The most immediate danger we have to worry about is the global famine. It could hold off for twenty or thirty years but we know that it's coming, and that it could start this year.
We're on the edge of it now because billions of people are already hungry. The loss of 10% or 20% of our food production would be a disaster, and we could easily lose much more than that.
The global famine was predicted in 1798 by Robert Thomas Malthus, who observed that the world's population was increasing while the land area available for farming was not. At some point, he concluded, the human population would be too great for the farmland to sustain.
It didn't happen in his time and the world now contains many more people than Malthus thought it could support -- but millions are hungry and, since Malthus' day, untold millions have starved to death.
About 35 years ago American biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted that the famine would begin by the turn of the century. He was wrong because even as he wrote, the so-called 'green revolution' was producing a huge increase in farm production.
But while the green revolution delayed global famine, it did not prevent it. New crops gave us a huge increase in the world's food supply but the population continues to increase and the growth of the food supply is slowing. Per-capita production of grain peaked in 1984 and has declined ever since.[1]
And there are factors in the modern food supply equation that Malthus did not know about. At this point it appears that the early models of global warming may have been faulty but science has been telling us for more than fifty years that our climate was about to change, and we have evidence that it is now happening.
But while we know that something is happening, we don't know exactly what is happening. For the moment it looks like the world is getting warmer, but some climatologists believe we may be entering a new ice age.
In Feb 2004 a report leaked from the Pentagon predicted that "abrupt climate change" could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy within the next few years. It said that by 2020 winters in Britain may be like present-day Siberia and "catastrophic" shortages of potable water and energy will probably lead to widespread war.[2]
At one time most people assumed that it would take hundreds of years for an ice age to develop but we now have evidence that it may take only ten years or so, and that some of the conditions that might precede such a flip already exist.
I don't pretend to know whether we are in for a long period of global warming or an ice age but I do know that any major change in the world's weather could seriously affect our food supply. Rather than quibble about which way the change will go -- with the knowledge that we will never be absolutely sure until after the fact -- the rational course of action is to prepare for both so we will be able to eat no matter what happens.
And there are more immediate dangers than climate change, because the green revolution produced more than an increase in the production of food. It also increased our consumption of resources and, so far, we have no idea how we will manage after they run out.
But we know they are going to run out. High-yield crops take enormous quantities of water -- American farmers use about 500,000 gallons to grow an acre of corn -- and we are now running short. Farmers in many areas use more water than rain provides and for the past 20 years or so we have been drawing down the world's groundwater. About 60% of the Ogallala aquifer, which waters much of the American prairies, has been withdrawn and current use is 130% to 160% of replacement.[3] If this continues, the aquifer will be drained by 2030.[4] As this is written, in the summer of 2005, much of the American west is in the fifth year of a drought that is causing major crop losses in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.[5]
The volume of Africa's Lake Chad has decreased by about 95% in the past 35 years[6] and the Aral Sea -- once the fourth largest lake in the world with a surface area of nearly 26,000 square miles -- has lost 80% of its area and 90% of its volume.[7]
The Gobi desert has more than doubled in size since the 1950s and is growing by an estimated 950 square miles a year. Scientists at China's Institute of Desert Research say the cause is increased use of water by humans. The demand for water exceeds supply in nearly 80 nations and some climatologists believe that most of Africa is now slipping into a drought that could last for decades.[8]
A study by British, Indian and Nepalese researchers at Calicut University in India predicts that both India and Pakistan will have more water than usual for about 40 years as the glaciers of the Himalayas melt, flooding the Indus and the Ganges rivers, but when the glaciers are gone both rivers will drop to less than half their present flow. The Indus irrigates about half the crops in Pakistan and the Indian government plans to take water from the Ganges to water the arid southern section of the country. When the rivers fail, crops will fail.[9]
Even if we had endless aquifers we would have to think twice about irrigation with groundwater, because it destroys cropland. Rain is essentially distilled water but groundwater contains dissolved minerals and, when it is used for irrigation, minerals which are not taken up by plants are left as salts on the surface. These salts are similar to the 'lime' that builds up in an electric kettle if we boil 'hard' water and, because they build up to toxic levels, farmers around the world abandon about 25 million acres of 'salinated' land each year.[10] The more we irrigate, the more cropland we lose. Some historians believe that the world's first empire, in Mesopotamia, collapsed when the irrigated fields that it depended on became salinated.[11]
The growth of cities takes more than 25 million acres of land a year. About half of this was cropland and around the world we now have only about 0.6 acres of cropland per capita, or about half the amount needed to feed the world to North American standards.[12] The United States is one of the great farming countries of the world but it has only 1.25 acres of cropland per capita, which is about the minimum required.[13]
We are also running out of the fossil fuels we need to make chemical fertilizers and pesticides and to pump water for irrigation and, believe it or not, we are even running out of sunlight! Astronomers tell us the sun gets hotter every year but, possibly because of air pollution and the contrails left by high-flying jets, less sunlight reaches the Earth every year. Parts of the former Soviet Union lost almost 20% of their sunlight between 1960 and 1987.
Sunlight is reduced in densely populated areas because of industrial smog but airliners reduce sunlight everywhere they travel, and their routes cross most of the farmland in the world.
The contrails left by modern airliners are just clouds, but there are so many of them that they increase cloud cover to unnatural levels. The three-day suspension of air traffic after 9/11 produced a measurable change in sunlight, and in the difference between day and night temperatures, across the United States.[14]
Yet another danger is created in part by the new crops themselves. Some are so successful that farmers around the world have adopted them and where we once had hundreds of varieties of each type of grain, we now have only a few dozen. That's dangerous because reduced diversity makes a crop vulnerable to pests and fungi, and the modern practice of buying new seed every year increases the danger.
When farmers collected and re-planted their own seed they did not sort it and alien seeds that blew in from neighboring fields were added to the mix. Author Stanley Johnson cites a biologist who used to find up to twenty varieties of wheat in a single field on the Anatolian plateau. After the distribution of 'improved' seed, each field contained only one variety.[15]
The single variety found in modern fields is more productive than any of the local strains but, because it is a single strain, it is more vulnerable to pests and disease.
A field that contains many varieties of wheat can resist most pests and diseases because any new pest or disease will find some varieties more vulnerable than others and, while the most vulnerable varieties may be killed, the less vulnerable ones will survive. A farmer may lose part of his crop but next year, when he replants with his own seed, the mix will contain more of the varieties that can resist the new pest and less of the ones that are most vulnerable.
When a whole field contains just one variety of plant a pest or disease to which that variety is vulnerable can wipe out the whole field. If farmers replant with new seed of the same variety, the crop will be lost again next year.
That happened in the USA when a new variety of wheat stem rust wiped out 65% of the 1953 crop of Durum wheat, and the same rust wiped out 75% of the 1954 crop.[16]
Concentration on a single crop caused the potato famine that killed more than a million people in Ireland in the mid 19th century. Peru's Inca empire cultivated about 3,000 different varieties of potatoes but only a few of them made it to Europe. Several were established in Ireland in the late 1600s but, after 1820, Irish farmers concentrated on the one called the "Lumper" because it was the most productive.
It was also the one variety most vulnerable to the Phytophthora fungus, which appeared in the United States in 1843 and Europe in 1845. The blight struck The United States, Belgium and France before it reached Ireland but, because farmers in those countries grew a variety of crops including at least four varieties of potatoes, it was not a disaster to them.
In Ireland Lumper potatoes made up literally half the national diet. The blight struck in August of 1845 and by October about 40% of the crop had been destroyed. The next year the whole crop was lost and by 1850, from a population of just over 8 million people, about 1.5 million had died of starvation or fever and 1 million had emigrated.
Could something like that happen on a global scale? It not only can, it probably will.
The potato blight caused famine in Ireland because all Irish farmers grew the same variety of potato. If farmers around the world grow the same variety of grain a blight, and the famine it might cause, could spread around the world. In the 19th century it took only two years for the Phytophthora fungus to migrate from the US to Europe and on to Ireland, and we have to assume that in the 21st century a new pest or disease could travel farther and faster.
Even now we are losing the fourth most important crop in the world. About half a billion people in Africa and Asia depend on bananas for up to half their daily calories but that may have to change because of the Black Sigatoka fungus which appeared in Honduras about 1980 and is now spreading. The fungus reduces yields by up to three quarters in affected areas, and cuts the productive life of banana plants from about 30 to two or three years.
In 2003 it reduced the production of Uganda -- the world's second biggest producer -- by 40% and it is now spreading through the Brazilian Amazon and the Far East. One Brazilian scientist estimates that production in Brazil, the world's fourth largest producer, will fall by 70%. It has also been reported in several countries in the Far East.
