Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto

The reason why is simple. At present humanity consumes the resources of 1.6 Earths every year, despite the fact that more than 2 billion people survive on less than 2,000 calories a day. That would appear to suggest there are too many of us. If so, the last thing we ’d want would be for the world’s poor to enjoy lifestyles similar to those of the more afluent countries. This poses a problem for anyone who wishes to address issues of global inequality and poverty, because any meaningful improvement regarding them would seemingly exacerbate environmental breakdown.

But it doesn’t end there. The Earth’s human population is expected to rise by a further 2 billion people ahead of 2050, and in order to provide all 9.6 billion of us a balanced diet, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation believes food production would have to increase by 70 per cent. In other words, by the middle of this century humanity would need the resources of more than two planet Earths simply for everyone to enjoy a decent standard of living.

Even that might be optimistic, however. Were everyone to enjoy the same diet as the average American does right now, consuming approximately 3,700 calories every day, we would need the resources of an additional five Earths within a generation. Even if you wanted today’s United States to be a template for global development, from the perspective of bio-capacity that isn’t remotely possible.

And when you integrate reasonable forecasts about the impact of climate change for agriculture the picture gets even worse. A 2009 report predicted that warming of three degrees would mean a 50 per cent reduction in wheat yields in South Asia between 2000 and 2050, along with a 17 per cent reduction in rice and six per cent in maize. That in a region with three of the eight most populous countries in the world – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – all of which are set to see their respective populations rise further over the coming years. Furthermore the glaciers which feed the great rivers of the Indian subcontinent, the Brahmaputra, the Ganges and the Indus, which provide drinking water to hundreds of millions, are starting to disappear.

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That same study forecast a decline in East Asian rice production by 20 per cent and wheat by 16 per cent. In sub-Saharan Africa, whose population is anticipated to double between now and 2050, rice yields would decline by 14 and wheat by 22 per cent. For the Middle East, like Africa particularly subject to the twin challenges of increased water scarcity and rapidly rising populations, it is even worse, with rice yields declining by 30 per cent, maize by 47 per cent and wheat by 20 per cent.

That isn’t to say the comparatively wealthier countries of the Global North will remain unafected, however. Within a low warming scenario, forecasts suggest the US would see corn and soy yields fall by 30 and 46 per cent respectively. Given the country is currently the world’s leading exporter of grains, that would spell disaster not only at home but for the world market. Even if other countries such as Russia and Canada stepped up to become agricultural powerhouses, this might only serve to increase the possibility of resource conflicts with their more militarily powerful neighbours.

Forget post-scarcity. Between rising populations, climate change, a dearth of fresh water and stretched bio-capacity, just avoiding widespread famine by the middle of this century would represent an astonishing achievement. So how exactly can our planet sustainably feed a world of 9.6 billion people?

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Under current models of food production, the answer largely depends on the kind of diet that is adopted. Over a year, the average American consumes 800 kilograms of grain in the form of food and secondary animal feed. Were that to become the global average then the present level of grain production, slightly above 2 billion metric tonnes, would only support a global population of 2.5 billion. By contrast if the average was in line with the Mediterranean diet, where each person consumes around 400 kilograms of grain a year, the earth could maintain a population double that. Finally, if all of us ate – directly and indirectly – the same quantity of grains as the average Indian, then present methods of food production could sustain a planetary population of 10 billion, more or less where we ’ll be by the closing decades of this century.

Put bluntly it is the meat and dairy consumption typical to diets of the Global North which have us living beyond our ecological means. Current levels of food production could even meet demand for 2050, but it would require a typical diet almost absent of animal protein.

There is at least some good news, however. While the Earth’s human population has exploded since the dawn of the Second Disruption, it is likely to peak at 10 billion this century – thereafter either falling or remaining static. From the perspective of mouths to feed that means it won’t look that diferent from today – an extra 3 billion people – which is what the world has added since 1974. Indeed, it is rising expectations in diet, combined with declining crop yields as a result of climate change, which represent the biggest hurdles in eliminating world hunger.

Claims about rising populations and the natural limits of the Earth are nothing new. Indeed Thomas Malthus, one of the most important thinkers in the early history of political economy, was obsessed by the issue. In his 1798 polemic An Essay on the Principle of Population, he observed how any increase in food production led to a growth in population rather than an improvement in the average standard of living. His resulting conclusion was stark. ‘The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.’

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Malthus was far from unique in such reasoning. William Jevons, an English economist writing in the 1860s, noted how more eficient steam engines counter-intuitively meant more coal was consumed rather than less – an observation since referred to as the ‘Jevons Paradox’. Between Malthus and Jevons the verdict appeared to be the same: humanity’s ingenuity, as vast as it is, can never hope to keep pace with its voracious appetites.

