Julian Cribb is up there in the running to claim the title of ‘Conscience of the Nation’. For decades, he has been raising the profile of science in the national psyche through his articles in The Australian; and he has asked the hard questions about how we do what we do and where it is all leading.
Professor Cribb, who was a keynote speaker at the TFGA’s 2011 annual conference, has long been warning about our sense of priorities. It was the theme of his book The Coming Famine: the global food crisis and what we can do to avoid it.
He says that the central issue for human destiny in the next 50 years is not climate change or another global financial crisis; it is whether the world can feed itself.
Australian politicians, he says, are like their counterparts everywhere else, they will not address this fundamental problem we face, “a looming scarcity of just about everything necessary to produce high yields of food – water, land, nutrients, oil, technology, skills and stable climates”.
At the same time, governments are deluding themselves about the quality of the food they are allowing to dominate our diets. Cheap, fast food is exactly what it says. Because we can afford to waste it, we do. For the same reason, farmers don’t get paid enough for the food they produce.
He says that our generation is the first in world history to lose respect completely for food. “Every other generation for the last 10,000 years or so did all it could to store, save and protect its food.”
“Societies that do not respect food, do not respect the people or landscapes that produce it. They don’t care if the soil washes away or the water is polluted, or the farmer is pushed off their land by profit-hungry supermarket chains, as is now happening to tens of millions of farmers worldwide…”
At fault is the industrialisation of food. The TFGA has long been advocating the need to think globally and act locally, particularly in the area of agricultural research and development. It is too easy for governments, state and federal, to adopt the razor gang approach of slash and burn to research funding. The attitude is that it is intangible; it has no direct impact on voters (especially in western Sydney) so prune it. That is so short-sighted.
Cribb asserts that there is a growing consensus among scientists and global institutions that a reduction of up to 50 per cent in food production is a real possibility by 2100 unless we can adapt food and farming systems to highly unstable weather conditions. That takes research and forward planning.
Now comes the scary bit.
It is said there are only seven meals between civilisation and anarchy. If people become alarmed about where their next meal is coming from, they will do anything to secure it.
A report by Sydney University’s Centre for International Security Studies painted a dire scenario as Asia faces a long term scarcity of the vital ingredients of agriculture – land, water, fertiliser and energy.
“How governments and other actors in Asia respond to emerging food security challenges at home has far-reaching consequences for human security and peace and stability of communities and states in Asia and in other parts of the world,” it says.
This is what our politicians fail to grasp.
“We may have plenty of food but, if parts of Asia starve, we will face security problems of an entirely different order: floods of refugees and collapsing nations in our region, and the conflicts that erupt as a consequence. Also, regardless of its sufficiency, our own food will double or triple in price,” Cribb concludes.
In actual fact, we’re already facing challenges with respect to food security. There has been a huge increase in imported vegetables over recent years; so much so that there is a real risk of us no longer being self sufficient in some crops. The logical end game of the current relentless downward pressure on food prices is that our supplies will end up coming from the least cost supplier – and that won’t be a local farmer. Once we lose local farmers because they can no longer produce food competitive in price with imports, that capacity is likely to be lost for good.
This is scary stuff, and certainly food for thought.
• John Hayward, in Comments: Jan doesn’t mention a recent Cribb book, Poisoned Planet, which is about the rapid proliferation of toxic man-made chemicals that have permeated every corner of the biosphere, particularly in the past few decades Agri-chemicals and forestry sprays are a big part of that, but Jan’s not big on regulating or monitoring them.
• Chris Sharples, in Comments: “…the central issue for human destiny in the next 50 years is not climate change or another global financial crisis; it is whether the world can feed itself.” Jan Davis is a bit confused I think. She is exactly right to say that food security is the central issue for human destiny in the next 50 years. But she is exactly wrong to say that climate change is not the big issue. They are one and the same issue. The biggest impact of climate change on humans will not be rising seas threatening millionaires sea-side mansions; it will be unstable and changing weather patterns causing increasingly widespread crop failures – which can only result in much much more famine, leading to social chaos, refugees, wars, etc etc.
