"At the same time around half of Australians are dying as a result of their diets, at enormous cost to those that live."

That's because they're fatty boomba's Julian. WE don't have a shortage of food, we have a surfeit of people with big mouths. We export $40B of food per year and export $6 B due to reciprocal trade agreements.

Right on about educating farmers although in my experience, when it comes to looking after the land, farmers might teach us a thing or two.

This article might have been stronger if it talked about why some eastern European nations have erected trade barriers when it comes to exporting food. There have been food shortages and some crops have failed in Russia and China but the knock on effects have been compounded by some nations not selling food. Why?

Greed.

Good article Julian, but may I add one very important point:

Re-think continuous growth!

The madness of rapid population growth in this country and hence the rapidly increasing demand for food and for income from food exports is integral to our focus on food security and quality.

An ever-increasing demand will undermine, dilute, cancel out or completely overwhelm gains that we could make in rehydrating, revegetating, recarbonising, recycling, renourishing, retraining and re-educating!

Good article, Julian, and on a crucial issue.

But how come you don't mention the most cost-effective anti-famine device of all: the humble condom? Or better still the modern mini pill?

You need to widen your vision and include this in your analysis of the options.

It's not the whole solution of course --there are already enough people to have the world on the edge of famine. But there are 80 million unplanned pregnancies a year in countries where poverty and lack of female education denies many people access to contraception.

Co-incidentally, that 80 million a year is about the rate by which world population is growing. And the latest news is that there is no longer any guarantee the world's population will level off at around 9 billion as we used to hope.

As Norman Borlaug, who received the Nobel Prize for the Green Revolution, pointed out, what he called "the population monster" is the ultimate problem, and if it is not tamed no technological solutions or social reorganisations will prove adequate.

Rip roarin'remarkable article Julian! But I agree with Livio and Ludwig - we have to deal with the demand as well as the supply side and that means stabilising population as soon as possible. As with climate change, where any increase in population will make it harder to achieve targets, so too any increase in population makes it harder for everyone to be fed with enough calories and nourishment. Stephanie Alexander has made a great start in Australia by introducing kitchen gardens to schools. We have to go beyond that so every school leaver has significant knowledge of gardening/horticulture/agriculture/animal husbandry to enhance food production locally. Come higher oil prices, transporting food medium and long distances may become prohibitive in price.

A good Article but you omitted a very important R

REWARD. Reward our rapidly shrinking pool of Farmers for their efforts. Food within Australia does not necessarily have to become more expensive.. Coles and Woollies margins have to shrink

We keep hearing stories, rarely denied , that the Farm Gate price can be 10% or lower , of the Big Two's selling Price.

Presently our Farmers are being screwed by the BIG TWO as well as by the processors.. Heinz shifting processing of Tomatoes and Beetroots offshore are 2 examples..

Maybe I am missing another R word..

REGULATIONS to ensure REWARD!

Dare I mention SUBSIDITIES as widely practiced amongst the rest of the World ?

Julian
"around half of Australians are dying as a result of their diets".
That's straight out nonsense, however a large portion of deaths may be attributed to the secondary effects of obesity. Diabetes, say. Perhaps you could attribute a portion of cancer deaths to too much red meat in people's diets?

Whatever. but that does not add up to creeping food insecurity for Australia.

As for the high food prices to which you refer, these are in fact due to poor people in India and China finding thsat they have more money, that is becoming less impoverished, and spending it on food. But the high prices won't last. They never do. Food prices have been falling, in real terms, for decades. Show farmers a few dollars and food will come. Don't believe this? Just hang around for a few years and you'll see..

Food security has always been a social issue. Its never had anything to do with imagined limits on production.

Dear Curmudgeon
Have you never heard of peak phosphorus? Never heard of falling water tables in North China and India? Never heard of climate change threatening to make major Asian rivers seasonal? Never heard of claims that we'll need 70% more food by mid-century so all nine billion or so can be fed properly? Understanding the past in this case is no assurance for understanding the future.

popnperish - I belive I've deflated all these wild-eyed disaster stories you managed to scare youself with before..

