Answering Questions about the World’s Food Supply

Hits:3029 2011-11-14

Bloomberg News Rising meat consumption is a major driver of overall demand in the food system, but no successful public policy has been devised that would reverse or brake the trend.
Many thanks to the dozens of readers who offered comments, criticisms and questions about my article in Sunday’s paper about the world’s food system. Below, I respond to a few questions that represent concerns raised by more than one reader.
Associated Press Norman Borlaug, a Green Revolution pioneer, with a wheat stalk in 1970.

Q：
How can you dismiss the environmental effects that the Green Revolution has had? The chemical and seed technology companies have a lot at stake in you believing that this is the only way to feed the world. Why aren’t people involved with farming without chemicals and biotechnology part of this conversation? There is certainly proof that organic can feed the world. Intensive agriculture depletes the soil, and do remember that there are as many obese people in the world as there are hungry, so we are obviously doing something wrong. In America we currently produce double the calories that each person needs. Hunger is not only about production, it is about distribution and politics.
Rachel Berger

A：
I do not dismiss the environmental effects. I take them seriously, and outlined them at some length in this blog post. It is beyond question that producing food for seven billion people has done massive damage to the planet, and that creating a more sustainable agriculture, even as we ramp up food production to meet rising demand, is one of the urgent challenges of our time. As you say, how food is distributed and how people eat — too much in some places, too little in others — are major issues, although they were beyond the scope of my recent article. I also agree with those readers who point out that food waste is a big issue.
But my reporting has not turned up “proof that organic can feed the world” — quite the contrary. Experts point out that organic production standards rule out the use of inorganic nitrogen fertilizer, and without added nitrogen, it would be mathematically impossible to feed the current world population, much less a future population of 10 billion. Vaclav Smil outlines the situation in this piece. Agronomists told me that the crucial task for them is to take as many good ideas as they can from organic agriculture and related movements and transfer those into the conventional food system. In my Sunday blog post, I discussed one attempt to do this, through a technique called conservation agriculture, but clearly more efforts are needed in this direction.

Q:
Perhaps the most significant unnamed driver of our looming food crisis is the massive use of grain, water, chemicals, and energy to produce meat and dairy products. For a start, please read the executive summary from the F.A.O.’s stunning report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow.”
Shams, Kensington, Calif.

A:
    Thanks for the link to what is indeed an interesting report. Several readers have raised the question of why I didn’t discuss the meat issue in my article. The point is well taken, in that rising meat consumption is a massive driver of demand in the food system. It is the reason China has a become a big importer of Brazilian soybeans, to cite just one among many examples of the environmental cost of meat. I dodged the subject in my piece partly because we have written so much about it in the Times over the years. But I avoided it for another reason, too. So far as I can determine, no one has come up with any public policy that would substantially lower the demand for meat and, at the same time, has a realistic prospect of being adopted.
    My analysis of this was influenced some years ago by a speech given in Des Moines by Sir Gordon Conway, then a senior scientific adviser to the British government. He started by acknowledging that lowering meat demand would ease many of the world’s food problems, but then he said, “I just don’t think it’s going to happen.” He pointed out that the world’s governments are likely to let consumer sovereignty prevail on this, as they have already for many decades, and the world’s consumers are not abandoning meat — they are moving in the other direction.
    It’s easy to see why politicians stay away from this topic. If they proposed policies that might actually reduce demand, such as high taxes on meat, they would probably get run out of town with pitchforks. Assuming the trend lines do not change, rising consumption of meat represents a demand on the food system that is going to have to be met, at least in the coming few decades. One can raise interesting speculations about the distant future; it really is hard to envision a planet of 10 billion people in the year 2100 eating the way that Americans eat today. I don’t really have a clue what happens between now and then; but take a look at Michael Specter’s recent New Yorker piece suggesting that we could wind up growing our meat in test tubes. In the meantime, if anybody has ideas for a public policy that can actually pass and would drastically curtail meat-eating, the floor is open for nominations.

Q:
I wonder if we, as a nation, have any sort of plan or strategy for how to deal with either the possibility of grain shortages here or the certainty of price spikes to come. Is anyone in Washington even thinking about this, or will we be left to what is euphemistically referred to as “market-based solutions,” i.e. price gouging, profiteering by speculators and growing domestic hunger?
Keith, Portland, Ore.

A:
    Keith, the experts I interviewed tend to agree with you that people in Washington need to be thinking not only about the national interest, but also about what constitutes ethical behavior in times of shortage. We are seeing the beginnings of this kind of thinking, but only the beginnings. During the price crisis in 2008, governments imposed export bans, essentially engaging in national hoarding that subsequent reports found had only worsened the situation. The year 2010 was not as bad, despite renewed price spikes, because the World Bank and other agencies leaned on governments to stay calm and not try to cut themselves off from the world market.
    Nowadays, many people are asking whether the world requires an emergency food stockpile beyond those that already exist in some countries, and how that would be managed and controlled. And how could the United States safeguard its interests — while recognizing that its grain exports are critical to food security for millions of people abroad?
Q.
    India’s wheat production this year has been largest to date. This fact doesn’t fit with your theory. How do you explain this?
Jagga, Chicago
A.
    Your argument reminds me of those who say, “A big snowstorm fell in my town last winter, therefore global warming must not be real.” Scientists say that what matters is the long-term trends for the planet as a whole, not what happened in a given location in a given year.
Q.
   What assurances do we have that the results of this work [on drought-resistant plants] will be freely available and remain in the public domain for all? For example it is not very hard to envision the more-than-likely scenario of a Monsanto or Bayer patenting a DNA sequence required to make a plant hardier to drought, applying the patent to both [genetically engineered and hybrid seeds] and demanding outrageous profit from a starving people.
RichWa, Banks, Ore.
A.
    There is indeed a possibility that patented innovations, like new drought-resistant seed varieties, will fail to reach many of the poor farmers who need them most because distribution to those farmers is unprofitable for companies. Yet much of the world’s most important crop-breeding research is still done in public institutions like the research centers on rice, wheat and corn that I mentioned in my article, and they make their work freely available to the world’s poor farmers. Also, interesting collaborations are starting to occur between public-spirited institutions like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and private entities like Monsanto, as I discussed in this blog post.
    As part of a Gates-financed project, Monsanto has donated a genetically engineered drought-tolerant corn for use by farmers in Africa, and many expect that this sort of thing will become more common in the future. A good comparison here might be the drug companies’ initial reluctance to make AIDS drugs available at low prices in poor countries. That eventually changed, as a result of activism by watchdog groups.
Q.
    Too many people. Family planning is the only answer.
Scientella, Northern California
A.
    You and many other readers wrote in to point out that the population explosion receives relatively little discussion. How far could the population growth curve be bent if the global community put more energy and money into family-planning programs and education for girls? Many policy experts believe it could be bent quite a lot. To all those readers who wonder why I didn’t discuss this in the food piece, it was simply beyond the scope of that article, which was meant to focus tightly on climate change and the future food supply.
    I was not saying that the population issue is unimportant. In fact, my colleague Celia W. Dugger and I collaborated on a front-page article about the population problem in the newspaper a few weeks ago, and we discussed the potential role of family-planning programs in some detail in a subsequent blog post. Other coverage on this issue is planned in The Times in coming weeks and months.