Yet the story of agriculture over the second half of the twentieth century tells us otherwise. While feeding a world of 9 billion might seem impossible, especially so within the broader context of the five crises, the most important achievement of the last sixty years suggests it can be done. Its name? The Green Revolution.

Food as Information: The Green Revolution

At present the amount of land given over to agriculture is around 37.5 per cent of the world’s land area – which is more or less the same as it was in the late 1970s. Yet our planet now supports an extra 3 billion people, while average calorie consumption has increased and food deprivation has fallen. Indeed, in the last two decades alone, the number of people experiencing hunger halved to around 10 per cent of the world’s population. All of this was achieved while fewer and fewer people were employed in agriculture.

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This suggests there is another way to feed 9 billion people, one that would mean we had more than enough food for everyone, all without the need for rationing or changing eating habits. Indeed, it would make food so abundant that – as with energy, labour and resources – it would become virtually free, with the value emerging more from the informational content than inputs such as land or human efort.

While you may never have heard of him, Norman Borlaug was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. A year after receiving his PhD in 1942 he assumed an agricultural research position in Mexico where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield varieties of wheat – a crop the country was failing to produce in suficient amounts. These modified varieties used most of their energy to grow edible kernels rather than long, inedible stems and had the additional benefit of being disease-resistant. Financed by the UN, various US government agencies and the Rockefeller Foundation, this was the very latest in agronomic research – and more than a decade before we understood how DNA and inheritance actually worked.

Mexican wheat production quickly flourished. By 1956 the country was self-suficient in the crop, and by 1964 it exported half a million tons of it. In the space of two decades the majority of the country’s wheat came from the newer grains bred by Borlaug. But problems with food production extended far beyond Mexico. In a world of nations newly freed of European empires, the spectre of global hunger was more pressing than ever. Economic under-development as a result of colonialism, combined with growing populations and relatively weak state structures, seemed a dangerous mix in an uncertain world.

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Which is why in 1961, as India stood on the brink of famine, Borlaug was invited to apply his skills beyond central America. There the region of Punjab had been selected to experiment with recently developed crops created by the new International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Just as with Mexico, India would subsequently make huge leaps forward as a result of its own programme of plant breeding, irrigation development and use of agrochemicals. Arguably, however, it was the adoption of the IR8 rice variety – a semi-dwarf grain developed by the IRRI – which proved decisive. Findings published in 1968 showed it to yield five tons per hectare without fertiliser, and almost ten tons under optimal conditions – a 900 per cent increase on traditional rice varieties in the country. That same year, the biologist Paul Ehrlich published the best-selling The Population Bomb which detailed how famine, particularly in India, would kill hundreds of millions over the following decades. With unremitting certainty, he wrote, ‘I don’t see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.

Except it did, and all while life expectancy doubled and a country historically plagued by colonially-imposed famine became the world’s leading exporter of rice by the early twenty-first century. Such unexpected success was the legacy of Borlaug, the IRRI and the Green Revolution more generally, the central principle of which was that food is ultimately information.

And, as we know, any information can be reprogrammed.

Completing the Green Revolution

Much of the Green Revolution, which transformed Asian agriculture in particular, involved spreading techniques and infrastructure already common to the industrialised nations.

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This included modern irrigation projects, as well as the use of chemical pesticides and synthetic fertiliser. Its primary aspect, however, was the adoption of vastly improved, and genetically modified, crop varieties. That is why wheat yields have tripled since the early 1970s among developing countries – possibly saving a billion lives in the process.

But what if that Green Revolution, which allowed us to feed more people than ever before, and using less labour to do so, was only the beginning? What if, rather than inhabiting an exhausted planet, we had only begun to understand how our mastery of nature could confer almost limitless abundance? If information wants to be free – and the bounty of nature is highly complex arrangements of information – then why should hunger exist at all?

The first Green Revolution seemingly confounded Malthus, Jevons and Ehrlich, confirming that our collective intelligence is suficient to satisfy our appetites. As with so much in the twentieth century, however, that isn’t to say it came without a cost. Fossil fuels were burned like never before, only accelerating climate change, while natural habitats were destroyed, rivers and lakes were poisoned and soil became ever less fertile. The last century may have proven the pessimists wrong, but it still appears we are living on borrowed time. The reprieve was temporary.