But I don't think I've done peak phospherous. What you're quoting is stuff dating from 2008 when phosphate rock prices went for a big run. They've since collapsed again but have moved up in recent months, I believe because a lot of the reserves and production are in the middle east (sounds familiar), and have been caught up in recent troubles there. If prices are stayed as high as the peak then alternatives would have been found, or demand would have fallen. Phosphorous can be found in a lot of places but it would, of course, be more costly to extract from other materials than the existing rock.

As for water tables falling in China. Yawn! China again. Articles warning of this or that trouble in Chinese agriculture have a long and venerable history.

Major Asian rivers seasonal.. right. Just like the Muarry was going to become seasonal. Are there any of these stories you don't believe?

There was a related item in todays news relative to this very important topic. Notably the shortage of water. Bill Clinton being an active mover and shaker.
Unfortunately this project could just turn out to be another push for the world wide privatization of all water supplies.

Good article Julian, and I'm right in front of you.
http://nakedhydroponics.com

Oh what a guilty feeling

To bin the peelings

Toyonder!

Three words: Paul. Ehrlich. Wrong.

Dear Clownfish
Paul Erhlich wrong? Yes on timing - I fear he will be proved right in the end. Let's hope not but we'll have to pull out all stops to avert widespread hunger this time.

Julian is spot on. it is time to put the old industrial form of agriculture to bed and seek a renewal. It has had 60 years of life and whilst it has served us well in many respects its downsides are becoming so significant that a new form of agriculture (and by extrapolation) a new form of education is needed. Julian posits the need for renewal, reeducate, retrain, rehydrate etc and whilst i agree I think there is one re I would like to see less of and that is reductionism. May the new form of agriculture and agricultural education be based around holism which embraces the subjective and the objective frames of reference. Julian and others might like to look at this website which demonstrates that this form of education has emerged:http://www.csu.edu.au/courses/undergraduate/ecological_agriculture/course-overview

popnperish, read Dan Gardner's excellent 'Future babble', and realise that you just trotted out one of the classic obfuscations of the wrong prediction-addicts. Congratulations, you're now in the same league as Harold Camping and his followers.

No, Paul Ehrlich was not wrong on timing, he was just wrong.

'Well, it's not quite the conflagration I'd been banking on. Never mind, lads, same time tomorrow… we must get a winner one day' - Peter Cooke.

Clownfish.
Let's hope you're right - don't mind being proved wrong but I suspect Ehrlich will be vindicated before long. Another Green Revolution anyone?

Excellent article.

Hear hear!

Gloom springs eternal for the neo-Malthusians.

Thanks, guys. As always, you can only fit so many issues into 700 words!

Livio/popnperish: you are correct. Population is vital. I deal with it in Ch10 of The Coming Famine. The good news is that the young women of the world are not getting married and are not having children - and are not bothering to consult men about it. They will lower the population voluntarily, regardless. The challenge is we have to feed >10bn people for 50+ years while they are doing it.Condoms won't help reduce the number of people who are living longer, either.

Aspley: I deal with Reward in "Why farmers need a payrise". http://www.sciencealert.com.au/opinions/20103008-21271.html Submitted this to OO, but was told it was too long.

Curmudgeon,

The same sorts of concerns that are raised by popnperish about limits to growth are raised in this paper by Rockstrom et al. from Nature, probably the most respected peer-reviewed science journal in the world. It discusses the dangers from our interference with a number of natural cycles

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html

Open version at

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/

Now which is more likely, that Rockstrom et al., the authors of the papers they reference, the referees, and the editors of Nature are all wild-eyed lunatics, or that you are in denial?

