How To Feed The World

Dr. Norman Borlaug, who helped create wheat strains in the 1960s that increased the production of farms throughout the world by ten fold, turned 90 last week. This "food hacker", and his fellow agricultural researchers, by launching the "Green Revolution", have done more to feed the world than anyone else before or since. He recently published an essay on the future of the world food supply entitled We can feed the world. Here's how.

Comments

make 10 times more food

[Anonymous Coward]

make 10 times more food and you'll have 10 times more people. Personally I think there is no moral obligation to turn every acre of land over to food production.

The food shortages in the world today have very little to do an overall lack of food.

Re:make 10 times more food

[eglamkowski]

Huh? Today, in 2004, the USA alone has the potential to grow more than enough food to feed every single person on the planet. The problem is one of distribution.

Distribution problems are 100% unrelated to destruction of wildlife and forest, either as cause or effect.

Re:make 10 times more food

[PainKilleR-CE]

make 10 times more food and you'll have 10 times more people.

However (and as was partially stated in the article), in countries with modern food production (which yeilded the 10-fold increase 50 years ago) population growth has generally levelled off to a sustaining rate, rather than increasing the population 10-fold.

Personally I think there is no moral obligation to turn every acre of land over to food production.

The moral obligation referred to in the article is that of reducing or maintaining the amount of land needed for food production in order to preserve as many acres of land not currently used for this purpose as possible. In other words, there is a moral obligation NOT to turn every acre of land over to food production.

The food shortages in the world today have very little to do an overall lack of food.

You're right, they have little to do with an overall lack of food, but rather with a localized lack of food in third world countries. Mexico, much of South America, and much of Africa are seeing more and more land cleared for farms because they do not have modern food production. They also aren't using proper crop rotations, so the land is losing most of its nutrients. In other worlds, areas in which people are already starving are also moving rapidly towards their own equivalent of the US' dust-bowl.

The US and other high-yield countries can continue sending food to these countries, or we can give them the means to use their own farmland to produce more food of their own. As long as they're not paying for the food we ship to them now (which most aren't), the long-term costs of improving their farming methods is significantly lower than sending them food every year. The added benefit is that better farm yields can lead to economic improvements, which lead to more imports of other goods and possibly, eventually, improvements in other areas of production within those countries, pulling them out of third world status.

Re:make 10 times more food

[eglamkowski]

All of them.

Even if we did send it, there's no guanatee it would reach those who need it. Look at Somalia. We tried and failed because local warlords wanted to control the distribution, and they absolutely did not want the US to get the food to everybody.

The problem, again, is distribution. Frequently for political reasons. If they would clean up their own politics so delivery was possible then we might just send more to them. But as long as their governments seek to control distribution for political reasons, there's just no point.

And it's not just Africa - look at Iraq or North Korea, where food was sent, but the leaders hoarded it and used it to reward loyalty and punish disloyalty. Food as a weapon! And you want we should just blindly send more food to such reigmes? I don't think so...

Re:make 10 times more food

[jonadab]

> and how many of the people starving in africa are you going to tell that we
> have the food we just don't send it?

It's true; we have extra food, more than we can possibly use. It sits around
and rots because the supermarkets don't buy it all up in time, and the food the
supermarkets do buy up, a significant portion of *that* sits there (mostly in
their back rooms, but sometimes out in the consumer areas even) until it rots,
because people don't buy it fast enough, and the food that people do buy, more
than half of it doesn't end up going into anyone's stomach, for one reason or
another -- it doesn't get prepared before it goes bad, or once it's prepared
there's more than enough and it doesn't all get put on a plate, or it does get
put on a plate but then it's not all eaten. The *poor* people in Ohio throw
away almost as much food as they eat, and that's just what gets all the way to
the consumer before it gets thrown out.

Restaurants waste even more food than supermarkets. School cafeterias,
*especially* college cafeterias, waste even more than restaurants.

We have plenty of food. More food than we know what to do with. Who do you
know who, if a clearly emaciated person obviously starving came to the door,
would *for lack of extra food* turn the person away? (Some people would turn
them away for other reasons (fear of criminal activity, annoyance at being
interrupted by a total stranger, a dislike for the poor, a worldview that
considers handouts not to be doing the recipient any favors, or cetera), but
here I'm talking about turning them away for lack of any food to spare.)

