Total world food demand is forecast to rise 110 percent in the next 40 years. By 2050 we will be feeding the equivalent of 13 billion people at today’s nutritional levels.
Simultaneously, we face a global water crisis. The volume of fresh water available to grow food is now in decline and we will probably have to double farm output using only two thirds of today’s water volume.
The world may also be facing ‘peak land’, meaning it has run out of good arable country. We are also haemorrhaging nutrients. Half the fertilisers applied on our farms are lost. Up to half the food between farm and fork is lost or thrown on the tip. Most of the nutrients in our sewage systems are lost. The world may already have passed peak phosphorus.
Biofuels are also eating into food production areas, in the US and Brazil especially. By 2020, the world will be burning 400 million tonnes of grain a year – which is the same as burning the entire rice harvest.
More bad news comes in the form of a decades-long decline in global scientific research to lift farm production. This means farmers worldwide will soon hit a major technology pothole, where less new technology will be available to help them lift output, because the research has not been done.
There is heavy inflation in the prices of fuel, fertiliser and chemicals driven by the oil surge. This is pricing these out of the reach of both poor and medium farmers in all countries.
Politics and economics are acting against agriculture. Globalisation of the supply chain is driving down prices to all farmers while the failure of trade talks is keeping them out of markets. Farm subsidies also continue to depress prices.
The climate is changing. UK Hadley Centre modelling suggests up to half the earth may be in regular drought by the end of this century. ‘Unnatural disasters’ will become more common.
What the world’s leaders, indeed all governments including our own, have failed to grasp is that the food crisis is not caused by one or two of these factors – but by all of them. It cannot be overcome by addressing one or two of them – only by tackling all of them together.
 Food prices
This situation heralds the real likelihood of regional and global instability. It is already manifest in soaring food prices – last year rice prices alone rose from $400–$1000t.
Most conflicts round the world in the last 20 years have been driven, at their core, by disputes stemming from a scarcity of food, land or water. Dafour, Rwanda and the Balkans were all triggered by arguments over these issues. This – rather than climate change – is the most urgent issue of the early 21^st century.Some answers to the global food challenge are laid out in the recent World Bank IAASTD report – a report Australia has declined to support. This report makes it clear that farmers are not only to be supported as the producers of the world’s food and fibre, but also as the stewards of its fresh water and biodiversity. They care for 40% of the earth’s total land mass and three quarters of the fresh water – and they need help and skills to manage these more sustainably.
To do this they need a great deal of knowledge, skills and technology to lift their production using less water, land and energy. It takes on average 15-20 years for a new piece of science and technology to be researched, developed and disseminated to most producers. And we have let our agricultural knowledge and skills run down.
In Australia, there have been cuts to State agriculture departments for quarter of a century. Our universities have seen 20-40% declines in enrolments in ag science. And many ag scientists are close to or past retirement age.
This is nevertheless a very dynamic time for farming. For the first time in over 40 years, the terms of trade are swinging somewhat in the farmer’s favour. Costs are rising – but so too are commodity prices. There has never been a better time in the last two generations to be a farmer, a farm worker, technologist or an agricultural scientist. Once more, young agricultural professionals are being challenged to feed and clothe the world. Once more, governments are being forced to pay attention to their needs.
Skills
The challenge for the agricultural skills sector is not only to re-skill our entire farm workforce and all its supporting professions – but also to develop agriculture as a knowledge and skills export industry.
Mining knowledge already earns Australia $3 billion a year – and there is no reason why, in the current climate of rising global demand for food, agricultural knowhow shouldn’t earn the same or even more. There is a knowledge export industry as large as beef, wool or wheat out there for the taking, along with tens of thousands of new jobs – but we simply haven’t reached out for it yet.
Let me illustrate this opportunity by focussing on a particular area: nutrients. Nutrients will be the oil of the 21^st Century. The world passed peak phosphorus in 1989. It is a totally finite substance – and there is no substitute for it. The country that first discovers ways to staunch the colossal loss of nutrients out of its farming, processing and urban systems and return them to the farm or food system will be at a global competitive advantage.
Speaking personally, I doubt the world can produce enough protein from conventional farming systems to feed the equivalent of 13 billion people in mid-century, year-in year-out. To sustain the growth in meat demand alone will require us to produce the equivalent of three billion tonnes of grain – which means, in a nutshell, we need to discover two and a half more North Americas somewhere on the planet. Another aspect is that to produce all this meat it will take two million more cubic kilometres of fresh water – which is almost as much as the entire world irrigation industry now uses – and we know the water is running out. So the world may have to employ other means besides agriculture to meet the rising demand for food.
Vegies
Besides all the gains in technical efficiency we must make, I foresee a time when vegetables will play a very much larger role in both the global diet and the farm commodity mix. There are, after all, over 1000 vegetables most people have never even heard of still to be farmed. So we need a new culinary and dietary paradigm for the 21^st century in which two thirds or more of our diet consists of vegetables. We need new skills in designing this diet and developing the intensive vegetable culture needed to support it – in our cities where the water and nutrients are already concentrated.
This intensive urban vegie culture is an entirely new industry and will a new professional, the ‘urban farmer’ who can grow food on the roofs and sides of buildings, in intensive bio-cultures and by other novel methods to feed the megacities of 50 million plus inhabitants that will emerge.
If we don’t, by 2050 we will have more than three quarters of the human population – almost eight billion people, living in places where they are totally without the means or the knowledge to feed themselves. Our giant cities will be gigantic death traps, at the mercy of even minor glitches in regional or global food supplies.
These challenges are far from trivial. With its current, run-down agricultural science and skills, there needs to be a fundamental shift in understanding among our leaders and society as a whole that food production still underpins our civilisation and merits due attention and investment.
Australia was a leader in the last Green Revolution and we need to rediscover that spirit and that determination to make a difference.