The reason why all these issues are coming to a head now was recently explained by the geologist Mike Sandiford in the Sydney Morning Herald: humans now have the numbers and impact to be a major geophysical force.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-scale-of-the-effect-we-have-on-the-planet-is-yet-to-sink-in-20110522-1eyqk.html

Jeremy Grantham of Grantham, Mayo, van Otterloo (GMO), with $107 billion under asset management according to the Wikipedia article on him, doesn't think that the commodities market is going to soon start trending down again. He is saying a lot of the same things as popnperish. See

http://www.gmo.com/websitecontent/JGLetterALL_1Q11.pdf

Clownfish,

It is true that Paul Ehrlich was unable to predict the success of the Green Revolution. Neither were a lot of other people, including the agronomist William Paddock, who would have been much better placed to understand its potential. However, you are implying that because we got lucky once, we are going to go on being lucky forever. You are like a gambler who has won big at the casino and now wants to go back and bet the house.

There have been a number of Malthusian collapses in history and in the archaeological record, when people weren't so lucky. You might want to consider the Irish Potato Famine, for example. The Spanish brought the potato back to Europe from South America in the 16th century, and it proved to be an immensely productive crop, able to feed up to 4 times as many people to the hectare as grain, when the growing conditions were right. It was hard to develop varieties for Northern Europe because of day length issues, but the farmers eventually succeeded with a few and potatoes were widely introduced. The population of Ireland grew from perhaps 1.2 million in 1600 to 8.5 million by the 1840s, even though Ireland's British overlords had commandeered much of the best land to grow export crops. Growth was especially rapid because traditional inheritance customs and colonial laws required land to be subdivided among all the sons, so all could marry and have children.

In the 1840s, the late blight arrived from Mexico, and none of the local potato varieties had any resistance to it. Whole crops were completely wiped out all over Ireland. By this time, a significant proportion of the population was living on plots of land that were too small to feed a family on anything but potatoes. 1 - 1.5 million people starved, and another 1.5 - 2 million were forced to emigrate. As Tom Kenneally points out in "Three Famines", many of the emigrants were so weakened by hunger that they died on the ships or soon after reaching the New World.

So, an extremely localised famine somehow proves the Malthusians? I think not.

The simple truth is that today, more people are better fed than ever before.

We did not 'get lucky once'. Humans applied human ingenuity to a problem and came up with a solution. It's kinda what humans do.

A provocative article, with much food for thought.

Though I agree with most of the author's suggestions for improving food production (whether or not this is as critical an issue as portrayed), one suggestion is of concern:

"frontier science such as re-engineering the photosynthetic pathways of crops and trees, to boost yields and lock up more carbon."

This proposition is suggestive of large scale genetic engineering, and, if so, I would have to disagree, on the simple grounds that traditional cross fertilisation to produce improved and genetically sustainable varieties, though a slower process, offers considerably greater assurance of improved yields without jeopardising tolerance to environmental stresses - and thereby ensuring longevity. The "quick fix" of artificial modification may risk emergence of an Achilles heel in future food reliability.

From Popnperish,

"Stephanie Alexander has made a great start in Australia by introducing kitchen gardens to schools. We have to go beyond that so every school leaver has significant knowledge of gardening/horticulture/agriculture/animal husbandry to enhance food production locally."

Urban gardens and an organic fresh food diet. An attractive proposition. Given the popularity of cooking and lifestyle TV programs, a movement such as that suggested may gain wide traction through the influence of youthful enthusiasm, and provide another creative and productive family pursuit.

Some, however, appear to think that agricultural production is a menial "falling off a log" pursuit, and suited only to the intellectually challenged. This is so very far from the truth, and a segment of society more closely in touch with the vagaries and trials of nature one will be extremely hard pressed to find. Farmers should be respected and lauded for persevering in spite of the rubbish they have to put up with, and the challenges presented by our largely duopoly-engineered and externally manipulated market place.

Let us also not forget that quality food production is under constant threat from the introduction of exotic pests and disease, in both plant and livestock arenas, and only vigilance and inviolable quarantine may be all that lies between abundance and extraordinary hardship.

