He's dismissive of one current bone of the food security campaigners, that repurposing food for biofuels was a major cause of the price rises. McMahon does a convincing job of ruling on which arguments to take seriously. Few of these positions tolerate much overlap. Some economists, and McMahon, want to reform the commodities market others to free all the markets even further still more to lavish aid on educating the small farmers who make up most of the hungry. The charity/financial justice lobby, as gathered in the current If campaign on ending hunger, want the rich to stop nicking the land and resources of the poor. The technophiles have more science and want to tweak the genes of plants and animals to do the job. Greens say all will be fine if the world goes organic and stops eating meat – and they have science to prove it. Where the consensus falls apart, spectacularly, is on what the answer is. As Rayner writes: "Food politics has long been hidebound by clumsy polarised arguments… a shouting match between the hardcore knit-your-own yoghurt foodinistas and the worst kind of grubby-handed climate-change-denying big business." But that isn't the hard bit: everyone agrees there's a problem. (That's food policy wonk sarcasm, by the way.)ĭrawing on his time at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, McMahon takes us efficiently through the history that brought us to this pass. Then they will sort the system out by restarting the World Trade Organisation talks. No doubt the G8 leaders will give Putin a good telling off at next month's London summit on food security. The result was civil unrest in 30 countries, the fall of half-a-dozen governments and the sparking of the Arab spring. McMahon says that, given the surplus of food, resources and land, it need never have happened. Russia led other producer countries into panicky export bans. We can't control the system, as shown by the abject failure to stop the panic in the commodities markets in 20/11. We throw away 30-40% of the food we produce and yet nearly 1 billion people live in near starvation. Climate change and scary demographics – basically, richer people eat more – will challenge a food distribution system that patently doesn't work for much of humanity. He wants to offer some hope and so, with 100% more jokes, does this paper's restaurant critic, Jay Rayner.īoth agree that feeding the 9 billion people of 2050 will be tough. (My shelf is even bleaker: So Shall We Reap, Eat Your Heart Out and Food Wars – and, full disclosure, I'm writing a little one myself.) But gloomy though his own title is, McMahon wants to put distance between him and the "professional doom-mongers". Since the food price spikes of 2008, he's seen many titles "all warning of an impending food collapse", including The Coming Famine, The End of Food, World on the Edge and Climate in Peril. McMahon admits that there are an awful lot of books in his genre. Paul McMahon's is a straight food apocalypse book, no jokes, one recipe: a four-ingredient plan to feed the planet. And all of the above, with celebrity attached. The part-time vegan diet book with anti-capitalist polemic, recipes and jokes (just reviewed that one, actually). The cookbook (with gardening tips) for that apocalypse. The polemic about food system apocalypse. Now the food books tumble out, unstoppable, in a startling range of sub-genres. Food got bigger than DIY about a decade back, but publishing took a while to hoist its tired old frame on to the bandwagon.
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