We often hear of the EU wine lake or butter mountain, but suppose there were a period of sustained crop failures worldwide (the reason is not important) how long could the world feed itself? I’m assuming that each bloc will look after its own citizens first.
Sustained crop failures? We’d all be toast. Or a toast-like, non-food item. No government keeps enough supplies for 1/100 of their population for any period of time, much less 100%. Every city in the US is 48 hours away from starvation.
But surely it takes longer than two days to starve? I remember hearing a sound bite that said the planet is 30-40 days away from starvation. I appreciate the difference between world wide, and the situation in a city. Food supplies are not evenly distributed. I also don’t mean to be pedantic over ‘starve’. Kinda like the ‘I got electrocuted by that outlet’ thing. In 48 hrs, I can see the publically available food supply depleted, esp. with panic buying, looting, etc. that would go with a disaster like this. But it’s not like we’d suddenly all drop dead 2 days after farmers stopped sending food. And that’s not what you meant, I’m sure. And wouldn’t a crop failure (absent a SF style super virus/chemical/ray that renders all food immediately useless) be relatively gradual? Give us time to prepare, to an extent. move to bulk grain intended for animal feed, etc. “More oatmeal, anyone?”
And don’t forget the Zoos. Plenty of good protein, at the Zoo.
Not everybody is that close to starvation, of course. But if the pantry is bare and the grocery stores are empty, things get dicey real quick. Personally (as you know) I’m good for a year or two just with what I carry around with me. But others are likely to be hurting fast. Not even talking about panic-buying. Grocery stores operate on the “just in time” stocking principle. If the trucks don’t come, normal sales will deplete the store in a day or two.
As for grains, switching them from animal food to human food is stupid. It’s a lot more advantagious to feed cattle corn than it is to feed people the same corn. We get a lot more out of a cow than just protein.
But a sustained pattern of crop failure world-wide would cause an immediate and massive die-off of a large portion of humanity, starting in the Thrid world and rippling out from there. The developed nations of the world are going to feed their own people first, so net importers of food are a write-off.
But how long would it take? There must be 6 months to a year of reserves at least because there’s only one main harvest per year per hemisphere. Yes, I know some areas can get a second harvest. So those harvests must be stockpiled somewhere and in emergency could be seized and rationed by the authorities.
With a major crop failure, you’d start seeing mass starvation in Third World countries within a month. As for stockpiles…it’s not like there is a central First Grain Bank of the United States. The grain is stashed in silos and the like all over every country. In the US, you can’t drive through Kansas without seeing a grain elevator every few miles. The manpower alone required to identify, evaluate, seize, transport and distribute that grain is overwhelming.
Assuming just one massive crop failure, we’d get by. There’s enough out there that we could pull through, with massive rationing and belt-tightening. But a second failure would be it. This is assuming all crops, for some unknown reason. If the failure only hits wheat, and leaves triticale alone, then you would see a global restructuring of crops, but that would be it. The developed world would get by. The rest of the world…wouldn’t.
As I have said before. Watch for the U.S to use food as a weapon, sooner rather than later.
Africa is screwed unless they want to join the twenty first century.
The US is in a much better position than China or India when it comes to food. Or most of the middle east for that matter.
Who blinks first? We shall see soon.
Hmmm. I learned it the opposite. You mean those ecology hippie vegetarians have it backwards? The acre or so required to make food for so the cow could grow much more food than the cow’s weight, esp. when the cow needs several years to reach optimum weight for slaughter.
Yes, we get more from cows than meat. Still.
I don’t beg, I just differ.
This was addressed in a GD thread last week. I’ll see if I can reference it. The brief version is that the data touted by vegetarian types is vastly overstated, to say the least.
Found it - Check posts #25, 42 & 45.
Anything that lead to the destruction of ALL crops for two or more years would almost certainly have fucked us up pretty good in and of itself: we are talking massive asteroid strike or nuclear winter or some such. The reduced human population there would help stretch existing stores: the sudden lack of labor would make dealing with and transporting those stores difficult. In any case, the causative disaster would be very, very relevant in how we dealt with the food shortage.
