Poorer people already spend far more of their income on food than richer people. By 2050, that divide could become much wider.
A new modelling study published in Earth’s Future found that the lowest-income 10% in parts of sub-Saharan Africa could be spending around half their income on food. In Southern Africa, the median projected food burden reaches 49.6% for the poorest 10%, compared with just 5.5% for the richest 10%. Western and Eastern Africa reach 48.4% and 42.5% respectively. These are not predictions of one inevitable future. The researchers tested thousands of scenarios involving income, population, land use, agricultural productivity, trade, energy and consumer behaviour. The point is to show which conditions could make food insecurity better or worse.
And one thing should be impossible to ignore. We are already wasting enormous quantities of food by feeding crops to animals. As we have previously reported, 766 million tonnes of grain suitable for human consumption are fed to farmed animals every year. For every 100 calories of edible grain fed to animals, only around three to twenty-five calories come back as animal products.
We keep being told the answer to food insecurity is to produce more. More crops. More technology. More intensification. But if a pipe were leaking most of its water before it reached the tap, the obvious answer would not be to pump more water through it. Unless, of course, you’re Thames Water. You fix the leak. Animal farming is a colossal leak in the global food system. We grow edible crops, feed them to billions of sentient animals, then kill those animals to recover only a fraction of the calories we started with. If some of the world’s poorest people could be spending half their income on food by 2050, continuing to funnel edible crops through animals is not just inefficient.
It is indefensible.