Food and cities: Food self-sufficiency defies the laws of nature
I’ve written before about how self-sufficient Birmingham could be, and why we should bother about local food growing. As far as feeding a densely populated area, local food growing doesn’t.
Local food growing has great civic, social and individual benefits — it is truly wonderful, as Caroline Hutton of Martineau Gardens so eloquently says!
But, unless we develop an at-present unimagined technology whereby we can, for example, manufacture new materials as foodstuffs, food self-sufficiency for a city defies the laws of nature.
The 3.6M of us here in the West Midlands live in the 60K hectare conurbation. We’re in competition for food with the other 60M+ in the UK, shortly to be 70M+ . . . And there are over 6 billion elsewhere, rising to 9 billion in 2050.
At Monday’s Forum meeting I gave the figure that 10 people can live off a hectare of highly fertile intensively farmed land. It’s a crude figure, but accurate enough for this discussion, and it doesn’t look likely to change radically anytime soon.
At a different level, self-sufficiency at a local or national level may well not be desirable either. It is not something recommended by either the GO-Science The Future of Food & Farming or the House of Commons Securing Food Supplies to 2050 as thereby lies threats to our own and other peoples’ food supplies.
The recent CPRE report From field to fork: The value of England’s local food webs gives examples of great local food webs and their value, including monetary value, to communities. But as a contribution to the nation’s food requirement, their own sums suggest a potential of only some 2% of what we require. (To reach that percentage figure, I’ve taken their figure of £2.7bn for potential future local food supplies [see p5] and the figure of £156.8bn cited by the IGD as the size of the UK grocery market in 2011.)
It would be irresponsible for city leaders and socio-political decision-makers to base their plans or action on the assumption that their city or conurbation could be self-sufficient in food.
Cities don’t have the land. And vertical farming is a non-starter for now because of capacity, materials structure and light . . . there may be technologies soon that can meet the last two of these issues but not the the first of them.
Although when I was a little babyboomer kid, we did know how self-sufficient the UK was, these figures aren’t easily accessible today — I’m conferring with experts on just this matter. Sure, we now have intensive farming so I’m supposing we do better now than we once did. But it no longer concerns the population. Yet, given the global challenges were facing this century, it should!
For those who wax lyrical about what happened during World War II, the dig for victory, the pig in the back garden and all that . . . here are some factoids: The UK produced a mere 30% of food for its below 50M population at the outbreak of World War II. Despite local initiatives, during the War and for some time afterwards, people had a meagre diet, doing without certain key nutrients* and there was rationing which lasted until July 1954. Indeed, potato rationing began in 1947, in response to impact on the potato crop of the bitter winter of 1946-7.
As a 1950s child, I remember pretty dire food, and shortages. We were given cod liver oil, virol (high calorie malt) and milk as the ‘normal’ child’s diet was deficient even with the most knowledgeable, affluent and conscientious of parents.
As for now and the future: there will soon be nine billion of us requiring twice the food production than we have now. This needs radical thinking and, crucially, realistic thinking too.
* The example that the link provides is an article published in the British Journal of Nutrition (2000), 84, 247-251. Its title is Nutritional Research in World War II: The Oxford Nutrition Survey and its research potential 50 years later by Huxley, Lloyd, Goldacre and Neil. Its abstract reads thus:
To investigate the nutritional status of the population of the UK during the Second World War, nutritional surveys were commissioned in 1941. These included surveys of two groups of pregnant women: the first comprised 120 working-class women who were studied in the spring of 1942, and a second group of 253 women in 1944. Both groups were followed up until after delivery. Detailed biochemical assessments were performed on each subject. Our statistical analysis of the haematological data showed that nearly 25 % of women from the 1942 group were deficient in protein, over 60 % were deficient in Fe and vitamin A, and over 70 % had severe vitamin C deficiency. The findings were reported to the Ministries of Health and Food who instigated a food supplementation policy at the end of 1942 that entitled pregnant women in the UK to extra rations of fruit, dairy produce and to a supply of cod-liver-oil tablets. A second group of 253 pregnant women were studied 15 months later which enabled the effects of this programme to be investigated. Supplementation reduced the proportion of women with vitamin A concentrations below the normal range from 63 % to 38%, and vitamin C from 78 % to 20%, but protein and Fe concentrations were not increased but actually declined. These findings continued to exert an influence over government food policy for pregnant women until the abolition of rationing in 1954.
