Most people in the world depend on food grains for their very survival. The more meat people eat, the more land must be devoted to the production of feed, and since essentially all the cultivatable land is already in use, the less land is available for production of food grains and pulses. The production of biofuels is also competing for land that could be used to produce food.
World economic growth increases demand for food, or more accurately allows more people to buy meat and other high protein foods. More demand and less supply results in higher prices.
When most poor people were subsistence farmers, higher food prices did not necessarily cause famine; people could still produce the food they needed on their farms. Today, most of the world's population lives in cities. The urban poor must buy their food. If the prices of food exceed their ability to pay, they go hungry. If there are large numbers of urban residents facing hunger as part of their poverty, they get angry and protest. Bad news for governments!
Donor programs that distribute food to the indigent hungry are finding the high costs of food limit their ability to respond at the same time that the numbers of the hungry are increasing.
On the one hand, we need to find ways to fund emergency feeding programs to meet immediate needs. On the other hand, we need to face the long term problem of feeding a growing population which should be increasingly affluent, with no more arable land to put into agricultural production. We might rethink the desire to produce biofuels, or at least find species that do not compete with lands that can be used to grow grains and/or pulses. We can also intensify agricultural production. Africa, for example has not invested in irrigation systems and does not use many modern inputs, and therefore could increase per acre yields.
An important element, however, it to increase agricultural research and efforts to move improved varieties into production. Unfortunately, donor support for international agricultural research has not kept up with the need. The world also must be very careful not to let fear mongering impose inappropriate limitations be placed on the use of improved varieties from agricultural research. Appropriate regulation of genetically modified crops and other new technologies is of course needed, but excessive regulation that prevents us meeting real needs with safe varieties is a real threat.
Friday, April 11, 2008
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2 comments:
Great post John....There is a good summary of the food situation at http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/fpr/pr18.asp.
But also, check out http://ifpri.org/pubs/fpr/pr17.pdf
I agree that more funding for agricultural R+D is needed. But this second publication asks whether it is too late for that. With respect to the current crisis, I think it is too late. We are likely to see lots more news reports of social unrest, similar to the recent riots in Haiti, Mexico City (tortilla prices) and elsewhere. The world food system needs to be put right. It will mean changing trade policies, re-thinking biofuels, ensuring that higher prices result in improvement in rural incomes, and ways to moderate rising prices for urban consumers.......Glenn
Thanks Glenn.
The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) does great work, and the references that you cite from that work are indeed interesting.
I think you are right that the solution to the immediate problem is not research, but on the other hand unless research funding is increased there are going to be more food crises in the future. This is really a case of "not eating the seed corn".
In the short run, I think the only solution is making more money available to buy food for the hungry. There has to be some means to get food that exists to be distributed more fairly, so that people on the edge get more. It probably would not hurt to get those of us who are overweight and eating ourselves into the grave to eat less. More money for the poor to enable them to compete more fairly in a market with rising food prices seems like an approach.
Letting the hungry know that their needs are understood and that the more affluent are transferring resources to help deal with those needs might also help ameliorate the likely political unrest due to the food crisis.
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