Huge shift in what we eat
Sidney Herald, Julian Cribb, March 14, 2012
...With 10 billion consumers eating a better diet than today, demand for food is likely to double by the 2060s. At the same time, scarcities of water, arable land, oil and petrochemicals, fertilisers and fish, combined with unstable climates, will make growing food by conventional means extremely difficult, costly and often unsustainable. This will drive a rethink of how we farm, what foods we produce and prefer, and indeed, the entire social relationship with food.
Among the boom food industries of the coming half century are aquaculture, algae farming, novel fruits and vegetables, urban agriculture and biocultures. These will yield a diet significantly kinder to the planet, more healthy and delicious for the consumer, more diverse and rewarding for the producer and investor, and less costly to governments in terms of the health budget.
Farmed fish and algae
When the ocean fish catch peaked in 2004 (Food and Agriculture Organisation 2010), it became plain that most of the world's table fish will have to be farmed rather than wild-harvested. Worldwide aquaculture now produces about 40 million tonnes of fish and 15 millions tonnes of water plants a year - but this is only a shadow of its potential.
For example, CSIRO's Dr Nigel Preston says 1.5 million hectares of land in northern Australia has been assessed as suitable for farmed fish production. Fish farms today yield five to 10 tonnes of prawns or barramundi to the hectare every year - so there is potential for an aquaculture sector many times larger, even, than our beef or sheep meat industries, provided the feed sources exist to support it.
One reason fish farming is set to boom is that fish convert feed into meat about twice as efficiently as large land animals, and use much less oil and carbon to do so. In a world where protein will be both scarcer and more expensive, farmed fish is an appealing option - so get ready for an explosion in choice: fish, crustacea, shellfish, echinoderms (like urchins and sea cucumbers), jellyfish, seaweeds and a host of aquatic things many people have never heard of.
Feeding these fish on grain will probably not be economic, quite apart from the likely cost to the planet in soil erosion and carbon pollution - so this in turn will lead to a boom in the growing of water plants, large and microscopic.
In future, huge algae farms will produce food for people, feed for animals, biofuels for transport, pharmaceuticals, plastics and fine chemicals - and themselves will be fed on the vast stream of nutrients emitted by the world's cities, as they begin to recycle food waste, organic waste and sewage. In the United States, the Obama government is already ploughing billions of dollars into algal biofuels research for defence forces. In Australia, James Cook University is pioneering new algal farming techniques, including the clever idea of using the waste CO2 emitted by power stations as a feed source. Algae can be farmed in tanks, vessels or ponds on waste land or roofs, and even in large floating containers in the oceans, without competing against agriculture or wilderness.
When all is said and done, algae are just water plants, and can be turned into delicious and healthy foods as readily as wheat, rice or any other crop. There isn't an algae bar at the supermarket yet - but watch this space...
