The Protein Crunch

The Protein Crunch

Dason Drew & David Lorimer

Introduction

The credit crunch has shaken our global economy, but it will recover. ‘The Protein Crunch’ is far more serious and, if we open our eyes, it is unfolding right in front of us. Our food – protein – comes from three sources: our water, land and seas. All of these natural resources are under increasing pressure from our burgeoning population: when more demand meets less supply, we arrive at ‘The Protein Crunch’.

Every day, newspapers cover some element of this looming issue: mine water pollution in Johannesburg, Chinese land purchases in the Congo, a single tuna sold for $380,000 in Tokyo, floods in Pakistan and the food price riots that ignited North Africa. Few of us understand the causes of these crises and events, nor how they are all connected. This book is the story of the crisis we face, from the viewpoint of an unashamed capitalist and entrepreneur. My belief is it will make you think; my hope is that it will make you act.

I have spent the last 25 years of my life fighting and winning in the game of business – from running other people’s multinational companies to creating and then selling my own. Two heart attacks later, I realised that the only game worth playing was that of living. I changed the struggles of the boardroom for a passion for life and moved to live full time on my farm in South Africa’s beautiful Tulbagh Valley.

I decided to walk myself fit. It turned out to be a journey of understanding of both the environment and myself. As the seasons changed I saw the streams dry up in summer and then flood in winter. Where we had felled trees, I saw soil erosion that turned the rivers muddy as they carried away the soil. This lit in me a passion and a concern for the environment: I began to read everything I could find on our water, land and seas.

I then travelled the world to see for myself the damage man is wreaking on these three vital eco-systems. I began to understand the extraordinary and unexpected connections between the many things I saw: from the teeming masses of China’s cities to the fertile plains of the Indus Valley and the dry rivers of America’s Mid-West – to name but a few. I began to realise the complexity of Nature and how the environment has shaped our past and will determine our future. During my travels over the last three years, two stories made an impact on me.

The first is a story of how wolves brought back the aspen trees to America’s Yellowstone National Park. The aspen trees have always been a feature of its landscape, but the established trees were ageing and no new trees were replacing them. The last wolf in the park was shot in the 1920s, since when the elk population expanded rapidly and grazed on the young aspen saplings before they could grow and mature. Since the re-introduction of the wolves in 1995, the elk population has been reduced and their natural grazing habits have returned. The elk, frightened of the wolf packs, no longer graze at the river edges or in woods but on the open plains. Young sapling aspen trees now survive and as they mature the woodlands are naturally re-establishing themselves.

The second story is of a small island in the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia. In 1944, a coastguard introduced 29 reindeer to the remote St Matthew Island as a reserve source of food for the men working there. The base was closed at the end of the Second World War, and all the men left the island. Just 13 years later, as they grazed on the abundant and nutritious lichen that covered much of the island, the reindeer population had reached 1,350. Without any natural predators on the island, the population exploded over the next six years, so that by 1963 there were 6,000 reindeer. But then disaster struck: the deer had eaten all the lichen, and just three years later there were only 42 left – 41 females, one sickly male and no fawns. This is a cautionary tale of what can happen when a species multiplies exponentially. In destroying their habitat, the reindeer destroyed themselves.

Just a 100 years ago it would have been inconceivable to think that the human impact on the environment might become so great as to threaten the Earth and our own survival. We now stand at a turning point in our history and in the history of the Earth. Mankind has acquired the scale and the power to wreck the biosphere on which we depend – yet also the knowledge to fix it. Throughout history, humans have cleared land or fished out rivers, and after exhausting other natural resources, moved on. Now with nearly seven billion people on the planet we are destroying environmental systems everywhere and simultaneously. There is nowhere else for us to go.

It is increasingly apparent that our capitalist global food system is not functioning effectively. With nearly one billion people hungry and another billion people overweight or obese, something clearly isn’t working. Having watched the recent credit crunch unfold, I saw many similarities in the way our environmental and food production systems were and are being stretched to breaking point. With food demand outstripping supply, food prices will inevitably increase.

Food price inflation brings with it civil unrest and political turmoil, as we have witnessed in the first months of 2011. Social order has already started to collapse in many failed states like Sudan and Afghanistan. In our interconnected global world, state failure may become contagious as environmental refugees migrate to survive. Our civilisation is on the brink of disaster.

I decided to write the story of what I had seen with a family friend, environmentalist and author David Lorimer. The Protein Crunch explains our impact on the earth’s natural systems and its resources on which we all depend. As some of these ecosystems become less productive or fail altogether, the speed and severity of ‘The Protein Crunch’ will accelerate. The way we respond to these environmental challenges is a matter of life and death, first for the poorest then for the rest of us, not to mention future generations. Many civilisations have collapsed before ours, but will we be the first to foresee our demise and prevent it?

It seems that our brains are wired to react to emergencies, but if the threat is not immediate we find it hard to galvanise ourselves into action. It is as if we are floating down a river heading towards a waterfall, ignoring the roar of the water and waiting until we see the foaming water, before we react and then look for someone else to blame for our predicament. What the Earth needs is for many more of us to understand our predicament, in order to change our collective consciousness and start the sustainability revolution we need to survive. There will be no time to waste looking for scapegoats: we will need to move and make change happen fast.

