Nearly a third of the world's land is used for agriculture, but one in eight people in the world are food insecure. According to research from the University of Minnesota, the problem is that we're not growing food very efficiently, and we're using the land to make fuel. Emily Cassidy, lead author of the paper and a biofuels research analyst for the Environmental Working Group, said about 45 percent of the calories the world grows on farms ends up as animal feed or biofuels.
"We really need to think about using the land that we are currently using for agriculture more efficiently so that we don't have to continue to deforest Malaysia, Indonesia and Brazil," she said. By shifting away from intensive meat production - especially beef - and away from biofuel crops that take up massive tracts of arable land, global calorie availability may increase by as much as 70 percent. That's about 3.88 x 1015 calories, by the way, if you're counting.
Eat Smaller Animals
Beef production is less efficient by orders of magnitude than other kinds of meat and dairy production. It takes 30 calories of feed to make one calorie of edible beef. Part of the reason is that large animals, including humans, burn more calories just standing around. It takes energy to pump blood out to the extremities and to make large bones, organs and frames. "They have less conversion efficiency because a lot of the calories that we're feeding them is going into inedible parts of the animals," Cassidy said.
According to the study published in Environmental Research Letters, 36 percent of the calories produced by the world's crops are used for animal feed, but only 12 percent of those feed calories end up contributing to the human diet. "Shifting to grain-fed chicken and pork could reduce the amount of land that's required to produce the meat that we consume." When counting calories alone, all meat and dairy is less efficient than plant sources.
Grow More Food
The world's voracious thirst for biofuels has also taken food out of the breadbasket. From 2000 to 2010, the amount of potential food calories used for biofuel increased more than 450 percent worldwide. In the U.S., the percent of corn used for ethanol jumped from 6 percent in 2000 to 38 percent in 2010. Cassidy said there are promising biofuel alternatives, like perennial grasses, that could be grown on land that wouldn't be used for food crops, and could be used to stanch agricultural runoff or filter agrochemicals around the boundaries of fields.
She suggested revisiting renewable fuel standards in the U.S. that have promoted conversion of corn to ethanol, which has impinged on the food system. "Corn is the world's biggest animal feed, and the U.S. is the world's largest producer of corn," she said. "Taking that animal feed and using it for fuel drives up the price of animal feed, which is a big determinant of meat and dairy prices."
Read More:
- Existing Cropland Could Feed 4 Billion More (University of Minnesota)
- Ethanol's Broken Promise (Environmental Working Group)
