[Vision2020] Fwd: Earth Policy News - World Facing Huge New Challenge on Food Front: Business-as-Usual Not a Viable Option

[Tom Trail]

>Visionaires   A very informative article about the world food crisis

by Lester R. Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute.

Tom Trail

>
>Earth Policy Institute
>Plan B Update
>For Immediate Release
>April 16, 2008
>
>WORLD FACING HUGE NEW CHALLENGE ON FOOD 
>FRONT                                                              
>Business-as-Usual Not a Viable Option
>
>http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update72.htm
>
>Lester R. Brown
>
>A fast-unfolding food shortage is engulfing the 
>entire world, driving food prices to record 
>highs. Over the past half-century grain prices 
>have spiked from time to time because of 
>weather-related events, such as the 1972 Soviet 
>crop failure that led to a doubling of world 
>wheat, rice, and corn prices. The situation 
>today is entirely different, however. The 
>current doubling of grain prices is 
>trend-driven, the cumulative effect of some 
>trends that are accelerating growth in demand 
>and other trends that are slowing the growth in 
>supply.
>
>The world has not experienced anything quite 
>like this before. In the face of rising food 
>prices and spreading hunger, the social order is 
>beginning to break down in some countries. In 
>several provinces in Thailand, for instance, 
>rustlers steal rice by harvesting fields during 
>the night. In response, Thai villagers with 
>distant fields have taken to guarding ripe rice 
>fields at night with loaded shotguns.
>          
>In Sudan, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), 
>which is responsible for supplying grain to 2 
>million people in Darfur refugee camps, is 
>facing a difficult mission to say the least. 
>During the first three months of this year, 56 
>grain-laden trucks were hijacked. Thus far, only 
>20 of the trucks have been recovered and some 24 
>drivers are still unaccounted for. This threat 
>to U.N.-supplied food to the Darfur camps has 
>reduced the flow of food into the region by 
>half, raising the specter of starvation if 
>supply lines cannot be secured.
>          
>In Pakistan, where flour prices have doubled, 
>food insecurity is a national concern. Thousands 
>of armed Pakistani troops have been assigned to 
>guard grain elevators and to accompany the 
>trucks that transport grain.
>          
>Food riots are now becoming commonplace. In 
>Egypt, the bread lines at bakeries that 
>distribute state-subsidized bread are often the 
>scene of fights. In Morocco, 34 food rioters 
>were jailed. In Yemen, food riots turned deadly, 
>taking at least a dozen lives. In Cameroon, 
>dozens of people have died in food riots and 
>hundreds have been arrested. Other countries 
>with food riots include Ethiopia, Haiti, 
>Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Senegal. 
>(See additional examples of food price unrest at 
>www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update72_data.htm.)
>
>The doubling of world wheat, rice, and corn 
>prices has sharply reduced the availability of 
>food aid, putting the 37 countries that depend 
>on the WFP’s emergency food assistance at risk. 
>In March, the WFP issued an urgent appeal for 
>$500 million of additional funds.
>
>Around the world, a politics of food scarcity is 
>emerging. Most fundamentally, it involves the 
>restriction of grain exports by countries that 
>want to check the rise in their domestic food 
>prices. Russia, the Ukraine, and Argentina are 
>among the governments that are currently 
>restricting wheat exports. Countries restricting 
>rice exports include Viet Nam, Cambodia, and 
>Egypt. These export restrictions simply drive 
>prices higher in the world market.
>
>The chronically tight food supply the world is 
>now facing is driven by the cumulative effect of 
>several well established trends that are 
>affecting both global demand and supply. On the 
>demand side, the trends include the continuing 
>addition of 70 million people per year to the 
>earth’s population, the desire of some 4 billion 
>people to move up the food chain and consume 
>more grain-intensive livestock products, and the 
>recent sharp acceleration in the U.S. use of 
>grain to produce ethanol for cars. Since 2005, 
>this last source of demand has raised the annual 
>growth in world grain consumption from roughly 
>20 million tons to 50 million tons.
>
>Meanwhile, on the supply side, there is little 
>new land to be brought under the plow unless it 
>comes from clearing tropical rainforests in the 
