Meat the future - is it the future?

[Tom Micklewright]

Bonjourno

Saw this article about meat production and wondered what people thought about it, will we be having to reduce out meat consumption as developing nations increase their intake and we are effectively forced out of the meat market by prices?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/aug/26/food-shortages-world-vegetarianism

What do people thinkaroo?

Tom

[Loz]

I think it's part of a wider issue, in that that I suspect we are living in a golden age where technology and resources are both peaking. As China, India and Brazil come up to first world standards - and consumption rates - then the massive increase in demand will create huge issues as the current first world is going to have to share.

This will mean technology stepping in to create new food sources. I fear that a nice juicy steak is going to become a real luxury item in the not too distant future, along with fuel, electronics (which all need the limited resource that is the Rare Earths) and other items.

I think this generation is going to experience the best age of man. I fear it may be downhill from here.

[DJKillaQueen]

It's interesting because when I was a child meat was a luxury. Chicken would be served as a sunday roast. Cheap cuts of meat during other times were used for making stews etc and there was no real snacking outside of three meals a day. So cheap and plentiful food, all year round is a fairly recent development. I think we will just have to end up going back to where we were, eating local and seasonal produce. And given the rising levels of obesity, perhaps that will be a change for the better.

[silverfox]

It is a worry but don't forget two thirds of our planet is covered in water. Nasa is working on ways to find and ultilise water on other planets for future colonisation.

Scientists need to work harder on practical and economic ways to improve desalination and seed clouds. The Guardian article is interesting in defining the problem but the reports appear short on solutions.

Does it really take "...2,500 politicians, UN bodies, non-governmental groups and researchers from 120 countries ... to address global water supply problems..." to state the obvious?

Less talking shops please and more action.

[Jeremy]

Could we use sea water for irrigation? Even if it meant growing different crops (or indeed GM crops).

[El Pibe]

I guess we could eat alot more kelp.

Or some sort of frankenfood mangrove rice perhaps?

[Jeremy]

Cows might quite like eating seaweed.

[El Pibe]

yaaay problem solved.

I thought inects were the way forward, they're hugely nutrient rich and all you need is a bit of stagnant water.

[silverfox]

Not quite solved unfortunately.

However, a good start would be to lock the thousands of delegates in Stockholm in the conference room with 50 barrels of sea water and tell them they'll get no food or water until they come up with a solution.

You'll find revolutionary solutions will soon appear

[Marmora Man]

Soylent Green - that's the foodstuff of the future.

[DaveR]

The danger of predicting that, for example, we will all have to turn vegetarian, is that this always depends in one way or another on a number of assumptions about the future, in particular about the what effect innovation and technological advances may have, when history tells us that people are incredibly resourceful when responding to powerful incentives.

In that context, one of the most interesting parts of the story was the link to a separate report suggesting that small, local investment in water pumps etc. couild have a dramatic overall impact on food production capacity (and a significant knock-on effect on the incomes of farmers in developing countries). To be fair to the authors of the main report, there is a chapter in theirs that says much the same thing.

I know that saying technological changes and other innovations may present solutions is often seen as complacent, and an excuse to do nothing, but to my mind the reverse is true. Too often the 'green' argument is to try to force people to change their behaviour ("you - put down that bacon sandwich and eat more tofu. And sell your car and get a bike!") which, frankly, is likely to be ineffective, and in practice little changes. The really 'green' approach is to incentivise both the development of new technology and the better use of existing technology to, in this case, maximise both the availability of water for agriculture and the capacity for food production out of the water available. Market forces will do that to a certain extent but there are lots of other things that can be done e.g. targeting aid money more effectively, improving access to information about irrigation techniques and equipment, and trying to tackle local barriers to land improvement (bureaucracy, corruption etc.)

[DJKillaQueen]

I mostly agree with that Dave and in part what you are talking about is local solutions to localised problems. There is also the issue of trade barriers too. Corn can be grown in many countries as easily as anywhere else, but the world trade setup makes it uneconomic for farmers in some countries to do so (because no one will buy the crop) as cheaper imports are preferable.

[LondonMix]

Agree with Dave. All you have to do is read Malthus to see that this is a concern that has cropped up several times and each time technoligical advances have met the challenge.

