A vegetarian diet is the only high ethical food ground - and reducing our dependency on meat is vital in tackling a potential global food shortage, said Lord Haskins, ex-chairman of Northern Foods, delivering the seventh annual City Food Lecture at London’s Guildhall.
Haskins told delegates that a 60-year trend of food surpluses, triggered by dramatic increases in cultivable land after World War Two, could be set to come to an end as climate change threatens future food production.
“Sadly it took farmers and politicians too long to wake up to these concerns,” he said. “At last the penny seems to have dropped; but the warring factions still persist in distorting facts to make their case.”
Haskins’ lecture, entitled ‘Are the Malthusian chickens coming home to roost?’ after 18th century cleric Reverend Malthus, who predicted the world was heading for a crisis because the population was going to grow faster than food supplies, argued that any possible food shortage is intrinsically bound up with the threat of climate change.
Haskins took a bleak view of the future, assuming the world’s population will rise by 30 per cent over the next 50 years to 8.5 billion, that increasingly affluent human beings will start to eat more meat, using more intensive livestock methods, that there will be fewer significant land tracts to bring into production, a decline in the productivity of existing land due to extreme weather patterns, and too great a reliance on energy crops for biofuels.
And even if the world takes opportunities such as maximising existing food science and technologies, exploring further scientific innovation - i.e. GM crops - liberalising trade and reducing reliance on energy crops, Haskins insisted changes in diet and consumer behaviour are key to averting any disaster.
“There could still be a crisis unless we can achieve radical changes in modern, rich consumer behaviour,” he said. “Put simply, we waste far too much food, energy and goods, and we eat too much. This is where there is a common theme between ensuring global food security and combating climate change. Waste is the most unappealing by-product of a self-indulgent, western consumer society.
“My guess is that, throughout the food chain, 50 per cent of the food produced on farms is wasted. If we could save even half of this, we would make a huge contribution to the environment, by reducing the huge tonnage of greenhouse gases created in the production and disposal of this unnecessary waste.
“I believe that a combination of skilful, responsible scientific innovation, well thought-out taxes and incentives, sound, effective regulation, unprecedented international co-operation and the inherent common sense of most human beings will avoid a Malthusian disaster in food supplies. And, if this can be done with food, it should also be possible to avert the catastrophe threatened by climate change,” Haskins concluded.
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