The Global Food Crisis landed squarely on the dinner table at this week’s conference of the Heads of State of the world’s eight leading economies. News leaked out that leaders of the world’s wealthiest countries were enjoying a sumptuous banquet worthy of kinds while hundreds of millions of people around the world face hunger and starvation. The growing global food crisis was supposed to be at the top of the political agenda of this week’s summit, but took up less time and attention than the protracted eight course dinner enjoyed by the world’s political elite; shameful when we consider the fact that rising energy prices over the past year have resulted in a dramatic rise in the price of food around the world. The crisis has been exacerbated by “real-time” effects that climate change is having on agriculture. Climate change induced droughts, floods and other forms of extreme weather have crippled food production in many parts of the world. With street rioting spreading to more than 30 countries, political leaders are now worried that further increases in food prices and mounting public anger and desperation could topple governments across the developing world and lead to unfathomable consequences for human civilization. Suddenly, the food crisis has been transformed from a humanitarian challenge to a global security issue. Still, at this weekend’s summit, not a single world leader had addressed one of the underlying causes of the crisis and how agricultural policies impact climate change.

The “elephant in the room” turns out to be a cow but no one seems willing to notice or call attention to its presence, despite the fact that the culprit was staring at them on their plate. The centerpiece of the banquet was the serving of the famed grain-fed Kyoto beef, but apparently no one made the connection between what they were eating and the unfolding food crisis. The global meat industry has gobbled up more than one-third of the world’s agricultural land and guzzled up massive amounts of the world’s fossil fuel reserves so that a small portion of the world’s population can luxuriate high up on the global food chain while hundreds of millions of other human beings face malnutrition, starvation, and death. As the price of oil continues to climb—we are heading to peak global oil production—the divide between the overfed rich and the underfed poor is only going to intensify, leading to a stark world of gluttony amid starvation. Compounding the problem is the fact that meat production is the second leading cause of climate change and even Al Gore will not talk about it. Civilization will not likely survive without a fundamental reorientation in the diet of the wealthiest people on earth. Here are the facts.

To begin with, the dramatic increase in the price of oil on world markets has played a significant role in the escalating prices of basic grains over the course of the past year. Modern agricultural production depends on oil and fossil fuel derivatives for every stage of the food production process. Petrochemicals are used in fertilizers, pesticides and packaging, while gasoline is used to run farm equipment and to transport food to far off markets. The result is that skyrocketing oil prices have raised the cost of growing the world’s grain. Food prices are up 54% in the last 12 months and cereal prices have gone up by 92% in the same time period. Rice and wheat prices have doubled in just the past year.

For the 2.7 billion people who have incomes of less than two dollars a day, price hikes of this magnitude can tip the scale from survival to starvation and even death. The Director-General of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Jacques Diouf, says there are now about 862 million people in the world without adequate access to food.

Many experts blame the escalating prices of food on the conversion of agricultural land to biofuel crop production. The gist of the argument is that increasing the use of arable land for biofuels is ratcheting up the cost of food grain. In other words, the question boils down to whether we feed cars or feed people?

While biofuels play a role in the increasing costs of food - and could play an even bigger role—its impact is still fairly marginal. The fact is that in 2007 less than 3.5% of the entire world’s food production was processed into biofuels.

All of which gets us to the central problem left unaddressed. The question is not a matter of feeding grain to cars vs. feeding grain to people, or simply ratcheting up short term oil production. Rather, the real question, as oil price rises continue to spark food price rises in the years ahead, is whether we should be feeding grain to animals or feeding grain to people. And this is what no world leader seems prepared to talk about.

The United Nations FAO addressed the subject in a study published in 2006 entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options”. According to the report, in 2002 alone, a total of 670 million tons of cereals were fed to livestock, representing roughly one-third of the global cereal harvest.

The point is that more and more of the arable land of the world is being converted to feed grain, which means less land is available to grow food, all of which affects the price of food available to the poorest people on earth. To make matters worse, the FAO estimates that global meat production is going to double by 2030, which means that far more of the remaining agricultural land will be converted from food to feed grain in the future.

But the food versus feed crisis doesn’t stop with hundreds of millions of hungry people. There is an equally important connection between feed grain, increased meat production and consumption and global warming, but apparently no one at the world summit felt comfortable talking about it.

The reality is that the grain-fed-meat that we put on the table is now the second leading cause of global climate change after buildings. Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize), has asked consumers around the world to reduce their consumption of meat as a first step in addressing climate change.

The United Nations FAO study reports that livestock generate 18 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions. This is more than transport. While livestock—mostly cattle—produce 9 percent of the carbon dioxide derived from human-related activity, they produce a much larger share of more harmful greenhouse gases. Livestock account for 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide emissions – nitrous oxide has nearly 300 times the global warming effect of carbon dioxide. Most of the nitrous oxide emissions come from manure. Livestock also emit 37 percent of all human-induced methane – a gas that has 23 times more impact than carbon dioxide in warming the planet.

While we bemoan the energy inefficiency and waste of driving gas-guzzling cars, the energy inefficiency and waste in shifting to a grain oriented meat diet is much worse. Consider the fact that an acre of cereal produces five times the protein of an acre used for meat production. Legumes produce 10 times more protein and leafy vegetables produce 15 times more protein per acre than beef production.

The livestock industry uses the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of grain-fed beef in the United States. To sustain the yearly beef requirements of an average family of four people – about 260 lbs of beef – requires the consumption of over 260 gallons of fossil fuels. When that fuel is burned, it releases more than 2.5 tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – as much carbon dioxide as the average car emits in six months of normal operation. The implications of the FAO report are clear. It is time to draw public attention to methane and nitrous oxide emissions in agriculture to encourage the livestock industry to introduce new ways of curtailing emissions. We should also consider a tax on feed grain and meat to encourage a reduction in consumption, just as we currently tax gasoline to achieve the same end. A tax on feed grain and meat will spur a shift to food grain production and free up much of the vast agricultural land currently being used to grow feed for cows and other livestock.

We should also encourage efforts to wean agricultural practices off of heavy fossil fuel and chemical inputs -including genetically modified food production technology — and toward more organic and agro-ecological practices, to reduce the costs of growing food.

Our determination to curb energy use and our global warming footprint in buildings and transport should at least be matched by an equally aggressive commitment to follow suit in our agricultural practices. In the end, the shift from feed to food production and from chemical to sustainable organic agriculture, are the only viable long-term means of addressing the twin challenges of the global food crisis and the climate change crisis. The rich and well-to-do consumers of the world now need to make a thoughtful dietary choice on behalf of their fellow human beings and the planet we all cohabit. Governments must do so as well. Time is running out.

By: Jeremy Rifkin

Brief biographical note: Jeremy Rifkin is the President of the Foundation on Economic Trends in the United States, an advisor to the European Commission and European Parliament, and Heads of State around the world. He is the author of seventeen books including Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (Plume).

The Foundation of Economic Trends