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The Forum > Article Comments > Feeding the world > Comments

Feeding the world : Comments

By Max Rheese, published 20/6/2008

How sustainable is agriculture in feeding the world into the future?

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I see food production as a kind of race. On the one hand you have GM, low tillage and the eat local movement. On the other hand you have oil depletion, climate change and population growth. I'm not confident the pluses can overcome the minuses. High prices are little use to farmers if they can't grow a crop. Until recently conditions seemed to go relatively well for the food industry. Now it looks like major resources will have to be diverted to keep it going. Because food was readily available for most we could preoccupy ourselves with sport and entertainment. If nothing else we could be entering an era of back-to-basics.
Posted by Taswegian, Friday, 20 June 2008 10:51:53 AM
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Max, your article is rendered worthless by its multitude of inaccuracies and untrue statements. For example,

1) It is obvious that you have never read Limits to Growth or you would understand how incomplete is the description in Wikipedia. Limits to Growth laid out a number of scenarios based on different initial assumptions of resource availability etc. Their predictions covered the 100 year period from 1970 to 2070. It is not true to say that "These were dire predictions that never eventuated". In fact, now that we are 30 years into the 100 year time period outlined by Limits to Growth we can see that their business-as-usual scenario is SPOT ON in its prediction of the current situation. By this scenario we are headed for a food and population crash by mid-century.

2) You perpetuate the myth (pushed by the GM multinationals) that we can engineer crops for greater productivity through GM. Crops today are only more productive because we have bred them to devote more of their energy production to grain production while we use oil-fuelled agriculture to do the tasks for them that they would normally do for themselves - we now take care of the plant spacing, the nutrient supply, the pest resistance. GM may help with stress and pest resistance somewhat, but there will be an energy penalty for this. When we no longer have the oil for industrial scale agriculture, most GM crops will be as useless as their conventional counterparts. Then there is the developing phosphate shortage (75% of world reserves now depleted) which will critically restrict agricultural productivity.

3) You "put aside" any discussion of oil in food production but that is like ignoring the role of oxygen in breathing. How will we produce more crops on more land with less oil. Ridiculous!

This is the dodgy-looking organisation that the author, Max Rheese, is "Executive Director" of:

http://www.aefweb.info/index.php
Posted by michael_in_adelaide, Friday, 20 June 2008 11:06:36 AM
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This is more facile optimism from someone connected with an apparently climate change denialist source. For a more sober view, see my recent paper to a Manning Clark House conference at ANU in Canberra, ‘Human Political Scenarios On A_Warming Planet’, see MCH Homepage http://www.manningclark.org.au/ .
The cost and availability of oil for tractor fuel (petrol and diesel),for irrigation pumps and sprays, and for fertiliser manufacture and transport, is a crucial factor in maintaining the present level of food output - let alone increasing it.
Tony Kevin
Posted by tonykevin 1, Friday, 20 June 2008 1:47:29 PM
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Aw phoowey, poowey and doggy-doowey.

How can anyone possibly talk about population growth and sustainability and come up with the conclusion that;

“There is a solid foundation for entertaining an optimistic outlook that the world can sustainably feed itself into the foreseeable future.”

The foreseeable future doesn’t stop at 2050.

For goodness sake Max, you’ve got to get away from the notion of increasing this, increase that and increasing every other goddam thing, in order to pander to an unaddressed continuously increasing population….oh, and expecting the environmental impact and the average quality of life to actually improve at the same time. MMMMmmmmmm.

Talk about the absolute opposite of sustainability!!

Rather than being happy with a slowly reducing rate of population growth (we’ve still got a rapidly increasing global population, with no end in sight), how about advocating maximised efforts to stabilise and then reduce population, as quickly as is possible in a humane manner? Don’t you think that this is a rather, slightly, just possibly essential element of real sustainability, as opposed to the blind acceptance of continuous growth…..until it crashes?

