Asia Sentinel

For Paul Roberts, the end of food, like the end of days, is just a matter of time. It could be avian influenza, which he calls only one of a “number of bullets that could plausibly strike the modern food system. A sharp spike in the price of oil, a series of extreme weather events, an outbreak of some new plant disease, the depletion of some critical aquifer, all would send massive and potentially disrupting shock waves through a system that, despite advances in areas such as bio-security, is losing more and more of its overall flexibility and resilience by the week.”

In exhaustive study of the world’s industrial food system that took him from the United States to China to Indonesia to Africa to Russia, Roberts, the author of the critically –acclaimed The End of Oil, paints a picture of looming catastrophe, of a system that has grown dangerously distorted, with perhaps a billion people starving at one end of it and 1.5 billion overweight at the other.

Roberts blames industrial agriculture, which he charges is depleting soils, emptying underground aquifers, overloading the planet with both fertilizers and pesticides, turning more and more forest – the planet’s green lung – into farmland. Even without a pandemic or natural catastrophe, Roberts writes, it is only going to take perhaps 10 to 20 years before the world’s expanding population faces disaster.

What he calls the epicentre of a perfect storm is probably going to be Asia. The mathematics appear to be inexorable for China and India in particular, both of which are demanding more protein in their diets. As he points out, it takes seven kilograms of feed to produce a single kilo of meat. As the Chinese and Indians take increasingly to a meat diet, the ability of the world to produce it will be unbearably strained. Already, vast areas of tropical rainforest, the world’s green lung, are being levelled for pasture. As rainforest comes down it produces growing amounts of carbon dioxide. Indonesia is the world’s largest contributor to greenhouse gases despite the fact that it has little industry and relatively few combustion engines.

“Although the catalyst could occur anywhere on the planet,” he writes, “Asia’s massive population, the rapid growth of its food sector and the yawing gap between that sector and the capabilities of its medical and political systems suggest that Asia’s odds of being the lead domino are quite high.”

In just the last couple of months, China has proven the concerns over its food system are tragically real. At least 53,000 people were stricken from milk and infant formula which had been adulterated by melamine. As many as 13,000 people have been hospitalized with kidney stones and renal failure. It wasn’t fly-by-night companies that added melamine to their milk products. It was such widely known and respected companies as Mengniu Dairy, Sanlu Group, Yili and others.

In one fascinating chapter, Roberts describes the introduction of antibiotics into animal feed, which began in the 1950s, when it was discovered that fish below a Lederle Laboratories facility on the Hudson River were gaining both size and weight after feeding on the laboratory’s discharge, which contained tetracycline.

In the wake of that discovery, Roberts writes …”the tetracycline was treating the intestinal infections that are routine in closely confined farm animals, and …calories that normally would have been consumed by the chicks' immune systems were going instead to make bigger muscles and bones….Other researchers soon confirmed that low, subtherapeutic doses of tetracycline increased growth in turkeys, calves, and pigs by as much as 50 percent, and later studies showed that antibiotics made cows give more milk and caused pigs to have more litters, more piglets per litter, and piglets with larger birth weights”.

From that point on, the use of antibiotics, particularly penicillins, tetracyclines, macrolides, lincosamides, streptogramins, aminoglycosides, and sulfonamides, soared upwards in animal feeds. It is estimated by the Union of Concerned Scientists that farm animals in the US are fed 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics per year. Of the medically important antibiotics used as feed additives, 69 percent are fed to hogs, 19 percent to broiler chickens and 12 percent to beef cattle, according to the Environmental Defense Fund in June 2005.

Comments (4)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Show/Hide comments

SIA License Training - interesting statistics
written by SIA License , November 09, 2008

Alarming statistics, thank you for the article.
Sia license training London, Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Portsmouth

report abuse

vote down

vote up

Votes: +0

The biggest contributor to the coming food shortage
written by Greg Majersky , November 06, 2008

Is the existing and worsening clean water and in many cases, complete shortage of water.

report abuse

vote down

vote up

Votes: +0

Pandemic Preparedness
written by Nigel Thomas , October 13, 2008

Good article. We need to keep pandemic preparedness at the forefront of every business manager's mind. It won't go away so better start preparing.

Nigel Thomas
For free references and resources go to Bird Flu Manual Online ( http://www.birdflu-manual.com ) or, if you need more comprehensive tutorials, tools and templates, consider Bird Flu D-I-Y eManual for your pandemic influenza preparedness ( http://www.birdflu-manual.com/...edness.htm ).

report abuse

vote down

vote up

Votes: +0

Pandemic Preparedness
written by Nigel Thomas , October 13, 2008

Good article. We need to keep pandemic preparedness at the forefront of every business manager's mind. It won't go away so better start preparing.

Nigel Thomas
For free references and resources go to Bird Flu Manual Online or, if you need more comprehensive tutorials, tools and templates, consider Bird Flu D-I-Y eManual for your pandemic influenza preparedness.

report abuse

vote down

vote up

Votes: +0

Show/Hide comment form

Write comment

Name

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (Registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment