Discussions of food policy, climate change, international security and many other global issues often take place in isolation, cut off from consideration of other factors delineating the pinch points as humanity’s population and appetites crest in the next couple of generations.
Robert J. Walker, executive vice president of the Population Institute, noted this tendency in a commentary responding to the package of reports on feeding 9 billion humans in the journal Nature that I wrote about here yesterday. He e-mailed me a link to his piece on the institute’s blog. Here’s the opening section and a link to the rest. I encourage you to ponder his points about the relative value of investments in initiatives that can increase the amount of food or reduce the number of mouths. Have a look and weigh in below.
The writers and editors at Nature this past week boldly proclaimed, with some carefully qualified caveats, that producing enough food for the world’s population in 2050 will be easy.
Maybe not. Sending humans to the moon and safely returning them to the Earth is easy. Been there, done that. Feeding 9 to 9.5 billion people or more by 2050? Not so easy. We’ve never done that. And there are good reasons to believe we might not be able to.
Let’s take a closer look at what the writers at Nature said, and do a little dissecting.
In 2009, more than 1 billion people went undernourished — their food intake regularly providing less than minimum energy requirements — not because there isn’t enough food, but because people are too poor to buy it. At least 30% of food goes to waste.
Scientists, like everyone else on this planet, need to differentiate the theoretical from the economical and the practical. If, as a result of grain embargoes by Russia and (possibly) Ukraine, the price of bread doubles this year, the impact on the world’s urban poor — many of whom are living on less than $1.25 a day — will be devastating. And it matters not whether wheat reserves are rotting in India or whether Russia and Ukraine have surplus wheat. And it doesn’t matter how many bread crumbs we discard.
The dictates of the marketplace can be brutal. There is plenty of money in the world, far more than is needed to eliminate severe poverty, but severe poverty persists. In a global economy, where people’s ability to feed themselves depends on the cost of rice or bread, hunger can exist on a wide scale, even if there is plenty of food–in theory–to go around.
Don’t believe that? Take a look at what’s happening today in the African Sahel. Last month, Josette Sheeran, the executive director of the World Food Program (WFP), warned that, as a consequence of widespread hunger, Niger was in danger of “losing a generation.” She said that the development of children under the age of five in Niger will be severely impaired unless food relief arrives soon. WFP plans to reach 4.5 million people in the region in the next few months, but Sheeran warned that the situation is deteriorating rapidly and that WFP needs about $100 million to bridge the funding gap.
Here’s what Nature said about the last global food crisis:
The 2008 food crisis, which pushed around 100 million people into hunger, was not so much a result of a food shortage as of a market volatility — with causes going far beyond supply and demand.
Wrong. During the 2007-8 food crisis the prices of wheat and corn doubled, while the price of rice tripled. Why? Because the world’s grain reserves during that period fell to the lowest levels in several decades. While market volatility may have contributed in some small measure, food production was not keeping up with demand. When grain reserves grow dangerously low, speculators will always drive up prices. Scarcity always does.
Here’s what Nature said about projected population growth:
Scientists long feared a great population boom that would stress food production, but population growth is slowing and should plateau by 2050 as family size in almost all poorer countries falls to roughly 2.2 children per family.
Not so fast. [Read the rest…]