*Humans applied human ingenuity to a problem and came up with a solution*

Quite correct Clownfish. Humans simply nick more land and resources
from other species, wiping them out in the process. As only
humans seemingly matter, that is apparently not a problem.

So we'll overfish the oceans to the point where whole species
vanish, we'll load it with plastic, so that seabirds will cark
it when they eat the stuff, we'll shoot anything that moves
in Africa's forests, for its meat and can be eaten. We'll knock
down more rainforest when the population pressure becomes
unsustainable, we'll knock out the mangroves, which used to filter
the oceans and act as a breeding ground for many species.

Never forget Clownfish. Without biodiversity, there won't be
a humanity. But learn the hard way. That seems to be what
we are best at.

*Food prices have been falling, in real terms, for decades. Show farmers a few dollars and food will come.*

They have, but at a huge cost. Do you know how many clapped out
farms are out there? They need lime, they need all sorts of minerals
which have been screwed out of them for years, to try and make
ends meet. Screw prices lower and lower, as has been the case,
its about survival, not farming. That means mining soils, not
farming them.

So your food production base is degrading year by year. Australia
already has poor soils. Its become a great deal worse in the last
decade or two. Future generations will wear the cost, or those
places simply won't produce much at all.

Good posts, Yabby, and here's hoping that we do everything Julian Cribb wants.

The price of phosphate rock is heading for the stratosphere again. See

http://www.mongabay.com/images/commodities/charts/phosphate_rock.html

For Curmudgeon's benefit, phosphorus is an essential element for the survival of every life form. You can no more find a substitute than find a substitute for the iron in your blood, although there have been reports that a hot springs bacterium can replace some (not all) of its phosphorus with arsenic. China is one of the biggest producers of phosphate rock, and their government now has a 110% export tariff on it to keep it at home. Why would they do this if they expected enormous reserves to soon be available to reduce the price?

Clownfish,

The Potato Famine was not "extremely limited". Several hundred thousand people starved in the rest of Europe as well, and this was a factor in the revolutions of 1848. Note that human ingenuity didn't save those people. We can probably update the story about Ireland by replacing "Ireland" with "world", striking out references to emigration (no suitable other planets), and replacing "too small to feed the population on anything but potatoes" with "too small to feed the population without added phosphate." The UN FAO food price index is at record levels (above 2008) even now.

You might also take a look at some of the predictions made in science fiction and popular science in the 1940s and 1950s. We can do things they never imagined, but we have no flying cars, robot servants, nuclear power too cheap to meter, bases (let alone colonies) on the Moon or Mars, etc. Most of humanity is still living in poverty, and people are still dying of cancer. We can't regrow amputated limbs, and we certainly don't have so much leisure that we don't know what to do with it. At least back then, mothers of young children could afford to stay home with them and still keep a roof over the family's heads. What happens if the particular advances we need don't come along in time or not at all?

For one thing, phosphorus is an element, and can therefore be recycled. Quite easily from urine, for instance. 'Peak phosphorus' is yet another non-scare from the neo-Malthusians.

The potato famine was indeed extremely limited. Many people in a few places starved, but most people in the world did not. You're committing the same fundamental sophistry as Jared Diamond does in 'Collapse': using examples isolated in geography and time, and falsely extrapolating them to a modern, global society.

Oh, and thank you for proving my point with your reference to science fiction of the past. You could also list another work of science fiction that's almost laughable today: Paul Ehrlich's 'The population bomb'. What a hoot. Some fools took it seriously, but then, some fools take L. Ron Hubbard seriously.

The simple fact is that humans will always surprise us with their ingenuity. Problems that seem insurmountable are solved, often in quite unexpected ways. When the great cities of the world were literally drowning in horse poo over a century ago, who would have predicted that the internal combustion engine would make the problem disappear almost overnight?

