There's a food crisis coming

[joeblow]

There's a food crisis coming

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The pitch has been further queered by big international speculators. Riding on anxieties of tight supply and expanding demand, food grain prices hit the sky in 2007, with wheat, rice and corn rocketing up by an eye-popping 90-plus%. This had a direct impact on the poor in the Third World - several millions were pushed further into poverty and hunger. The incendiary situation led to food riots in two dozen countries and at least two governments - in Madagascar and Haiti - were toppled.

For India, this is not just an academic issue. India is home to by far the biggest number of hungry people in the world. While the FAO projections for 2009 do not provide a detailed country-wise break-up, its 2008 report did, and in that India accounted for 252 million of the 873 million under-nourished people all over the globe in the period 2004-2006. That's almost 30% of the world's undernourished population, a share larger than sub-Saharan Africa and twice China's. More worryingly, it's a significant increase from the 210 million undernourished people India had at the beginning of the 1990s.

ECONOMIC & HEALTH COSTS

Quite apart from the human-moral angle, hunger and malnutrition entail large economic costs, severely compromising the productivity of individuals, including the learning ability and physical growth of children.

When more than 20 or 30% of the population is chronically undernourished, as is the case in almost 40 countries including India, the growth of entire economies slows down. Economic costs range from loss of productivity to increased medical care.

There are indirect costs too, due to compromised cognitive and physical development. In developing countries, one in three children under the age of five is stunted due to chronic malnutrition, and 148 million children are underweight. Micronutrient malnutrition affects over 30% of the world's population - some two billion people - and is accompanied by serious physical incapacity/impairment, illness and disease, including those related to excess consumption (overweight and obesity, heart disease, diabetes and stroke), according to a report presented at the World Food Summit in Rome last month.

Food policies are failing to respond adequately to the squeeze on land, people, health and environment , says Timothy Lang, professor of food policy at the City University, London. "Strong evidence of systems failure and stress ought to reframe 21st century food politics and effort. Yet so far, international discourse is too often narrow and technical," Lang told TOI-Crest.

Everybody who is involved with agriculture - agri-businesses, scientists, NGOs, governments agrees that if nothing is done now, this crisis is going to blow into a full-scale catastrophe in the coming decades. So, how does the world tackle this?

LAND LOCKED

The most obvious solution is ruled out, at least for the present. Production cannot be increased simply by bringing more and more land under cultivation. In the past half a century, even as food production zoomed by 166%, additional land brought under cultivation increased from 639 million hectares to 687 million hectares, that is, by just about 8%. FAO estimates that in the next 40 years, not more than 70 million hectares of additional land can be brought under cultivation, an addition of just 5% to the total cultivated land in the world today. The reason is that in most developing countries large tracts of land are tied up in archaic tenure rights - leading to under-utilisation and choking the flow of investment. Clearing forests is no longer feasible because of the damaging impact on climate. So, land is not going to solve the problem.

PRODUCTIVITY IS KEY

There is, however, vast potential for increasing food grain production from the existing cultivated lands. A comparison of productivity (production per hectare) across regions bears this out. While the global average of productivity has nearly trebled since 1960, it camouflages a huge gap between countries and regions — in Africa, farmers get about 1.5 tonnes of cereals from each hectare of cultivated land, while in North America the yield is nearly six tonnes per hectare. These differences are key to a country's ability to feed its people. India produces about three tonnes of rice per hectare, China over six tonnes, and the US wrings out nearly eight tonnes. In other words, if India could match even China's productivity levels, it could double its output without bringing any more land under cultivation.

WATER DIFFERENCE

It is often mistakenly believed that lack of technology leads to low yields. Sure, technology makes a difference, but the most fundamental factor is water. In most of the developing world, water is the crucial input that farmers, particularly the small ones, lack. Irrigated agriculture covers one-fifth of arable land and contributes nearly 50 per cent of crop production. In India, 56 per cent of food grains is produced from 47 million hectares of irrigated land while the rest 44 per cent comes from 95 million hectares of rain-dependent land. In other words, irrigated land is about two-and-a-half times as productive as land dependent on rain. So, adequate irrigation itself can boost production immensely.

But water is another natural resource that is under stress. Globally, about 1.4 billion people are living in areas where groundwater levels are declining . And, any future expanded use of water for irrigation will require closely supervised management. The only viable solution lies in rainwater and collected surface water, delivered through canals. around the world considered the question "How to Feed the World in 2050". Their answer: the planet can feed itself provided the required resources are effectively mobilised. The single biggest cause of hunger and malnutrition is under-investment in agriculture in developing countries. About 4 per cent of national public spending goes into agriculture in economies where more than two-thirds of the population is dependent on it. In the 1970s, at the time of India's Green Revolution, many countries were spending up to 10 per cent.

On average, between 1997 and 2007, annual gross investments in primary agriculture at 2009 prices have been estimated at approximately $142 billion. To achieve the average annual requirements towards 2050, developing countries as a group need to raise annual total gross investments in primary agriculture and downstream services by about 47 per cent, with public investment rising in proportion.

The solution to the crisis is thus clear. It requires a reversal of the neglect of agriculture over the last couple of decades. But unless governments exhibit the political will to do so, and do so now, the world will just keep becoming a hungrier place to live in.

THE PROBLEM WITH GM FOOD

Another myth is that adopting high yielding or genetically engineered varieties is a magic wand that will boost productivity straightaway. But there's an accompanying problem. According to FAO, 50 per cent of plant-based calories in the human diet is derived from just four crop species. Diversity in food is dying out even as supermarkets pack their shelves with hundreds of processed food items that give the appearance of great diversity. This is a dangerous situation because genetically modified crops cannot crossbreed , leading to a proliferation of hybrids, as natural varieties do. This leaves the modified crop extremely vulnerable to new pests, diseases and climatic changes.

The pitch has been further queered by big international speculators. Riding on anxieties of tight supply and expanding demand, food grain prices hit the sky in 2007, with wheat, rice and corn rocketing up by an eye-popping 90-plus%.