A global food crisis is looming, so policymakers everywhere need to think hard about how to make food cheaper and more plentiful. That requires making a commitment to producing more fertiliser and better seeds, maximising the potential offered by genetic modification, and abandoning the rich world’s obsession with organics.
Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine is making less food available, because the two nations have been responsible for more than a quarter of global wheat exports and large quantities of barley, maize and vegetable oil. On top of punishing climate policies and the world emerging from the pandemic, prices of fertiliser, energy and transport are soaring, and food prices have climbed 61% over the past two years.
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2022-07-11-bjorn-lomborg-going-organic-might-be-fashionably-green-but-it-wont-feed-the-world/
Sri Lanka is the big example of the moment
Sri Lanka had been self-sufficient in rice production for decades, but tragically has now been forced to import $450m worth of rice. Tea, the nation’s primary export crop and source of foreign exchange, was devastated, with economic losses estimated at $425m. Before the country spiralled downward towards brutal state violence and a popular uprising, the government was forced to offer $200m in compensation to farmers and come up with $149m in subsidies.
Sri Lanka’s organic experiment failed fundamentally because of one simple fact: it does not have enough land to replace synthetic nitrogen fertiliser with animal manure. To shift to organics and keep production it would need five to seven times more manure than the total amount of manure available to it today.
Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, mostly made with natural gas, are a modern miracle, crucial for feeding the world. Largely thanks to this fertiliser, agricultural outputs tripled in the past half-century as the human population doubled. Artificial fertiliser and modern farming inputs are the reason the number of people working on farms has been slashed in every rich country, freeing people for other productive occupations.
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2022-07-11-bjorn-lomborg-going-organic-might-be-fashionably-green-but-it-wont-feed-the-world/
Lomborg concludes:
To sustainably feed the world and withstand future global shocks, we need to produce better food cheaper. History shows that the best way to achieve that is by improving seeds, including by using genetic modification, along with expanding the use of fertiliser, pesticides and irrigation. This will allow us to produce more food, curb prices, alleviate hunger and save nature.
• Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is ‘False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet’.
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2022-07-11-bjorn-lomborg-going-organic-might-be-fashionably-green-but-it-wont-feed-the-world/
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60 years of globalism has resulted in considerable vulnerabilities that many anticipated in the 1970-1980’s. Everything has a downside especially if it goes too far or is unbalanced. Industrial agriculture and centralized control of main basic food commodities, (grain) has become entrenched. So, grain like oil becomes a control/cartel/regulatory lever point for global powers. It is a system vulnerable to people who want to rule the world, save the planet, gain political advantage, or wage war, (actual and propaganda).
The only way to weaken the growing grip of global centralization of our food supply is one of my favorite things I think about when smoking my pipe ….a family/community based agrarian movement. Globalization is the anthesis of owning land and family/community-based subsistence/local market commercial farming. Wherever consumerization, commercialization, industrialization of globalism has taken hold, land ownership and family based agrarian pursuits have been vastly weakened, (think USA 1950 and USA 1990 and USA now…. from massive land/farm/family food production to almost 2% and less than 0.1% producing their own food. …we are too busy fiddling with the stupid phone and waiting for the package from Amazon to get our hands dirty growing food)
I am not talking prepper hunkering down. I am talking about subsistence farming in 2022….growing some or all of your own food. Certainly, makes sense for the virtual corporate worker like myself where I have to earn two salary dollars to spend one dollar at the grocery store. Wheat is doable when families work together or belong to a coop that has nano- scale harvesting, threshing and winnowing machinery. The problem is much of the seed is locked up in licensure and many of the open pollinated varieties are hard to get. Hey ag schools… do us a favor, develop OP barley, and wheat seed that work well is SW PA.
So having several thousand small farms in your area makes you more secure than 2 or 3 big farms. Really.
As to your desire to ban food imports, people like being able to eat food out of season, or that can’t be grown locally.
The only way you are going to ever get more than a tiny fraction of the population to agree to going back, is by forcing them to.
BTW, if you think that forcing a majority of the population to go back to an agrarian lifestyle, you should have a conversation with Pol Pot sometime.
Hey Mark,
Remember it’s something I dream about when I smoke my pipe! I am not talking policy, regulation or leverage on anyone to do anything, nor am I talking a utopian solution. I am merely suggesting an alternative for people who want to do something different like grow food for themselves as a lifestyle choice not as a self righteous pursuit or political statement. It was once the most prominent lifestyle choices in America. It was what America was about before WWII. Land ownership, farming and subsistence farming was the ground for American conservatism. Like coal and steel the American farm family was a vital strength of America. Nor am I anti-industrial farming, It’s not going away nor should it. I am not a nostalgic romantic wanting to bring back the 19th century. Yet, with the improved nano-mirco scale infrastructure technologies for farming, family commercial farming and subsistence farming could make a comeback. And it is totally scalable from the family that produces $400 a year of their own food to families making a living. I live in a region full of small family farms… old farms (Penn Charter farms) protected from development by various covenants. Food plentiful and widely available at many sources other than the supermarket. Flour mills are plenty full so flour is available but not in the supermarket this week unless it is organic. Booo! I will not pay that premium. As we have seen by the Ukraine grain nuttiness. that a reduction of their input into the global market appears to be impacting our market here. The total expected reduction of their total annual global export maybe 4-6% of what is consumed in an average year. The difference is within the normal annual yield variation. . Why should this be impacting our market? It is fear my friend driving demand. It’s a game. Dependency drives that sort of fear and yes having a few more people growing food in your local community helps to dispel fear. I am thankful for the local grain growers and the local mills.
The point is to produce more food and more babies please. My point is not either/or but both/and. Both American Industrial farming and and increase in American family farming to produce more food and decrease dependency on centralized markets. More food is the margin that dispels fear to combat the lower fertility rates in America. We need a baby boom soon.
It won’t produce more food. It will produce much, much less.
These “centralized markets” also do not exist.
It was never a lifestyle choice. It was a technological necessity.
As soon as the technology for improved farming was available, people abandoned farming as fast as they could.
I never said that people shouldn’t engage in farming if they want. What I ridicule is the belief that such farms would ever do more than feed the families doing the farming and most won’t come close to do even that.
The only one feeling this fear is you.
The problem has never been the amount of food produced, rather its distribution. The globalists invented GMO seeds to increase profits, with the excuse that they were a “better” product.
Crops need water. If there is a drought, no amount of chemical fertilizer or insecticide will make a difference to the plant not growing. If there is too much water, fertilizer and insecticides won’t stop the plant from drowning. Recently, a US study showed that 80% of urine samples tested contained cancer causing glyphosate – an “essential” agricultural chemical. We survived for thousands of years without chemical fertilizers and insecticides. We don’t need them now.
They are a better product. That’s why farmers world over select them when governments aren’t banning them.
di-hydrogen monoxide is associated with cancers as well.