Black Sigatoka threatens only the 'Cavendish' variety of bananas and there are others, but that's not very reassuring. The Cavendish was second choice to a variety called the 'Gros Michel' that dominated the world market until it was wiped out in the 1950s and 60s by the fungus that caused 'Panama disease.' When and if Black Sigatoka wipes out Cavendish bananas growers will turn to another variety -- but that will be their third choice and presumably not as good as either the Gros Michel or the Cavendish.[17]
Modern crop researchers believe that they avoid the problems of uniform crops by mixing genotypes, but belief that something "can never happen" can never be proved. In this case the belief could be proved false by the development of a blight but if there is no blight this year or next we can not be certain that there will not be one the year after. In fact the longer we go without a blight the more dangerous our situation, if we keep increasing our dependence on a few supposedly-safe crops.
Pests and pathogens are evolving all the time and no one can guarantee that any single crop is safe.
If a new pest or disease wipes out one of our major grain crops we have seed banks from which to breed a new variety but it takes about ten years to develop a new crop and grow seed. In a world in which tens of millions of people are already hungry, that would be a disaster.
Genetically modified crops that promise to increase food production will be even more uniform than naturally developed crops, and will therefore be more vulnerable if a pest or disease finds their weak point. Genetic modifications may also entail other problems that have not yet been reported or proven.
And there is a serious chance that, sooner or later, some genetic or other experiment may go awry and destroy a considerable percentage of our capacity to produce food.
This is no joke. It not only could happen, it nearly has happened. Scientist and author David Suzuki says that a few years ago a German biotech company re-engineered a common soil organism called Klebsiella planticula to consume rotting crop waste on farms and produce ethanol fuel as a by-product.
The company applied for permission to test the new bacterium in the United States and the US Environmental Protection Agency assigned the project to Oregon State University, which in turn assigned it to doctoral student Michael Holmes.
Suzuki says that normal procedure would have been to test the new bacterium in sterile soil to avoid the possibility of interaction with other bacteria. Instead, Holmes chose to test it in a variety of 'living' soils that already contained other kinds of bacteria.
To his amazement he found that every plant that was put into soil containing the engineered bacteria died. It turned out that the modified Klebsiella killed other organisms called mycorrhysal fungi, and that plants can't live without the fungi.[18]
If Holmes had followed normal procedure and tested the new bacteria in sterile soil he would not have discovered the danger. If the engineered bacteria had got loose in the world -- as killer bees got loose from an experiment in Brazil -- they might have wiped out all plants in the areas they infested. Because Klebsiella lives under the soil it might be impossible to eliminate an infestation or even to stop it from spreading.
Another problem is that seeds for genetically modified crops are available from only a few sources. If a disease gets into one of the farms where the seeds are grown, or one of the plants where they are processed and packaged, it will spread around the world much faster than would a disease of natural crops. If terrorists or natural disasters knock out the sources of the seeds, there will be no crops.
OUR OPTIONS
So much for the gloom and doom. Now for some hope.
One ray of hope light is the fact that most famines in the past have been caused by shortage of money rather than an absolute shortage of food. At the height of the potato famine English farmers in Ireland continued to export grain and if the Irish peasants had been rich, they need not have starved. In recent years we have seen grain exported from African countries while people in those same countries starved.
That may not sound like a ray of hope but it could be because more grain is fed to animals than is eaten by people and, in the early stages of famine, we could still feed people if we cut back on meat production. That may be a forlorn hope, but it is a hope.
We could also begin now to prepare for the hard times that are likely to begin within the new 20 or so years. For a start, we can diversify our crops. Even if we had a thousand different varieties of wheat growing in each field there is no guarantee that some pest or blight could not strike all of them, but why limit ourselves to wheat?
The ancestors of modern wheat were domesticated in the Middle East perhaps 10,000 years ago and wheat is the dominant crop in the world today largely because the nations that dominate the world today are descended, directly or indirectly, from empires that were built on it.
Rice is also a major crop because, like wheat, it was domesticated in areas that evolved powerful empires. Corn was a staple of at least three American empires but, perhaps because those empires were all conquered by wheat-eaters, corn is now used mostly as feed for animals.
The potato was a staple of the Inca, who were probably the most advanced farmers of their time but, after they were conquered by Spain, Inca farmers were forced to grow wheat for the Spaniards. They continued to grow potatoes because the Spaniards used them to feed the slaves who mined silver but the Spaniards ate wheat and, because they were the rulers, wheat was seen as the more prestigious food. A few potato plants were sent to Europe as curiosities and decorative flowers but it took Europeans more than a hundred years to realize that the potato was a useful food.
