Think, Eat, Save

FOOD OR NAUGHT | From farm to plate, we waste 30-50% of our food even as every seventh person on earth goes hungry. With the 7 billion global population poised to grow by nearly one-third by 2075, we could rethink food or starve. THE CHOICE IS NOW

Tehelka, 3 June, 2013 

IF YOU are reading this, you have had an English education, which is a functional economic indicator in India and places you above the hunger line. But the world may soon reach a stage, certainly in your children’s lifetime, when no amount of money will buy food, at any rate, not enough of it. Since most of you, including those who starve to get into or stay in shape, have at some point of time known what it is to be hungry, you should be worried. Already, there are one billion hungry people. The global population will swell by another two billion by 2050. There is simply no moreland to further expand agriculture. Farm productivity has already plateaued after decades of chemical abuse of soil. Aquifers have hit rock bottom, irrigating the water-intensive crops we grow unthinkingly. Forget producing more food, business as usual is unlikely to sustain even the present yields for too long. The day is not very far when the rich and the poor, the developed and developing world, will wage war over granaries.

I’m not being alarmist. Traditionally, we tilled more land whenever we wanted to produce more food. We triumphantly cleared forests (remember Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil?) till most of us grudgingly accepted that the skies may not rain and the air may not breathe if we did not let the few remaining green patches be. Since the 1960s, agricultural land has expanded by just 12 percent while our population has grown 10 times faster. The fact that we are not starving yet (at least the 85 percent relatively better- off majority are not) shows that we have managed to wring the same stretch of land for a lot more food than natural. For example, between 1960 and 2000, production of rice, maize and wheat grew by 66–88 percent in Asia and Latin America. We are taught to be proud of our great progress in agrotech. But nothing really comes from nothing.

What fuels us is solar energy stored in food. The sun did not shine brighter, nor did the plants convert more than the usual 2 percent of sunlight they receive into food to help the Green Revolution. The extra energy for producing the extra food came from fossil fuels. We burned more and more oil (and coal for thermal power) to run tractors, pump out groundwater and produce chemical fertilisers and pesticides to boost yield.

Predictably, we are fast running out of each of these finite resources — diesel, coal and groundwater. We are also losing the topsoil — the few inches of the nutrient-packed upper layer of earth that takes decades to accumulate — too fast to be replenished. Worse, our preference for high yield at the cost of resilience, and hence sustainability, is leading to rapid extinction of hardy but neglected plant and farm animal breeds that could be our best insurance against an uncertain future.

On 27 May, Zakri Abdul Hami, the head of the UN biodiversity panel, confirmed the scary state of affairs. “Out of 30,000 edible plants, just 30 crops account for 95 percent of the energy in our food that is dominated by rice, wheat, maize, millet and sorghum. More than one-fifth of the world’s livestock breeds are at risk of extinction. It is more important than ever to have a large genetic pool that can withstand and adapt to future diseases and climate uncertainties,” he warned.

But even after extracting such a high cost from the planet, can our blinkered food production policies solve the problem of hunger? Today, the world produces 4 billion tonnes of food, which is enough to provide 2,000-odd calories a day to each of some seven million people on earth. Yet, at least a billion suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition kills more than two million children every year.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) blames this failure on wastage. According to FAO estimates, 30-50 percent of the global food production never reaches anybody’s plate. The trail of waste begins with mismanagement of primary resources. We are not only squandering water, soil and energy, but also usurping prime cropland for urbanisation and industry. Between 2006 and 2011, 5 lakh hectares of agricultural land was lost in India alone.

The less developed countries lose a major chunk of their food produce during postharvest procurement and storage due to inadequate infrastructure such as bad roads and lack of warehouses. In India, for example, 21 million tonnes of wheat rot in the open. In the richer economies, the waste occurs at the retailer and customer end of the food chain. Perfectly edible fruits and vegetables are discarded because of their not-so-perfect shape or colour. An average American or European simply throws away around 100 kg food every year.

The following pages of the TEHELKA Green Special offer a scrutiny of the eight stages of the farm-to-fork journey, each riddled with holes, leaving too many hungry. At each stage, we take stock of the global and the national scenario and learn from two Indian experiences what is wrong and how it can be fixed.

BUT, UNDENIABLY, there is more to hunger than wastage. A rural Indian household, or any household in a traditional agro-economy, wastes nothing. Take rice, for example. Different varieties are consumed in the puffed, popped, flattened and fermented forms. The straw is used as fodder, for roofing, packaging and making winter beds for cattle. The husk is used as fuel, for mulching of soil and even hatching eggs. The bran is a common feed for fish and livestock. In general, every peel of kitchen waste is either composted or fed to the family cow.

