The world food prospect

26

Long Range Planning Vol. 10

February 1977

The World Food Prospect* Lester

R. Brown-f

The global supply of food is now acting as a constraint on both population and economic growth. The worldwide scarcity of food in recent years has led to soaring food prices. These in turn have contributed to rising death rates in the lowest income countries and, through efforts to check inflation, a global slowdown in economic growth. Thus, food has become not only a limit to future world growth but a very visible indicator of declining human welfare. ln this paper the author demonstrates how the agricultural and nutritional advances of the last quarter century have ended on a resounding downbeat characterized by a falling fish catch, falling grain yields, increased infant mortality. falling food reserves, and price instability. Then he examines the way in which overpopulation, affluence inefficiency and political expediency have led virtually the entire world to heavy dependence on the North American breadbasket. Faced as we are with restraints on increased production-limited land, water, fuel, fertilizer, technology, capital, as well as ecological deterioration-one can only conclude that a vigorous global effort will be required to reverse the troublesome trends emerging during the seventies.

The Last Quarter a Downbeat

Century:

Ended on

The world food situation has deteriorated dramatically during the seventies. As it now enters the fourth year of precariously balanced food supplies, the world must at ’ least prepare for the possibility that the current situation may not be a temporary one. The slack appears to have gone out of the system, leaving the entire world in a highly vulnerable situation. The conditions under which the world’s farmers and fishermen will attempt to expand food output during the final quarter of this century will be far more difficult than those prevailing during most of the quarter century just ending. To understand where we are, and what problems lie ahead, it is important that we assess agriculture’s recent track record; history may or may not repeat itself, but the past does provide some clues to the future. ‘This paper was presented by the author at the ‘Limits to Growth’ Conference (1975). Woodlands, Texas. tfhe author is president of the Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC.

In 1950, outside of North America and Australia, ycr ca ita world food production was still well below that o P the prewar period. This was the result of the disruptions and devastation of World War II, the struggle of newly independent countries to get their economies organized, and the worldwide spread of medicines which lowered mortality rates. As the fifties progressed, unmanageable surpluses accumulated in the United States and the per capita production averages regained prewar levels everywhere except Asia and Latin America. In 1954 the United States launched the ‘Food for Peace Program’. As the sixties began, the population juggernaut was gaining momentum in the developing countries, while economic planners emphasized industrial development at the expense of agriculture. China began importing large quantities of grain in 1961, and a grim situation became even more so as India suffered consecutive monsoon failures in 1965 and 1966. The close brush with famine led to an adjustment in priorities and a strengthened emphasis on agricultural development in both fooddonor and recipient countries. The Green Revolution was launched in India, Pakistan, Turkey, Mexico, and the Philippines. Food production surged ahead, reversing the decline in per capita food output of the early sixties. India, accumulating a grain reserve of nearly nine million tons, teetered on the brink of cereal self-sufficiency following a doubling of its wheat harvest between 1965 and 1971. Mexico exported 10 per cent of its grain crop between 1965 and 1969. The Philippines became a modest exporter of rice during the late sixties. But the new seeds were simply buying time to get population growth under control, time which most countries failed to use wisely. As the seventies got under way, the food pendulum began to swing back. The leaf blight which struck the U.S. corn crop in 1970 underlined the recariously narrow genetic base on which major cerea P crops rest. The world had hardly recovered from this scare when it received another shock, in the form of massive, unprecedented grain purchases by the Soviet Union, which only a generation ago had been a major exporter. Meanwhile, a fertilizer shortage began to develop; the

The World Food Prospect latter had scarcely begun to make itself felt when the price of petroleum quadrupled, further hindering efforts to expand food production. Grain prices increased dramatically. Unstable markets have wrought havoc with foreign exchange budgets. Shortages of food have contributed to global doubledigit inflation and political instability. Governments in Ethiopia, Chad, Niger, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Ecuador have been rocked by public dissatisfaction with food policies. Reserve stocks have declined year by year, to the point where they are now measured in days rather than months. Measured in terms of consumption, we had 105 days of grain reserves in 1961; now we have only 31 days remaining, as shown in Table 1. Today the entire world is living hand to mouth, trying to make it from one harvest to the next. National leaders in rich and poor countries alike are becoming uneasy over future access to food supplies. The world fish catch, which had tripled between 1950 and 1970, not only ceased its dynamic growth, but turned downward several years in succession. Shattering the myth that the oceans were a limitless reservoir of food, this unanticipated reversal further increased pressure on land-based protein sources. In response to the above trends and events, 50 million acres of idled U.S. cro land were returned to production. But still supply Pagged behind demand. As less desirable lands were brought into cultivation, and tropical soils began deteriorating from over-exploitation, world grain yields began to decline for the first time: farmers were working harder but getting fewer bushels per acre.

