How long can we survive in the face of massive famine?

Factual Questions
21

I see no way to answer this without knowing which crops are extinct. If yams, cassava and sorghum aren’t affected, much of Africa is about to be an international powerhouse.

I wouldn’t speak so quickly. While the entire world, developed and developing, is indeed rapidly urbanizing, there are chunks of the planet that are removed from global distribution systems and do rely primarily on local smallholder farmers. I can speak to Northern Cameroon, where commerce revolves around local farmers bringing goods to the weekly markets. Food imports are limited to the occasional tin of tomato paste from Nigeria and some Maltese powdered drink mixes. In many places, the road wash out for months at a time, and nobody brings anything in or out. 95% of people’s diet is grown themselves, and indeed some people can go years without making any kind of cash transaction.

It’s a marginal existence, for sure. Kids are malnourished, nobody has money for anything, meat happens once a month and there is usually a time before harvest when people just don’t have food because their stores have been used. But we aren’t talking about today, we are talking about some dystopian situation where everyone is starving. In that case, a marginal existence might be comparative good.

22

Right, but how do subsistence farmers fare when some random number of their staple crop species suddenly die? There are lots of people who depend on rice or maize or wheat to provide the majority of calories for their daily lives.

A malnourished subsistence farmer who gets by without starving is going to tip into famine when all his rice, or wheat, or corn withers in the field, along with all his neighbors crops. Like Blake said people can switch to other crops, but do they have enough seed to plant a large enough crop to replace the grain crops they used to plant?

23

No barley means no beer or Scotch. No maize means no bourbon.

Life would lose all meaning. Survival is unnecessary.

24

Many farmers will not survive. Its those who are able to adapt and plant new crops that will.

The OP asks how long will it take to recover. I say a few decades before new crops are fully realised.

25

:confused:

Where are people getting the seeds for all these “victory gardens”?

“Victory gardens” are notoriously inefficient compared to broad acre farming. So if there is a shortage of seed material, why would you squander it on the least efficient manner of producing food?

And if there is no shortage of seed material, then why is there any need for “victory gardens”

26

Sugar cane isn’t on the chopping block, so it’s all good.

27

Potatoes are remarkably productive. “Seeds” can be obtained by cutting up market potatoes although we’ll have to stop treating them to prevent sprouting.

Quite a few people already have seeds/gardens/whatever.

If the “broad acre” farming is barren due to the death of wheat, etc. then victory gardens are better than starvation. All they have to do is get people though the immediate emergency. Backyards combined with canned foods and existing stores could probably get the majority of people through the crisis if no one got completely stupid. Of course, people DO get stupid so there’s no guarantee.

Those “broad acre” farms you speak of are usually set up for a specific crop, like wheat or corn or barley. As already noted, switching over to a significantly different crop won’t happen overnight. For the first year or two yields are likely to be low and inefficient.

28

So you intend to produce seed by destroying edible food. That’s not just hideously inefficient, it’s not going to happen. Nobody lacking food now is going to be destroying the little food they have in hopes of producing crop next spring.

I don’t think you appreciate how much seed is going to be required to replace all the cereal crops in the world. The seed that Joe Public hold is such a small proportion that it isn’t even measurable.

This doesn’t address the question at all. The land isn’t “barren”. It hasn’t been sown because of a lack of seed.

So if you have seed, why would you choose not to sow the productive land, but instead sow inefficient “victory gardens”?

I just can’t make sense of it.

Broad acre farms produce 10 tonnes of potatoes per hectare. “Victory gardens” produce 5 tonnes of potatoes per hectare. You have a shortage of seed potatoes. You have a shortage of food. You have limitless broad acre farmland.

So why on earth would you use your limited seed potatoes to sow land that produces only half the yield of food?

I still don’t understand how you think backyards, and inefficient way of producing food, have any role at all to play.

“Victory gardens” were useful in time when seed was limitless and land was limited. We are talking about a situation where seed is limited and land is limitless. Exactly the opposite.

Can you explain why “victory gardens” are going to do anything but make the problem worse?

No. As I already said, most farms today change their crop at the drop of hat based upon markets. And they can do that because ag science is so good that so long as the manual is followed, productivity is guaranteed.

Farms may have been “set up” for a specific crop 40 years ago. It hasn’t been true since the 80s.

  1. Given that it does happen overnight, can you explain why it won’t? What do you see as being the limitations

  2. If a broad acre, cleared, pre-tilled commercial farm with huge amounts of agricultural equipment and experienced staff and scientific advisors can’t switch production overnight, why do you think that people with no farming experience and no equipment will be able to switch from uncultivated lawns to efficient crop production overnight? This also appears to make no sense.