Let’s address both sides of the equation Max; increasing food production/distribution/efficient usage AND working towards at least stabilising if not reducing the demand. We need to do the latter with AT LEAST as much effort as the former.
Posted by Ludwig, Friday, 20 June 2008 4:04:20 PM
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Without adequate supply of now obviously dwindling fish protein and fish-meal feed supplement and guano fertilizer from the increasingly devastated world ocean environment, can anyone point to data establishing argiculture can sustain world food supply?

Where is such data? Does such scientific evidence exist or not?
Posted by JF Aus, Saturday, 21 June 2008 7:19:16 PM
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ABC Radio National's Bush Telegraph programme on 20 June had an interview about approaching "Peak Phosphate". You can hear it by going to:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bushtelegraph/default.htm

Bit of a spanner in the fantastic food future delusion eh?
Posted by michael_in_adelaide, Saturday, 21 June 2008 7:38:58 PM
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After reading so much thinly supported junk from the AEF, I expected this to be more of the same. Instead what Max gives me something I wish I saw a lot more of on OLO - a clear definition of the issue he is addressing, a clear description of the course of action he thinks we should take, a list of facts he bases his opinions on and most importantly a healthy sprinkling of links to background reading supporting those facts. I don't agree with his conclusions, but the article made me think and taught me things I wasn't aware of before. I can't ask for more. Thanks.

The FAO link was great. You know a link is good when you find yourself wasting a lot of time looking for more of the same. I was totally unaware of how much the worlds food situation had improved during my lifetime. I was also unaware of how much unused arable land was available. These things are all good news. But Max seems to of ignored some of the other statements in that same article. It appears land isn't the major limiting factor in food production. It is water, and from the sporadic reports I see in many places in the world many places (eg China and India) are pushing the limits of what is available.

As others have pointed out the price of petroleum based fertilises are going through the roof right now, and phosphorous doesn't appear to be far behind if our local retail prices for phosphorous based products are anything to go by. According to Max's links, without tractors, fertilisers and phosphorous production per acre of land falls by a factor of 10. Indeed, its lightly the high prices of these inputs are already effecting productivity in poorer nations.

So after reading the links provided by Max I don't see the same rosy picture he does. Perhaps Max is a optimist. I recall a lecturer saying optimists are generally happier people than pessimists. In the long term though, the pessimists usually have the consolation of being proved right.
Posted by rstuart, Sunday, 22 June 2008 12:07:17 AM
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The present limiting factor in food production is a shortage of money that people in need have to have to buy food that agriculture is capable of producing.

I am amazed that authors here do not mention shortage of money together with shortage of fertilizer and water.

Plant and animal life obviously needs adequate nutrition and water. Consumers need adequate money and nobody wants to die due to malnutrition or starvation. The customers exist, farmers exist, transport companies and retailers exist, adequate money does not exist amongst the majority of people.

There is cleary an economic problem that needs to be addressed to feed the world on a sustainable basis. Yes, feed the world, animals also need food.
Posted by JF Aus, Sunday, 22 June 2008 11:14:24 AM
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Tut tut Max Rheese

I see you're at it again and not a mention of the urgent requirement to remediate our seriously depleted soils in Australia.

Max, if you wish to be taken seriously you'd best cease masking your "free" market, pro-industry strategies under green titles. AEF indeed!

Altruistic philosophies or conservation have nothing to do with your push for GM foods and the international restrictions now on carcinogenic, chlorinated chemicals are impacting the profits of Monsanto, Dow et al. As a result, they've implemented a global push to flog off glyphosates to keep their snouts in the trough but not so fast Max.... not so fast man...we're onta ya buddy.

And those who forget Monsanto's ignominious past, could be forced to witness a repeat!

http://www.foe.org.au/sustainable-food/media/news-items/front-page-news-feed-1/new-report-gm-crops-increase-pesticide-use?searchterm=GM+crops

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:q3Z3oXAcMScJ:www.foe.org.au/news/2007/burkes-backyard-the-new-face-of-greenwashing-in-australia+max+rheese+profile&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=au&lr=lang_en
Posted by dickie, Tuesday, 24 June 2008 11:58:14 PM
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