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Food for all in a sustainable world: The IIASA food and agriculture program
326 FOOD PRODUCTION
Food for All in a Sustainable World: The I I A S A Food and Agriculture Program. IIASA Status Report SR-81-2. Kirit Parikh and Ferenc Rabar (Editors), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Schloss, Laxenburg, A-2361, Laxenburg, Austria, 1981, xiii + 250 pp., single copies available free of charge, ISBN 3-7045-0013-5.
This is a b o o k that people should be aware of, and which belongs in institutional libraries. But this is because of its purpose rather than its contents, and few people are likely to make it a prominent part of their libraries. Despite its title " F o o d for All in a Sustainable World", this b o o k is no popular explanation of h o w to meet the world's pressing food production and distribution problems. It is rather a summary of the presentations at the Status Report Conference of the F o o d and Agriculture Project of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), held in February 1981. As the interim report of a research project, it does not have the diversity of other multi-authored volumes, and it does not have the sense of integration of final reports of major projects. It does n o t resolve problems, and one can nit-pick every chapter in it to death. To review this b o o k is to review the IIASA project and, perhaps, the Institute itself. It is here that the considerable significance of this volume lies. IIASA is an international organization governed b y the Academies of Science (or equivalents) of 17 developed countries, East and West. Its purpose is to bring scientists together to work on complex problems of c o m m o n concern. Its F o o d and Agriculture Project was begun in 1977, with the view of examining the international food situation: production and trade; local, national, and international; economic, policy, and environmental. The basis adopted for the analysis was a general equilibrium economic model whose c o m p o n e n t pieces would be national econometric models feeding into an international trade model that linked and united the national models. Each model was to reflect the conditions that were most significant for the country in question, and each national model could accept a set of policy inputs that represented the instruments actually used in the country to regulate agriculture. Environmental factors could be treated as constraints on the reh source allocation system, as factors in the production function, or as any other appropriate mechanism. As a modeling exercise, the F o o d and Agriculture project appears to have had both successes and failures. Some of the national models are built and running, although the Status Report does n o t provide enough information to c o m m e n t on any of them. Others are still on the electronic drawing board. Of particular interest to readers of this journal is h o w the models link agriculture and environment. Only t w o of the national models (Sweden and Thailand) include environmental factors, and they do so in very different ways. In the first, weather is a specific exogenous variable, and the role of
327
fertilizers in the eutrophication of surface waters is considered. In the second, the c o u n t r y is considered in terms o f agricultural subregions, to underscore the different resource e n d o w m e n t s o f different parts of the country. Throughout the project, the notion of the environment in agriculture is restricted in ways that ignore some significant relationships. However, this is to be expected in a modeling exercise whose bases are primarily economic. Some of the national model descriptions include a statement of the concerns of the countries in question or the policy instruments available to the respective governments. Others do not. A b o u t half of the chapters in the b o o k are so specific to the F o o d and Agriculture Project that they have no utility b e y o n d the advisory committee meeting. The other half provide some useful insights into the nature of national and international food situations that either apply broadly to many countries or illustrate the difficulty of generalizing perceptions gained at the national level to the international scale. They also contain a great deal of useful information for people wishing to survey the available data bases or the state of the art of modeling national and international food systems. The volume itself is rather cryptic on these last points, but references are given to other work carried out at IIASA and other institutions, to allow follow-up. In addition, the project's 'grey literature' published by IIASA, is also listed. Unfortunately, the research papers produced by the project and published in the open literature are not listed. This b o o k is easier to nit-pick than to praise (as are all interim status reports!). It remains significant, however, in the way it illuminates the progress on a major project on the structure of world agriculture. We do not hear much these days a b o u t famine and crop failure. But world population is continuing to grow, and farming as the world's pre-eminent environmental activity is bringing new environmental and resource problems even as it solves old ones. We clearly need the kind of global planning tool that IIASA is working on. The IIASA project will continue through 1984. But this status report makes it clear that it will n o t be completed by 1984, at least not to the degree that would be most useful. Whether the project is completed by IIASA or by s o m e b o d y else, it represents a first step in addressing a significant world need. As much as its substantive insight into the IIASA project, this b o o k provides much food for thought a b o u t some of the key questions facing the 1980's: what kinds of tools do we really need to plan the development of national and international agriculture and food policy over the next 20 years? Who should develop the tools, and h o w can nations work together? H o w do we anticipate interrelationships among agricultural technologies, institutions, and environmental problems such as soil degradation or genetic vulnerability? W.B. C L A P H A M
Cleveland State University Cleveland, Ohio 44115 U.S.A.)
