Growing population pressure and a diminishing resource base threaten food security in the coming century. No easy solution to increase food production are in sight since arable land resources are more or less exploited. Yields will have to be improved through modern agricultural technology and scientific innovations.
Never before in human history has our planet been so densely populated: more than 6 billion people live on Earth today and, even though birth rates are decreasing in most countries, 70-80 million people were added to our numbers in 1999 - 98 per cent of them in developing countries. Those of us born before 1950 are the first generation in human history to witness a doubling of world population.
Because nearly 40 per cent of the people in developing countries are under the age of 15 - in other words, still not in what demographers call the reproductive years - high absolute population growth will continue into the next century despite declining birth rates. The present international consensus is that in the next 30 years world population could swell to 8-9 billion, and then there might be 1 billion more added before population growth stops.
While the world has been changing over the last decade politically and economically in unexpected and remarkable ways, food security remains an unfulfilled dream for more than 800 million people - only about 10 per cent fewer than in 1970. What seems to be a small improvement should not go unappreciated, however, as about 1.5 billion people were added to the population of developing countries since 1970. There has been progress on a global scale - but not for all.
The World Food Summit in 1996 defined food security as "a situation in which all households have both physical and economic access to adequate food for all members, and where households are not at a risk of losing such access." There are three dimensions implicit in this definition: availability, stability, and access. Availability means that, on average, sufficient food supplies must be at hand to meet consumption needs. Stability refers to minimizing the probability that in difficult years or seasons, food consumption might fall below the critical minimum. Access draws attention to the fact that people can go hungry in the midst of plenty because they do not have the resources to produce or purchase the food they need.
Food security for the world as a whole is one thing. If we look at food security for individual nations, however, the picture is not as good. In most sub-Saharan African countries, for example, the situation is far from satisfactory. Food security can be even more problematic if measured for individual households, for we know that due to intra-household inequities, women and young girls can suffer despite a household being above the critical threshold.
As Nobel Price Laureate Amartya Sen once said in explaining his "entitlement" approach to food security: Hunger is almost always but never exclusively a consequence of the food quantity produced. Because deficits in food security stem from the combined effects of factors such as poverty, low levels of food production, and diminishing environmental quality, the best way to deal with the challenge lies in strategies that tackle all problems comprehensively. Poverty eradication is the most important objective to be achieved. In most cases, this means transforming local agriculture into a sector that generates employment and income for rural people, stimulates the non-farm sector and the overall economy, and increases food supply.
Poverty is linked not only to poor national economic performance but also to a political structure that renders poor people powerless. Hence policy matters of a general nature, and in particular good governance are of overriding importance for food security. The details of an appropriate development strategy will vary from country to country, but the "wheel" of sustainable development has already been invented. It may need adaptations and adjustments to different territories, but in comparison to the easily available basic knowledge with regard to the political, economic, social, and ecological essentials of sustainable development, these are minor issues.
Most experts believe we need to double food production in the developing world. Already the fact that a significantly higher number of human beings will have to be provided with food in adequate quantity and quality poses a number of political, economic, social, ecological, and technological problems. Two salient features of population growth will make it particularly difficult to achieve future successes on the food security front: urbanisation and polarisation.
First, the world is becoming more urbanised. People in cities are not able to feed themselves by subsistence food production, and their eating patterns differ from those of rural folk. The amount of high-value, transportable, and storable grain (such as rice and wheat), animal protein, and vegetables in their diets is higher, with a corresponding decrease in the proportion of traditional foodstuffs. Amongst other things, this requires an increase of agricultural production resources. Already today's 400 million or so subsistence farmers cannot feed the urban population of 1.5 billion; the 800 million subsistence farmers of the year 2025 will not possibly be able to feed 4 billion city-dwellers. This means that future food production will have to come from a dualistic agriculture. The subsistence sector will continue to support those living in rural areas, while modern agriculture and intensified production will have to supply the urban dwellers.
At the same time, while the number of people in the low-income groups is growing faster than world population in general, the share of income of the rich has been rising significantly. When people earn more they move up the food chain - they consume more livestock products, in other words, and the production of these products either requires more grain or absorbs arable land. Poverty also puts increased strain on food production: While absolute poverty has direct negative implications for human development, increasing economic disparities against a background of widespread poverty put the social fabric at risk. As Robert Kaplan has described convincingly, a disintegrating social fabric will have grave consequences not only for the environment, political stability, and the safeguarding of regional and national tranquility but also for food security.1
As there are no technical solutions to social and political problems, new agricultural technologies can only contribute one stone to a complex mosaic. But without yield-increasing innovations, world food security will not be attained. The plain fact is that the doubling of the developing world's food production has to be achieved
with less arable land;
with fewer non-renewable resources, such as phosphorus and potassium, that go into fertiliser;
with less water and a lower quality of whatever water is available; and
with fewer people and an older group working in the agricultural sector.
These challenges will not be met with a "business as usual" approach in the agriculture of developing countries. The yield increases of major food crops are at best stagnating, and they are declining in the areas where agriculture is most developed. If we do not come up with scientific and technological progress - and if we do not come up with it soon - we will see more hunger, more civil strife, and less human development.