Clownfish
Your assertions aren't holding any water, sorry. Sure, we can recycles phosphorus to some extent if we seperate every toilet in the country into liquid and solid wastes and recycle the liquids back onto farmlands. Not sure that's going to happen. With regards to Collapse, it wasn't fiction, it was history - the kind that we can learn from. And the lesson is that when human numbers grow too large for the resources available to sustain them, then civilisations or societies are at risk of collapse. In some cases, it occurs when the numbers are stable but a critical resource disappears, such as water in the SW USA, where a long term drought associated with temporary global cooling drove away the Anasazi people. As for Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb, there was an element of fiction in it but based on the science of the day. In the sixties, everything pointed towards global cooling. Paul Ehrlich continues to win prestigious awards - he is held in very high regard by his peers. His body of work - especially in association with his wife Anne - is substantial.

So you agree that phosphorus can be recycled. Quite easily. Urine was but one example, and the ease with which it can be done is shown here: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/07/10/1973803.htm

I didn't say 'Collapse' was fiction, but I did say that it was sophistry, which it is. Its argument is weak in the extreme. Diamond repeatedly mis-used examples of extremely isolated, pre-technological communities, which have no bearing on a highly industrialised, global society.

Even by the science of the day, Ehrlich's book was clearly tendentious, flawed, and, as history has shown, completely and utterly wrong. That Ehrlich is held in high regard by anyone simply illustrates how mediocre and herd-like is the mindset of the neo-Malthusians.

Clownfish
Yes, I agree some phosphorus can be recycled but at what cost in energy terms? We're about to enter an energy constrained future and recycling phosphorus is going to add to food costs in a big way.
'Collapse' may have been about pre-industrial societies but the same principles apply: if you have too many people for the resources available and if the biosphere cannot absorb all our wastes (as with greenhouse gas emissions now), then you set up conditions for collapse. And there are a number of countries on the point of, or past, collapse now. Look at Somalia and Yemen. Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, will run out of water within five years and desalination is not an option because it is too far inland.
As for Ehrlich, you clearly haven't read his subsequent books. As a neo-Malthusian, I'm happy to be associated with them, and indeed, him.

Clownfish, you appear to be advocating a "crisis management" approach - to only address a problem when it becomes essential to do so. However, planning for success has been the more favoured and effective way to ensure achievement of stable outcomes. Failing to plan has been described as "planning to fail". I tend to agree. It is only prudent to consider all supply and demand pressures in the development of strategies to avert crises and structural collapse.

The overriding question is whether "business as usual" is the best possible way forward, or should we rather be planning to resolve issues of inequality, repression and conflict which are rife in many quarters, before the human condition kicks into override and results in all-out aggression in pursuit of dwindling resources.

I would advocate planning for peace, equity and stability as being far superior objectives to strident maintenance of current unsustainable divisiveness.

popnperish, I'm sure the empty-headed numpties in Harold Camping's church are quite happy to follow him, too.

It's a sadly demonstrated fact that, no matter how incontrovertibly wrong the predictions of doomsayers prove to be, their acolytes will loudly and loyally insist that they were, in fact, right. Ehrlich's fans are, unfortunately, no different.

There is absolutely no reason why we should be entering an 'energy constrained future' (apart from the screeching ninnies in the Climate Alarmist movement). Known reserves and current technologies alone guarantee plenty of energy for centuries yet - without reckoning on new technologies.

Who, little more than a century ago, could have foreseen the end of the great horse-poo crisis then literally engulfing the world's cities?

You're making the same mistake (or committing the same sophistic sleight-of-hand) as Jared Diamon by singling our Somalia and Yemen. Two isolated areas, one of which at least owes its problems more to poor political governance than anything else.

Saltpetre, I merely point out that Divergence and popnperish, as with all neo-Malthusians, from Malthus himself to Paul Ehrlich, fatally underestimate human ingenuity.

The solutions, as unexpected, unpredicted and surprising as they will be, will be there.

