More food from less land

My Times column on farm yields and land
sparing:

If something drops out of the news, it usually
means it is going well. Mad cow disease killed nobody last year;
Mozambique and Angola are growing their economies at a furious
lick; the Somerset levels are not flooded this winter. There were
only two localised famines last year — in South Sudan and the
Central African Republic — both caused by conflict, rather than
drought or population pressure. That’s because the feeding of the
world is going so well it’s not news.

New figures from the United Nations’ Food and
Agriculture Organisation show that the world’s cereal harvest,
which provides more than half of the calories that humans eat,
broke a new record last year at 2.54 billion tonnes — an
astonishing 20 per cent higher than ten years ago. Thanks to better
techniques and seeds, the world’s farmers (of which I declare I am
one, in a mostly hands-off way) have provided a growing population
with more food per head, year after year, largely without
cultivating extra land or using extra water or chemicals.

Maize, rice and wheat — the big three cereals — each broke
records in 2014. So why do we hear frequent cries that the world
soon will be or is already struggling to feed itself?

“The world is closer to a food crisis than most people realise”
headlined one newspaper in 2012. “The food-apocalypse is already
upon us”, the same paper shrieked last year. “Rising temperatures
reduce global wheat production” was the title of a widely cited academic paper in
2014.

The title was stretching it somewhat since global wheat
production has been increasing. The paper was about predictions
from a mathematical model that if average global temperatures rise
by one degree (which at the rates of warming experienced over the past
35 years would take seven decades), and if farmers do absolutely
nothing to adapt, such as switching to more heat-tolerant maize in
some places, then wheat production might drop by — wait for it — 6
per cent. That’s less than 0.1 per cent a year, when it is going up
by 2 per cent a year.

And once Africa, the gigantic continent whose average yields
have barely budged in 50 years, gets access to plentiful
fertiliser, global harvests will increase even faster. It’s not
just plants that are getting better at giving us what we need
thanks to science; so are animals. The rate at which cows, pigs and
especially chickens convert grain into meat is also going up
steadily.

Thus even as a richer world turns increasingly to meat and other
luxuries, we can cut the human footprint on the planet. Jesse
Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in New York, calculates that if we continue raising average
yields at the current rate, stop putting 40 per cent of America’s
maize into cars in the form of ethanol, and reduce food wastage,
then, despite the rising population, an area the size of India
could be released from agriculture over the next 50 years and
handed back to Mother Nature.

There is one exception to this happy picture. Europe has seen
its wheat yields stagnate. If wheat and barley yields had gone on
increasing in Europe at the rate they did in the 1980s, they would
now be 30 per cent higher. A study published last week ruled out the fashionable
excuse for this — climate change. “Climate trends can account for
only 10 per cent of the stagnation in European wheat and barley
yields,” it said.

Actually, there is good evidence that carbon dioxide emissions
are measurably increasing the growth rates and yields of crops.
After all, greenhouse owners pump CO2 into their glasshouses to
make tomatoes grow faster. Studies confirm that crops and forests are growing
faster and yielding more today than 50 years ago because of the
extra carbon dioxide in the air, especially in arid areas. This
phenomenon has cut the appropriation of land for farming by about
13 per cent compared with what it would otherwise be, resulting in
more land being left wild.

The authors of the paper on European yields conclude that the
explanation for the stagnation lies mostly in “changes in
agriculture and environmental policies”. That is to say, just as
the European Union cannot grow its economy, so it cannot grow its
harvests, and for similar reasons. The fault lies in European
officialdom’s perpetual war on innovation in agriculture — its
precautionary and bureaucratic de facto opposition, at the behest
of what the former environment secretary Owen Paterson calls the
Green Blob, to safer pesticides and genetic modification, both of
which demonstrably boost yields, save inputs and spare land
elsewhere in the world.

As Britain’s new life science minister, George Freeman, put it
on a recent visit to Brussels, EU anti-science regulation risks
condemning the continent to the slow lane of the 21st century
bio-economy, as evidenced by the announcement of the chemical firm
BASF that it was leaving Europe. He added with refreshing
directness: “If the EU won’t put in place a more supportive policy
framework, we will use our reform, renegotiate and referendum
strategy to pursue the progress we need.”

There are two ways to try to achieve both abundant food and
resurgent wildlife in the 21st century. One is to make farming as
wildlife-friendly as possible, essentially sharing the bounty with
insects and birds, but needing lots of land. The other is to coax
as much from each acre as possible for ourselves, but spare lots of
acres for wild vegetation and its wild consumers.

This second strategy, of land sparing, is proving more
successful. If we tolerated weeds and pests in fields to the degree
we did 50 years ago, we would need more than twice as many acres to
feed today’s population.

The ultimate land sparing policy is to grow more food indoors. A
Japanese entrepreneur named Shigeharu Shimamura is now using low-energy, pink LED lights and
hydroponic irrigation to produce 10,000 heads of lettuce a day
inside a semiconductor factory that was damaged in the 2011 tsunami
— occupying 2 per cent of the land that would be required if the
lettuces were out of doors. He uses 99 per cent less water and no
pesticides, because pests are denied entry to the factory.

The late, great science writer Nigel Calder once wrote that a
Martian would conclude that the masters of planet Earth are three
species of grass — rice, wheat and maize — which have somehow
persuaded huge numbers of apes to toil day and night to clear
forests, irrigate deserts and kill weeds on their behalf.