Vaclav Smil (Penguin Books)
We had better hope that Vaclav Smil is wrong about the world’s food system. If he is right, the implication is that we will end up bulldozing what little remains of nature to keep the food we like on our plates.
The message I took from his new book, How to Feed the World: A factful guide, is that the food system pretty much has to be the way it is, and that there will be no big revolutions in food production or in what we eat. With continued, gradual improvements, however, we will be able to keep producing enough food for a growing population in the coming decades.
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As Smil explains: “There are too many exaggerated expectations for new, radical ‘solutions’ in the modern world – it is gradual gains that will matter more.” Maybe he is right. But it is one thing to say that things couldn’t be different and quite another to prove it.
What’s more, if you think the answer to the food and environment crisis is more of the same plus “the power of incremental changes”, then it matters if the same will remain possible. For me, this book’s biggest flaw is that it fails to address the numerous ways in which global warming is going to affect food production, from extreme weather devastating crops to ocean acidification reducing yields on shellfish farms.
In the introduction, Smil declares he isn’t going to cover the “fashionable” topic of climate change, implying that enough books have already been written on this. Is there a reason why this topic is so trendy, I wonder?
The book has too many of these pompous statements for my taste. For instance, Smil emphasises how his book is packed with numbers because, without them, “you will make incorrect interpretations”.
Yes, but having the right numbers put in context matters more than having lots of numbers. Take the part where Smil looks at how much fishmeal and fish oil from wild fish is required to produce farmed fish. He cites numbers that suggest fish farming is becoming more efficient and seems to say we could produce more farmed fish while reducing the environmental impact.
Smil uses the numbers to show why the idea that organic farming could feed the world is 'a load of excrement'
Back in October, however, I heard a radically different story from Patricia Majluf at the non-profit group Oceana. Her team estimated that the number of wild fish killed for fishmeal and fish oil to feed farmed fish is up to three times higher than previous estimates.
Furthermore, global warming will have a huge impact on fish oil production, Majluf told me. In warmer waters, algae produce less of the vital omega-3 oils that end up in fish oil, and fish have a lower fat content. “So you need to catch a lot more fish to produce the same amount of fish oil,” she said. “And there’s not going to be a lot more fish.” Nor does raising farmed fish on plant-based feeds solve the problem, as crop farming is also far from sustainable.
To be fair, there is a lot of good stuff in this book. Smil uses the numbers to show how we underestimate both the economic importance of food and how much energy it takes to get it onto our plates, why the idea that organic farming could feed the world is “a load of excrement” and why scaling up the production of cultured meat will be so difficult.
But, overall, this book is more about how the world is fed now than how to feed it in the future. And on a rapidly warming planet, I fear gradual gains in food production will, sooner or later, fail to keep pace with accelerating losses. That’s why we had all better hope Smil is wrong about the lack of possibility for big change.
In particular, he acknowledges the “impressive” potential for radical yield gains from genetic modification, but then dismisses it as something that isn’t likely to happen soon. Perhaps. But new gene-editing techniques are not only much more powerful than older methods, they are also being treated differently by regulators, meaning gene-edited foods are reaching the market much faster.
Yet despite the extraordinary importance of the task, there is still surprisingly little investment in developing better crops for a warming world.
For me, the take-home message shouldn’t be that we can’t rely on revolutions in how we produce food. Rather, we need to do whatever it takes to make revolutions happen.
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