Hunh. I love and trust my fellow Dopers. Must be a contentious issue, the first few websites I scanned agreed with Mr. Brown. Of course it’s not that simple.
Lies my teacher taught me corrected. Thanks, Silenus.
I’m not sure why this is not a larger issue. It Seems obvious to me. Maybe this should go to the pit.
A new cold war is on, nothing has been declared yet but it is happening. At least the younger people here will get the taste and feel of the cold war.
I didn’t spot this aspect being addressed.
One small point about keeping herbivorous animals, though: they can eat vegetation that grows where crops cannot.
Years? We grew our own beef when I was growing up, my father would buy a 6 month old calf one spring and it was butchered the next. According to this site, cows are butchered at 18 to 22 months of age.
**Intention ** gives no actual numbers for his case in any of those posts. I’d need to see the proper figures before I would accept any of his contentions. They may be true. More likely there is a particle of truth of in them. They may be completely wrong. He gives us nothing to decide by.
All I’m seeing lately are stories that U.S. food surpluses are dwindling:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2008-05-01-usda-food-supply_N.htm
[QUOTE=The Sonoran Lizard King]
The acre or so required to make food for so the cow could grow much more food than the cow’s weight, esp. when the cow needs several years to reach optimum weight for slaughter./QUOTE]
Actually, it’s a common misconception. It doesn’t take years, and more importantly, an awful lot of beef, and other meat comes from marginal grazing land. Most of the American west, large portions of Asia, mountainous regions the world over, etc.
Yes, let’s not forget that transportation etc is not affected - it’s just sustained crop failures.
Ah, tasty Cold War cuisine. You might want to pick up some entertainment, too, for those long nuclear winter nights.
As for grain versus meat, it should be pointed out that while the raw calories resulting from edible meat are a fraction of what cattle or pigs consume (fowl are somewhat more efficient), there are a number of dietary elements–specifically, essential proteins, but also some fats–in meat that cannot be had in cereal grains like maize or wheat. One can obtain complete proteins from vegetable sources with a broad and judicious selection of fruits, nuts, pulses, and cereals, but meat provides a denser and and more readily managed source of proteins and lipids, and as a bonus domestic herbivores can eat food that is unsuitable or indigestible to humans. If you try to live exclusively on corn or foods with a high cellulose content you’ll find yourself excreting a lot of the nominal calories that a cow would digest.
Regarding time to famine, silenus has it right; while the United States and other industrial nations to maintain large stockpiles of cereals, albeit not so much to reduce the incidence of famine due to crop failure (essentially unheard of in developed countries during peacetime this century except as the result of political meddling, i.e. the 1920s Ukraine and Russian famines) but to regulate commodity prices. The developing and Third World does not have this luxury; nations like India, Egypt, and Mexico, which are net grain importers, are essentially living hand to mouth, and nations where water depletion is causing reductions in once bountiful crop yields, like China and Pakistan, do not have enough excess to maintain large stocks; what they don’t need domestically is sold almost immediately. A crop failure for these countries would be precipitous, leading to widespread famine. It is unlikely that even if Europe and the U.S. had sufficient stockpiles to head off such a catastrophe that it could be transported effectively.
I would expect that most Asian and African nations have, at any time, about a two week to a month stock of stock cereals ready for consumption; probably on the lower end with increasing crop prices. And don’t forget grains needed to support dairy production, which provides a significant resource of perishable fats and proteins. The notion that there is a six month or more reserve of grains at any given time is as fanciful as getting advice from a caterpillar.
Stranger
Depends on what populations we are talking about and what time of year. Where I was in Cameroon, most rural families harvested once a year, would sell a small portion and stockpile the rest for the year. Peanuts, gathered greens, and fruits would supplement the grains. Cows were not fed grain, but grazed in the bush and other livestock grazed in town from garbage piles and the like.
The two big problems are that stocks really do run dry near the harvest and people do eat a lot less. And it’s not the poor who keep the government in power, but the urban elites who have minimal stockpiles (although most do still buy their grain by the bag.)