Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Food and population defy simplistic portrayals

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

It’s easy to link rising human populations with food insecurity.  Too bad that explanation is often oversimplistic.

It’s nice to see this article in the NY Times (Food Experts Worry as World Population and Hunger Grow), which basically gets right many of the underlying features of food insecurity.

Let’s consider several of the points:

Scientists and development experts across the globe are racing to increase food production by 50 percent over the next two decades to feed the world’s growing population, yet many doubt their chances despite a broad consensus that enough land, water and expertise exist.

….The global financial recession added at least 100 million people by depriving them of the means to buy enough food, but the numbers were inching up even before the crisis, the United Nations noted in a report last week.

If there is one main point from the Nobel-prize winning work of Amartya Sen, who studied the Bengali and Ethiopian famines, it’s that poverty is one of the main determinants of food insecurity, not lack of food production.  People are often too poor to buy food, even when it’s produced in overabundance, and poor food distribution systems often compound that effect, as the next quotes illustrate:

“The way we manage the global agriculture and food security system doesn’t work,” said Kostas G. Stamoulis, a senior economist at the organization. “There is this paradox of increasing global food production, even in developing countries, yet there is hunger.”

….But the conundrum is whether the food can be grown in the developing world where the hungry can actually get it, at prices they can afford. Poverty and difficult growing conditions plague the places that need new production most, namely sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

The next quote reiterates some of the points I made in an earlier post that chronic humanitarian aid often exacerbates food insecurity by undercutting the development of a profitable agricultural system in poor countries:

Mrs. Clinton often calls agriculture aid a critical issue, saying the administration supports domestic efforts in developing nations and improvements in production by small farmers, particularly women. Philip J. Crowley, a department spokesman, said, “We are trying to shift away from emergency aid toward agricultural development.”

One part of this article that’s worth criticizing is this quote about genetically modified (GM) crops:

Then there is the question of genetically modified crops. No issue provokes such an emotional division among agronomists, who debate whether they constitute the building blocks of a second green revolution or a health menace.

“Who is steering this fear and global paranoia about the G.M. cotton and all these G.M. crops?” said Hans P. Binswanger-Mkhize, a South African agriculture consultant. “Show us where the corpses are — the corpses of earthworms, the corpses of bees, the corpses of antelopes and the corpses of humans. Nobody has yet ever shown us a corpse.”

Forget the health issues and dead bugs (for now)…how about the 100,000 indebted Indian farmers who have committed suicide over the past several years?  Not because of GM crops per se but because of the economic outcomes of technology packages, of which GM crops are a part:

• More technology like the Green Revolution drives up crop yields and drives down prices because of food surpluses.  Farmers are pushed deep into debt considering that they have to pay for all of the inputs to make Green Revolution crops work—-high-yielding hybrid seeds, water, fertilizer, pesticides.  Punjab, India is an unfortunate example of this.
• Lower grain prices per acre means that farms have to grow crops on more acres to break even (American Agriculture from 1950-today).  As the US example has shown, land, power, and production concentrate into the hands of the few farmers with access to capital, who drive everyone else out of business.
• The patenting of GM seeds will likely add even more to the costs of poor farmers, who have to buy new GM seeds each year, driving up debt further and making farmers beholden to agribusiness for future genetic modifications to deal with unanticipated global changes.

Sure, technology will likely play a needed role in boosting world food production.  But technology advocates need to temper their enthusiasm with an understanding of the social side effects that magnificent yield gains bring about in poor, developing nations.  Read the Newman article before jumping on the technology-solves-everything bandwagon.