Wild Food Peak
The importance of wild food has obviously been in decline right from the time when a few hunter gatherers decided to have a try at farming. Now, although wild food caught or gathered on land is still important in parts of Africa and places like the Amazon for most of us in the west it is a very small part of our diet.
Wild fish, on the other hand, is far more important. It is a superb high protein food that has been a significant part of our diet and the collapse of fish stocks forecast over the next 20 years could not come at a worse time.
We should remember that until the time of catch there is no input of energy in wild fish while farmed fish obviously uses far more energy. Thus moving away from wild meat and fish will not be easy.
Below is part of an excellent article by Janet Larsen from the Earth Policy Institute website:
“After decades of growth, the reported global wild fish catch peaked in 2000 at 96 million tons and fell to 90 million tons in 2003, the last year for which worldwide data are available.
The catch per person dropped from an average of 17 kilograms in the late 1980s to 14 kilograms in 2003—the lowest figure since 1965.
As fishing fleets expanded through the late 1980’s and as fish finding and harvesting technologies became more efficient, the world’s fishers have systematically gone after their catch at greater depths and in more remote waters. Over the past 50 years, the number of large predatory fish in the oceans has dropped by a startling 90 percent. Catches of many popular food fish such as cod, tuna, flounder, and hake have been cut in half despite a tripling in fishing effort. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the 4 million vessels scouring the world’s waters are at or exceeding the sustainable yields of three quarters of all oceanic fisheries.
The 10 most-fished species constitute 30 percent of the world’s catch. Seven of these have reached their limits and are classified as fully exploited or overexploited throughout their entire ranges, meaning that we cannot expect to increase their harvests. Included in this group are two types of Peruvian anchoveta, Alaska pollock, Japanese anchovy, blue whiting in the northeast Atlantic, capelin in the North Atlantic, and Atlantic herring. The other three species—chub mackerel, skipjack tuna, and largehead hairtail—are overfished in parts of their ranges.
Interestingly, several of these species became fishing targets only after the stocks of more desirable fish were overharvested. After the collapse of the 500-year-old Canadian cod fishery in the early 1990s, blue whiting catches increased. In the northwest Pacific, the overfishing of Alaska pollock and Japanese sardine led fishers to focus on Japanese anchovy, largehead hairtail, and squid. Some scientists warn that continuing to ‘fish down the food web’ will lead to harvests almost exclusively of bait fish and jellyfish.”
Eating the Kids’ Food Inheritance
It has become fashionable for people to say that they are going SKI ing (acronym for Spending the Kids’ Inheritance), often by taking equity from their house and spending it on holidays etc.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with that, they earned it or more likely gained it through house price inflation. Now though, governments are taking on unimaginable amounts of debt that is in effect stealing from our children’s future and bequeathing them a less prosperous life.
Yes, our children could probably cope with less prosperity, but they will struggle to deal with inheriting an Earth with a changed climate and food production system dependent on the use of resources that have been depleted by previous generations.
The twentieth century started with 1.5 billion people. We are now close to 7 billion and will pass 8 billion around 2028. This has been possible only because we found ways to convert cheap, plentiful fossil energy in to food energy. On average it now takes about 10 fossil calories, in the form of oil and gas to deliver 1 calorie of food energy. As these resources are finite, they must become scarce and expensive at some time and then the fossil energy based food system will fail, resulting in famine.
The present food system also consumes vast amounts of mined phosphate and potash fertilizers instead of recycling nutrients back to the soil. Ancient aquifers are being depleted to irrigate crops in dry areas. Many of these aquifers, from America to India are close to empty.
How will future generations judge us baby-boomers, the babies born in the post- second world war years when soldiers returned home and birth rates in the West shot up? We lived through a period of relative peace and unprecedented prosperity. We enjoyed the swinging sixties, travelled the world and ate and drank in a way that kings would have envied. In so doing, we plundered and damaged the Earth and built up massive debt.
The thing that they will be unable to understand is that when we realised what was happening we were unwilling to change. We want to live as we do a little longer and to hell with the kids. Some people would call it Gordon Brown mentality.
Famine Author at LAMMA
John Gossop, author of Famine in the West and www.peakfood.co.uk attended LAMMA recently as the guest of Nationwide Diamond Concrete. During the first day of the show he spoke to many farmers about peakfood and the future threats to food production. Copies of his book were sold at a special show price of £5.99 .
Food for Nine Billion
On the evening of the nineteenth of January 2010, The City Food Lecture was held at the Guildhall in London. The main speaker was Sir David King who was the government’s chief scientific adviser for seven years.
Sir David spoke about the huge challenges that we face and how they interconnect. He said that in the past when a population had overworked and misused their land, they could move on to fresh land. We can no longer do that. We have ploughed the last furrow.
He mentioned that we entered the twentieth century with 1.5 billion people and left it with 6 billion and that we can be fairly certain that the 8 billion mark will be passed before 2030 because the people who will breed the extra numbers had already been born.
Those numbers will have a knock-on effect on other aspects of life on this planet.
Climate change, Sir David thought, is influenced by human activity. We are using a set of resources much faster than they can be replaced or new ones found. Food production would be under severe pressure and water would be in short supply.
He said that if the forests were the left lung of the world, then the oceans were the right lung and we are in danger of losing some of that capacity to absorb CO2 and release oxygen. If present trends continue, by mid century the oceans will be bereft of large fish.
He suggested that resource shortages could cause conflict and terrorism and even speculated that the Iraq War might one day be identified as the first resource war of the 21st century.
He gave examples of projects where desertification was being reversed but he said that in democracies there is a disconnect between what we understand is necessary and government action which is usually delayed until it’s almost too late.
Energy from Waste Food
In the past, ancient solar energy stored as fossil fuel has been so cheap that there has been little incentive to find ways to waste less. Similarly, with current solar energy collected by plants, not only do we waste the energy in millions of tonnes of waste food that goes in to landfill, but the methane gas given off – unless collected – is a very powerful greenhouse gas.
There are now encouraging signs that this is starting to change. A fantastic example is the potato packing and processing plant belonging to Fenmark in Cambridgeshire. Their new anaerobic digestion unit will divert thirty thousand tonnes of food waste each year from landfill to generate electricity and provide heat for water and space heating with the by-product sold as a soil conditioner.
One small step towards food security.
Buy Famine in the West Printed Book £6.49 +pp
Buy Famine in the West Ebook £2.99
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