The Fool on the Hill: Feeding the one billion

This essay is unfinished: come back later to see a better draft.

These problems are very hard to solve: it's very hard to see how we can get from where we are, economically and politically, to a stable and satisfactory society. But they have to be solved, or else there isn't a future.

Just ignoring the problems of a billion people isn't going to work. Creating a 'fortress Europe' with impenetrable borders and watching complacently as the bodies pile up outside the fence, even if that were possible, would be hugely corrosive on our own societies. And it isn't possible. Even without weapons, people whose only alternative is death will fight to overcome our barriers.

We cannot build new housing on agricultural land, because we also need to feed people. But we need to distribute people across the landscape differently anyway, because we aren't going to have the energy either to use the sort of high energy input farming we do now, or to move large quantities of food long distances.

But at the same time, we have typically built our cities on prime agricultural land, because those are the geographies that supported high population densities in the past, and potentially could in future; but in doing so, we have concreted over and contaminated much of that land beyond economic remediation.

So, what might the shape of a sustainable and satisfactory high population density landscape look like in a lower energy future?

To go back to where we started: there are three quarters of a billion people in Europe now; if a billion people are forced to relocate because of #ClimateEmergency, then probably a quarter of them must come to Europe. Which puts the future population at one billion, ignoring growth of the indigenous population.

The area of Europe is only just over a billion hectares, giving about one hectare per person.

But that one hectare per person includes mountains, swamps, built up areas, and grossly polluted land. Roughly 25% of land in Europe is arable (capable of growing crops); roughly a third is agricultural, so roughly 8% is agricultural but not arable (i.e. pastoral). I'm using figures from the EU here and scaling up to the whole of Europe, which is roughly twice as large, so these figures are rough.

So, how many people can Europe feed? The answer is that one hectare of European arable land can produce enough food under modern agriculture to feed three people. Which means, Europe is just about feeding its own population just now, but not with a lot of margin.

However:

1. Modern agriculture is leading to a catastrophic loss of both biodiversity and of soil fertility, which means unless we change things yields are definitely going to fall;
2. Climate change is already leading to desertification of previously highly productive areas in Spain, and will affect production across more of Europe as heating intensifies.

So all that sounds really bad. What's the good news?

10% of arable land in Europe is currently used to grow biofuels; we don't need to produce that.

Roughly 40% is used to produce animal feed. If we ate less meat and dairy, we don't need that.

We'd need to eat less meat; we wouldn't necessarily need to eat none. Although some of the land now used as pasture could be used as arable, some can't be. We can still have some beef.

In other words, simply by cutting out biofuels and intensive beef, pork and poultry production, we could DOUBLE the number of people Europe could feed on the current arable land allocation. We can also potentially increase the arable land allocation by returning, e.g., airports, golf courses, country parks and some pastoral land to arable.

But, we can't continue with 'modern agriculture', because modern agriculture has very large inputs of diesel and artificial fertilisers, both derived from fossil hydrocarbon, which we can no longer use. So we need to turn to systems of agriculture which are more labour intensive and less fuel intensive. Which is fine, we have the population to do it.

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