It is easy to conclude that such practices are offshoots of poverty. One cannot waste when one does not have much. But many prosperous farmer households I have been to do not do it any differently. Veterinarian and livelihood expert Sagari Ramdas sums it up in the words of the farmers of Andhra: “Kasu leka pashu ledu, pashu leka penta ledu, penta leka panta ledu, panta leka kasu ledu (Without fodder, no animals; without animals, no dung; without dung, no crop; without crop, no fodder).”

Evidently, natural recycling boosts agro-economy. But the no-waste lifestyle of most rural agricultural societies is also an appreciation of, literally, the fruit of their labour. At the other end of the food spectrum, generations born and brought up in cities, and that means every third Indian and more than half the global population, have developed a serious disconnect. Without any involvement in or knowledge of how food is grown, they are merely consumers at the end of a supply chain. For them, food comes from supermarket shelves or kirana stores and is always restocked.

Indeed, urban households can afford to waste so much food because there is always more to buy at the store across the road. The irony of global food politics is such that cities, and developed economies in general, that squander food are never short of supply while those who waste little are increasingly left with nothing. Across the world, staple food is getting cheap enough for the rich to waste without qualms and yet too expensive for the poor to buy.

Unfortunately, even the shocking estimates of food wastage, instead of prompting redressal of this injustice, often end up making it worse. Take India, for example. From FAO to our government and industries, everybody agrees that a lot of food — 25-40 percent of fruits and vegetables and 5-10 percent of grain — is wasted. Nor does anyone dispute that at the very least 20 percent of Indians go to bed hungry.

So what is the government’s remedy? In its ‘Vision 2015’ document, the Ministry of Food Processing Industries decided to increase the “level of processing of perishables to 20 percent, enhancing value addition to 35 percent”. It has also approved 50 mega food parks or clusters of food processing units. Such steps will help India’s $135 billion food processing sector grow to an estimated $200 billion by 2015. The packaged foods industry is growing even faster and attracting massive investments from MNCs.

What are the markets for this glut of processed and packaged food? Some will be shipped abroad as India wants to double its share in the global food trade to 3 percent by 2015. The rest of it will go to urban and semi-urban centres and consumers with rising disposable incomes. Do the hungry figure anywhere in this scheme of things?

If it is our stated policy to process, package, export and over-consume in our cities just because some perishable is anyway going waste, it is not surprising that we never attempted to fix the distribution lines that could reach the hungry. Instead, we set up 60 agri-export zones in 20 states.

HUNGER, SAYS the World Health Organisation, is the single gravest threat to public health. It kills once starvation causes loss of more than a third of one’s normal body weight. To get there, the hungry burn body fat, muscles and tissues for energy. Essentially, the body feeds on itself. Can a starving population, larger than ever, be saved from that indignity?

Not unless we go back to the basics. For that, modern farming has to relearn to respect soil and revive traditional practices rooted in many centuries of experience. It has to stop forcing water-intensive cash crops on arid fields, drastically cut dependence on fossil fuels and chemicals, and allow hardy genes that have gone out of fashion to flourish again. In the age of glowing GM crops, does that job list sound like a lunatic call to return to the hunter-gatherer stage? It better not. A hunter-gatherer lifestyle today will not sustain even 3 percent of the global population. We have reached where we are because of our technology and we should be proud of that progress. But we need to unlearn some of it just as we need to relearn something from our forefathers.

Hunter-gatherers operated in groups. Numerical strength was their biggest asset. This made our ancient ancestors accept the interest of the collective as greater than their own. They were not selfless but an early concept of ethics made them share what they had. Since everybody watched everybody in small foraging groups, nobody could or would hoard while another did not have enough to eat.

Our switch to agriculture started a population boom that continues till date. Teeming with people, the Global Village has long become an anonymous world. With nobody watching us, and we not watching the hungry, we indulge and waste without compunction. Far away from all of us, unobserved and unquestioned, big money and power spin more money and power by poisoning our land, water and air in the name of innovation and growth.

The world needs innovation more than ever to solve the imminent food crisis. But our blind faith in technology is becoming our undoing. We must separate what is empowering from what is suicidal and marry that knowhow with some of the ancient values of our forefathers. Because no matter how much food the world produces and saves from going waste, some of us will always go hungry unless the rest care to share.

Every morsel must count.