Food enough for all on this planet? Part 2

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The forth opportunity could be production of feed ingredients from non-food sources such as wood fibres, plant fibres and sea weed. To get to the sugars they in large are composed of it is necessary with tough treatments such as hydrolysis, high temperatures or pressures, but the result may be highly valuable. An research are giving directions for possibilities.

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The fifth effort lies in the use of bacteria, fungi and moulds as production units for fat, carbohydrate and protein. They are excellent transformers of unwanted and abundant resources into high grade raw materials for food and feed. Dairy industry utilise this with great sophistication today, but GM technologies may accelerate this enormously.

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 The sixth opportunity is the discard of fish at sea. Today quotas are calculated, based on how much is landed. Therefore much is discarded at sea and never landed. Only in the EU this amounts to several million tonnes in the years before the ban is being implemented (5-15 million tonnes of fish). This is raw materials good enough for food, but rather than throwing it back in to the sea this would also make feed for a similar amount of high value fish from farms (40 % of the feed formulae).

 The last effort I would have liked to see a joint international focus on is vertical production of fruits, berries and vegetables. This diverts the pressure from intensive land use over to production that could be done inside cities if necessary. This will release the pressure on fuels for transportation and cut future waste.

To double or triple the food production should be a piece of cake, the bigger question is do we want to?

The economic interests in maintaining high raw material prices are probably stronger. My argument against this static view is that these radical scenarios would most likely unlock the economic crisis and generate new growth in a better world of tomorrow.

The way out of a depression has in earlier times always been to generate a new market. Food must be the perfect vehicle for this, but the customers still lack in buying power, and this is an ethical and political question and should not be up to the market forces uncorrected.

Einar Risvik

Chief Scientific Officer, The Norwegian Institute of Food, Fisheries and Aquaculture research