Discovery Channel Magazine: Fixing Food

Discovery Channel Magazine, March 2013

The global food system is rife with horrible statistics. Here’s one: 925 million people experience hunger, at a time when we produce enough food globally for all of them. Another: just under 15% of people in the developing world are undernourished. A third: in this delicate environment, grain prices are up 12% in a year. One more: as much as half the food produced in the world ends up as waste.

These numbers aren’t just urban myths, plucked from the air and repeated on the internet. The first is from the UK Government Office for Science, the second from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the third from the World Bank, and the fourth from the UK’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

“Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry,” says Raj Patel, who has worked at or for the World Bank, WTO, the UN and whose book Stuffed and Starved is an angry and confronting narrative of the failures of the world food system. “The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.” (Figures on global hunger vary between 800 million and a billion depending on your definition, but you get the point.)

And it’s going to get worse. Much worse. There are about seven billion people to feed today; that figure is expected to top nine billion by 2050. Not only will they all need to be fed, but their dietary needs will have changed: as people become wealthier, particularly in high-population nations like China and India, they seek more protein in their diet, particularly meat – which, as we’ll discover, is especially bad news for the planet. “The global food system,” says the UK government report The Future of Food and Farming, “will experience an unprecedented confluence of pressures over the next 40 years.” In addition to the demands of a bigger and wealthier population, “on the production side, competition for land, water and energy will intensify, while the effects of climate change will become increasingly apparent. The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to a changing climate will become imperative.”

So how bad is it, and what can we do? To find out, Discovery Channel Magazine sought out the experts at the world’s biggest organisations, from Rome to Washington DC, Oxford University to San Francisco. But our journey starts four years ago, at the sharp end of food security, in Bangladesh.

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