The food crisis: should we stop eating meat?

photo credit: Jesse Gardner

They’ve been noting in Egypt. And Mexico. And Indonesia. In Bangladesh 20,000 workers took to the streets of the capital, Dhaka, last week. In Haiti, where famine has reduced many to eating biscuits made from mud, a UN peacekeeper carrying food to his colleagues was dragged from his car and shot dead. No less than 37 countries are now in the grip of a major food crisis. Food prices have increased 83% in three years (wheat soaring by 120% in the past year; rice by an astonishing 75% since February). The head of the IMF now warns that if nothing is done, “hundreds of thousands of people will starve”. Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, has called on its members to provide £250m to deal with the immediate problem.

Yet look closely at the figures and you’ll find that last year’s global grain harvest was the biggest on record. So why is there a problem? Because fully one-third of that record harvest went into the bellies not of humans but of their livestock, to accommodate the luxury of meat-eating. It takes 8kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef; if you really want to help those at risk of starvation, the remedy is simple - eat less meat.

Try telling that to the emerging middle classes of China and India though. For the first time ever, they find they can afford meat, and they’re not going to give up this new delight because rich people in the West tell them to. No, the only way to handle the huge rise in demand is to meet it. And that means giving up our sentimental attachment to small-scale farms , sustained by vast public subsidies - and allowing full rein to the “irredeemably unromantic” forces of agribusiness. It also means ditching our newfound attachment to biofuels: on dubious “green” grounds, they have been encouraged to use up vast swathes of prime crop-growing land In the US, around a third of gram production has now been diverted to this grotesquely inefficient form of energy production.

But we all know the biggest single step the West could take to alleviate the food crisis. It’s what the World Trade Organisation in its Doha round of talks has been striving to achieve since 2001: liberalisation of global agricultural markets. The protectionist tariffs designed to shield farmers in Europe and the US have deprived the developing world of markets and incomes for decades. Gordon Brown rightly urged world leaders this week to redouble our efforts for a WTO trade deal. For until Western politicians are prepared to confront their farm lobbies, the food crisis will just keep getting worse.