In a hugely cap­ti­vat­ing and com­pre­hen­sive look at the food sup­ply chain in Britain, Jeremy Hard­ing pro­vides a look at “the future of food and its supply”–including food ethics, food secu­rity and the dire need for a sus­tain­able future.

Harding’s case is the most cogent I’ve read and it offers much more than a con­dem­na­tion of our cur­rent, unsus­tain­able habits: the arti­cle focuses on what Hard­ing dubs the “seven big stories”–the seven fun­da­men­tal “loom­ing threats” we must keep in mind when plan­ning for a sus­tain­able, effi­cient and secure ‘food future’.

  1. Pop­u­la­tion growth: The expected large-scale urban­i­sa­tion of the future “poses big ques­tions about land use (hous­ing v. farm­ing) and the pro­duc­tion of food by a minor­ity for a major­ity as the gap between the two gets wider”.
  2. ‘The nutri­tion tran­si­tion’: As we move fur­ther away from a diet based on grains, pulses and legumes and toward one of meat and dairy (the tran­si­tion from maize feed­ing us to maize feed­ing the ani­mals) means that “global pro­duc­tion of food – all food – will have to increase by 50 per cent over the next 20 years to cater for two bil­lion extra peo­ple and cope with the ris­ing demand for meat”.
  3. Energy: “The indus­trial pro­duc­tion of food is sure to become more expen­sive as fuel costs rise. It takes 160 litres of oil to pro­duce a tonne of maize in the US; nat­ural gas accounts for at least three-quarters of the cost of mak­ing nitro­gen fer­tiliser; freight, too, depends on fuel”.
  4. Land: “The amount of the world’s land given over to agri­cul­ture con­tin­ues to grow, but in per capita terms it’s shrink­ing. As with oil, it’s pos­si­ble to envis­age ‘peak food’ (the point of max­i­mum pro­duc­tion, fol­lowed by decline), ‘peak phos­pho­rus’ [and] ‘peak land’: the point at which the total area of the world’s most pro­duc­tive land begins to dimin­ish (soil exhaus­tion, cli­mate change) and mar­ginal land comes up for reassessment”.
  5. Water: “World­wide, one in three peo­ple face water short­ages and by 2030 the ratio will have nar­rowed. […] Much of our fruit and veg comes from water-scarce coun­tries and […] lack of water closes down food pro­duc­tion and livelihoods”.
  6. Cli­mate change: “Extreme weather events will […] jeop­ar­dise agri­cul­ture and the move­ment of food from one place to another”.
  7. Agri­cul­tural work­ers: More than half of the world’s 1.1 bil­lion agri­cul­tural work­ers” own nei­ther land nor machin­ery and live in a state of semi-slavery. The con­di­tions of this new global under­class are at last a mat­ter of con­cern: world­wide food pro­duc­tion is set on a down­turn as their wretched­ness weak­ens their capac­ity to pro­duce and earn, dri­ving more peo­ple inex­orably towards the cities.

I sup­pose you could call these the food equiv­a­lent of Jared Diamond’s twelve prob­lems of soci­etal sus­tain­abil­ity.