27

How do these trends and developments in the world food economy translate in nutritional terms? From 1950 on through the early seventies the level and composition of diets improved for much of mankind, but the encouraging trends of the recent past have been reversed. Acute nutritional stress in many societies as a result of soaring world prices and a precipitous decline in the availability of food aid have led to a degree of nutritional stress unlike any that has been experienced for close to a generation. Life expectancy in almost all developing countries increased markedly between 1950 and the early seventies; during the mid-seventies, however, this trend has been reversed. Infant mortality has turned up sharply as a result of severe nutritional deficiencies. The discouraging thing is not that a great deal of progress was not made over the past quarter century, but that it has ended on such a downbeat. The problem is that many of the conditions that facihtated such progress have changed or disappeared. The crucial analytical question is whether the current situation is temporary, or whether it signals a fundamental shift in the world food economy, one which will be characterized by chronic scarcity and severe nutritional stress among low-income people wherever they are.

Increasing Dependence on the North American Breadbasket Prior to World War II, all geographic regions except Western Europe were net exporters. North America

Table 1. Index of World Food Security, 1961-76 Grain Equivalent of Idled U.S. Cropland

Reserves as Days of Annual Grain Consumption

Year

Reserve Stocks of Grain’

1961 1962 1963 1964

163 176 149 153

1966 1967 1968 1969

147 151 115 144 159

71 78 51 61 73

218 229 166 205 232

:: 59 71 85

1970 1971 1972 1973

188 168 130 148

71 41 78 24

259 209 209 172

89 71 69 55

1974 1975 1976

108 111 100

0 0

108 111 100

z: 31

Total Reserves

(million metric tons) 68 231 81 257 70 219 70 223

105 105 95 87

Source: Based on U.S. Depanment of Agriculture data and author’s estimates.

1 Based on carryover stocks of grain at beginning of crop year in individual countries for year shown. The USDA has recently expanded the coverage of reserve stocks to include importing as well as exporting countries, thus the reserve levers are slightly higher than those heretofore published. 2 Preliminary estimates by USDA.

28

Long Range

Planning

Vol. 10

Table 2. The changing

pattern

of world

Region

North America Latin America Western Europe E. Europe and U.S.S.R. Africa Asia Australia and N.Z.

1934-I

938

+5 +9 -24 +5 +1 +2 +3

February

1977

grain trade’ 1948-l

952

+23 -;: 0 -6 +3

1960

1970

(million metric tons) +56 +39 +4 0 -30 -25 +1 0 -5 -2 -37 -17 +12 +6

19762

+94 -3 -17 -25 -10 -47 +8

Source: Derived from FAO and USDA data and author’s estimates. ‘Plus sign indicates net exports; minus sign, net imports. 2Preliminary estimates of fiscal year data.

was not the only exporter nor even the leading one. All this has now changed. A measure of growing worldwide food deficits, grain exports from North America have doubled over the past decade, expanding to nearly 100 million tons. All but a handful of the 115 nations for which data are available are now net importers. Only Canada and the United States remain as significant exporters (Table 2). The reasons for growing dependence on North American food supplies are varied. They include rapid population growth in some countries, mostly in Latin America, Asia and Africa; affluence, which has increased demand for richer diets in the industrial countries and more recently in the OPEC countries; agricultural inefficiency and political expediency, which have resulted in increasing imports by the Soviet Union and other nations that have removed production incentives from the farming sector; and ecological deterioration of food-production systems as a result of poor management and over-exploitation, in the Sahel, in North Africa, on the Indian subcontinent and in the Andean countries. Overpopulation A comparison of North America and Latin America illustrates the devastating role of rapid population growth. As recently as 1950, North America and Latin America had roughly equal populations, 163 and 168 million respectively. The difference since then expIains much of the changing trade pattern. While North America’s population growth has slowed substantially since the late fifties, Latin America’s has escalated at an explosive rate. Several Latin American countries like Mexico, Venezuela, Peru and Brazil have annual population growth rates of 3 per cent or more, a rate which leads to a nineteenfold population increase within a century. If North America’s 1950 population had expanded at 3 per cent per year, it would now be 341 million rather than the actual 236 million. At current per capita consumption levels, those additional 10.5 million people would absorb virtually all exportable supplies and North America would be struggling to maintain selfsufficiency. Brazil, far from fulfilling

its much-vaunted

destiny

as a

major supplier of food for the world, is now a net grain importer, and if its current rate of population growth continues unabated, it will have to contend with a population larger than that of China and India combined well before this time in the next century: this, combined with fragile tropical soils, illiterate farmers, and a semi-feudal system of land tenure do not seem very promising indicators of Brazilian nutritional selfsufficiency, much less surplus production. Population pressures have also broken the agricultural strides of Green Revolution countries like India. the Philippines, Mexico, and Turkey, which after a period of improvement in the late sixties, succumbed to the need for everincreasing imports. The new seeds bought a little time to slow population growth, but that kind of time will not be bought so cheaply again (Figure 1).

