The emptying of supermarket shelves during the COVID pandemic demonstrated the chaos that disruption to the UK’s food supply can provoke. Could this type of disruption have a different cause in the future? And what might the impact on society be?
These are the questions we sought to answer in our new study, which involved surveying 58 leading UK food experts spanning academia, policy, charitable organisations and business.
Haha. 50 years is naively optimistic. There’s going to be widespread civil unrest due to food costs and shortages within the next 20 years, in most countries.
Agricultural productivity requires stable, predictable weather. As the weather and seasons continue to grow more extreme and less predictable, the global output of most crops will fall. This can only lead to inflation unless demand reduces proportionally to supply (many tens/hundreds of millions of excess deaths per annum). When I plan for retirement, I assume a rate of inflation double what it has been the last 30 years at the very least - that’s my most optimistic scenario.
If the rain stops falling where the farms are, or where the lakes and dams can capture it, we’re fucked. We can’t desalinate the amount of water agriculture or cities require, without releasing significantly more GHG’s, anytime in the foreseeable future.
Dangerously naive even. The World Economic Forum and the United Nations have us down as beyond fucked well before then too.
Global freshwater demand will exceed supply 40% by 2030 and 90% of global top soil and arable land is at risk of depletion by 2050.
Good luck growing food with no water or top soil.