The chart shows that the world average has more than halved from 1.45 hectares per person in 1961 to 0.63 hectares in 2018 – meaning that, although the amount of farmed land has actually increased, the amount of land to feed each person has declined. And already “Agricultural sprawl” at 40% of the planet’s surface is FAR GREATER than Urban Sprawl(1%). And of that 40%, only about 6% is cereal crops eaten by humans: the rest is used for raising livestock and feedstuffs fed to livestock.

We need to change our entire thinking about how we feed ourselves – because everything about our current system is wrong: far from the bucolic fantasy of rural life with cows grazing in pristine meadows, Old Macdonald’s happy farm, and the gathering of Harvest Home – that’s over!  The reality is factory farming, with millions of animals brutally murdered every day, soils depleted, biodiversity decimated and vast quantities of pollutants running off into our rivers and oceans.  

Though Regenerative Agriculture of the kind pioneered by Alan Savoury provides some of the answers, and our local farmers’ initiative, Groundswell, the real revolution will come from Precise Fermentation of meat-tasting proteins. In his book, Regenesis, George Monbiot calculates that this approach to food production will use 1/27,000 of the land required for livestock farming – and thus save the planet. Read his article on how “Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet.”

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Fresh Water

The chart shows that the amount of renewable Fresh Water per person has gone down from 13,406 cubic metres per person per year in 1962 to 5,658 cubic metres in 2018. But that figure disguises some massive national variations: Brazil, for example, still has 27,000 cubic metres per person, where Egypt has just over 10.  It is often said that, though the battles of the past were fought over land, the battles of the future will be fought over access to fresh water.

Solutions?

1. Reduce Water Consumption: If the people of Egypt can survive on 10 cubic meters a year, the rest of us can learn to live with much less. So reducing water use – in manufacturing processes, in farming and in our homes is the first, and most important, solution to promote.

2. Desalinisation: The process of taking salt out of seawater and making it fresh and drinkable – or usable for irrigation and/or manufacturing. The biggest Desalinisation plant in the world is Saudi Arabia’s $750million Rabigh 3  Reverse Osmosis (RO) plant, which can produce 600,000 m3/day of desalinated water, fulfilling the water demands for almost one million households in the Makkah Al Mukarramah and Jeddah regions. DEEP (the Desalination Economic Evaluation Program) can be used to compare and evaluate the performance and cost comparitors of various seawater desalination and co-generation options including Reverse Osmosis (RO), Multi-Effect Distillation (MED), Multi-Stage Flash (MSF), and hybrid options. It includes formulation of different alternatives such as different turbines configurations, backup heat, intermediate loop, water transport costs and carbon tax and a fully-fledged discounted cash flow analysis.