Safe And Secure: Feeding 9 Billion People
7 April 2010 Crop protection companies must address infrastructure in Africa and other developing countries if they want to be part of the world’s food security solution.
Food At Risk
A panel of experts at the Global Food Safety Conference in Washington, DC discussed food safety in early February. Experts from The World Bank, JohnsonDiversey, NSF-CMi and Cornell University analyzed survey responses from industry professionals in 53 different countries. Participants agreed that the top three food safety issues facing the world in 2020 would be biological risk, problems in the supply chain and contaminants. The threat of intentional food safety incidents was also a fear, as well as accidental incidents.
“Safe food will be a major economic and political threat for international security,” said moderator Serban Teodoresco, president of Preventa.
Challenges
Trying to answer the question of how to feed the projected global population of 9 billion people in 2050, a panel of experts hosted by CropLife International, Council on Agriculture Science and Technology, and Biotechnology Industry Organization was held in Washington, DC at the end of February. Experts from the US and EU spoke to a live audience of hundreds and an online following of more than 35,000 people. The panel agreed that genetically modified (GM) crops would have to play a role to increase yields on limited cropland, as well as grow food in areas plagued by drought, cold, heavy flooding, poor soil, or disease or insect infestation. Agricultural education, lacking in much of the world, prevents the acceptance of biotechnology and the ability to properly use modern agricultural equipment and advances in seed and ag inputs.
The challenges expected to face agriculture in 2050 were determined to be: the expected population load of an additional 3 billion people; climate change; the use and availability of potable water; and the diversion of crops to energy, such as biofuels, and feed for livestock. “It takes five to 10 times as much grain to make a pound of meat than a pound of you,” said Dr. Nina V. Federoff, science and technology adviser to the US Secretary of State and to the administrator of US Agency for International Development.
Infractructure And Politics
The two largest issues contributing to food insecurity, agreed the panel, are politics and infrastructure. The lack of rural roads in most of Africa is one of the largest barriers to transporting food and building processing plants. Farm-to-market roads, the land-grant concept and university extensions built in the US changed agriculture in that country, the panel said, stressing the need for similar changes in Africa. “Without infrastructure, you go back to subsistence agriculture,” said Dr. Calestous Juma, Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor. “People only grow what they can use because they can’t move it.”
Robert Paarlberg, author of “Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa,” agreed, blaming the lack of roads for the general lack of modern agriculture in the region. “Smallholder farmers do not have access to nitrogen fertilizers, irrigation or improved seeds,” he said. “They’re stuck with farming technologies that give yields one-tenth as high as yields in the industrialized world.”
This lack of infrastructure, as well as the opposition to GM crops, falls into the realm of politics. “Political barriers to modern science in agriculture” are preventing a green revolution in countries such as India, said Federoff. She explained that the amount of arable land around the world hasn’t changed in more than 50 years; therefore, maximizing yield through GM crops is necessary for producing the amount of food 9 billion people will need to survive.
“There’s a 70-20-10 rule,” said The World Bank’s John Lamb at the Global Food Safety conference. “Only 10% of productive land is going to come from continued expansion of the ag frontier; 20% from intensification on the land that’s already being used, and 70% has to come from innovations.”
The Road To Security
The Council for Agricultural Science and Technology report studies four regions, said lead author Dr. Gale Buchanan. China and India were studied because of their booming populations; Brazil, the “largest country with untapped potential for agriculture,” and sub-Saharan Africa, with its fragile economies and governments, where people live the closest to starvation.
Wellesley College Professor and Harvard University Associate Paarlberg said that in 1994, it was predicted that China would “starve the world” due to its high import demands. “But Chinese ag has responded,” said Paarlberg. “Production of wheat, corn and rice [has increased], and China is now a net exporter. The country has a modest land base compared to its population, but advances have made up for it.”
In addition to growing enough food to feed the world’s burgeoning population — and making sure the food safely gets to where it’s needed — farmers also need to grow food without depleting soil nutrients or harming the environment. When Federoff recited the idiom, “If you give a man a fish, you’ll feed him for a day, but if you teach him to fish, you’ll feed him for a lifetime,” former USDA Under-Secretary Buchanan added his own spin. “If you give a man a fish, he’ll get one meal out of it. If you teach him to fish, he’ll fish until all the fish are gone from the pond. But if you teach him to grow fish sustainably — well, then you’re OK.”
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