Further, there are lots of people in the USA who would be happy to donate
food, even purchase food just to donate it, for the warm fuzzy feelings they
get from it. When the public library offers "Food for Fines", wherein people
can pay their fines with the equivalent amount of food, which is then donated
to some community action group, people come out of the woodwork to pay off
fines that they've let stand for months or years. McDonald's would be
pleased (if they were approached correctly) to donate a hundred thousand
Extra Value Meals toward a Solving World Hunger initiative just for the PR
value, and they're not alone.

But shipping donated food to where the starving people are is less than
altogether practicable (much less practical). If the recipients can't afford
food, they *certainly* can't afford the international shipping. On a small
scale, the cost of the international shipping positively *dwarfs* the cost
of the food, so that you feel like you're mostly giving your money to the
shipping company, not to the starving people. On a large scale, the
ecconomics of the shipping would be somewhat less unfavourable, but getting
the scale large enough would almost certainly require government involvement
(which raises budget issues and can upset taxpayers) or a large corporation
(which by the time you consider shipping and organizational overhead can
probably get a larger PR kick by doing something domestically).) And the
problems don't stop when you drop the shipment of food onto the docks. The
starving people are mostly inland, and the transportation infrastructure is
somewhat less developed[1] than around here. So you're looking at probably
using choppers half the time... it gets expensive fast.

Then with any large-scale food import operation there's the issue of making
sure the starving people get to eat the food; in a lot of places this would
require a significant long-term military presence, lest the local thugs[2]
take the food to make feeding their armies a little easier. Of course, a
significant long-term military presence has serious political ramifications;
Various nations (mostly Europe) would not be keen to allow us to keep armed
forces all over Africa on a more-or-less permanent basis. They would make
a big deal publically abo

Uh...

[ichimunki]

Did he ever really answer the question?

All he seems to be doing in this essay is advocating that farmers use modern farming techniques (i.e. synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, mostly). So fine. That's not all that controversial is it? But how does that ensure that the food actually gets to people? How does that ensure efficient use of resources?

Where's the sensible criticism of the bizarre government involvement in the U.S. food supply? Why does he not take issue with price supports and all the other nonsense that makes a gallon of milk cost more here in the heart of dairyland than any two gallons of gas? Why does he not mention vegetarianism, which is far more energy efficient than processing vegetable matter through cows and chickens and pigs? Why does he not talk about the problems that foreign aid and the drug trade produce in many countries, where farmers find it more profitable to be on the dole or to grow drug crops than they do to grow food crops that could feed their coutnrymen?

If the answer were as simple as "use synthetic fertilizer and pesticides", don't you think we would have solved all of this by now?

Feed the world?

[TwistedGreen]

Can't the world feed itself?

The real problem with poverty and starvation can't be solved by sending a starving family your leftovers. Sending food their way is just going to alleviate hunger for a few days. This is a band-aid solution that simply isn't sustainable.

The real problem is infrastructure. When a country is constantly in a state of war, when its government is controlled by a dictator who doesn't give a damn about his people, there obviously isn't going to be enough food. People can sustain themselves if they are left alone: people can easily be self-sufficient. But when they are exploited and oppressed in the name of greed and lust for power, when the knowledge of how to be self-sufficient is obliterated, people starve.

We can't feed the world, but we can free the world to feed itself.

Providing more food may not be the answer

[glawrie]

The general observation that there is sufficient food to feed the current population, if only we could find a equitable way of distributing it, is one thing. But you need to factor in the impact of better food production on future demands too.

Recently there was a TV documentary in the UK to commemorate 20 years since the 'Band Aid' / 'Live Aid' events triggered by famines in Ethiopia. This insightful program (Ethiopia: A Journey with Michael Buerk) by the original reporter who broke news of the famine observed that prior to the famine, the country was able to feed itself (provided the rains came). Twenty years of food aid and the ensuing population explosion later, Ethiopia remains the largest receipient of food aid in Africa, and no longer can produce enough to feed itself even in a year with good rains. There is also apparently an increasing problem with fresh water supplies in the country.

So more food may be part of the answer, but simply providing more food to hungry people does not appear to be the solution. As always, it seems to be much more complex than that.