Food for All in a Sustainable World: The I I A S A Food and Agriculture Program. IIASA Status Report SR-81-2. Kirit Parikh and Ferenc Rabar (Editors), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Schloss, Laxenburg, A-2361, Laxenburg, Austria, 1981, xiii + 250 pp., single copies available free of charge, ISBN 3-7045-0013-5.
This is a b o o k that people should be aware of, and which belongs in institutional libraries. But this is because of its purpose rather than its contents, and few people are likely to make it a prominent part of their libraries. Despite its title " F o o d for All in a Sustainable World", this b o o k is no popular explanation of h o w to meet the world's pressing food production and distribution problems. It is rather a summary of the presentations at the Status Report Conference of the F o o d and Agriculture Project of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), held in February 1981. As the interim report of a research project, it does not have the diversity of other multi-authored volumes, and it does not have the sense of integration of final reports of major projects. It does n o t resolve problems, and one can nit-pick every chapter in it to death. To review this b o o k is to review the IIASA project and, perhaps, the Institute itself. It is here that the considerable significance of this volume lies. IIASA is an international organization governed b y the Academies of Science (or equivalents) of 17 developed countries, East and West. Its purpose is to bring scientists together to work on complex problems of c o m m o n concern. Its F o o d and Agriculture Project was begun in 1977, with the view of examining the international food situation: production and trade; local, national, and international; economic, policy, and environmental. The basis adopted for the analysis was a general equilibrium economic model whose c o m p o n e n t pieces would be national econometric models feeding into an international trade model that linked and united the national models. Each model was to reflect the conditions that were most significant for the country in question, and each national model could accept a set of policy inputs that represented the instruments actually used in the country to regulate agriculture. Environmental factors could be treated as constraints on the reh source allocation system, as factors in the production function, or as any other appropriate mechanism. As a modeling exercise, the F o o d and Agriculture project appears to have had both successes and failures. Some of the national models are built and running, although the Status Report does n o t provide enough information to c o m m e n t on any of them. Others are still on the electronic drawing board. Of particular interest to readers of this journal is h o w the models link agriculture and environment. Only t w o of the national models (Sweden and Thailand) include environmental factors, and they do so in very different ways. In the first, weather is a specific exogenous variable, and the role of
327
fertilizers in the eutrophication of surface waters is considered. In the second, the c o u n t r y is considered in terms o f agricultural subregions, to underscore the different resource e n d o w m e n t s o f different parts of the country. Throughout the project, the notion of the environment in agriculture is restricted in ways that ignore some significant relationships. However, this is to be expected in a modeling exercise whose bases are primarily economic. Some of the national model descriptions include a statement of the concerns of the countries in question or the policy instruments available to the respective governments. Others do not. A b o u t half of the chapters in the b o o k are so specific to the F o o d and Agriculture Project that they have no utility b e y o n d the advisory committee meeting. The other half provide some useful insights into the nature of national and international food situations that either apply broadly to many countries or illustrate the difficulty of generalizing perceptions gained at the national level to the international scale. They also contain a great deal of useful information for people wishing to survey the available data bases or the state of the art of modeling national and international food systems. The volume itself is rather cryptic on these last points, but references are given to other work carried out at IIASA and other institutions, to allow follow-up. In addition, the project's 'grey literature' published by IIASA, is also listed. Unfortunately, the research papers produced by the project and published in the open literature are not listed. This b o o k is easier to nit-pick than to praise (as are all interim status reports!). It remains significant, however, in the way it illuminates the progress on a major project on the structure of world agriculture. We do not hear much these days a b o u t famine and crop failure. But world population is continuing to grow, and farming as the world's pre-eminent environmental activity is bringing new environmental and resource problems even as it solves old ones. We clearly need the kind of global planning tool that IIASA is working on. The IIASA project will continue through 1984. But this status report makes it clear that it will n o t be completed by 1984, at least not to the degree that would be most useful. Whether the project is completed by IIASA or by s o m e b o d y else, it represents a first step in addressing a significant world need. As much as its substantive insight into the IIASA project, this b o o k provides much food for thought a b o u t some of the key questions facing the 1980's: what kinds of tools do we really need to plan the development of national and international agriculture and food policy over the next 20 years? Who should develop the tools, and h o w can nations work together? H o w do we anticipate interrelationships among agricultural technologies, institutions, and environmental problems such as soil degradation or genetic vulnerability? W.B. C L A P H A M
Cleveland State University Cleveland, Ohio 44115 U.S.A.)