Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
total meat supply would have to more than triple in four decades. Even worse, if
Asia in 2050 were to reach Europe's 2010 mean (that is, going from about 28 to
77 kg/capita), it would have to raise its meat supply roughly 3.5 times. Neither of
these achievements is likely, and while the North American, European, and Japanese
intakes of animal foods have reached their respective saturation points, even con-
servative expectations mean additional demand increases on the order of 30%-50%
in both Asia and Africa. Such increases may not be fully met by higher yields and
may require further expansion of cropland for feed production.
And rich but land-poor countries may add to this demand. Rich food importers,
particularly the Middle Eastern hydrocarbons-exporting states (Kuwait, Saudi
Arabia, Qatar), have been buying up large tracts of land abroad to grow food crops.
They have been joined by China (which secured nearly 3 Mha abroad between 2006
and 2009) and South Korea (whose failed deal in Madagascar aimed at growing
rice on 1.3 Mha), while British investors have shown some interest in acquiring
foreign land for the production of biofuels (the UK to grow jatropha in Ethiopia
and Mozambique). What is new about these deals is their size: 1.5 Mha in Sudan
(including 690,000 ha for South Korea and 400,000 ha for the United Arab Emir-
ates), 2 Mha in Zambia, and 2.8 Mha in the Republic of Congo (Knaup and Mit-
telstaedt 2009). Are these just a few exceptional events, or does this represent the
beginning of a new megafarming trend on behalf of foreigners?
The production of liquid biofuels could further add to these claims. Irrational
as it may be from environmental, economic, and technical points of view, a deter-
mination to expand the output of ethanol, biodiesel, and even biokerosene for jet
l ight could become a major contributor to further losses of natural ecosystems to
cropland—and some fantasies even envision adding another 2.4 Gha of rain-fed
arable land (on top of the already cultivated 1.5 Gha), most of it in the tropics, to
avoid the continuing reliance on fossil fuels (Read 2008). Perhaps the most chari-
table assessment of such calls is what Marland and Obersteiner (2008, 335) wrote
in an editorial: “But it is not now clear if his [Read's] vision is a dream or a night-
mare.” I do not hesitate to label it a vision beyond nightmare. Moreover, as Fargione
et al. (2008) showed, such massive land conversions (mostly in Brazil, Southeast
Asia, and the United States) could also release one to two orders of magnitude more
CO
2
into the atmosphere than the mass of the gas displaced by using phytomass-
based rather than rei ned oil liquids.
At the same time, there are enormous opportunities for reducing not only post-
harvest (storage, processing, and distribution) phytomass losses but also unaccept-
ably high household food waste losses. Annual losses are about 100 kg/capita in