[BrandNewGuy]

But to believe that that technological advance will continue indefinitely is simply an article of faith on your part. No technology has thus far trumped the vast growth in fossil fuel use over the last two centuries that is simply unsustainable into the future. Indeed the progress of technology has been made possible by that growth, not the cause of it. Energy issues will ultimately make high-cost high-energy technophile 'solutions' (mega mirrors in space, mining on Mars...) look like pie in the sky.

[El Pibe]

I think what they were saying was that ingenuity helps man to overcome obstacles and that necessity is the mother etc.

There are plenty of potential and very workable solutions much more mundane than the rather bizarre ones you cite, but the continued cheap supply of fossil fuel and demand for cheap goods has meant that these technologies have been underinvested in.

As we reach peak oil this will begin to change and when fossil fuels are no longer cheap this will very much come to the fore.

Interestingly the two countries investing most in renewable technology are China and the US.

[BrandNewGuy]

I agree that ingenuity helps man to overcome obstacles, but this does not mean that technology will supply us with endless answers to the neverending growth of global industrial society based on the exploitation of a highly concentrated, highly mobile source of fuel such as oil. A world where oil hits $200+ a barrel will start to look very different from ours, regardless of the development of solar, wind and wave power.

Most of the green technologies that the USA and China are sniffing around are themselves dependent on high energy inputs, transportation costs etc. China's interest in electric cars is less to do with the environemt and more to do with its relative lack of domestic oil resources and a desire to fuel transportation through electricity generated predominantly by coal. Similarly in Germany, which is lauded for its (highly subsidised) alternative energy sector - check out how much coal Germany is planning on burning to keep the lights on. Not the outcome the Greens wanted...

[????]

Fracking will extend fossil fuels 'reign' by another 50 years or so and remove the US's need on middle eastern despots

[El Pibe]

'fracking' always makes me snigger. I blame Battlestar Galactica.

[BrandNewGuy]

???? Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Fracking will extend fossil fuels 'reign' by

> another 50 years or so and remove the US's need on

> middle eastern despots

Dream on... as with most current renewable technologies, fracking takes massive inputs of energy and resources for modest returns compared to conventional oil drilling. That makes a big difference.

[Ridgley]

I thought they were cloning animals is that not the solution?

[Loz]

Creating them is not a problem. Housing and feeding the sheer numbers needed is the problem.

[DaveR]

"But to believe that that technological advance will continue indefinitely is simply an article of faith on your part."

I guess that's where we disagree. The evidence of the last 300 years or so points all in one direction, and it certainly doesn't support any kind of doomsday scenario.

The danger is that we allow the debate to become binary i.e. it's either

"progress must stop, and if we can't persuade people, governments must force them"

or

"market forces will solve all our problems, and you know, maybe global warming's not such a bad thing"

when the sensible position is

"the single most likely route to solving various problems is innovation, so the one thing we definitely ought to do is promote that by incentivising different approaches and removing barriers to change".

Although we've kind of moved on to talking about oil, the original post was about the impact on food production of pressure on global water resources, and, as I pointed out above, there are plenty of very sensible people making concrete proposals about how the situation could be improved, without suggesting that everybody should stop eating meat. There are the same kind of people contributing to sensible debate about the future energy policy, but, unsurprisingly, they get drowned out by doom mongers and their opposite numbers.

[Inkmaiden]

The future is synthetic apparently... http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jun/22/fake-meat-scientific-breakthroughs-research

But how would this impact on the dairy/egg/leather etc industries?

Would synthetic meat appeal to those who are vegetarian on moral grounds?

[BrandNewGuy]

DaveR Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> "But to believe that that technological advance

> will continue indefinitely is simply an article of

> faith on your part."

>

> I guess that's where we disagree. The evidence of

> the last 300 years or so points all in one

> direction, and it certainly doesn't support any

> kind of doomsday scenario.

How about looking beyond the last 300 years? History is littered with civilisations that fell once growth came up against hard physical limits. And saying "Malthus was wrong" doesn't get you round that conundrum.

Mine is not a doomsday scenario - FWIW I think global industrial civilsation based on the one-off exploitation of cheap fossil fuels will decline over a couple of hundred years or so, with some plateaus, some growth and some sudden falls. Not Mad Max :-)

[edited for sp]

[DaveR]

I chose 300 years because it's a reasonable approximation of the industrial age, and because I would regard industrialisation as having been something of a game changer as regards the ability of society to engineer solutions to problems. You may well be right in your prediction but I think you would have to accept that if I take a different view it is a bit more reasoned than a leap of faith.