The End of Food: The Coming Crisis in the World Food Industry

Despite its off-putting title, The End of Food provides a balanced, thorough, and well-researched analysis of the world food industry. Paul Roberts provides a holistic view of our modern food system, including the history, evolution, and outcomes of the industrialised global food system. He focuses on the challenges of this system in relation to the persistence of global hunger, food-borne disease and challenges for food safety, and degrading natural resources and the environment. He analyses both transgenic and organic foods, plus a variety of other alternative food-production models, and offers some potential strategies for the future.

The strength of the book is its holistic and thorough approach, examining every aspect of the global food system, drawing on ample research including facts, figures, and citations. It makes a substantive contribution to the debate about how our food is produced, and it does it without pedantic 'sermonising'. Roberts deftly utilises key informants and case studies to 'make real' his arguments and humanise the ramifications of our technological and policy choices. He approaches the problem from the perspectives of both the richest (industrialised countries) and the poorest (developing countries) citizens of the world.

I found the title objectionable because, clearly, 'the end of food' would literally be the end of the human race. So, although the author argues that the industrial food model is not a good fit for many industrialised-country consumers nor for developing countries, food supplies will not 'end', in my opinion. The widening gap between consumer demands and what is actually supplied and how will induce evolution in the food-production system, but I doubt that it will lead to a cataclysmic end. Inspired by the mantra 'American Agriculture Feeds the World', the US agricultural lobby, agribusinesses, and the supporting agricultural R&D complex (including public and private institutions) will ensure that some form of the industrial model that includes mass production, economic affordability, product uniformity, and heavy processing will continue into the future.

Roberts does go a long way towards dispelling the myth that 'American Agriculture Feeds the World'. In spite of an abundant, cheap food supply in the USA and most other industrialised countries, the industrial food model has not come close to eliminating hunger or 'feeding the world'. In fact, while the cost of food has been halved in the USA over the past fifty years and we continue to enjoy a meat-rich diet made possible by over-abundant feed grains, the numbers of malnourished and chronically hungry people in the world have continued to grow. Ironically 'the world has nearly as many malnourished citizens as it does overnourished ones' (Prologue, p. xvii).

Reading the book during a short-term assignment in Kenya, I found Chapter 6, 'The end of hunger' particularly poignant. It begins with a case study of a subsistence farmer in Kenya whose story serves as a metaphor for the failures of the global economy and skewed agricultural policies of both industrialised countries and his own. To turn the situation around, Kenya needs heavy investments in early childhood nutrition, AIDS prevention and treatment, and, for its farmers, 'access to bank loans, irrigation systems and technologies, farm extension services, and the rest of the infrastructure that Western farmers take for granted…' (p. 164). However, according to Roberts, 'we also understand that food insecurity comes not simply from bad government, fickle aid strategies, and post-colonialism, but also from the pressures of a burgeoning population coming up against natural constraints such as poor soils, scarce water, and a changing climate. In this, it is possible to imagine the crisis in Kenya not as a vestige of our food history but as a vision of our food future' (p. 174).

The vision of our food future seems bleak indeed. It is based on 'a system so focused on cost reduction and rising volume that it makes a billion of us fat, lets another billion go hungry, and all but invites food-borne pathogens to become global epidemics…' (p. 207). At the same time, arable land grows scarcer, inputs like pesticides and fertilisers are increasingly expensive, soil degradation proceeds at alarming rates, water supplies are rapidly depleting, and the rising price of petroleum calls into question the entire agribusiness model.

On the more optimistic side, Roberts presents the argument of those who believe that transgenic crops and the power of science and technology will once again save the day, or at least delay the impending disaster. 'Innovations are coming that will completely transform food production' (p. 240), say enthusiasts. For example, Monsanto claims that the transgenic corn of the future will be capable of yields of 300 bushels/acre and more, compared with common yields of 200 bu/a today. These optimists, including many economists and food-policy experts, further believe that the food economy is more or less self-correcting. In recent history, food shortages have tended to result in higher food prices, inducing new technologies that bring on additional supplies, 'pushing the Malthusian monster back into its box' (p. 241).

Yet not everyone shares this optimism, nor the ability of technological developments to solve the challenges faced by the world food economy. An alternative position is that 'the very technologies by which the food economy supposedly corrects itself are actually destroying that economy…At best, our recent food triumphs are temporary reprieves, because they rely on the unsustainable withdrawals of energy, water, soil, and other increments of the natural capital upon which food production depends…What is needed is not simply a new round of technology but an entirely new model of sustainable agriculture that is conscious of natural limits, is mindful of external costs, and, above all, seeks to moderate our obsession with technological fixes' (pp. 241-2). Roberts summarises the way forward thus: 'What is becoming clearer by the week is that the food challenges of the future - a rising population, degrading soils, declining quantities of energy and water, climatic instability, and a host of food-related health problems - now exceed the capacity of any single technology or school of thought. Instead, such challenges will require not only new technologies and methods but an openness to new ideas about what constitutes success and failure - ideas that could be as foreign to many consumers and policymakers as either transgenic food or organic farming was when they emerged decades ago' (p. 268). These new technologies include such things as poly-cultures, closed-loop production systems, bioregional food systems, and more. 'In building the next food economy, making room for these ideas may prove to be the most challenging step' (p. 268).

The book is appropriate for a wide audience, including anyone concerned about food and how it is produced. I recommend it wholeheartedly for professionals and students in academic, advocacy, policy-making, and/or agribusiness professions who are interested in agriculture, economics, environment, human health and nutrition, or social-justice issues.