Clownfish
There's a difference between the adherents of Harold Camping's church and my support for Ehrlich. The difference is a choice between religion (and a quasi religion at that) and science. Every step of the way I look for evidence to back up what I support, and the evidence is in that we are in overshoot, that we have exceeded the Earth's biocapacity by 40 per cent and that another 2.4 billion by mid-century is going to make it very hard to feed everyone (which is what Julian's essay is all about).
Let's hope you're right on the energy front but there certainly WILL be a liquid fuel crisis in the next few short years because we don't have in place alternatives to oil.It's not running out (a trillion barrels to go) but it will become increasingly expensive which will be very disruptive to our economy and life as we know it.

Clownfish,

I had an exchange with you here on OLO back in 2008, when grain prices skyrocketed and there were food riots in 34 countries. You claimed that this was a purely temporary phenomenon, a "perfect storm" of unusual events all coinciding. I agreed that some of the issues, such as the drought in Australia, were indeed temporary, but thought that others were continuing problems. The UN FAO food price index is even higher now than it was then, higher than it has ever been, in both real and nominal terms, and high food prices have been a factor in the revolts in the Arab world. See

http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/

It seems that your record as a prophet isn't much better than Paul Ehrlich's. I could say, "What a hoot!"

People have, of course, been recycling phosphates since the invention of agriculture, but a lot still ends up in the oceans. The question is whether there will be enough to sustain today's very high agricultural productivity. There are other factors too. See Julian Cribb's video

http://vimeo.com/23244839

I gave you a list of unsolved problems that people in the 1940s and 50s were assured would have been solved by now by the popular science writers of the day. How is this possible with human ingenuity at work? Wouldn't it be smarter to be prudent for the time being?

popnperish, and Divergence,

If the principal components of food (and organic matter generally) which are converted in digestion, or in energy production, are the sugars, starches and cellulose (and maybe some nitrogenous compounds), leaving the trace elements largely intact, then, by inference, total recycling of "waste" could theoretically enable retention of the majority of the components necessary to "reconstitute" food by the application of photosynthesis in the presence of sunlight, CO2 and water - and possibly with the addition only of some nitrogenous fertilisers.

If so, perhaps the answer to food supply is effective recycling of all organic and non-organic waste, together with intensive management of the water supply.

To some (more limited) extent, it may also be possible to recycle oil-based waste, to eventually reduce the extent of reliance on "reserves".

As with all "alternatives" to conventional exploitation, cost will be a factor, and "viability" will be determined in due course by market forces.

I still think solar energy is far under-rated as a potential solution for food, energy, and oil for chemical and plastics manufacture, etc. The sun is an immense, and virtually limitless, energy source, which could be employed with appropriate bacteria and algae (or other organisms - if necessary, genetically modified) to manufacture just about anything. We just need a far more efficient and cost-effective way to harness the sun's energy. (As well as far more efficient ways to recycle our waste.) Waste not want not?

Saltpetre
Unfortunately, we cannot recycle energy thanks to the second law of thermodynamics that basically says the universe is constantly losing usable energy and never gaining. So using oil turns it into either work or unusable heat.
As for elements such as phosphorus. Plants take it up and it is consumed by humans who excrete it. Unless returned as 'night soil' (common in parts of the world still today) then, as Divergence says, it generally ends up in sewerage and ultimately the sea.
But yes, we do need to recycle more and try and retain more of valuable nutrients so we end up with a closed, not an open, system.

I love it when people think that trotting out the Second Law of Thermodynamics is some kind of scientamific trump card.

The Second Law applies to closed systems.

The Earth is not a closed system.

(Now as per the patented Clownfish Drinking Game, I do believe I have to drop my trousers and run around the room ;) )

Oh, and Divergence - 3 years does not make a long-term trend. That was my original point, back in the dim, dark days of 2008. Ehrlich has been wrong for over 40 years. Blindly asserting that he was right, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, indeed smacks of the same unthinking dogmatism as Camping's followers.

Plus we do have at least one alternative to oil - shale gas. There are others already at hand - such as nuclear - and I have no doubt others will rise from the wellspring of human creativity.

The Stone Age, as the saying goes, did not end for lack of stones.