Middle classes 'more immediate threat than climate change'

Roger Highfield, The Telegraph 6 Mar 08;

The relentless rise of the middle classes presents a more immediate threat to developing countries than climate change, says the Prime Minister's chief scientist.

As an increasing proportion of people rise out of poverty, a surge in investment in modern agriculture and irrigation will be essential if global food security is to be achieved and to avoid huge hikes in the cost of food, says Prof John Beddington, Chief Scientific Adviser, who was speaking at the Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster.

He says that there had already been references to how "a perfect storm" was brewing for agriculture as a result of many factors - increasing food and energy prices, a shift to non food crops, climate change, the rise in the world's population - expected to reach 9 billion by 2050 - water supply issues and alleviating poverty.

But he warns that of these factors it is the rise of the middle classes that most concerns him, since they leave a much bigger footprint on the planet's resources, as they demand high-value agricultural products and processed food compared with the desperately poor.

Prof Beddington believes that this factor has been relatively neglected and will have more immediate effects than either climate change or the burgeoning overall world population.

The World Bank estimates that, as the economies of China and India boom, the number of households in developing countries with incomes above £8,000 per annum will rise from 352 million in 2000 to 2.1 billion by 2030. Meanwhile, the global population will surge from 6.5 billion to around 8.5 billion.

So in the short term, the world needs to invest in agriculture to cope with a crisis in energy and food production, to make better and more efficient use of water, concludes Prof Beddington, a mathematical biologist at Imperial College London who has done work in fields such as chaos theory,

The strain is already showing in the food supply, which is at an all time low. Since 2005, world agricultural production has started to lag behind population growth and the resulting rise in demand for energy, and as the middle classes change from pulses and grains to eating more meat, will put huge pressure on irrigation and agriculture. Chicken, pigs and some beef are fed on grain, so the global demand for grain will rise along with the need for water.

At the same time, the world's food resources are at an all time low, the demand for cereals for biofuels is rising, and world energy demand is projected to soar by over half by 2030.

In his talk, Prof Beddington refers to a report by Joachim von Braun, Director General, of the International Food Policy Research Institute that points out how low-growing supply, low stocks, and supply shock at a time of surging demand for feed, food, and fuel have led to drastic price increases, "and these high prices do not appear likely to fall soon."

Higher food prices will cause the poor to shift to even less-balanced diets, with adverse impacts on health in the short and long run. "Business as usual could mean increased misery, especially for the world's poorest populations. "

Another pressure is global urbanisation, Prof Beddington says. Cities are now home to half of the world's 6.6 billion humans and by 2030 that urban fraction will rise to 60 per cent as nearly 5 billion people will live in cities of the projected global population of around 8.5 billion,. This is likely to put a huge strain on resources, particularity water supplies.

The UK also needs to maintain if not grow the capacity for food production, as the population is projected to rise from 59 million to 70 million by 2030, although there has been a decline in agriculture and food sciences in our universities.