Peak Food – who cares?
We at Peak Food have been warning for several years that we have an unsustainable food production system that will be unable to sustain the 8 billion people expected by 2025. Modern farming is dependent on finite fossil fuels for it’s power needs, for nitrogen fertilizer and for pesticides. The world is losing about 25 million acres of land each year to desertification, salination and urban growth. Climate change will bring disruptive weather in the form of droughts in some places and floods in others. Shortages of water for irrigation due to falling aquifer levels and lower river flows because of competition from cities will also limit yields.
We have not just warned of food supply failing to keep up with rising population. There is also the possibility of a sudden and disastrous failure of the food supply system in the event of geo-political events causing severe fuel shortages. Farming operations such as seeding and harvesting need to be done at the correct time and without diesel in the tank, farms would grind to a halt.
We have had lots of people who agree that Peak Food may already be here and that from now on the amount of food that can be produced for each person in the world will decline as the population increases, but in general, because we are just ordinary people, our message is ignored.
So when Professor John Beddington, no less a person than the chief scientific advisor to the U.K. government, made a speech earlier this year predicting that a “perfect storm” of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources, all operating on the same time frame, threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst affected regions, we expected big things to happen.
This should have been headline news in newspapers and on television. There should have been demands that the government make this a top priority and start to develop a sustainable food supply system. Considering the consequences for our children, this should have been the subject everyone was talking about.
But what happened? Pretty much nothing. The media was full of big brother celebrities and other trivia. So far as we know, the government has not started any new major programmes, and the general public missed it completely.
Peak Food – does nobody care?
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The government certainly does not seem to care. We asked the environment agency if they considered food security, before they planned to flood the fertile land around the Humber in order to provide mud for the birds. The E agency replied that they had asked DEFRA ( our government department for food & rural affairs) about food security & DEFRA said they did not know what food security was……