From Peter Sutton
I was very interested and pleased to read Debora MacKenzie’s informative article on the global food crisis (14 June, p 28). I do feel, though, that she overstates the case against biofuels as a technology for the future.
Crops such as wheat and rice produce over 3 tonnes of straw per hectare – which we could put to many carbon-efficient uses, for example, as packaging or as a source of waxes, given time and resources to research them.
There is vast potential to increase production of crops such as sugar cane and sugar beet for bioethanol production. In Europe for the past 50 years sugar beet has been grown under a quota system to limit production.
From Catriona Millican
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Your article contained a statement I have often seen before, that to produce 1 kilogram of beef you need 6 kg of grain; for 1 kg of chicken you need around 2 kg of grain; and so on.
The implication is that if everyone would only stop eating beef, we would have six times as much food in its place, and if those pesky people in developing countries would stop supplementing the tortillas, chapattis and rice, which have always made up the bulk of their diet, with unnecessary meat, we would all be better off.
Of course most westerners eat too much protein, but many people around the world don’t get enough. The desire to replace a nutritionally poor diet with one which contains enough protein to thrive hardly qualifies as destructive greed.
To replace meat with grain would be to invite malnutrition. Surely the comparison should be like for like – meat for pulses. It seems that yields per hectare of pulses are around one-third those of grain, so 1 kg of beef is equivalent to 2 kg of pulses and 1 kg of chicken is equivalent to just 700 grams of pulses. Suddenly, giving up meat doesn’t look like such an easy solution.
Glasgow, UK
From Susan Lees
I find it astonishing that neither your editorial (14 June, p 3), nor Debora MacKenzie’s article, mentions encouraging family planning as one part of the solution, to slow the growth of population.
London, UK
The editor writes:
• The population bomb has already gone off. If every woman now of fertile age has only two children on average, we’re still headed for 9 billion people in 2050. The issues now are unemployment and hunger, not contraception, although many people still need easier access to the contraception they want. Reproductive rates are already declining fast: if this trend continues, population will fall after 2050. The only ways to slow it further would be an even more rapid fall in birth rates – which would need impossibly rapid cultural change – or a massive rise in mortality.
Guildford, Surrey, UK
