Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Marty Kraft <martyk@allspecies.org>]

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1325467.ece

The hungry planet
As stocks run out and harvests fail, the world faces its worst crisis 
for
30 years

By Geoffrey Lean
Published: 03 September 2006

Food supplies are shrinking alarmingly around the globe, plunging the 
world
into its greatest crisis for more than 30 years. New figures show that 
this
year's harvest will fail to produce enough to feed everyone on Earth, 
for
the sixth time in the past seven years. Humanity has so far managed by
eating its way through stockpiles built up in better times - but these 
have
now fallen below the danger level.

Food prices have already started to rise as a result, and threaten to 
soar
out of reach of many of the 4.2 billion people who live in the world's 
most
vulnerable countries. And the new "green" drive to get cars to run on
biofuels threatens to make food even scarcer and more expensive.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the US Department 
of
Agriculture (USDA), which produce the world's two main forecasts of the
global crop production, both estimate that this year's grain harvest 
will
fall for the second successive year.

The FAO is still compiling its latest crop forecast - due to be 
published
next month - but told The Independent on Sunday late last week that it
looked like barely exceeding 2 billion tons, down from 2.38 billion last
year, and 2.68 billion in 2004, although the world's appetite has 
continued
to grow as its population rises.

The USDA estimates it will be even lower - 1.984 billion tons. This 
would
mean that it would fall 58 million tons short of what the world's people
are expected to consume this year: 10 years ago, by contrast, farmers 
grew
64 million tons more than was consumed. The world's food stocks have 
shrunk
from enough to feed the world for 116 days in 1999 to a predicted 57 
days
at the end of this season, well below the official safety level. Prices
have already risen by up to 20 per cent this year.

The gathering crisis has been largely unnoticed because, for once, the
harvests have failed in rich countries such as the United States and
Australia, which normally export food, rather than in the world's 
hungriest
ones. So it has not immediately resulted in mass starvation in Africa or
Asia.

Instead, it will have a delayed effect as poor people become 
increasingly
unable to afford expensive food and find that there is not enough in 
store
to help them when their own crops fail.

The lack of world attention contrasts with the last great food crisis, 
in
the mid-1970s. Then Henry Kissinger - at the height of his powers as
Richard Nixon's Secretary of State - called a World Food Conference, in
which governments solemnly resolved that never again would they allow
humanity to run short of sustenance. The conference, in Rome, resolved 
to
eradicate hunger by the mid-1980s. Kissinger himself pledged that 
"within a
decade, no child should go hungry to bed".

Yet, a generation later, more than 800 million people worldwide are 
still
constantly hungry. Every day, some 16,000 young children die, at least
partly because they do not get enough food. And the new food crisis
threatens to be even worse than the last one. In the seven years 
running up
to the Rome conference grain production fell below consumption only 
three
times, compared to six now.

It was at the conference that I first met Lester Brown, who has, ever
since, been the principal prophet of the coming scarcity, repeatedly
warning of the new crisis which is now upon us.

Brown - who now heads the Earth Policy Institute, a respected
Washington-based think tank - gleaned his first insights into the 
world's
predicament as a tomato tycoon when he was a teenager. Back in the early
1950s, when he was just 14, he and his brother bought an old tractor for
$200 (£105), rented a couple of fields near their home in southern New
Jersey and started growing the vegetables after school.

Soon the brothers were among the top 1 per cent of tomato growers in the
United States. They easily qualified for the Ten-Ton Tomato Club - "the 
Phi
Beta Kappa of tomato growers" - which is open to those who harvested 
that
amount per acre.

Then Campbell's Soups, trying to lower costs, threw money into research 
to
increase yields. Within a few years, the club had to change its name to 
the
Twenty-Ton Tomato Club. But the pace of improvement could not be 
sustained.
Despite decades of more research growth of yields slowed dramatically; 
by
the mid- 1990s the best growers were getting about 30 tons of tomatoes 
per
acre.

That, says Brown, is what has been happening to the world's harvests as 
a
whole. Between 1950 and 1990 grain yields more than doubled, but they 
have
grown much more slowly since. Production rose from around 630 million 
tons
to 1.78 billion tons, but has only edged up in the past 15 years, to 
around
2 billion tons.

"The near-tripling of the harvest by the world's farmers was a 
remarkable
performance," says Brown. "In a single generation they increased grain
production by twice as much as had been achieved during the preceding
11,000 years, since agriculture began. But now the world has suffered a
dramatic loss of momentum."

Apart from increasing yields, there has always been one other way of
boosting production - putting more land under the plough. But this, too,
has been running into the buffers. As population grows and farmland is 
used
for building roads and cities - and becomes exhausted by overuse - the
amount available for each person on Earth has fallen by more than half.

There are more than five people on Earth today for every two living in 
the
middle of the last century. Yet enough is produced worldwide to feed
everyone well, if it is evenly distributed.

It is not just that people in rich countries eat too much, and those in
poor ones eat too little. Enormous quantities of the world's 
increasingly
scarce grain now goes to feed cows - and, indirectly, cars.

The cows are longstanding targets of Brown's, who founded the 
prestigious
Worldwatch Institute immediately after the 1974 conference, partly to 
draw
attention to the precariousness of food supplies. As people become
better-off, they eat more meat, the animals that are slaughtered often
being fed on grain. It takes 14kg of grain to produce 2kg of beef, and 
8kg
of grain for 2kg of pork. More than a third of the world's harvest goes 
to
fatten animals in this way.

Cars are a new concern, the worry arising from the present drive to 
produce
green fuels to fight global warming. A "corn rush" has erupted in the
United States, using the crop to produce the biofuel, ethanol - strongly
supported by subsidies from the Bush administration to divert criticism 
of
its failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Just a single fill of ethanol for a four-wheel drive SUV, says Brown, 
uses
enough grain to feed one person for an entire year. This year the 
amount of
US corn going to make the fuel will equal what it sells abroad;
traditionally its exports have helped feed 100 - mostly poor - 
countries.

From next year, the amount used to run American cars will exceed 
exports,
and soon it is likely to reduce what is available to help feed poor 
people
overseas. The number of ethanol plants built or planned in the corn-belt
state of Iowa will use virtually all the state's crop.

This will not only cut food supplies, but drive up the process of grain,
making hungry people compete with the owners of gas-guzzlers. Already
spending 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food, they simply cannot
afford to do so.

Brown expects the food crisis to get much worse as more and more land
becomes exhausted, soil erodes, water becomes scarcer, and global 
warming
cuts harvests.

Making cars more fuel-efficient, and eating less meat would help but the
only long-term solution is to enable poor countries - and especially 
their
poorest people - to grow more food. And the best way to do that, studies
show, is to encourage small farmers to grow crops in environmentally
friendly ways. Research at Essex University shows that this can double
yields.

But the world needs a new sense of urgency. "We are living very close to
the edge," says Brown. "History judges leaders by whether they respond 
to
great issues. For our generation, the issue may well be food security."


© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

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