>Amazon and Congo basins and in Indonesia, or 
>from clearing land in the Brazilian cerrado, a 
>savannah-like region south of the Amazon 
>rainforest. Unfortunately, this has heavy 
>environmental costs: the release of sequestered 
>carbon, the loss of plant and animal species, 
>and increased rainfall runoff and soil erosion. 
>And in scores of countries prime cropland is 
>being lost to both industrial and residential 
>construction and to the paving of land for 
>roads, highways, and parking lots for 
>fast-growing automobile fleets.
>
>New sources of irrigation water are even more 
>scarce than new land to plow. During the last 
>half of the twentieth century, world irrigated 
>area nearly tripled, expanding from 94 million 
>hectares in 1950 to 276 million hectares in 
>2000. In the years since then there has been 
>little, if any, growth. As a result, irrigated 
>area per person is shrinking by 1 percent a year.
>
>Meanwhile, the backlog of agricultural 
>technology that can be used to raise cropland 
>productivity is dwindling. Between 1950 and 1990 
>the world’s farmers raised grainland 
>productivity by 2.1 percent a year, but from 
>1990 until 2007 this growth rate slowed to 1.2 
>percent a year. And the rising price of oil is 
>boosting the costs of both food production and 
>transport while at the same time making it more 
>profitable to convert grain into fuel for cars.
>
>Beyond this, climate change presents new risks. 
>Crop-withering heat waves, more-destructive 
>storms, and the melting of the Asian mountain 
>glaciers that sustain the dry-season flow of 
>that region’s major rivers, are combining to 
>make harvest expansion more difficult. In the 
>past the negative effect of unusual weather 
>events was always temporary; within a year or 
>two things would return to normal. But with 
>climate in flux, there is no norm to return to.
>
>The collective effect of these trends makes it 
>more and more difficult for farmers to keep pace 
>with the growth in demand. During seven of the 
>last eight years, grain consumption exceeded 
>production. After seven years of drawing down 
>stocks, world grain carryover stocks in 2008 
>have fallen to 55 days of world consumption, the 
>lowest on record. The result is a new era of 
>tightening food supplies, rising food prices, 
>and political instability. With grain stocks at 
>an all-time low, the world is only one poor 
>harvest away from total chaos in world grain 
>markets.
>
>Business-as-usual is no longer a viable option. 
>Food security will deteriorate further unless 
>leading countries can collectively mobilize to 
>stabilize population, restrict the use of grain 
>to produce automotive fuel, stabilize climate, 
>stabilize water tables and aquifers, protect 
>cropland, and conserve soils. Stabilizing 
>population is not simply a matter of providing 
>reproductive health care and family planning 
>services. It requires a worldwide effort to 
>eradicate poverty. Eliminating water shortages 
>depends on a global attempt to raise water 
>productivity similar to the effort launched a 
>half-century ago to raise land productivity, an 
>initiative that has nearly tripled the world 
>grain yield per hectare. None of these goals can 
>be achieved quickly, but progress toward all is 
>essential to restoring a semblance of food 
>security.
>
>This troubling situation is unlike any the world 
>has faced before. The challenge is not simply to 
>deal with a temporary rise in grain prices, as 
>in the past, but rather to quickly alter those 
>trends whose cumulative effects collectively 
>threaten the food security that is a hallmark of 
>civilization. If food security cannot be 
>restored quickly, social unrest and political 
>instability will spread and the number of 
>failing states will likely increase 
>dramatically, threatening the very stability of 
>civilization itself.
>
>#   #   #
>
>Lester R. Brown is President of the Earth Policy Institute.
>
>For more information, see Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing 
>to Save Civilization, available online for free 
>downloading.
>
>Data and additional resources at www.earthpolicy.org.
>
>For information contact:
>
>Media Contact:
>Reah Janise Kauffman
>Tel: (202) 496-9290 x 12
>E-mail: rjk (at) earthpolicy.org
>
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>Janet Larsen
>Tel: (202) 496-9290 x 14
>E-mail: jlarsen (at) earthpolicy.org
>
>Earth Policy Institute
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>Washington, DC  20036
>Web: www.earthpolicy.org
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