If you are using “Victory gardens” then yields will always be low and inefficient. That’s a trait of the farming type. There’s a reason why farming has become broadacre. If small farming was just as productive and efficient would never have been replaced.

29

Pumpkins and squash are another fallback.

30

I wonder how many people keep emergency supplies of food (and water, but it seems we assume that water distribution remains unchanged in this scenario). I have about a month of food set by in case of “the big one” (I’m in SoCal) plus the assorted stuff in my kitchen–canned tomatoes, ramen, stock, those canned chestnuts from two Christmases ago, half a dozen partial bags of rice, etc etc that I’m going to use up–and of course if wheat and other crops disappear I’m going to ration all that food right away.

In addition, I’m going to plant beets, cabbage, and carrots (seeds I happen to have on hand) everywhere I can to help eke out my supplies, because things are uncertain and I don’t know when US agriculture is going to get on its feet again. I think my family would be all right for, say, four months–beyond that not so much. Someone might try to take what I have, but that’s what the Mossberg is for.

So, my points–do enough people in places like LA keep enough food on hand to make a difference? Probably not, I suspect. And in places like NYC or London or Hong Kong apartments there’s not enough room to keep a large supply of emergency food on hand anyway.

Does the global supply of food take into account all canned/dried/preserved food, or is it just fresh produce and meat?

If maize disappeared, there’d be nothing to eat for a lot of cows–and I guess pigs and chickens. What do sheep eat? I expect many, many animals would be slaughtered very quickly and frozen or otherwise preserved–not sure what the ability of America’s meat processing plants is to handle a massive influx of extra animals–but would the sudden availability of “extra protein” help tide the US/Canada/Australia/Argentina/etc. through?

Blake, what about kitchen gardens as an adjunct to stored/rationed food? Maybe they’re not the solution long-term, but wouldn’t they help many supplement their diet?

31

How are you defining this? Food that’s already processed? Food that’s been harvested, but not food still in the field?

32

The survivors would surely envy the dead.

33

It’s not rigorously measured. But the amount of food stored in private households is so tiny compared to the amount stored in warehouses and on-farm as to be insignificant. You may have a month’s food in your house, but that’s only about 30, 000cc of space, or 0.03 cubic metres.
For comparison, a typical city imports on the order of 2, 500cc of food/person/day. So if everybody in the world had 30 days food (and they don’t) that would be equivalent to about 10 days worth of what is sitting in trucks at any given moments. And trucks, of course, represent only a tiny fraction of what exists on farm, in store and in warehouses. So if everybody in the world had 30 days food in their house, it would probably represent >1% of the global food reserve.

Contrary to popular opinion, no cattle are “fed” on grain. Cattle are raised on pasture, and then fattened on grain for a few days or months at the end of their lives. So if the grain supply dried up, the animals would simply be shipped back out onto pasture. That would lead to a doubling of stocking rates (actually only about 1.5 times stocking rate) and short-term overgrazing, but nothing of long-term consequence. The cattle would lose weight, but they wouldn’t die for at least 6 months. So there wouldn’t be any desperate need to slaughter any cattle overnight. Abattoirs would be working at capacity, certainly, but they could handle the load without any waste.
How significant that would be in terms of providing calories I’m not sure.

Sure, sprouting any seeds you may have and eating the sprouts would also supplement the diet. So would feeding the seeds to a guinea pig, and eating the guinea pig. But nobody would be tempted to do those things because everybody recognises that you can get much better returns by actually growing the seeds out.

The same applies to kitchen gardens. It’s simply an inefficient form of turning seed into food. The choices are:

  1. Pool the seeds. Sow 10, 000 acres of land. Harvest 100, 000 tonnes of food
  2. Split the seed into 100, 000 packets. Sow 100, 000 x 1/10 acre kitchen gardens. Harvest 50, 000 tonnes of food.

No matter how I look at it, I can’t see how it would ever be a good idea to utilise kitchen gardens. I just can’t see what the advantage of utilising an inefficient technique is supposed to be. Kitchen gardens are a great idea when land is in short supply and seed is plentiful. It seems to be the worst possible idea when seed is limited and land is plentiful.

34

It’s food that has been harvested. Though looking around, the current figures seem to be around 50 days, so 6 weeks rather then 2.

Like all these figures, it’s not rigorously defined or measured, it’s a best estimate. What it does highlight is that the modern world is totally dependent on a constant transport stream to bring in fresh food from farms to the consumer. In ages past, the figure would have been at least 3 months, since at any given time about half the world’s population would have just finished harvesting and storing for the “off” season. Today, with global distribution networks we harvest, ship and process instantly and continuously, very little food needs to be stored, so very little is. Even “peasant” farmers are more likely to sell most of their crop at harvest and use the cash to buy food later than to actually store their own food.

