FEEDING A WORLD OF 9 BILLION

FEEDING A WORLD OF 9 BILLION


By Henrylito D. Tacio


Malthusian fears that population growth will outstrip food supplies have been widely dismissed as food production kept well ahead of growing human numbers in the last half century. But in recent years, experts are sounding the alarm of a possible food crisis. The reasons: climate change, forest denudation, land degradation, water shortage, livestock extinction, and destruction of coastal ecosystems.


The root cause of these problems: the ever burgeoning population. Between 1980 and 2000, global population rose from 4.4 billion to 6.1 billion and food production increased 50 percent. By 2050, the population is expected to reach 9 billion.


To keep up with the growth in human population, more food will have to be produced around the world over the next 50 years than has been during the past 10,000 years combined, said the participants of the recent UN-backed forum in Iceland on sustainable development.


At the 1996 World Food Summit political leaders from 186 countries pledged to halve the number of hungry people in the world by the year 2015. At that time, about 800 million people were reported to suffer from under-nourishment. Today, latest estimates from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) suggest that there are 854 million people who do not get enough to eat everyday. "Far from decreasing, the number of hungry people in the world is currently increasing," said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf.


For young children, the lack of food can be perilous since it retards their physical and mental development and threatens their very survival. In fact, some 5.6 million children die from hunger-related illness every year before their fifth birthday.


"This is unacceptable," deplored Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. "In a world overflowing with riches, hunger is inevitable. It is a violation of human rights. The right to food is a human right that protects the right of all human beings to live in dignity, free from hunger."


Hunger is even more inevitable as the world faces the threats of climate change. Experts have agreed that abnormal changes in air temperature and rainfall and the increasing frequency and intensity of drought and floods have long-term implications for the viability and productivity of world agro-ecosystems.


"Agriculture is the sector most affected by changes in climate patterns and will be increasingly vulnerable in the future," said FAO in a press statement. "Especially at risk are developing countries, which are highly dependent on agriculture and have fewer resources and options to combat damage from climate change."


Farming is most dependent on stable climate. "The most serious threats will not be occasional severe drought or heat wave but subtle temperature shifts during key periods in the crop's life cycle, as these are most disruptive to plants bred for optimal climatic conditions," wrote Danielle Nierenberg and Brian Halweil in a Worldwatch report.


In Asia, plant scientists have found that rising temperatures may reduce grain yields in the tropics by as much as 30 percent over the next 50 years.


"The best friend of earth of man is the tree," Frank Lloyd Wright once wrote. "When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources on the earth." Forests and trees offer a direct contribution to food supply and to nutritional well-being: provide a source of income necessary to purchase food; give protection to the resource base upon which food production depends; and provide a source of fuelwood to cook food.


To increase food production, an estimated 90 million hectares of new land "may be brought into agriculture in the developing countries," mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. "About half of this is likely to come from forests," FAO said in a report.


The FAO's State of the World's Forests 2007 reported that between 1990 to 2005, the world lost 3 per cent of its total forest area, an average decrease of some 0.2 per cent per year. Net forest loss is 7.3 million hectares per year or 20,000 hectares per day, equivalent to an area twice the size of Paris.


The denudation of the ecologically-fragile forests is causing erosion of the most valuable source of farming -- topsoil. The world loses the equivalent of five to seven million hectares of farmland through erosion each year. This is equivalent to the land area of Belgium and the Netherlands combined. A recent study by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded that approximately 30 per cent of the world's arable crop land has been abandoned because of severe soil erosion in the last 40 years.


It takes 200 to 1,000 years to form 2.5 centimeters of rich topsoil. But on the average, farmlands are losing 2.5 centimeters of topsoil every 16 years, or 17 times faster than it can be replaced. "Soil erosion is any nation's enemy - far worse than any outside enemy coming into a country and conquering it because it is an enemy you cannot see vividly," said Harold R. Watson, Ramon Magsaysay award-winning soil scientist. "It's a slow creeping enemy that soon possesses the land."


