The World Food Situation

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9980/04/index19article5.html

Contrary to the prediction of many environmentalist ideologues, world food supplies have more than tripled in the past 30 years, staying well ahead of world population growth. Global food supplies, if equitably distributed, could provide an adequate diet for 700 million more people than there are living in the world today…

I am now in my 58th year of continuous involvement in food production programs in developing nations. During this period, I have seen much progress in increasing the yields and production of various crops, especially the cereals, in many food-deficit countries. Clearly, the research that backstopped this progress has produced huge returns. Yet despite a more than tripling in the world food supply during the past three decades, the so-called Green Revolution in cereal production has not solved the problem of chronic undernutrition for hundreds of millions of poverty-stricken people around the world, who are unable to purchase the food they need, despite abundance in world markets, due to unemployment or underemployment. Still, the world’s food situation has improved markedly.

Thirty years ago there were many who claimed that global famine was unavoidable. For example, in 1968 biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted in The Population Bomb, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any programs embarked upon now.” In 1967, Lester Brown, who later founded the environmentalist think tank the Worldwatch Institute, declared, “The trend in grain stocks indicates clearly that 1961 marked a worldwide turning point… food consumption moved ahead of food production.” Brown, too, saw famine looming. But fortunately they were wrong. They merely extrapolated trends without taking into account how the hard work of farmers, combined with breakthroughs developed by researchers, would dramatically boost world food supplies.

Sometime during the 21st century, world population will reach—and hopefully stabilize at—9 to 10 billion people. This event is likely to occur sometime around 2050. To give you some idea of the population increase that the world experienced during the 20th century, when I was born in 1914, there were only about 1.6 billion mouths to feed; in 2002 we will number some 6.1 billion. While global population growth rates have slowed over the past 20 years—and are actually negative in some industrialized countries—absolute population increases are still on the order of 75 to 80 million per year.

It must be acknowledged that in many of the more productive areas—especially the irrigated areas located in warm climates—there are problems of soil erosion and declining water quality, which if left unchecked can lead to the permanent loss of prime agricultural land. In most cases… the root cause of this environmental degradation has been mistaken economic policy—such as mistaken pricing policies and poor engineering design—not modern, science-based technology.

The invention of agriculture, some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, heralded the dawn of civilization. It began with rainfed, hand-hoed agriculture, which evolved into an animal-powered, scratch-tooled agriculture, and finally into an irrigated agriculture along the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, that for the first time allowed humans to produce food surpluses. This permitted the establishment of permanent settlements and urban societies, which, in turn, engendered culture, science, and technology. The rise and fall of ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Mesoamerica were directly tied to agricultural successes and failures, and it behooves us to remember that this axiom remains valid today.

Poets—and city folk—love to romanticize agriculture, portraying it as some sort of idyllic state of harmony between humankind and nature. How far this is from the truth! Ever since Neolithic man—or more probably woman—domesticated the major crop and animal species some 10 to 12 millennia ago, agriculture has been a struggle between the forces of natural biodiversity and the need to produce food using increasingly intensive production systems. Thanks to advances in science during the past century, food production has kept ahead of population growth and, in general, has become more reliable. But with global population likely to continue substantially over the next 50 years, meeting future food demand will be a challenging task.

— Norman E. Borlang,
Feeding a World of 10 Billion People
: The Miracle Ahead,
in Global Warming and Other Eco Myths:
How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death,
ed. Ronald Bailey