Feeding the world.

The UN conferences on population (Cairo, Beijing, Istanbul), together with the World Food Summit in Rome (Nov. 1996), have brought to the fore the question of whether the earth can feed its growing population. In the London Financial Times for October 17, Alison Maitland presented the evidence as to whether or not the next generation is going to face an unprecedented food crisis.

Prophets of doom

The prophets of doom argue that the ecological limits to growth have already been reached. The world's population, estimated to have been 2,516 million in 1950 and to be 6,158 million in 2000, may rise to 8,800 million by 2030. Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington is a long-standing doom monger: "We're moving from a half-century dominated by surpluses to an era which is going to be dominated by scarcity and rising grain prices." The pessimists have been calling for fundamental changes in eating habits, to divert food from the rich to the poor. Brown wants wealthy nations to eat less meat, so that grain which is used to fatten animals can be used to feed the world's hungry.

Professor David Pimentel of Cornell University contends that intensive farming is eroding soil much faster than it can be replaced. The pessimists argue that earlier shortages of food were bridged by "miracle cures," such as the green revolution, advances in the production of nitrogen fertilizer, and the development of hybrid corn (which brought the concept of a good yield from 60 to 70 bushels per acre to over 200). But the scale of population growth, and the constraints which it is placing on land, water, and other resources mean that the miracles which saved us in the past are not likely to happen in the future, they say.

The Optimists

The optimists point to a near-tripling in the world grain harvest between 1950 and 1990, and put their faith in the market and in agricultural innovation. Grain reserves were virtually wiped out last year. As a result, prices rose, more land came into production, and better harvests have driven wheat prices down a third from last May's peak. Tim Dyson, Professor of Population Studies at the London School of Economics, writes in a recent book entitled Population and Food that "there is fair reason to expect that in the year 2020 world agriculture will be feeding the larger population no worse and probably a little better than it manages to do today."

He concedes that the task is enormous. Nearly three billion tonnes of cereals will be needed in 25 years to satisfy global demands, compared to 1.9 billion now. This will require the average cereal yield throughout the world to reach four tonnes per hectare, compared to just under three tonnes now. Use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer will probably have to double to 170 million tonnes a year. But such huge increases are possible, Dyson argues. The rate of growth in world cereal yield, which has slowed in the past ten to fifteen years -- particularly in North America, may again resume; it has already done so in some regions.

In his book The Ultimate Resource (understandably not mentioned in the Financial Times (FT) article; it came out some years ago), Julian Simon argues that some African nations are actually underpopulated: if they had more people, they could have better road and rail systems and better storage facilities.

The question of distribution

The FT article does quote Hans Binswanger, the World Bank's senior policy adviser for agriculture and natural resources, as saying that arguments over future food supplies obscure the much more important issue of distribution. "For the last 25 years," he says, "we have had the lowest food prices on record and we still have 800 million people going hungry. Solving the long-term food security problem is not going to solve the hunger problem."

Official Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) figures show that the average daily calorie intake of North Americans and Europeans is a third higher than they need, whereas for Africans it falls six per cent short. In much of the developing world, hunger persists alongside plentiful supplies of food grown for export. Ensuring better access to food means overcoming poverty, says Binswanger. This will require small-scale lending, education and health programs, together with land reform and road construction.

Special problems exist in certain parts of the world. Growing affluence in Asia is putting enormous demand on grain as a source of animal feed, and alternatives such as fish are no longer plentiful. In sub-Saharan Africa, the population is expected to double in the next twenty years, whereas food production will not do so; in some areas, 33 per cent of the people are undernourished.

Special challenges

One is to manage water supplies more efficiently. Competition between water for agriculture and the demands of fast-growing cities is one of the most serious problems facing the producers of good.

Another is better management of land. Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have unrealised potential following the agricultural disasters of recent decades. But other land is being lost to erosion and deforestation. On the whole, it will be more productive use of existing agricultural land rather than new land that will provide the greater part of increased food output.

Many researchers pin their hopes on genetically improved crops. At Kisumu on the shore of Lake Victoria, Kenyan scientists are developing new strains of corn, genetically altered to combat witchweed, a parasite which halves the crops of a hundred million African farmers every year. The technique was developed by Jonathan Gressel, Professor of Plant Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel; he says that the technique will enable farmers to double their yields, and give them the money to buy fertiliser, which will enable them to double their output again.

Other experts fear that such solutions will bring their own problems. The "green revolution" of the 1960s, for example, introduced high-yielding varieties of rice, wheat, and corn which had larger grain heads and shorter stems. But the shorter stems made the crops vulnerable to flooding, while the reliance on single strains made them prone to devastation by pests -- and so the use of chemicals rose. Greenpeace is one group which would like to see a ban on field experiments with genetically engineered plants because they could lead to further disasters.

Professor Gressel contends that while biotechnology is not a panacea, a ban on it would condemn people in developing countries to death: people are starving now. Professor Ben Miflin of the U.K.'s Institute of Arable Crops Research argues that no solution should be ruled out. It could take between 10 and 20 years of research to find out some of the consequences:

"We can't sit back and say that all the other things like storage, distribution and politics will come right, so we don't need to tackle basic plant productivity. It could be a bit late by then to find out whether the optimists or the pessimists were right."

The story in statistics

Some of the statistics in the charts accompanying Alison Maitland's article are very revealing. The daily calorie supply of people in sub-Saharan Africa is 93.7% of requirements; of people in South Asia, 98.7%. In Europe, on the other hand, it is 132.6%, and in North America still higher -- 136.2%. Fertiliser use in the sub-Sahara is 13.9 kg. per hectare; in the Far East, well over ten times that amount -- 196.8. The results correspond to this difference: the yield in the Sub-Sahara is 1,165 tonnes per hectare, and 3,817 in the Far East. The one is expected to climb a respectable amount by 2020, to 1,597; the other by an astonishing amount, to nearly 6,000 tonnes.

Feed grain consumption in China has shot up from practically nothing in 1960 to 100 million tonnes at present. And whereas in 1950 there was half a hectare of arable land for each person of the world's population, in 2050 there will be only about .15 of a hectare per person. This is based on projections by the UN Population Division, which do not reflect a possible levelling off of population increase, not to mention a possible decline as a result of abortion, contraception, AIDS and the one-child-per-family policy in China.

The moral dimension

In the Holy Father's statement on ecological questions several years ago, he stressed that in every aspect of such matters there are moral considerations.

From a purely secular perspective, Julian Simon emphasizes that human ingenuity is able to solve almost every kind of crisis: the ultimate resource in the fight against starvation is the human mind, which should be able to perceive and solve the problems involved. For the Christian, our confidence in God's providence implies that we can find solutions without resorting to the draconian measures proposed at various international conferences -- abortion, contraception, and sterilization disguised under the euphemism of "reproductive rights."

As the Financial Times article pointed out, there are many challenges to be faced. If we are wasting too many of the world's resources, we will have to change our practices. If there remains a great disparity between our food consumption and that of people in the third world, we can seek out the admittedly complex and baffling ways of overcoming this situation. We must realize that technology has a place in the search for remedies, and that we must do whatever we can to help Canadian expertise be passed on to areas of the world which can profit from it.

There are some things we can learn from an examination of this problem. First, despite the doomsayers, the scientific and statistical evidence does not say that the world's food supply is hopelessly inadequate. Second, the world should be able to feed itself, and for us to help our starving neighbours is a moral imperative. Third, we can pray and work so that political leaders throughout the world will see the need for responsible leadership in seeing that two grains of a cereal crop will grow where one grew before, and that the benefits of growth will trickle down to those who most need them.