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Still ticking The population bomb has not been defused

15 February 2021 Filed under: Tags: , ,

These days, population is barely considered as a factor in food security. That doesn’t mean the problem is solved.

A plant and its shadow seen against dry soil

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As a young biology student, one of the things I and my classmates worried about was population. You didn’t need to be a mathematical whizz to understand the force of Thomas Malthus’ argument in An Essay on the Principle of Population, even if you didn’t agree with the methods he proposed for dealing with it. Firebrands like Paul Ehrlich whipped us up, and Limits to Growth from the Club of Rome provided food for thought as we contemplated future famines. And then, just like that, population vanished as a suitable subject for conversation.

A textual analysis of loads of published works on how to feed the world confirms this impression. The number dealing with population becomes vanishingly small, even while those about increasing production just keep going up. A conversation with one of the paper’s authors, Giangiacomo Bravo of Linnaeus University in Sweden, prompted me to look back at some of the history.

Notes

  1. The trigger paper for this episode was From population to production: 50 years of scientific literature on how to feed the world. It is, alas, behind a paywall.
  2. The Population Bomb is online, as is a 2009 appraisal of their work by Paul and Anne Ehrlich
  3. I’m grateful to The Internet Archive for all the work they do. That’s where I found archive tape of Paul Ehrlich, Newsweek and Joseph van Arendonk. Jørgen Randers was from YouTube.
  4. Just ignore this nonsense 5qikwjcph1aiCyoAte7sdel2P2iot2puh21lcz
  5. Banner photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash.

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The quest to conserve rare breeds The importance of yesterday’s heritage breeds for tomorrow

1 February 2021 Filed under: Tags: , ,

Using land that could be used to feed people to feed animals is a terrible waste, but for today’s modern breeds it is absolutely essential.

A White Park cow maintaining a Site of Special Scientific Interest on Salisbury plain in England

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Modern livestock breeds are incredibly efficient, gaining weight at a prodigious rate and supplying astonishing quantities of milk and eggs. That efficiency, however, comes at a cost: the food needed to support such a metabolism. Much of that food could be eaten directly by people, and certainly the lush pastures that support modern dairy cows, for example, might be put to better use growing food for people. But then, where will our meat, milk and eggs come from?

Lawrence Alderson founded the Rare Breeds Survival Trust in the UK in 1973. Those breeds, he contends, are the key to future food security. It is thanks to the foresight of Alderson and other visionaries around the world that rare and heritage breeds are still here to convert stuff we can’t eat into stuff we can eat.

Notes

  1. Lawrence Alderson’s has a website. His new book is The quest to conserve rare breeds: setting the record straight. If you follow that link (which is an affiliate link), you’ll do better by clicking on the flag at top right and switching to the UK front for bookshop.org.
  2. Here’s where to find out more about the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.
  3. I remain dubious about the whole Sir Loin story, although I wasn’t going to press the point any harder than I did. Wikipedia seems to agree: “There is no reliable evidence for this explanation and scholars generally hold it to be a myth.” I don’t doubt that James I of England dined on some fine beef at Hoghton Tower in 1617, and the beef could well have come from White Park cattle. Did he knight it? Convince me.
  4. In case you were wondering about the new herds of Northern Shorthorn Dairy cattle, I think this is one of the places Lawrence Alderson was talking about: Stonebeck Raw Wensleydale Cheese.
  5. Rules 4 and 10 of Ten golden rules for reforestation to optimize carbon sequestration, biodiversity recovery and livelihood benefits are why you should not plant trees on uplands.
  6. Here is the transcript.
  7. Banner photo of a White Park cow maintaining a Site of Special Scientific Interest on Salisbury Plain by Natural England/Paul Glendell used with permission

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