Wake up and smell the food scarcity

You’ve hopefully heard about the problems with the prices of rice and other grain staples. This is serious stuff, probably more important than oil price and oil scarcity. Nothing makes people as hungry for change as being physically hungry.

Check out this excellent article detailing the thankfully widening appreciation that meat consumption at the levels we see in the West is simply not sustainable, especially on a global scale. China is entering the global food import market and the relative affluence developing there and in other countries is going to make it impossible for meat consumption to continue as it is.

You simply cannot feed millions of tons of grain to animals in order to eat them and ignore the fact that this food goes a lot further when fed directly to humans. It is deeply ironic that China, with a diet typically very low in dairy and meat produce, may well be the deciding factor as to whether people in Western countries do or don’t have meat on their plate most days of the week in 5 years time.

One thing’s for sure – its going to become a lot more expensive, which is as it should be. The gap between non-organic and organic prices is likely to narrow as the bottom-of-the-barrel produced meat prices increase due to scarcity. This is probably a good thing in the long term, as people will have notchoice but to eat less but better reared meat and dairy products. It might even in time turn around the prospects of our respective nations’ health – but possibly not so for the Chinese.