Archaeological records show that the domestication of plants for human consumption dates back to 14,000 B.C. The development of agriculture was the catalyst for the transition from nomadic tribes to civilization as we know it. As productivity of local resources improved, villages sprung up, but it wasn’t until after the establishment of the Roman Empire in the first century B.C. that trade between communities was common. Trade routes developed, and areas no longer had to rely solely on goods that were able to be grown locally. By roughly 350 A.D., the Roman Empire was facing a food crisis, as wealthy merchants capitalized on an opportunity to hoard food supplies and resell it at higher prices. The difficulties of supply and demand, heavily influenced by political motivation and a growing population, had been born.
More than 1,000 years later, in 1798, English economist Thomas Malthus proposed a theory to explain this relationship, in his Essay on the Principle of Population. In it he argues that while population increases geometrically, the food supply increases arithmetically. In other words, population always surpasses the food supply, and therefore poverty and social unrest are inevitable. The Malthusian viewpoint grew increasingly controversial over the next century, though it was very influential in the early years of classical economics, when death rates from famines, disease and war were significantly higher than today. Malthusian projections went out of favor in the 20th century, as medicine and public health cut down the number of deaths and technology helped improve living standards and life expectancies.
Despite this, Malthusian ideas still resonate. As recent history shows, however, it’s less that population absolutely surpasses food supply, and more that supply is distributed unevenly. The 20th century saw several large-scale famines that occurred as a direct result of food shortages in one region while overall global production was flourishing. In the 1930’s, an estimated 7.5 million people died in Ukraine, a period known as the Holodomor, which some scholars regard a genocide inititated by Joseph Stalin. Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” resulted in a massive Chinese famine from 1958 to 1962, in which as many as 45 million people died. Nearly a million people died in North Korea in the 1990’s due to a food crisis there.
In recent years, food shortages have occurred in several regions around the world leading to riots and disorder. The Food and Agriculture Organization (F.A.O.) of the United Nations, however, estimates that there is enough food produced to meet the caloric requirements of the global population. The number of calories available has, in fact, increased continuously since 1970 and is on track to do so until at least 2050. It’s the uneven distribution of these calories that is responsible for the unprecedented crisis that the food industry faces in the 21st century. An estimated 30 to 50 percent of food produced globally rots away uneaten. One reason for this excess, perhaps, is the Green Revolution, a period of intense research and development of new technological tools meant to increase agricultural yield that began in the 1960’s.
The goal of the Green Revolution was to produce more food through energy-intensive farming. This involved the increased use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and the use of hybridized seeds. The most notable hybrid strains that took root were maize and grain sorghum, while crossbreeding resulted in the increased production of rice and wheat.
Norman E. Borlaug (1914–2009), an American plant scientist and recipient of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, is generally considered the father of the Green Revolution—a title he called “a miserable term.” Borlaug led the experimentation of breeding high-yield crop varieties, working primarily in developing countries that were food deficient.
The new seeds developed by Borlaug and his colleagues were engineered to absorb more fertilizer and water. By the late 1940’s, researchers had learned that yield could be increased with the use of nitrogen-rich fertilizer. Borlaug’s genitically modified (GM) seeds, when given large amounts of this fertilizer, produced enormous heads of grain. Wheat output could be tripled or even quadrupled on the same amount of land. Mexico adopted the breeding program whole-heartedly, and by the mid-1960’s India, which had been importing the majority of its grain, began ordering shiploads of Borlaug’s seeds from Mexico. Between 1961 and 1990 wheat yields rose at nearly 3 percent per year, enabling these countries to become major players in the global agricultural market.
Times focus
A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself
By JUSTIN GILLIS
The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.
Consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories—wheat, rice, corn and soybeans—has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels. The imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in two huge spikes in international grain prices since 2007, with some grains more than doubling in cost.
Those price jumps, though felt only moderately in the West, have worsened hunger for tens of millions of poor people, destabilizing politics in scores of countries, from Mexico to Uzbekistan to Yemen. The Haitian government was ousted in 2008 amid food riots, and anger over high prices has played a role in the recent Arab uprisings.
Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change.
Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia, and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.
Experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand. And they need to do it while reducing the considerable environmental damage caused by the business of agriculture.