The necessary production quantities to satisfy growing food demand will have to be achieved in developing countries themselves - imports from the "North" will remain the exception to the rule.
Developing countries must
produce food at home
An emphasis on domestically grown food is important for several reasons. For one thing, in developing countries agriculture is far more than just a supplier of food. In most of them it still provides 60-80 per cent of all gainful employment. Agriculture is a source of income not only for rural farm workers but also for those employed in related trades and small industries. Further, the pull of working the land has deterred people from migrating to already overcrowded cities. Rural development cannot take place without a flourishing agriculture. In the past, overall economic development through the sustained growth of industry and services has rarely proved possible without the secure foundation of agricultural growth.
Second, agriculture always means sustaining the landscape and caring about the environment too, in many cases protecting it against erosion. Moreover, agri "culture" is a constituent of the many-faceted cultural patrimony of the developing countries.
Third, meeting the food requirements of developing countries on an ongoing basis with surpluses from industrial countries would hardly be feasible logistically. A.F. McCalla has calculated that a doubled food demand will result in an increase in grain consumption (mainly wheat, rice, and maize) from today's 1.9 billion tons to 3.8 billion tons.2 Worldwide trade in these grains now amounts to around 200 million tons, or about 10 per cent of overall consumption. Even if the needed surpluses of wheat and maize, for example, could be grown in industrial nations without detriment to the environment, the problem of food security would still be far from settled. Increasing trade volume to the level that would suffice to supply just the 4 billion city-dwellers in developing countries, together with all the transport and storage facilities and the distribution channels that would be needed in the importing countries, would present practically insurmountable problems of logistics and organization.
A last argument for the validity of the assumption that developing countries must produce their food at home is the fact that little foreign exchange is available to pay for the necessary imports.
If we look at possible ways of raising food crop production to the needed levels, the three main sources of the future will be the same as in the past.
Arable land and possibly irrigation will have to be increased: There are still possibilities to put new land under the plough, but only in a few countries and at high financial and ecological cost.
The proportion of the arable land that is harvested - the cropping intensity - will have to rise: Cropping intensity will grow with the changeover from shifting cultivation to settled agriculture, as well as with the multiple harvests made possible by modern seed varieties and irrigation.
The yields from each unit of land harvested must be increased by intensifying production: Yield increases have been the most important source of expanded production increase over the past 20 years and will remain so in future. This can be illustrated with an example described by Norman Borlaug, the "Father" of the Green Revolution and Nobel Prize Laureate. In 1996, India produced on 100 million hectars more than 214 million tons of cereals, and the average yield per hectare was 2.14 tons. In 1961-63, the yield figure stood at 0.95 tons per hectare. If India were still using today the technology of the sixties, 225 million hectares of arable land would be needed - millions more than were available in 1961. In other words, if the yield per hectare had not doubled, achieving the results actually recorded in 1996 would have required a doubling of the land under cultivation today - an impossibility without destroying the last forests and other fragile ecosystems.
As resources are dwindling, securing the world's food supply in the next decades is going to depend crucially on yield-increasing innovations. A number of signs point to the great importance of biotechnology and gene technology in increasing future yields. Quantum leaps like those achieved through the Green Revolution are less likely in future, but most food experts today see the potential still to be high, and to be attainable mainly by closing the gap between the countries with the highest and the lowest yields and the yield gap within countries.
Avoiding ecological disaster
Developing countries faced with the formidable task of doubling their food output over the next 25 years must accomplish this - in contrast to the record in industrial countries - in ways sparing of the environment and resources. Population pressure has already begun to affect the environment in large parts of the developing world. Because of intensive land use and widespread biomass shortages, cultivated soils are being depleted of essential nutrients and organic matter. Fisheries, livestock, and forestry resources are also under increasing strain. Unless countries with high population growth start regenerating their resource base and achieve a sustained social transformation that results in a substantially lower birth rate, they will continue to move towards a major social and ecological disaster.
One main precondition for food security is a constructive political leadership that is responsive and responsible to the people and uses peaceful means in dealing with both internal conflicts and other governments. A second pillar upon which food security for a growing world population rests is a new dimension of solidarity between the "rich" and the "poor" of this world. Last but not least we will need new technologies, whether they are traditional Mendelian methods or the newer biotechnologies.
The next 25 years will be decisive in many respects - environmentally, demographically, and with regard to economic development. There is still time - and there is the knowledge as well as the financial resources - to reverse the social and ecological trends that threaten food security.
1 R.D.Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1994, pp.44 - 77.
2 A.F.Calla, Agriculture and Food Needs to 2025: Why We Should Be Concerned, Sir John Crawfod Lecture, CGIAR, Washington D.C., 27 Oct. 1994.
Dr. Klaus M. Leisinger is Executive Director of the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development in Basel, Switzerland and also serves as Professor of development sociology at the University of Basel. The above is the text of a lecture given at the International Symposium "The World Food Situation and the Improvement of Soil Fertility" in Bonn, May 18, 1999.