Capitalism may have caused many of our existing environmental problems, but the best way of making this change happen quickly is to use capitalism itself. As a lifelong capitalist and now eco-entrepreneur, I have seen and become involved with some extraordinary businesses around the world. Three of these are both unusual and interesting: using fly larvae, Gibraltar-based Agri-protein recycles abattoir waste into useable protein for animal feed at a fraction of the price of existing natural sources; the UK’s Oxitec genetically modifies and breeds sterile male mosquitoes, which when released breed with wild females that lay eggs that won’t hatch, substantially reducing disease-carrying mosquito populations; the Urban Wind Farm in Belgium has borrowed wind- accelerating techniques from aircraft wing construction as well as braking technology from Formula One racecars to help generate clean power from urban rooftops. All of these could be billion- dollar businesses within the next 10 years. The next Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg will make their fortunes in the business of the environment.

Before my journey into the environment, I understood neither the unbelievable risks we are running nor the extraordinary opportunities for entrepreneurs and eco-capitalists like myself. Commitment is the only thing that drives change. When you commit you act, and the world changes around you, conspiring to help you in ways you never thought possible. I am now committed full time to making a difference to the world we live in – through creating more awareness of the environment and excitement about the opportunities it can bring us all.

The clock is ticking. We are in a race between education and catastrophe. The Protein Crunch will help you understand the harsh reality of where we are and the exciting future we can make for ourselves.

Let’s get busy repairing the future.

Jason Drew – May 2011

Tulbach, Western Cape, South Africa

Chapter One

Water

Water is the most extraordinary thing. There is as much water on the Earth now as when time began. You cannot make more, you cannot throw it away, you cannot destroy it. Water just is.

The drip of water from your kitchen tap could have been in the blood of a dinosaur or the sweat of a slave, the breath of an eagle or the gills of a fish. Water is endlessly recycled and is the only compound existing in Nature in all its three states: as a solid, a liquid and a vapour.

The Earth’s surface is over 60% water – as are we. We can live for weeks without food but only days without water. Water has powered civilisations and caused their downfall. It has fuelled the industrial revolution, enabled the current population explosion and helped create our consumer goods – yet we take it for granted. We have to change the way we think about water: we need to understand and manage our scarce water resources before they manage us.

We are becoming increasingly aware of our daily household water usage, but most of us remain clueless about the amount of virtual water we use. Almost everything we eat or the goods we use require vast amounts of water to produce.

The water we use in our daily domestic activities is often metered and paid for making us more aware of its consumption. Households in the United Kingdom (UK) without a water meter use nearly 55,000 litres per person a year, or enough to fill more than two petrol tankers. Metered households use nearly 10,000 litres a year less. In Canada, amazingly, they manage to use five times more water than the UK of which more than half is used to irrigate their gardens.

In a typical industrialised country, 60% of water used inside the house is for bathing and flushing the toilet; 25% for laundry; and only 10% for cooking and cleaning. The trend in Europe and the United States (US) is to more efficient flushing systems, as mandated on all new builds. This could dramatically reduce our water, and therefore energy, consumption.

While we use a lot of water for bathing and flushing, we use almost as much in washing our clothes and linen. In the US top-loading washing machines are still used, rather than the front-loading European type designed to use 40% less water. The US and the rest of the world should mandate the use of front loaders as a first step towards saving water. New ‘waterless’ washing machine technologies would save both water in washing and energy in drying our clothes. Governments need to pave the way for these technologies by taxing the old technologies and subsidising the new.

Most of the Western world’s water supply infrastructure is obsolete and requires repair, if not replacement. Imagine how much water is lost as a result of this poor maintenance and under-investment. In a water- scarce world, we need better solutions than the wasteful infrastructure upon which we currently depend.

When we waste water, we waste energy, causing pollution which can be avoided. The amount of energy required to produce and deliver clean water to households is substantial, and will increasingly feature in the cost of household water as energy prices rise.

The minimum personal water requirement is around 50 litres a day, or roughly a third of what the average British household uses. In developing countries, a mere 20 litres per person per day is often considered a luxury. In the West water is increasingly provided by private companies focused on maximising short-term profit and not the public good. In developing countries, privatisation of water supply is pushed in return for loan and aid extensions. Many people in these poor countries do not yet have access to effective water supply, let alone sanitation, and often pay more for their water than the rich in the West.

The advent of the modern megacities and their associated slums has led to sanitation issues not seen in the West since pre-Victorian times. Consider the many millions of street dwellers in Mumbai without access to sanitation: half a kilogram of excrement per person per day equates to thousands of tons of human waste just left on the streets.

A possible solution could be waterless composting toilets as a key to water sustainability when we begin to provide sanitation to the developing world. These toilets are odourless and waterless systems that convert human waste into reusable compost for our fields. This modern technology confirms what we have always known: human waste is a great fertiliser.

The amount of water we use around the house may seem a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the virtual water we consume indirectly through the food we eat and the things we buy. An invisible trade in virtual water underlies the world economy from agriculture to consumer goods.

It takes about 1,000 litres of water to grow a kilogram of grain. It can take 24 kilograms of grain to produce a kilogram of beef. It therefore takes a tanker load of water to make a kilogram of steak. The export of beef from the US to the Middle East is as much