Some 40 percent of the world's agricultural land is seriously degraded. Among the worst affected regions are Central America, where 75 percent of land is infertile, Africa, where a fifth of soil is degraded, and Asia, where 11 percent is unsuitable for farming.


In the past, water – in the form of irrigation – had been a key factor in enabling the world to increase food production. Since Asia's agricultural revolution, the amount of land under irrigation has tripled. Today, about 40 percent of the world's food comes from the 18 percent of cropland that gets irrigation water.


But in most parts of the world, rivers are now running dry. "The Ganges and the Yellow river no longer flow," said Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the UN's Millennium Project. "There is so much silting up and water extraction upstream they are pretty stagnant."


Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of all water used globally, as much as 90 percent in many developing countries. To keep pace with the growing demand for food, it is estimated that 14 percent more freshwater will need to be withdrawn for agricultural purposes in the next 30 years.


Take the case of rice, the staple cereal of nearly half the world's total population. Current rice production systems consume a high amount of water. It takes about 3,000 liters of water to produce one kilogram of rice. Irrigated non-agriculture areas, which provide 75% of total Asian rice production, consume 50% of all freshwater diversions.


"This profligate usage of water in irrigated rice production is unsustainable, given the increasing demand for freshwater due to growth in rice demand and growing competition from other sectors," said Tumurdavaa Bayarsaihan, a senior agricultural economist at the Manila-based Asian Development Bank.


Nearly 2 billion people globally rely on livestock to meet part or all of their daily needs. "Livestock now meet 30 percent of total human needs for food and agricultural production, converting low-quality biomass, such as corn stalks and other crop residues, into high-quality milk and meat," wrote Danielle Nierenberg in another Worldwatch report.


In the coming years, meat consumption is expected to rise. The Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute estimates that by 2020, people in developing countries will consumer more than 36 kilograms of meat per person, twice as much as in the 1980s.


Unfortunately, important breeds of livestock are also fast disappearing. The Criolla Mora sheep, which can be traced back in 1548, are used for meat and wool and they are resistant to endoparasite infestation. Scientists are now uncertain how many remain – anywhere from 100 to 1,000 live in the Colombian highlands.


According to FAO's State of the World's Animal Genetic Resources report, at least one livestock breed a month has become extinct over the past seven years. Around 20 percent of the world's breeds of cattle, goats, pigs, horses and poultry are currently at risk of extinction. "Wise management of the world's animal genetic resources is of ever greater importance," said FAO Assistant Director-General Alexander Muller.


Jose Esquinas-Alcazar, Secretary of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, considers genetic resources as "the basis of food security." He compares the thousands of different breeds of crops and livestock to LEGO blocks: "Just as children a variety of different size and color blocks to build a building or castle, we also need all the little pieces of genetic diversity in agriculture to build food security."


Fish are the "last wild meal" in the human diet. For nearly one billion, mostly in Asia, fish supply 30 percent of protein; worldwide, the figure is just six percent. Yet, coastal and ocean fisheries - the largest harvest of a wild food source on the planet - are in serious trouble. According to recent study published in the prestigious Science, seafood will be all but a memory by 2048 if surging human populations keep devouring fish and polluting oceans at current rates.


"Species have been disappearing" faster and faster, said lead author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. "If the long-term trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within my lifetime."


"Collapse" is defined as the catch of a species dropping by 90 percent, said Worm, one of a group of ecologists and economists studying how marine biodiversity helps sustain humanity. Twenty-nine percent of fish and seafood species have collapsed already, Worm said. "It is a very clear trend, and it is accelerating."


According to FAO, only investment in agriculture – together with support for education and health—will turn this situation around. "Agriculture may have become a minor player in many industrialized economies, but it must play a starring role on the world stage if we are to bring down the curtain on hunger," it said.


Many studies have shown how agricultural growth reduces poverty and hunger. For example, the only group of countries to reduce hunger during the 1990s was the group in which the agriculture sector grew. FAO, looking back at the figures for the last 30 years, found that "those countries that have invested and continue to invest most in agriculture now experience the lowest levels of undernourishment." --###