35

:rolleyes:

You don’t destroy ALL your edible food. One potato can be turned into a half dozen or more plants, all of which will produce more potatoes. Haven’t you ever had a garden?

But the seed that Joe Public holds can be used to supplement the food supply.

The point isn’t to replace commercial agriculture with victory gardens, it’s to use the gardens as a supplement to whatever the pros are doing. That level of disruption is going to screw up supply chains as well as what particular things are being grown. Having locally grown produce will smooth out some of the bumps.

The scenario isn’t a shortage of potatoes, it’s a shortage of grains. We’d be growing all sorts of things to replace those calories, and potatoes are one of the better choices for that.

The potato supply is unaffected. Potato demand is likely to go up.

I already grow about 2/3 to 2/4 of my vegetables every year as a casual gardener. If we had such a massive disruption in food supply as envisioned you can be damn sure I’ll expand the backyard garden and get damn serious.

Hell, I’d set my hydroponics back up and grow fresh food through the winter in such a scenario so I can be assured that MY household will have something to eat.

36

As long as the Blue Agave isn’t touched, its all good.

37
  1. Farmer raises 100,000 tonnes of food, army takes it all, everyone sees a little bit, army, police, truckers, fertilizer makers, etc. are well fed.
  2. Locals raise their own food in isolated gardens behind fences, hidden. Prudent and clever gardeners eat better, survive.
38

“So if everybody in the world had 30 days food (and they don’t) that would be equivalent to about 10 days worth of what is sitting in trucks at any given moments. And trucks, of course, represent only a tiny fraction of what exists on farm, in store and in warehouses. So if everybody in the world had 30 days food in their house, it would probably represent >1% of the global food reserve.”

Wait, I think we’re missing each other here. My assumption/suggestion is that people’s food reserves at home–whether disaster supplies like mine, or root cellars, or 50lb bags of rice with 45lbs remaining because bought at discount store because it’s cheap, people with lots and lots of half-eaten jars of cocktail olives–that these food reserves amount to a pretty fair amount of calories in a good portion of the first world. Hell, Nutella has tons of calories–how many jars of that are sitting around in America and Europe?

Unless I’m mistaken, I don’t think this food is being accounted for in the estimates of global food supply. So if you’ve got 50 days of “official” food reserve–7 weeks, but let’s say six–many people can eke out at least a couple extra weeks with the pantry/emergency food. (This is America/first world.)

Thanks for the clarification/reminder on how cattle are fed. But let’s say as a policy measure there is ramped-up slaughter of animals and mass distribution to keep the US (Canada, UK, Italy, etc.) fed. There will be a meat shortage later, but right now we need to keep people alive.

Meanwhile, frantic (and let’s say successful) efforts are underway to grow food crops that were not affected by the “blight”–even though they are 4 months from from coming fully on-line.

This seems like a terribly difficult problem, but totally solvable–for the first world at least.

Blake, I’m sorry to seem obtuse, but I still don’t think I’m grasping your point about gardens. Is it your contention that in a crisis like this, private citizens ought to turn in their seeds to bigger farmers because of the efficiencies of big agro? And that there are not enough (carrot, cabbage, beet, etc.) seeds in the existing supply chain to kick-start a different agriculture without private citizens contributing seeds to this effort?

39

Mistake.

40

Can I point out that a simple “Victory Garden” is not going to be for growing grains?

The basic white potato is phenomenal [given my hatred for monocropping] because 1 acre can produce enough basic carbohydrate for a family of 4 for the year. And it is a valuable source of other nutrients, and can be used baked, stewed, pureed, or even dried and turned into a sort of flour and also importantly as animal feed supplements for dogs and cats [though they do need more than just vegetables, they are after all obligate carnivores] and if you add other easily grown vegetables like pumpkins, zucchini[blargh] squashes, peas, beans, carrots, beets, radishes, lettuce, spinach you can have a varied and fulfilling diet.

I would recommend that you research “square foot gardening” and learn more about what can be grown in very small spaces. You can have a salad garden very easily with microgreens [7-10 days from germination to eating] radishes [10-14 days from sprout to eating] and spinach - 20-28 days from sprout to eating in window boxes, though one enterprising bunch has an interesting idea for recycling large soda bottles to be used as hanging planters. I myself have 6 aerogardens, I cheat and use them as lighting around the house as well as growing herbs and greens [and tomatoes on the one specifically designed for it.]