Inca farmers also developed the Lima bean but most of the native crops of the Americas and Africa are now just local curiosities.
Still, many 'native' crops are as good as or better than our staples. An ongoing series of studies by the United States' National Research Council has identified dozens of grains, legumes, tubers, fruits, vegetables and other crops that have been domesticated by other cultures but never adopted by mainstream European or American farmers. Even without the benefit of modern plant breeding some of them are more prolific and/or more nourishing than the crops we are used to, and many of them could be improved. They can also survive harsh conditions -- some African grains grow wild on sand dunes at the edge of the Sahara.[19]
We could also make more use of some nourishing foods that most of us have seen, but do not recognize as food. One of the staples of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was a type of algae called spirulena which grew in Lake Texcoco. The lake is no longer there but spirulena is now sold in many health food stores and another variety of algae called chlorella -- also sold in health-food stores -- offers another cheap and nutritious food.
We have all seen chlorella -- it's the slime that forms on decaying organic matter in fresh water. Most of us don't think of eating it but, grown under controlled conditions, chlorella can be a valuable crop. Experimenters at the Carnegie Institution found they could grow high-protein chlorella with up to 88% protein or high-fat chlorella with up to 75% fat. All types were rich in vitamins and most contain all the essential amino acids that we need.
The Carnegie Institution experimenters calculated that a commercial chlorella farm could produce up to 40 tons of dry chlorella per acre per year. The raw materials are water, sunlight, carbon dioxide and any convenient source of fixed nitrogen. Because little of the water is actually consumed most of it can be recycled and a chlorella farm could flourish in a desert.[20]
Many North Americans would reject the idea of eating 'slime' but that's just a cultural prejudice. In fact chlorella is a more 'natural' food for us than grain. We know that because we can digest chlorella in its natural state but we can't digest grains until they have been processed by cooking or fermenting. Our ancestors could not eat grain until they learned to use fire or to brew beer.
Some types of algae, yeasts and fungi are grown from waste water, in tanks called 'bio-reactors,' and are even now among the ingredients of many commercially prepared foods.
Bio-reactors also grow the lipid oils used in many sun-tan lotions and other cosmetics and they can grow edible fungi from materials that we generally see as waste. At the University of Waterloo Dr. Murray Moo Young found a way to grow a type of fungus called neurospora on virtually any cellulose. With his process sawdust, wood chips, straw or corn stover could be turned into food or animal feed that would be cheaper and more nourishing than soy meal.
Chlorella, yeast and fungi are also easy to store. The Inca kept stores of food that could feed their people for more than three years and, for a tiny fraction of our annual defense budget, we could make and store enough concentrated ready-to-eat food to help us through several years of unexpected shortage.
Most western countries have stocks of grain but grain is not a good emergency food. One problem is that to use grain we need to cook it and victims of a famine or disaster may not have pots, firewood or enough water for cooking. Another is that grain alone is not an adequate diet. At the very least, humans who live on grain need a legume for balanced nutrition.
The most practical way to store food for a disaster or for distribution to famine areas would be as single-serving bars of solid food that could be eaten direct from the package with no preparation, that would provide a balanced diet and that would keep indefinitely without refrigeration. Such bars could be made from surplus crops, chlorella and/or other foods.[21]
They could be produced from waste that would otherwise be thrown away. Sawmills across Canada burn sawdust by the ton, to get rid of it. Instead, it could be used to grow neurospora fungus that can be dried for storage and that is about as nutritious as beefsteak.
MEAT ANIMALS
We need vegetable food and some of us are willing to live on it but most of us prefer to eat meat. Some see this as a perversion but our cousins the chimpanzees eat meat when they can and while science tells us that the right mix of vegetable food can be nourishing, it also tells us that meat is more nourishing than any single vegetable. Again, we invoke the test of digestibility. We can live on raw meat but not on raw grain.
But while our ancestors ate meat before they were human they didn't eat big animals until after they developed weapons, which was just a few tens of thousands of years ago. Through most of human pre-history we were probably carrion eaters and, like chimpanzees and many modern people, we certainly ate small animals and insects.