You make some very telling and important points but I wonder if you should focus more on the city-region rather than the city itself. Of course, with 60 million people in the UK self-sufficiency is probably not possible but there are immense possibilities for far more local food growing than we see at the moment. Many areas of land within the city(-region) that could be cultivated are not and growing local food within neighbourhoods and communities is important not just in terms of providing health and exercise but also in terms of providing opportunities for people to get together. There are opportunities for trade within the region. This is terribly important particularly as understanding where food actually comes from is something that fewer and fewer people seem to have a grasp of.
Also, apart from self-sufficiency a major issue is actually diet and nutrition. There is a problem with obesity in this country and this has to do with having so much food available to us and food which is in many ways addictive but not nutritious. You can be fat and malnourished if your diet is composed of processed junk foods high in fat, sugar and salt. So feeding the city is one problem. Feeding the city in a healthy manner is another and I think for this to happen people gain some control over what they eat, how they source, produce, grow, prepare and share their foods. This is why local food growing is important because it is also about community and sociability.
Birmingham was chosen as an easily understood, bounded location with its own powers for social decision-making.
It’s tempting to think of Birmingham being fed by the produce of its hinterlands. But is it possible? The scientists I’ve asked just don’t know of any quants about it. None think it would be easily possible, if at all. And, of course, we have to remember the competing requirements of other UK centres of population.
The scientists are united in saying that (a) it’d require us to have a radically different diet, one that people wouldn’t choose given a choice. And (b) that it probably wouldn’t provide us with the calories and all the other nutritional requirement we need for healthy bodies and minds.
You say that people need ‘control’ over their food source. It’s impossible for millions, let alone billions of us to gain control over food supplies from field to fork, except near the end of the food chain. If we did have the kind of control I think you’re saying, thereby lies famine.
Disruption of our food chain should not be undertaken lightly. Yet the Government Office for Science says that our current system has to change radically to meet the demands of the future. Rocks and hard places?
Hunger and famine have haunted people through the ages. We’re only in the second or third generation of people here in the UK who haven’t known hunger. Our fortune may be a blip in our history.
The response to the challenges were facing cannot be to go back to how things were for the masses. Things in the past weren’t very good. Moreover the population was significantly lower, with thereby dramatically different demands on resources, notably land, water and energy. Hence a return to the past would mean a poor diet for nearly everyone, hunger for some, perhaps many. Perhaps famine.
Even with modern intensive farming practices (which many argue are unsustainable) the UK would find it difficult to feed itself, perhaps impossible. It would certainly mean a highly restricted diet and rationing . . . That’s a pretty good reason to resist putting up trade barriers, let alone the effect of that on other nations and the impact on global trade. For good or ill, we’re in this together.
That’s not to say that local food growing is irrelevant to our lives. It isn’t. It should be encouraged, stimulated and celebrated. It has wonderful benefits at many levels, as I’ve written on this site earlier as here: http://newoptimists.com/2011/12/29/how-self-sufficient-can-birmingham-be-should-we-even-bother-trying/
And teaches growers some hard facts of life.
I grow food. My second set of spuds have yet to appear; the first lot drowned. And I’m on my third planting of beans, the first two having rotted and this third crop has only eight of 15 plants germinated. Toms look worried. Stawbs still look good, and there’s maybe some raspberries coming. Plus courgettes and squash. Indoors, my aubergine is a stonking great thing, flowering too.
But as for my meals: So far I’ve chomped my way through about £3-worth of lettuce.
Woman cannot live by leaves alone!
Since writing this blogpost, I’ve discovered the hugely informative website http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/
It was set up and is run by Professor Tim Benton, Leeds Professor of Population Ecology and the UK’s Champion for Global Security and his colleagues.
I learn from here that the UK imports about 40% of its food requirement today.