It is not just that people in rich countries eat too much, and those in poor ones eat too little. Enormous quantities of the world's increasingly scarce grain now goes to feed cows - and, indirectly, cars.

(...)

 As people become better-off, they eat more meat, the animals that are slaughtered often being fed on grain. It takes 14kg of grain to produce 2kg of beef, and 8kg of grain for 2kg of pork. More than a third of the world's harvest goes to fatten animals in this way.

Cars are a new concern, the worry arising from the present drive to produce green fuels to fight global warming. A "corn rush" has erupted in the United States, using the crop to produce the biofuel, ethanol - strongly supported by subsidies from the Bush administration to divert criticism of its failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Just a single fill of ethanol for a four-wheel drive SUV, says Brown, uses enough grain to feed one person for an entire year. This year the amount of US corn going to make the fuel will equal what it sells abroad; traditionally its exports have helped feed 100 - mostly poor - countries.

From next year, the amount used to run American cars will exceed exports, and soon it is likely to reduce what is available to help feed poor people overseas. The number of ethanol plants built or planned in the corn-belt state of Iowa will use virtually all the state's crop.

This will not only cut food supplies, but drive up the process of grain, making hungry people compete with the owners of gas-guzzlers. Already spending 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food, they simply cannot afford to do so.

Famine is an efficient market clearing mechanism, as we know.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

The conventional wisdom was that the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone, and Amartya Sen has argued that famines are caused by unresponsive political systems, not by lack of food.

Does the article explain the causes of this food shortage? I'll go and find out.

Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman

Making cars more fuel-efficient, and eating less meat would help but the only long-term solution is to enable poor countries - and especially their poorest people - to grow more food. And the best way to do that, studies show, is to encourage small farmers to grow crops in environmentally friendly ways. Research at Essex University shows that this can double yields.

Of course, that might involve, (shock, horror) trade barriers to protect those small farmers from large agri-businesses in the US, EU and Australia...

So, that won't be happening any time soon.

Most interesting to me is that an awful lot of people of a certain type (many of whom are economists) always like to point to the failure of the Malthus predictions.

Of course, now it seems like those predictions were just delayed by oil-based fertilizer revolution.

Add this in to the graph showing both rise in living standards and volume of oil extraction and we have some unpretty pictures of a low-oil future.

Even if supplies are currently down, this could be remedied in one growth cycle if the US put all its non-productive land back into cultivation.

Will this still be the case 20 years from now when the world has added another billion people? I doubt it.

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

Anyhow those corn/ethanol farmers will be out of water before we're out of oil! I'm still a bit surprised as we do have to leave in fallow quite a lot of fields because of overproduction that would hit prices...!

In further countries, where war is raging, I can understand that the quotas will not be met (that's an euphemism ), and China has problems on that part!
But to call for a world famine is surprising... Unless it is linked with global warming previsions ?

Another flying saucers brainwash scare ???
Let's ask tropical countries to grow more cane, and to rehabilitate those old ruined distilleries to care about ethanol !
Let's stop growing corn and feed soybeans to the cows (poor things)!

And let's get thinking about water...

"What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman

So I should buy birth control stocks?

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!

The room is a "doomsday vault" designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world's crops. It is being built to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies. "If the worst came to the worst, this would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet," says Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organisation promoting the project.

New Scientist has learned that the Norwegian government is planning to create the seed bank next year at the behest of crop scientists. The $3 million vault will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors. It will not be permanently manned, but "the mountains are patrolled by polar bears", says Fowler.

Will we need this sooner than anyone expected?

Over the ten year period from 1990 to 2000, the number of people in the world that lived on an inadequate amount of food increased from 840 million to 858 million. Due to the population increases over this period, the percentage of the population that is undernourished simultaneously decreased from 16% to 14%.

Of all the people living in Central Africa, over 60% are undernourished. The Democratic Republic of Congo has the highest levels of undernourishment: 3 in every 4 people there are undernourished.

Reducing the proportion of undernourished peoples is an aim of Millennium Development Goal 1.

The nutritional value of insects is quite amazing (~600kcal/100g) and of high quality. Furthermore, the method to grow this kind of food is simple, efficient and very well understood, widely use (you can find  insect in any pet shop).

why are we not using our wastes or other sources to process this very energy efficient method of nutrition, processed as nutrition powder or other form ?

Many human would be better of to get access to this kind of resources instead of suffer of malnutrition, and the world would be better of as well if we would be able to give up our very inefficient way to produce our food, the quantity of energy wasted to get a kilogram of beef meat is truly unacceptable and not sustainable.

http://www.food-insects.com/

Soylent Green.

Interesting to see that Lester Brown is credited with founding the Worldwatch Institute, which is referred to in the above-linked diary. The WI's report on biofuels (pdf) is generally favourable, even for first-generation biofuels (ie food crops used as feedstocks). Strange.