Population, Food, and Sustainability

This post is in response to the two videos and article for this past Tuesday's class.

We have seven billion human beings on this planet. Seven billion. That is a ridiculous number--an unfathomable number. Some people (who I believe are truly sick) celebrate this fact as some sort of accomplishment of humankind. Really, it's not. I promise.

(More than) a few issues arise with this sort of population growth, the most significant, in my opinion, being the ability to sustainably produce food for this amount of people. This is especially a problem in the US--with obesity rates so high, there's no question, even without looking at the facts, that we consume more than any other country in the world. The average American consumes forty-three times more resources and food than the average African, according to Jason Clay's speech.

The two videos we watch offer different solutions for the same problem. In the "Tribal Natural Resources" video, the Native Americans living on the reservation claim that the key to sustainability is small farming and hunting--living off the land, essentially, as their ancestors did. In the other video, the speech by Jason Clay, Clay claims that sustainability in food production can be achieved through working with the largest production corporations. Since they have such a monopoly over the industry, farming practices in general will be far more sustainable even if we can only get the top one hundred corporations to agree to sustainable practices.

Both Clay and the Tribal Natural Resources group offer valid solutions. However, I believe that the Tribal Natural Resources group's solutions are idealistic and unrealistic. Now, don't get me wrong; I have an indescribable respect for that way of life, and I think it's a way of life that would work well for an individual reservation or community. However, I could never see it working on a global scale, especially with the way Americans consume food and resources. We would need to consume far less and reduce our population significantly if we would ever wish to remotely attain that life of small farming.

Another problem that arises is that there are too few small family farmers, and the amount of farmers is decreasing in general in the western world. We can't expect people, with the amount of educational and career opportunities that exist in the developed world, to stay at home and farm. There are people who both have careers and farm, but this is unrealistic for many working people. It is a noble idea, but it simply will not work on a large scale.

In order to truly make food production more sustainable, we need to work with what we have now, as Clay says. The corporations aren't going to disappear. Our desires for processed foods are not going to disappear. We have to work with the large food producers and consumers. However, I do think it is essential for humans to work as hard as we can to reduce further population growth and our consumption alike. One thing that we need to reduce is the amount of food that gets turned into non-food. For example, potatoes to potato chips, soybeans to tofu, okay; corn to high fructose corn syrup and soda, not okay. Another wasteful use of resources is, of course, animal food production. Putting in 26 pounds of food such as soybeans, corn and grain to obtain one pound of beef is just about the most unsustainable and inefficient practices in the world of modern food production.

Fortunately, this is where we have the power as consumers. Try to buy the simplest, most efficient form of food, locally if you can, and make your own meals and foods. We need food to live, and there is no way we can avoid contributing to the industry in some way, but if we are more selective with the food that we buy, perhaps we can change the industry for the better.