Conventional wisdom tells is that big animals produce more meat than small ones, but in fact dozens of small animals that have been or could be domesticated could provide more meat than the cattle, pigs and sheep we are used to. A study published by The National Academy of the US notes that a 1,300-pound steer eats one ton of hay in 120 days and gains 240 pounds of weight from it. Three hundred rabbits would together weigh about the same as the steer and would also gain about 240 pounds from eating one ton of hay, but they would do it in one quarter the time. The report also notes that where a cow produces one calf per year, a rabbit will produce about 30 offspring a year.[22]
Rabbit was a popular meat in Rome and it was Romans who spread rabbits over most of Europe from their original home in Portugal. Romans also ate stuffed dormouse and analysis of scats shows that some people of the Americas, including the Aztec and the Anasazi, also ate mice.[23]
We don't think of mice as a source of food for humans, but they could provide much more meat than 'conventional' farm animals.
A typical cow will produce her first calf when she is a few months more than two years old and will then produce a calf every year. Steers are slaughtered when they are about two years old so, leaving the cow to bear again, we can afford to eat less than one-third of our total beef herd every year.
A common house mouse begins to breed at the age of about 10 weeks and one female mouse can produce a litter of eight to twelve young every five weeks. If we ate mice, we could afford to eat 500 to 800% of our total stock every year.
If we didn't eat them a single mouse and her descendants could produce about 4,880 descendants in one year. In the next year each of her 2,440 female descendants could produce another 4,880 descendants -- a total of 11,907,200. In the third year the original mouse would be dead, but her family would number in the tens of billions.
If each mouse weighed one ounce, two year's progeny from one mother would weigh more than 370 tons. In two years the progeny of one cow would weigh less than two tons. It would be a challenge to process hundreds of tons of mice for human consumption, but sardine canners have conquered a comparable one. We eat the bones of sardines and we also eat the bones of quail and other small birds.
The guinea pig was domesticated about 7,000 years ago in the Andes and is still a popular meat animal in many countries. Official numbers suggest that the 25 million people of Peru eat about 65 million guinea pigs a year[24] but, because many Peruvians raise guinea pigs at home and official numbers count only animals raised for sale by businesses that report to the government, the real number is probably several times that many. In some parts of the world the meat of some rats sells for more than beef, because it is generally considered to be better tasting.[25]
A shift to meat production by small animals might also help the environment because, even if enormous numbers of small mammals produce as much methane as smaller numbers of cows, small animals can be raised indoors and the methane they produce could be trapped and used as fuel rather than released to the atmosphere. Because methane is lighter than air, it would naturally collect under an airtight roof.
Insects are another potential food source. If that surprises you remember that a lobster is a relative of insects. It's also a carrion eater and while some insects eat carrion others -- such as the locust which is one of the most popular insect meats in the world -- eat only fresh green plants. Locusts and grasshoppers are specifically named as kosher food (in Leviticus, 11:22) and are also permissible under Muslim food laws.[26]
In parts of France and Italy, cheese with fly larvae in it sells for more than the same cheese without larvae. In her book Creepy Crawly Cuisine Professor Julieta Ramos-Elorduy of the National Autonomous University of Mexico says that 1,417 species of insects are eaten in 113 countries by more than 3,000 ethnic groups.[27]
In Mexico City, she says, a pound of ants sells for about 10 times the price of a pound of beef. Grasshoppers, red agave worms and the eggs of an insect called the water boatman sell for about twice as much as beef and white agave worms sell for about 14 times the price of beef.
Insects reproduce and grow at incredible rates. The fastest growing animal in the world is probably the female larvae of the goat-moth, which multiplies its weight about 28,000 times in six months. The growth of other insects is less-spectacular but, still, an indoor insect farm the size of a typical dairy barn could produce tons of meat per day.
Insect farming will be a very profitable business some day, and it could be started right now. Some small businesses already raise insects for pet food but big business will raise them as a high-protein feed supplement for farm animals. Some day fast-frozen caterpillars will be packed in plastic trays for sale in gourmet food stores and, eventually, in regular grocery stores.
Mass-produced insects could also make fish farming more practical. We used think of the sea as an inexhaustible source of food but agricultural ecologist David Pimentel of Cornell University says it produces no more than 3% of our animal protein.[28] Stocks of wild fish are now depleted and many fish farms are not sustainable because the fish they farm are carnivores which are fed mostly on the wild fish we are now running out of. We can't afford to feed fish with fish, but we could feed them insects.