No less an issue is the treatment of animals within this ultraeficient paradigm of farming. The agricultural practices of the modern era may deliver higher amounts of protein, carbohydrate and fat, but in addition to exhausting our planet it also brings immense sufering to sentient life. Millions of male chicks, along with their shells, are macerated alive on conveyor belts because they can’t lay eggs, while chickens in battery farms spend their lives in a space the size of an A4 sheet of paper pumped with antibiotics to stop infection. Female cows must calve at least once a year to continually produce milk and are artificially inseminated to do so. A cow would naturally suckle her calf for nine months to a year, but calves born on dairy farms are taken from their mothers within days of being born – a traumatic experience for both animals. Males are of little use to a dairy farmer and more than one hundred thousand bull calves are shot in the UK every year.

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Highly automated food production might feed more people than ever, but the sight of such slaughter is something which few would wish to watch or even know about.

Synthetic Meat: Meat without Animals

With the exception of some extraordinary organisms at the bottom of the ocean, almost all life on earth is powered by the sun. Plants and algae feed themselves through a solarpowered chemical reaction called photosynthesis, combining carbon dioxide from the air with water. This is done with chlorophyll, a green pigment which gives these organisms their colour, and is responsible for capturing the sun’s energy. The same process occurs with phytoplankton in the oceans, tiny organisms responsible for half the world’s oxygen and the basis for nearly all marine life.

These solar-powered life-forms provide the energy for herbivores such as bison, elephants and zooplankton in the wild, and domesticated animals such as sheep and cows. In turn these animals form the basis of the carnivorous diet, whether it be for predators such as large cats, larger fish, or humans and domesticated animals. Humans have generally reared and eaten omnivores and herbivores. In addition to being easier to feed, these creatures also have higher levels of body fat meaning there are more calories to go round.

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Nevertheless, compared to a plant-based diet, animals remain energy intensive and ineficient at converting solar energy to food. A Bangladeshi family living of rice, beans, vegetables and fruit can subsist on an acre of land or less. Meanwhile the average American, who consumes 270 pounds of meat a year, could require as much as twenty times that. If you examine the inputs necessary to produce a pound of soy protein compared to animal protein, the latter uses twelve times as much land, thirteen times as much fossil fuels and fifteen times as much water – and soy is a famously ineficient non-meat product.

Nearly a third of the useable surface area of the planet is given over to livestock either directly or indirectly, with animal feed accounting for the majority of global crop production. One study by Cornell University found that while 302 million hectares were given over to livestock in the United States, only 13 million hectares were allocated to vegetables, rice, fruit, potatoes and beans. Such a huge gap shows that animal products are a highly ineficient way of using finite resources to produce food.

What’s more, livestock farming contributes to 14 per cent of all human caused greenhouse gas emissions and, according to a 2006 report by the UN, generates greater amounts of CO than cars. Meanwhile 69 per cent of the world’s freshwater withdrawals are committed to agriculture, most of which is in meat production, with the average cow consuming 11,000 gallons of water a year. That means the average pound of ground beef requires 440 gallons of water, while a dozen eggs need an astonishing 636 gallons. And all in a world where 3.4 million people die every year from water-related disease.

Most remarkable of all is that after using all this water, energy, land and labour – not to mention the greenhouse gas emissions created as a by-product – we dispense with as much as half of the animal’s carcass. A heifer weighing a thousand pounds will, on average, produce 610 pounds of ‘hanging weight’, with this falling to 430 pounds of retail cuts after the removal of bone and fat. Once you factor in skin and hooves, two years of digestive processes, consciousness, respiration and just moving around, food from a living cow starts to look incredibly wasteful as a means of transforming solar energy into beef and milk.

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Given the challenges of climate change, resource scarcity and rising populations, it is clear that the world needs to eat far less meat than it does. Preferably, we would completely eliminate it from our diets. But what about freedom of choice? After all, humans might be better adapted to eating fruit and vegetables, but we are omnivores and animals provide a tasty source of protein. In many countries the consumption of meat is viewed as part of a broader cultural heritage, and regardless of health risks and saving the planet, those kinds of value systems take decades to change, if at all.

Yet as with all the other crises examined so far, there is a solution running parallel with a paradigm which seems so utterly untenable. It turns out we could feed more people better food, save the planet and reduce energy demand, all while virtually ending animal sufering in agriculture. In a certain sense, it represents the culmination of the Green Revolution and food becoming an informational good. Its name is cellular agriculture.

The \$325,000 Hamburger

In 2008 a Dutch professor named Mark Post presented the proof of concept for what he called ‘cultured meat’. Five years later in a London TV studio, Post and his colleagues ate a burger they had grown in a laboratory using those same principles. Secretly funded by Google ’s Sergey Brin, the journey from petri dish to plate had cost approximately \$325,000 – making theirs the most expensive meal in history. Fortunately, the results were promising, with the consensus being that the patty was ‘close to meat but not as juicy’. Here was confirmation that Post’s concept worked. The next question was the extent to which it might be refined, scaled up and made cheaper. Much cheaper.

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