’t have enough and why, what the limits of the resources are until infinity and beyond. As several people have pointed out, if you extrapolate any trend in a linear way you eventually exceed physical limits. The problem with that is that no trend is linear, it rises and falls based on all sorts of factors that we can neither control, nor predict. In the 1970’s they predicted based on current trends that by 2000 almost 90% of all people would be unemployed, and Canada would be wiped out by an ice age. Sorry, but history doesn’t happen like it does in the books. The books take hours to read. The history takes decades, perhaps centuries. You can’t pull out page 76 and based on that decide what’s going to happen in the next 100 years.
If you want to know what the real issue with food supply and nutrition is, there are several sites you can go to that have excellent detailed statistics on those things country by country. The Economist, the CIA, the sites Willis used and mentioned here, all kinds of places to get your own info. Then make lists of the countries that have lots and lots of food and ones where people are really really hungry. Put the type of government each has beside the names. I’ll just give you the top couple of countries from my lists to get you going:
Too Much Food
United States, democracy
Canada, democracy
Japan, democracy
Not Nearly Enough Food
North Korea, dictatorship
Zimbabwe, dictatorship
Somalia, no functioning government
I’m certain you’ll find examples that show well fed dictatorships or poor democracies. Watch the trend my friend. That’s just page 76…
OK a few points:
1. Forecast population increases are like forecast increased CO2 or temperature increases. They are part of what I call tabloid science, in this case the familiar nonsense of taking a chart of a recent trend and projecting it into the indefinite future. As others have already said as far as population is concerned there is plenty of evidence that increasing prosperity depresses population increase even to the point where it is less that replacement despite greater and greater longevity.
2. Recycling is in its infancy. Things like iron atoms, carbon atoms and many other things do not disappear from the planet when ‘used up’. They are still around, just scattered into many different places.
3. Nuclear fusion?
4. Outer space mining of asteroids etc?
And that is without touching such taboos as coal etc, greater nuclear fission and genetic modification.
The answer to increased food production is to raise the atmospheric level of CO2 which will do two things:-
1/ Reduce the need for chemical fertilizers.
2/ Reduce the water requirement so releasing more water for other uses.
Simple!
Willis: I had done the same thing when I read Weepin’ Bill’s column, and came to the same conclusions.
I would suggest showing the total global grain production as well. Its over a 3-fold increase in the same time frame, and the chart is a positive linear slope of 26 million tonnes per year, since 1950. The increase in grain production has to be seen, to be believed. The per capita is slightly misleading with out the context of total production.
A bit puzzling, though, is that my source, while following the same curve as yours, is about 50 kg per capita lower.
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/data_center/C24/
Geronimo and Fred Berple make interesting points about switchboard operators and hansom cabs in the early years of the 20th century. It was then confidently predicted that the market for buggy-whips would decline precipitously, and so it proved. But only a century later, with the rise of the internet (which is, after all, a development of telephone technology), S&M practitioners have been able to communicate with each other with ever-increasing ease. Consequently, the demand for buggy-whips has…. oh, never mind.
Hey Becky, I looked at one of your links, “overwork the soil”.
I love it. I have never seen a more mealy selection of speculation masquerading as information. Selected quotes.
In other words, modern farming scares us, and we know it must somehow be bad, but we can’t seem to prove it.
Perhaps elements of the USDA are as bad as RealKlimatScience
Sorry, one link was all I could take.
I live in France where I consider myself well fed. We buy much of our food from the market, mostly, but not exclusively from producers. We don’t count calories, proteins nor carbohydrates, so you’ll get no citations from me.
Instead let me just bore you with an account of a short visit to the American Midwest 25 years ago where for 500 miles it was an endless sea of maize and each time I looked out of the bus window I had the impression of seeing the same farmhouse with the same silo. On arrival, the first gesture of my kind hosts was to show me the well-stocked refrigerator from which I was invited take what I wished when I wished. But no matter how much I ate, but the industrial food was so bad that within a couple of days I felt as though I was starving and a visit to a local restaurant did not help. The only respite was a return to Chicago where I found a simple corned beef restaurant in State Street where along with the meat there were boiled potatoes and a quarter cabbage. Don’t know where they sourced their food, but it was “wholesome”, whatever that might mean – I could feel it doing me good.