Earthworms are also a huge and potentially valuable source of food. A research team headed by biologist Dr. Maurizio Paoletti of Padova University in Italy analyzed the food value of worms eaten by Yakuana Indians of the Upper Orinoco River in Venezuela and found that the meat is slightly more nutritious than beef. It's especially high in iron and calcium, making worms an ideal diet for women who have just given birth. Yakuana women traditionally eat only earthworms and cassava for at least a month after giving birth.
Some of the worms the Yakuana eat are about the size of a man's arm. They must be cleaned before eating because earthworms have no teeth and, like birds, they swallow gravel which they store in gizzards to grind the food they cannot chew. Once cleaned they are eaten raw, smoked, dried or roasted.[29]
Paoletti reports that Yakuana Indians collect adult worms and cocoons during their mating season, when they are easily collected, and move them to river and stream banks where they will be more convenient to harvest the next year.
Most of the insects and worms we see are small, but there are more of them than most people suppose. As a rule of thumb, when a good pasture in temperate North America is being properly grazed by cattle the total weight of insects in the field could be twice the total weight of cattle, and the total weight of worms under the field is three to four times the weight of the insects.[30]
It would probably take most of us a while to get used to the idea of eating insects and earthworms but in a world threatened by pandemics we might learn to prefer them, because they do not share diseases with humans. Anthropologist and author Hugh Brody says that many of our most damaging diseases are actually transfers from animals. We got measles, tuberculosis and smallpox from cattle, the flu from pigs and ducks, whooping cough from pigs and dogs and at least one form of malaria from birds. We got the 1918 flu that produced one of the greatest pandemics in history from birds and in the past couple of years governments in Asia have slaughtered uncounted millions of chickens to protect the world from at least two threatened epidemics of bird flu.[31]
Diseases can transfer to us from mammals and even birds because we are fairly close relatives but we are so different from worms and insects that, as far as we know, any disease they can catch cannot possibly affect us.[32]
In most cases, we would eat the larvae rather than adult insects, but we also need to consider the possibility of catching and using wild insects. As I write this a huge swarm of locusts is eating thousands of tons of grain a day in Africa and governments are spending millions of dollars in attempts to poison it. Whether they succeed or not, the poison will be added to the environment and it will also harm beneficial insects and eventually be eaten by humans.
Farmers and governments try to poison locusts because they see them as pests and -- perhaps more important -- because wealthy companies and agents make profits when they make, sell and apply the poisons. Whether they pay bribes or offer campaign contributions or not these people certainly make an effort to be friendly with government officials, and the officials listen to their advice.
But there is another way of looking at the problem. The locusts, up to four inches long, are very nutritious and completely edible. In fact there are thousands of tons of high-quality meat flying around and, instead of trying to harvest it, people are trying to poison it. In some areas locust meat is believed to be good for diabetics and governments have to warn people not to eat them because of the poison.
If we could capture them all there are probably more locusts than people in the area could eat but any surplus could be sold as fodder. If nothing else, they could be plowed under as fertilizer.
A plague of locusts could be seen as a flying meat farm, but how to catch them? I don't pretend to have a final answer, but I can offer suggestions.
Some fishing nets are several hundred meters wide and ten or more kilometers long. They're much too heavy to catch locusts, of course, but this is the size range we're thinking of.
Nets to catch locusts could be made of plastic, and molded rather than woven. The plastic mesh used to make bags for some fruits and vegetables would be suitable.
Imagine a net perhaps 100 meters high and thirty kilometers long, suspended from a row of balloons across the swarm's path. As they hit it some of the locusts will cling to the net and eventually they will drag it down but, in the meantime, millions will fall to the foot of the net where they can be collected by hand or by a large vacuum cleaner. If the weight of locusts pulls the net down too quickly the trap could consist of a series of nets, one behind the other.
Because the locusts will be sold the operation might make a profit. Even if it does not, it would be much less harmful than poison.
Starting from scratch it would take a while to make the nets but, because the mesh is already in production, it should not take too long. A well-organized world would keep nets in reserve because there is a swarm somewhere in the world every few years, and each swarm continues for a year or more.
If nets hung from balloons don't work, how about a net cast by a line of mortars or catapults to fall over the swarm and drag it down? I like this idea because the same net cast the same way could also be used to capture the Quelea birds that are pests in Zimbabwe. These birds are small but estimates place the total numbers at between 100 and 150 billion and a flock will strip a field of grain in a few hours. Quelea birds roost in trees but after a few million of them have roosted, a grove of trees is reduced to bare sticks.
