The world is rapidly moving towards disaster; call it doomsday or apocalypse. I am not referring to the global financial crisis or the risk that financial problems in Greece, Ireland and other EU countries will drag the rest of the world down with them. No, I am talking about the global food situation. We are facing a global food shortage, the like of which the world has never seen and the world’s resources are insufficient to meet future food needs. How do I know that? Because I have been reading books, articles and blogs with titles such as “Agricultural Apocalypse 2010,” “The End of Food,” “Food Wars,” “Fearing Food,” “In Defense of Food” and many others who make every effort to bring Mr. Malthus, the philosopher who more than 200 years ago stated that world population would increase faster than food supply, thus resulting in mass starvation, back to life. One could argue that these publications are written by authors who are aware that exaggeration and sensationalizing get people’s attention. Books, that predict that the end of the world is nigh, sell.
But even serious scientists and international organizations are talking about the perfect storm of global food shortages. When global food prices increased rapidly during 2007 and the beginning of 2008, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) reported large increases in the number of undernourished people. FAO’s estimates of 100-170 million additional hungry people were quoted by other international organizations and newspapers worldwide. FAO’s admission that these estimates were very rough and subject to large errors was lost in the frenzy to quote them. When food prices fell dramatically during the last half of 2008, neither the news media nor book authors seemed to notice. Good news does not seem to be newsworthy. However, when the Russian wheat producers faced drought and production shortfalls, and speculators pushed up wheat prices on the futures market, the doomsayers were back in an instant. At the time of this writing, wheat prices are back down and the food apocalypse seems to have been put on hold again.
So what is the global food situation and is the world really headed towards a global food apocalypse? No, not really. However, large groups of people do not have access to sufficient food to meet their needs. Hunger and malnutrition contribute to the death of around 5 million preschool children every year. For them, the apocalypse is real but unfortunately, that is nothing new. Many more, although we do not know how many, survive but suffer from malnutrition and associated poverty and poor health. These real problems are not caused by the earth’s inability to produce the food needed but by lack of access on the part of poor people.
There is plenty of underutilized productive capacity to feed the present and expected future global population. The key questions are whether the natural resources that make up this capacity will be managed sustainably, whether food prices are high enough to cover the costs of expanding food production, whether the millions of poor people will get access to enough food and whether governments and international organizations will prioritize sustainable food production for all. More than two-thirds of the African farmers are net buyers of food. They cannot produce enough food to meet their own needs. Not because they are lazy and not because the productive capacity is absent. It is because they do not have access to credit, fertilizers, knowledge and high-yielding seeds that are resistant to insects and drought tolerant. They do not have access to markets where they can sell their products at prices that cover production costs. Their crop yields could be doubled or tripled. How do I know? Because it has been done in localities where the above problems have been solved.
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So, did I just join the doomsayers? No, because the problems I mention can be solved with enlightened policies and investments. The policy interventions needed will vary among countries and localities but three are likely to be very important in most settings: improved rural infrastructure (roads, irrigation facilities, and institutions), risk management policies to help farmers and consumers cope with expected large future production and price fluctuations caused in part by climate change and partly by adverse policies and agricultural research to expand yields, reduced unit-costs of production and assured sustainable use of natural resources. Triple wins, such as reduced soil degradation, increasing food production and escape from poverty are waiting to be realized in many developing countries. For example, access to fertilizers will reduce soil mining, increase yields and help poor farmers out of poverty. But this will only work if the farmer has access to credit and the infrastructure gives him access to markets without excessive transactions costs.
What will happen if efforts to expand food production in a sustainable manner are not made? The doomsday prophets will be right: Many more millions of children will die, natural resources will be destroyed and the world will face real food shortages. Will policy-makers respond in time? Must the challenges we face be exaggerated for them to pay attention? The global food crisis, that gave ammunition to the predictors of a food apocalypse, was a warning of what may happen when the food sector is ignored by policy makers. Unwarranted complacency is the doomsday prophet’s best friend.
Per Pinstrup-Andersen