So Willis, though I’m a fan of your writings, I’m with Becky on this in saying that nourishment is not just a question of “nutrition” – of carbohydrate or protein intake and the angle of your article strikes me as being about as simplistic as the warmists’ take on the climate. It’s not as simple as that, is it? And yes, GM crops may well resist plant disease and pests better than others, but didn’t I hear that Montsanto also engineer their seeds to produce sterile plants in order to be able sell their seed every year? Perhaps you can correct me on that – it’s hearsay, I can’t trot out either citations or statistics.
John Wright: Your
but didn’t I hear that Montsanto also engineer their seeds to produce sterile plants in order to be able sell their seed every year? Perhaps you can correct me on that – it’s hearsay, I can’t trot out either citations or statistics.
That’s right. Its hearsay. According to Monsanto, they decided in 1999 to NOT make the “terminator” seeds.
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/terminator-seeds.aspx
As for your hunger pangs? Its because you have intestinal fauna used to food (and water) in France. I don’t feel hungry in the mid-west, but I am always hungry in France. (and not just because of the small portions).
Actually, John Marshall is right!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/26/farmers-versus-famine/#comment-629879
See my previous comment
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/26/farmers-versus-famine/#comment-629816
Based on the figure on this page there was a maximum in cereal production in 2008 and then a small decrease for the last couple of years:
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/csdb/en/
Hard to say if this is start of a new trend or just an anomaly, but the statement that production has been falling “for years” isn’t entirely wrong.
For a START There is NOT 7 billion people on this planet! do the math!
Thomas: Look at the long term data.
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/data_center/C24/
With minor year to year variations, the trend is strongly up, at 26 million tonnes per year.
Note also that food production invariably falls the during or the year after economic crisis’s, such as 2008, 2001, 1998, 1991, 1987, 1981 etc.
This for the same reason peak oil is declared during each downturn. In a downturn, production of commodities fall. Buts it due to a fall in demand, not a fall in capacity.
Andy is right: all growth phenomena are limited by the availability of the resources on which the growth depends. Most growth phenomena intially follow a log curve of growth accelleration (Malthus), then a path of slowed growth (missed by Malthus) as they approach the theoretical maximum and steady state defined as the carry capacity of the system, determined by the availability of resources. Those of you arguing against Andy are making the same sort of mistake Malthus made: you assume human knowledge and technology have no limits.
Becky said,
Neither link says anything of the sort. The second link talks about plants that are optimized for production, not root structure — with no reference.
For decades, farms have been moving from highly worked soils to no-till farming which is resistant to wind and water erosion and retains important soil structure.
With respect GMO and nutrition I give you this from Wikipedia:
In developing countries 500,000 per year become blind and up to 6,000 per day die from vitamin A-malnutrition.
http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech-info/articles/biotech-art/potrykus.html
Willis,
This being a “free-market” system, at any point a billionaire can order up and hold onto grain to make a good profit when prices rise even more. Does he care if people starve with this move? No.
The “free-market” system would be fine only if all the countries were on the same playing field. How many companies have jumped ship to China, India, etc. to generate more profits? Investors want the best return and not nickels and dimes. So who suffers? The lowest income.
This then gets to having too many civil servants than the population can carry due to the times are good attitude in hiring and generating new programs.
We are to the point that survival cannot be achieved at the current wages and unrest due to starvation has to occur.
Every time the price of oil rises, that is more people who cannot afford food and others that can buy 1000 times what that family needs.
If this system does not drastically change, there will have to be major wars due to the debt incurred by countries that cannot pay it.
Many people forget the good times of the past when you could afford a house and car on a one family income. Not anymore with the global interaction of the “free-market”.