We tend to think this isn’t a problem
Ridding ourselves of fossil fuels has been a tortuously ponderous process and, in the current political era, one that can seem to be in full retreat. But we do have the tools to run our cities, vehicles and industries on clean energy and even through the murk of vested interest, the contours of a post-fossil world are becoming clearer.
Our system of producing food, though, is in a relative stone age when it comes to the climate crisis. We continue to raze vast tracts of carbon-rich forests for crop and grazing land thereby creating, by some estimates, as much as a third of all global planet-heating emissions.
As parts of the developing world get wealthier, people eat more meat, meaning more forest and grassland is obliterated and greater emissions are belched out by livestock and its attendant machinery, feed and chemicals. Even if we do manage to kick the habit of coal, oil and gas, modern agriculture now has enough heft on its own to shove us headlong into environmental catastrophe.
Be still our beating hearts, another Malthusian book telling us we’re all doomed, doomed I tell ‘ee. As population peaks and people get richer therefore diets will change, more land is needed and we’ll end up eating the world if we don’t boil ourselves first.
We tend to think not:
As we all get richer we use less land per head to feed ourselves.
Yes, yes, we grasp the original point. Richer people eat more, eat more meat, waste more food. Therefore there is indeed that pressure to use more land. On the other hand, consider what it is that makes people richer? Not being a peasant trying to live on a an acre or two of runty corn and a few goats. The entire process of getting richer is leaving that peasant lifestyle for indoor work, no heavy lifting. This is definitional.
Industrial farming is hugely more productive per acre of land than peasant farming is. Yields triple, quadruple. So, people getting richer means less peasant farming, more industrial, people getting richer means using less land area to feed ourselves.
We’ve thus those two impulses working in different directions. Richer diets require more land, richer people less. How does it work out? Well, as above. Moving Africa off that runty acre or two will lead to richer Africans on better diets - Huzzah! - and less land use - Hurrah!
So, let’s do that then, shall we? We might also put the Rev Malthus back in his historical box….
Tim Worstall