Green Algae Strategy Products - Food

World hunger – food The academies of sciences from 58 countries, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, summed up the global situation in the Population Summit report:

Humanity is approaching a crisis point with respect to the interlocking issues of population, food, natural resources and sustainability.

The report documents the serious status of vital resources needed to support human life. Similar to global warming, science has not computed the carrying capacity of Earth but the report makes clear that current practices are not sustainable. The report recommends local solutions give way to more cooperative global solutions to support food security and human life. Food security means access by all people at all times to sufficient food. Yet a hunger death occurs every 3.6 seconds.

Figure 1.1 Status of World Hunger

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, estimates that 850 M people are chronically undernourished. Undernourished mothers give birth to low birth weight babies who are stunted and usually exhibit mental and physical impairments. Currently in India and Bangladesh, one in three babies begin their lives with severely low birth weight. Undernourishment and stunting frequently overlap with the vitamin and mineral deficiencies that affect nearly 2 B people worldwide.

Jacques Diouf, FAO Director General, presided over the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome that proposed to reduce by half the number of undernourished people by 2015. Unfortunately, he recently announced failure in that goal and “far from decreasing, the number of hungry people in the world is increasing – at the rate of 4 M a year.” Jacques Diouf describes poverty in an unusual word picture:

''If poverty could be photographed, it would show a family of landless peasants – the poorest of the world’s poor. Coming second to them in this cheerless classification are the people with plots of land so small and depleted that they cannot produce enough to feed themselves. The value of this picture is the clarity of its message: land – or to be more precise, the lack of it – is one of the root causes of world hunger and poverty. ''

Jeffry Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University calls this the poverty trap where peasant farmers are caught in the spiral of rising population with stagnant or diminishing food production per person. Unfortunately, more people are falling into the poverty trap due to a lack of cropland, water shortages and fertilizers and from global warming that spawns severe storms and expands deserts. The U.N. Report on Biofuels, May 2007, said:

''Liquid biofuel production could threaten the availability of adequate food supplies by diverting land and other productive resources away from food crops. Many biofuel crops require the best land, lots of water and environment-damaging chemical fertilizers.''

Loss of food security – scarcity and price – will hit the most vulnerable 2.2 B people who are already starving because they cannot afford the price of food today for themselves or their family. Over 2 B people subsist on less than $2 a day. Food aid programs typically have fixed budgets and if the price of grain doubles, food aid is reduced by half. A small increase in food prices or lack of supply will cause many millions to die from malnutrition and associated diseases.

In 2008, America will spend over $20 B on subsidies to burn 100 M tons of corn for ethanol and displace less than 3% of foreign oil imports. It seems difficult to rationalize a policy that burns food for a weak fuel additive when 30 M children under five die from starvation every year. Over 60 M Americans received federal food assistance in 2006 under the $53 B USDA food assistance programs which include Food Stamps, National School Lunch, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children and the School Breakfast Program. Food assistance expenditures have increased each of the past six years and annually set historical records. The rising cost of corn raises all food prices which significantly adds to the cost of food assistance.

The working poor make extraordinary sacrifices but receive little in return. The USDA charged with supplying food for the nation’s poor, spends half its budget on food stamps and lunch programs. About 31 M Americans, 1 in 10 U.S. citizens, receive food stamps. Over half of the recipients are children and 8% are over age 60. Food stamp recipients are impacted by ethanol because burning food causes eflation, ethanol induced prices increases. The price of milk, cheese, chicken, pasta and corn products have increased over 50% due to ethanol so the average $94 monthly food coupon buys less food. When the price of pasta doubles, food stamp users can buy only half a pound. Hungry Americans, especially children, get less food.

While increasing numbers of Americans struggle to survive on USDA food assistance the USDA pays farmer subsidies and helps orchestrate the ethanol industry. The USDA reports show each year more bushels of corn burned for ethanol. Converted to millions of tons of corn, those figures look like Figure 1.5. Where is the logic in a strategy that burns 100 M tons of food while distributing $1-a-meal food stamps to 31 M hungry American?

Figure 1.5 Food Stamp Recipients and Corn Burned



Food solutions Algae growing on non-crop land the size of Maine, about 20 M acres could provide 80% of U.S. imported energy. This would enable cropland to be put back into production for food crops to feed Americans and the world. The National Renewable Energy Lab, NREL, estimates that 10 M acres, the size of Maryland, as the cropland are that could supply 100% of energy imports. The estimate precision is not critical. The clear message is that algae are far more productive as a biofuel than corn. The coproduct of algae grown as a biofuel is protein that could feed people or animals. Production systems optimized for fuel would probably lack sufficient cleanliness for human foods. However, the surplus protein could feed millions of animals.

The major challenge for solving world food is not production but distribution. If cultivated algae production systems, CAPS, can be designed for small, medium and large scale production, many communities and villages throughout the world could produce their food locally on non-cropland.

Algae cannot be used as a human food today because the cell walls are not digestible. To be used as a human food directly, strain selection or bioengineering must solve the cell wall problem. Digestible cell walls will provide the tipping point that enable algae to serve as a world food.

World food production depends on water that is become increasing scare. Water represents a more critical resource for sustainable foods than either cropland or energy. Food fails to grow without lots of water.

This is the start page for the food section of the Green Algae Strategy Products. It will have 4 sections:

Food(for human consumption)

Food Ingredients

Fodder

Fisheries