Agronomists emphasize that the situation is far from hopeless. Examples are already available, from the deserts of Mexico to the rice paddies of India, to show that it may be possible to make agriculture more productive and more resilient in the face of climate change. Farmers have achieved huge gains in output in the past, and rising prices are a powerful incentive to do so again.
But new crop varieties and new techniques are required, far beyond those available now, scientists said. Despite the urgent need, they added, promised financing has been slow to materialize, much of the necessary work has yet to begin and, once it does, it is likely to take decades to bear results.
When Norman E. Borlaug, a young American agronomist, began working in Mexico the 1940’s under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Yaqui Valley farmers embraced him. His successes as a breeder helped farmers raise Mexico’s wheat output sixfold. In the 1960’s, Dr. Borlaug spread his approach to India and Pakistan, where mass starvation was feared. Output soared there, too.
Other countries joined the Green Revolution, and food production outstripped population growth through the latter half of the 20th century. In the late 1980’s, food production seemed under control. Governments and foundations began to cut back on agricultural research, or to redirect money into the problems created by intensive farming, like environmental damage. Over a 20-year period, Western aid for agricultural development in poor countries fell by almost half, with some of the world’s most important research centers suffering mass layoffs.
Output continued to rise, but because fewer innovations were reaching farmers, the growth rate slowed. That lull occurred just as food and feed demand was starting to take off, thanks in part to rising affluence across much of Asia. Millions of people added meat and dairy products to their diets, requiring considerable grain to produce. Other factors contributed to demand, including a policy of converting much of the American corn crop into ethanol.
In 2007 and 2008, with grain stockpiles low, prices doubled and in some cases tripled. Whole countries began hoarding food, and panic buying ensued in some markets, notably for rice. Food riots broke out in more than 30 countries.
Forty years ago, a third of the population in the developing world was undernourished. By the tail end of the Green Revolution, in the mid-1990’s, the share had fallen below 20 percent, and the absolute number of hungry people dipped below 800 million for the first time in modern history.
But the recent price spikes have helped cause the largest increases in world hunger in decades. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated the number of hungry people at 925 million last year, and the number is expected to be higher when a fresh estimate is completed this year. The World Bank says the figure could be as high as 940 million.
Dr. Borlaug’s latest successor, Hans-Joachim Braun, recently outlined the challenges facing the world’s farmers. On top of the weather disasters, he said, booming cities are chewing up agricultural land and competing with farmers for water. In some of the world’s breadbaskets, farmers have achieved high output only by pumping groundwater much faster than nature can replenish it.
The positive effects Borlaug’s seeds had on the developing world cannot be understated, though the effects were not all positive. The farming systems that were developed during the Green Revolution require heavy irrigation, and aren’t as effective in regions with water shortages. During the 1960’s, local strains were abandoned as farmers opted for GM seeds, and agricultural biodiversity was considerably lessened as a result. According to the U.N., genetic diversity in food crops was diminished by 75 percent in the 20th century. Because GM seeds required massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides, demand and prices rose accordingly, and by 2010 the price of fertilizer was higher than the price of wheat.
According to a 2010 report released by the Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, 81 percent of all soybeans, 64 percent of all cotton, and 29 percent of all corn produced globally was grown from GM seeds. At the beginning of the 21st century, concerns about of the harmful nutritional and environmental effects of fertilizers and pesticides necessary to GM seeds had begun to mount.
One response to the growing prevalence of modified foods has been the nascent organic foods movement, in which no artificial pesticides or chemicals are used in the production of foods or in feeding livestock. While the popularity of organic agricultural products continues to increase in developed nations—in the U.S. sales of organic food increased 7.7 percent from 2009 to 2010 alone—scientists are still uncertain whether organic agriculture and traditional methods can meet global food needs.
World population has been growing steadily since the Industrial Revolution, with higher standards of living and advances in technology and medicine that eradicated diseases and allowed people to live longer. World population increased more rapidly than ever before in the second half of the 20th century. In 1999, global population reached 6 billion, and in 2011 the U.N. released a report that projected global population would soon pass 7 billion. The same report predicted that population would surpass 9 billion by mid-century, and 10 billion by 2100. If there’s going to be enough food to feed all 9 billion by 2050, according to the F.A.O., net investments of $83 billion must be made in agriculture each year—an increase of 50 percent from current global agricultural spending. This is further complicated by the increasing demand for agricultural resources for bioenergy, the declining amount of rural land as developing nations move toward industrialization, and the yet-to-be-determined effects of climate change.
Corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans amount to 75 percent of global food production, and total global agricultural exports rose nearly 200 percent from 1990 to 2008. In 2009, India led global production of rice, with 29 percent of all rice farmed, followed by Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. China led global production of wheat, at 17 percent, followed by India, Russia, and the U.S. The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of corn, amounting to 41 percent of global output, followed by China, Brazil, and Mexico. The U.S. also produces approximately 40 percent of world’s soybeans. Small-scale political or environmental change in these countries, then, can have large-scale effects on the global food supply, especially in countries where small amounts of these commodities are produced
locally. This was seen in 2008, when India stockpiled its rice supply by instituting a ban on export, triggering a global rice crisis, or in 2010 when Russia instituted a ban on wheat exports. Some researchers predict that commodity prices could fall by as much as 57 percent if all countries were more open to trade.
One important factor affecting the global food supply in recent years is the increasing demand for biofuels, primarily corn-based ethanol. In 2008, the E.U. passed a regulation requiring cars in all 27 member states to use at least a 10 percent ethanol blend gasoline. China had a similar goal of 15 percent. In 2005, President Bush announced the amount of ethanol used in motor fuels would be doubled to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. With gas prices high, a 10 percent ethanol dilution comes as a bit of a relief. Yet some believe that the costs of ethanol production outweigh the benefits; in 2007, corn prices were 50 percent higher than in the previous year. The rising cost of corn for animal feed also results in the higher cost of meat and dairy. In 2011, amid mounting political and economic pressure for spending cuts, the U.S. Congress voted to end tax cuts and trade protection that benefit the corn-based ethanol industry.
Another major factor in the changing global food supply is livestock production, which since the 1980’s has far outstripped that of cereals. In 1961, the world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons. By 2007, it had reached nearly 285 million tons, and per capita consumption had more than doubled. Meat consumption rose twice as fast in the developing world; in China, for example, meat consumption more than doubled between 1980 and 2005. Americans eat roughly eight ounces of meat a day per capita, roughly twice the global average. To meet this increasing demand, in the second half of the 20th century, traditional methods of livestock production were abandoned in favor of “factory farms.” In terms of efficiency, these assembly-line meat and dairy factories far exceed traditional methods. Yet industry experts in developed countries have begun to question the cost of factory-farming livestock, given the enormous amounts of energy (including feed grain) required, concerns of animal welfare, and the increased pollution of water supplies, and greenhouse gas emissions. According to the F.A.O., livestock production generates 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than transportation.
In 2010 the Food and Agriculture Organization (F.A.O.) of the United Nations estimated that there were 925 million undernourished people in the world—16 percent of the population of developing nations. “Undernourished” or “chronically hungry” is defined by the U.N. as anyone who regularly goes without the 1,800 calories per day, considered the minimum average energy intake. In 2009 there were more than 1 billion undernourished people.
Most of the decrease was in Asia (with 80 million fewer people hungry), and in sub-Saharan Africa (with 12 million fewer). Despite the modest decline, the actual number of undernourished or hungry people in the world was higher in 2010 than it was before the recession of 2008–09. In 2010 the U.N. reported that 22 nations were facing a protracted food crises—classified as such if a country reports a food crisis for at least eight years, and receives more than 10 percent of its foreign assistance in the form of humanitarian relief. These countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Tajikistan, North Korea, and 17 African countries, require targeted assistance but also longer-term tools such as school meals and food-for-work programs.
The United Nations World Food Programme (W.F.P.) is the world’s largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide. It was initiated in 1961, about the same time as the Green Revolution took hold. In 2011 the agency intended to reach more than 90 million people with food assistance in more than 70 countries. The W.F.P. also works toward emergency preparation and in rebuilding efforts with the goal of countries maintaining agricultural independence even in the face of disaster. In 2009 the W.F.P. was able to provide food and nutrition assistance for nearly 102 million people affected by conflict, financial crises, storms, droughts, and displacement. Much of this assistance is in the form of micronutrient powders or high-energy bars that enhance other food available regionally. The number of children under five, nursing mothers, and pregnant women who received fortified food rations doubled from 2008 to 2009. In 2008 the W.F.P. launched the Purchase for Progress program, through which the agency purchases staple crops directly from farmers’ organizations in developing nations.