June 2018
The Global Miller
History is replete with examples of advanced civilisations that thrived for centuries only to collapse and implode in a relatively short period of time (often less than a human lifetime) when climate change caused crop failure and famine.
Mesa Verde in Montezuma County, Colorado, USA, is an amazing complex of cliff dwellings constructed beneath the protective overhang of a massive cliff. Built by Ancestral-Pueblans, the well-preserved site dates back to the late 1190s.
The ruins provide clear evidence of an advanced and thriving civilisation. However, archaeology has shown that years of successive droughts caused repeated crop failures that forced the sudden abandonment of the site and caused its mysterious inhabitants to vanish from the historical record.
The more recent example of the potato famine in Ireland, (1845-1849) killed one million people (an eighth of the population) and provides a chilling warning about the danger of a lack of dietary diversity.
Despite these sobering lessons from history, we are by no means free from a similar threat. By 2050, the planet must feed a population projected to reach 9.7 billion. This would be a challenging goal in the best of circumstances, but now, faced with the worsening effects of climate change, that goal seems even more daunting.
Currently only around 150 different crops are cultivated in any significant quantities. Even more alarming, ninety percent of the world's calorie intake comes from just 30 crop species. It is not a very good model for diversity.
In terms of food supply, our planet is already in a precarious position, with large swaths of the globe inhabited by humans who are already suffering the effects of undernourishment. Agricultural science has advanced in leaps and bounds during the latter half of the twentieth, and the beginning of the twenty-first century. But despite this, the effects of climate change now threaten to outpace those advances.
Changing diet, changing minds—in general, humans dislike change—especially when it comes to diet. Every nation has its own unique diet and cuisine, based on tradition and which foodstuffs can be grown and sourced locally. With modern transportation, however, the hunter-gatherers stalking modern supermarkets are free to consume foods transported from half a world-away, including fruits and vegetables that would normally be out-of-season and impossible to grow in their own climate.
The bleak lesson of the Irish Famine shows the dangers of a society grown dependant upon monocultures. The challenge for the future is to move away from traditional grains to hardier strains that resist climatic extremes while still providing high levels of protein. The Global Crop Diversity Trust has been leading these efforts, while the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) is seedbank located in an underground vault on a Norwegian island to offer a "fail-safe" insurance against an incremental or catastrophic loss of crop diversity.
We need genetic diversity in our crops to avoid the effects of blight and disease. We need crops that can resist environmental stressors while maintain yield. We need crops that can sustain an affordable living for farmers.
Moreover, we need sustainability. We live in a finite world with finite resources. The only thing we know that has no foreseeable limit is human population and the number of mouths we will have to feed.