The birds are said to be good eating but, because farmers and governments try to poison them, the government of Zimbabwe warns people not to eat them.[33]
If we develop cast nets large enough we could trap birds in the fields, or perhaps as they approach a field. If not, perhaps we could cast a net over a section of forest where the birds roost. In that case the birds would still be in trees and hard to catch but if they are within a net they will be caught, somehow.
Mice can also be a plague. In one episode of The Crocodile Hunter TV series host Steve Irwin visited an Australian farm so badly over-run that the mice literally looked like a moving rug. In a situation like that a big vacuum cleaner might collect tons of meat -- and save tons of grain -- in a few hours.
Again -- the meat might not be suitable for human consumption but fish are not choosy. There might be a question about feeding mammals to mammals -- that's how mad cow disease got started -- but diseases do not jump from insects to mammals or from mammals to fish.
These plagues -- locusts, Quelea birds and mice -- have all occurred outside Canada but they were all on our planet and they all contribute to planetary food shortages.
We often let food go to waste in Canada. On beaches beside the Great Lakes I have seen thousands of tons of dead alewife fish, and I recall news reports of a lake in northern Saskatchewan that was poisoned by the fish that died when the lake froze so completely that they could not get oxygen. A few years ago tens of thousands of caribou were drowned in Labrador, when a dam released water as they were crossing the river. Within the past couple of years a plague of grasshoppers cost western farmers millions of dollars.
All these are potential sources of fish and animal feed or, at the very least, fertilizer. A well-managed operation to collect them should pay for itself, add to our food supply and reduce pollution, all at the same time.
But rather than make the best use of food, we destroy it. In times of plenty, even edible crops may be destroyed to 'maintain prices.'[34] In a rational world all food would be valued and waste would be seen as a crime against humanity.
URBAN FARMS
We also need to reconsider the wisdom of getting our food from huge farms that are hundreds or thousands of miles away from consumers while some of our own farmland is paved for highways, shopping malls and parking lots. Many of the vegetables we eat in Canada are trucked from Mexico and the Southern States and this would not be sustainable in a world wracked by famine or disrupted by natural disaster.
I don't suggest that we could do without highways, malls and parking lots but no matter how much we like cars, our food supply is more important and cities and farms can and should be intermixed.
As in fact they have been. Through most of history city dwellers have had their own gardens, some with professional gardeners, and in times of emergency home gardens have been primary sources of food.
A hundred years ago about 3,500 acres of small farms within the city of Paris produced most of the vegetables needed in the city plus a surplus that was exported to consumers as far away as London, England. During World War II an estimated 10 million 'war gardens' in the US produced an average of a half-ton of food each per year.
Even now, one United Nations report says that in the 1980s more than 90% of the vegetables and more than half the meat and poultry consumed in the world's 18 largest cities were produced in urban areas.
In Singapore about 10,000 licensed farmers work more than 17,000 acres of city land on three or ten year leases. Some of the land is worth a fortune but the farmers' rent is geared to the value of their production rather than to the value of the land. About 45% of the vegetables consumed in Hong Kong are grown within the city and more than one third of the dollar value of all agricultural produce in the United States is grown within urban metropolitan areas.[35]
We need to look to urban farming, Singapore style. A city like Toronto has thousands of acres of vacant lots, hydro corridors and other waste land. Some of it could and should be used as parks but we can also consider a government program to rent vacant land to people who will use it to produce food. Some of Toronto's empty land is polluted, of course, but a rational government would not allow it to stay polluted. If private land is polluted the owner should be required to either clean it up or sell it to the city, province or nation at a bargain price. The government would then be obliged to clean the land and re-sell it. Because the sale price would be higher than the purchase price, this would cost the government little or nothing. The owners of polluted land would, of course, protest, but should a government allow land to stay polluted?
We like to think that we in Canada have lots of food but in fact we do not produce enough to feed ourselves and, even now, millions of people in other countries are starving. A minor change -- smaller than the climate shift that is predicted in the leaked Pentagon study -- could push us into a famine; and a rational government would start now to prepare for it. As they say in Japan, hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
And we must start to prepare immediately, because we have no idea when the global famine will start. We think that modern science will warn us of an impending famine but in fact it has warned us, and the warning is being ignored. We are on the edge of disaster now and we have no guarantee of any food supply beyond whatever we have in storage.
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