Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 5

of death are diet related - coronary heart disease, some cancers, stroke,
diabetes mellitus, and arteriosclerosis. Alarmingly, the obese are increas-
ingly outnumbering the thin in some developing countries, particularly
in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Peru and Tunisia. 4
So, despite great progress, things will probably get worse for many
people before they get better. As total population continues to increase,
until at least the latter part of the 21st century, so the absolute demand
for food will also increase. Increasing incomes will mean that people will
have more purchasing power, and this will increase demand for food. But
as our diets change, so demand for the types of food will also shift
radically. In particular, increasing urbanization means people are more
likely to adopt new diets, particularly consuming more meat and fewer
traditional cereals and other foods - what Barry Popkin calls the nutrition
transition . 5
One of the most important changes in the world food system will come
from an increase in the consumption of livestock products. Meat demand
is expected to double by 2020, and this will change farming systems. 6
Livestock are important in mixed production systems, using foods and
by-products that would not have been consumed by humans. But, increas-
ingly, farmers are finding it easier to raise animals intensively and feed them
with cheap cereals. Yet, this is very inefficient: it takes 7 kilogrammes of
cereal to produce 1 kilogramme of feedlot beef, 4 kilogrammes to produce
one of pork, and 2 kilogrammes to produce one of poultry. This is clearly
inefficient, particularly as alternative and effective grass-feeding rearing
regimes do exist. 7
These dietary changes will help to drive a total and per capita increase
in demand for cereals. The bad news is that food-consumption disparities
between people in industrialized and developing countries are expected
to persist. Currently, annual food demand in industrialized countries is
550 kilogrammes of cereal and 78 kilogrammes of meat per person. By
contrast, in developing countries, it is only 260 kilogrammes of cereal and
30 kilogrammes of meat per person. These gaps in consumption ought
to be deeply worrying to us all.
Commons and Connections
For most of our history, the daily lives of humans have been played out
close to the land. Since our divergence from apes, humans have been
hunter-gatherers for 350,000 generations, then mostly agriculturalists for
600, industrialized in some parts of the world for 8 to 10, and lately
dependent on industrialized agriculture for just 2 generations . 8 We still