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The Protein Crunch: Civilisation on the brink
Jason Drew and David Lorimer
International businessman, serial entrepreneur and passionate environmentalist, Jason Drew has seen many things during his business tours all over the world, was working 7 days a week, didn’t believe in stress and now 2 heart attacks later has decided to share some of the knowledge he has gained and the crisis he has seen that has made him decide to take a leap into retirement and converting into a passionate environmentalist ,spent the last 2-3 years travelling the world then wrote the book, The Protein Crunch: Civilisation on the brink which dishes up harsh truths of the world in which we live in. In a way in which we can all relate. He exposizes the world system that lets rich people get richer while poor people get poorer. President Jacob Zuma is the only president that had had any experience in sustainable agriculture and preserving our ecosystems as a farm boy and has offered some really good alternatives.
As the warning on the cover of the book states that this could change the way you view the world around you; this book really is an excellent piece of work that any person with a conscious would find alarming. People from different demographics with no interest in environmental preservation would be shocked by the hard facts that Jason Drew shares. We are living in a planet with about 9 billion people in our population and this still increases by more or less 200 000 everyday. Which is not really a good thing, we all know that but no one really knows why it is not a good thing. Well it is because we are actually running out of resources for everyone to live by and by resources I mean every single human beings basic necessities like water, land and food.
This does not really seem alarming at first because of course it seems like we will probably never run out of any of these resources because they are everywhere just like the air that we need to breath. Well what you did not know is that everyone across the world is at this very moment already consuming what is like the reserve fuel of a car except of course it is the reserve resources for our planet. Did you know that it took 30 000 litres of water to make your phone? Try imagining how many litres of water it took to make the phones of everyone in your household. Or that to feed their citizens China and Saudi Arabia have bought more farmland in Africa than exists in the whole of France? Or that fishing has been banned on the Sea of Galilee as fish stocks have collapsed? It is facts like these that make The Protein Crunch: Civilisation on the brink such a fascinating read.
During Jason Drew’s interview with allafrica.com he mentioned the problems with our freshwater, land and seas, fishing in Africa more specifically. The EU set aside 2 billion to decommission its fishing fleet instead spent the money buying fishing rights in West Africa; this emptied their seas while there are 10 million people in Africa that live off seas that had to migrate to other jobs. In Nigeria, a third of lake Chad provided sustainable fishing for Nigerians but this lake has shrunk (because water is being extracted here for irrigation ) so much that fisherman have become farmers because there is hardly any water in Nigeria anymore. Even notice the way that the fish we buy is getting smaller, when you go to the super market you will find baby hake and sole that is not because it is easier to catch but because we ate all their parents.
He spoke more about these facts because of his interest in fishing but just as a pastime. He urges that most aquaculture is disastrous.
“To make a K of salmon takes 2-3 kilos of marine caught fish to feed as fishmeal. We are better off eating the last fish in the sea than fish farming. We have to catch, feed fishmeal to growing salmon, but we have to catch 3 kilos to make 1k of fishmeal”. A third of all fish taken out of the sea are used for industrial farming as the cheapest for of protein, most of these fish are single stomached so they need animal protein as part of their diet. This protein is now being replaced by fishmeal. So one of Jason Drew’s businesses, Aprotien, uses flies to recycle abattoir waste (blood and guts) takes them then feeds eggs of flies on it as they grow into larvae. When they are in their third stage before papate arvest dry and this then turns into protein meal, a natural food for fish and chicken which he sells to people to sell it to them
All these things related to our health and that is the whole point of the book. The saying that an apple a day keeps the doctor away has now turned into 5 apples a day keeps the doctor away. Everyone is in danger, it might not be staring at us in our faces at the moment but it is creeping up on us every day and affects us indirectly. If we sit back as the human race and do nothing about it because we feel that even if it is happening we won’t see its affects in full throttle then we are fooling ourselves. Our world is starting to deteriorate and this will affect the next generation the most by 2050 most of the things that Jason Drews writes about will be noticeable. Only 25% of all water around the world goes to the sea, river after river no longer goes to sea and by the looks of things in about 10 years time the Nile River may not aswell. Is that really what we want for our world to become?
