The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [69]
This is what it would take to feed nine billion people in 2050: at least a doubling of agricultural production driven by a huge increase in fertiliser use in Africa, the adoption of drip irrigation in Asia and America, the spread of double cropping to many tropical countries, the use of GM crops all across the world to improve yields and reduce pollution, a further shift from feeding cattle with grain to feeding them with soybeans, a continuing relative expansion of fish, chicken and pig farming at the expense of beef and sheep (chickens and fish convert grain into meat three times as efficiently as cattle; pigs are in between) – and a great deal of trade, not just because the mouths and the plants will not be in the same place, but also because trade encourages specialisation in the best-yielding crops for any particular district. If price signals drive the world’s farmers to take these measures it is quite conceivable that in 2050 there will be nine billion people feeding more comfortably than today off a smaller acreage of cropland, releasing large tracts of land for nature reserves. Imagine that: an immense expansion of wilderness throughout the world by 2050. It’s a wonderful goal and one that can only be brought about by further intensification and change, not by retreat and organic subsistence. Indeed, come to think of it, let’s make farming a multi-storey business, with hydroponic drip-irrigation and electric lighting producing food year-round on derelict urban sites linked by conveyor belt directly to supermarkets. Let’s pay for the buildings and the electricity by granting the developer tax breaks for retiring farmland elsewhere into forest, swamp or savannah. It is an uplifting and thrilling ideal.
Should the world decide, as a professor and a chef have both suggested on my radio recently, that countries should largely grow and eat their own food (why countries? Why not continents, or villages, or planets?), then of course a very much higher acreage will be needed. My country happens to be as useless at growing bananas and cotton as Jamaica is at growing wheat and wool. If the world decides, as it crazily started to do in the early 2000s, that it wants to grow its motor fuel in fields rather than extract it from oil wells, then again the acreage under the plough will have to balloon. And good night rainforests. But as long as some sanity prevails, then yes, my grandchildren can both eat well and visit larger and wilder nature reserves than I can. It is a vision I am happy to strive for. Intensive yields are the way to get there.
When human beings were all still hunter-gatherers, each needed about a thousand hectares of land to support him or her. Now – thanks to farming, genetics, oil, machinery and trade – each needs little more than a thousand square metres, a tenth of a hectare. (Whether the oil will last long enough is a different subject and one I tackle later in the book: briefly my answer is that substitutes will be adopted if the price rises high enough.) That is possible only because each square metre is encouraged to grow whatever it is good at growing and global trade distributes the result to ensure that everybody gets a bit of everything. Once again, the theme of specialised production/diversified consumption turns out to be the key to prosperity.
Organic’s wrong call
Politicians can make my prediction fail. Should the world decide to go organic – that is, should farming get its nitrogen from plants and fish rather than direct from the air using