UK chief scientist brings food message to Brazil

The world faces a major challenge to meet the demand for more food and energy from the millions of people being lifted out of poverty, the United Kingdom government’s new chief scientific adviser has warned on a visit to Brazil. And this country can play an important role in providing both, but must not do so at the expense of key ecosystems, he added.

Professor John Beddington, who took over from Sir David King in January as the principal adviser on scientific issues to the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, spoke to the website O Eco at the start of a five-day visit to Brazil, his first trip outside the UK since he started in the job. He is here to close the Brazilian-British Year of Science and Innovation, which has resulted in a number of research partnerships on issues such as bio-energy development and climate change.

Sir David King had played an important international role in raising the profile of climate change on the world agenda, famously provoking controversy by claiming it was a greater threat to humanity than terrorism, and convincing Tony Blair to make it a priority for the G8 group of leading economies.

Now his successor is trying to bring the same sense of urgency to the question of global food demand, while insisting that he is not in any way questioning the vital importance of dealing with climate change.

In his interview with O Eco, Prof Beddington said the big increase in the price of basic food commodities in the last two years had a number of specific factors, including the switch from grain to biofuel production in the United States, a disastrous drought in Australia, and an enormous increase in demand, primarily from India and China.

Unfortunately, according to the British scientist, this is not a temporary phenomenon. In the first place, population is still increasing dramatically, with more than the equivalent of the current population of the United Kingdom (about 60 million) being added to the planet each year.

But equally important, he says, is the large number of people moving from a state of abject poverty to more decent living conditions. “As anti-poverty programmes are working rather successfully in a number of countries including China, India and Brazil itself, what you are seeing is a change in consumer demands for different types of agricultural products including livestock,” Professor Beddington said.

As people get richer, in other words, they tend to eat more meat, and that requires not just more land for the animals themselves, but more grain such as soya to feed them, especially in the case of pigs and chicken. And when you consider that around 3bn people currently live on less than two US dollars a day, successful anti-poverty measures will create enormous extra food demand as these people change their dietary habits.

“So you don’t just have population growth which is projected to increase by 50% over the next two or three decades, you have this increase in basic demand for foodstuffs and for energy as well. What you are looking at is an expected increase of 50% in demand for energy, and somewhat in excess of 50% increase in demand for food. So this is a long term problem,” added Prof Beddington.

In his analysis of the impact of biofuels, Prof Beddington was careful to distinguish between the pressure on grain supply created by the switch to ethanol in the US agricultural regions, and Brazil’s biofuel policy. “Brazil’s biofuels are actually extremely useful to the world, because we are all aware of the problem of climate change, but we do need energy for fuelling out transportation system. We also have these problems of food supply, so we will be needing to produce both food and biofuels on the land, and one thing that Brazil has is a great deal of potentially productive land.”

One implication of the warning about ever-greater demands for food is the added pressure this will create to open up more ecosystems such as the Amazon and Cerrado for grain and meat production. In the recent announcement of increased deforestation figures for the last five months of 2007, the environment minister Marina Silva made a specific link with increased prices of commodities such as beef and soya – a link immediately denied by the agriculture minister.

Professor Beddington agrees this is a danger, but says it is one that can and must be avoided: “I think the challenge for the world, for Brazil and the UK amongst others, is to try to ensure that agricultural production grows sufficiently to meet both the requirements of the extra demands for food and energy, but also to ensure that the key ecosystem services are properly preserved. It’s not an easy job, but it’s absolutely essential that it’s tackled appropriately.

“It’s not going to help world food production if you get problems of cutting down rainforests and an increase in greenhouse gases. It would be incredibly unfortunate if by trying to sort out one problem you created another, but I don’t believe that is likely to happen because I think people here are well aware of the issues.”

This article appeared in Portuguese on the O Eco website, an information service focussing on environmental issues in Brazil