Figure Jj7uence

The spread of affluence, from the small world elite of a few centuries ago to the average citizen in most of the world’s industrialized countries today, has resulted in greatly improved diets and a heavy demand on the earth’s food-producing system. The dramatic increase in consumption which is attributable to affluence can be seen most clearly in per capita annual grain consumption statistics: the poor people in Third World nations consume an average of 400 lb of grain yearly, while the more affluent Europeans, Americans, and Canadians consume nearly one ton of grain per year, mostly in the form of meat and dairy products. The people of the Third World would also like to enjoy such a rich and varied diet: to the extent that they can acquire the purchasing power, they are certain to increase the

The World demands placed upon the world’s food supply. The OPEC countries provide us with a recent and vivid example of how affluence translates into increased demand for food. The unprecedented accretion of wealth and purchasing power in oil-exporting countries over the past few years is now reflected in their expanding food imports. Not only is the increase in purchasing power a very sharp one, but the number of people involved also represents a substantial portion of world population. The 13 OPEC countries have a combined population of 268 million, nearly half of them in Indonesia. Market size aside, the level of food consumption, especially of high protein foods, among OPEC populations is modest. Given the relatively low consumption base, much of the new income and purchasing power will be spent on food. Given the arid nature and historical neglect of agriculture in most of these countries, any sharp increase in demand will have to be satisfied initially by imports. From a humane point of view, increasing the purchasing power of more than a quarter of a billion of the world’s lower-income people is unquestionably desirable. But from an analytical point of view, these claims on the world’s exportable food supplies are very steep and abrupt. In addition, they come at a time when there is little slack in the world farm economy. Japan is another case study on the im lications of affluence for world grain trade. lapan is Par and awav1 importing more the world’s largest -grain impo&&, than anv, other two countries combined. The reasons are obvious. The government is upgrading diets for a well-paid population equal to nearly half that of North America, yet squeezed into an area smaller than California. Agricrrltural ineficiency and political expediency Agricultural inefficiency, resulting from lack of incentives for farmers, inequitable systems of land tenure, ignorance of optimal farming practices, or unrealistic food policies, has impeded global efforts to expand food production. Another, similarly retarding factor has been political expediency, which has prompted governments to favor industry over agriculture, and the interests of vocal urban populations over those of rural food producers. These. factors are hampering efforts to achieve gains in food production in many of the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and are operating in some of the industrialized countries as well. The Soviet Union provides one example of how agricultural inefficiency and political expediency combine to undermine efforts at increasing food production. Soviet agriculture is hamstrung by some basic institutional inefficiencies. Collectivization has dampened individual incentive. Almost universal reliance on dual purpose breeds of livestock for milk and meat has resulted in production inefficiencies : the Soviet Union is using more grain yel- capita than the U.S. to provide fewer (‘jer cqita) pounds of meat for its consumers

29

Food Prospect

2ocKl r

Source: USDA

0

1960 Figure

’

!

’

’

’

1965

’

’

’

’

IPrelim. Est.)

’

1970

’

’

’

1 1975

2.

(see Figure 2). Despite great organizational efforts, and allocation of tremendous amounts of grain to the meatproducing sector, the Soviet system cannot provide comparable quantities of meat for its consumers, who now consume scarcely half the meat consumed by Americans and Canadians. This is where political expediency joins hands with agricultural ine&ciency. The Soviet decision to offset crop shortfalls with massive imports rather than via the more traditional method of belt-tightening by consumers is the single most destabilizing factor in the world food economy today, one which is enormously costly to consumers everywhere. The instabilitv derives not so much from the scale of Soviet grain cmports as from their erratic and secretive nature. The question now before the international community is how to reconcile the erratic need for imports with the urgent need to maintain some semblance of stability in the world grain market. As a result of these trends-overpopulation, affluence, inefficiency and political expediency-the world today is supported by food supplies from- North America. This dependence shows every indication of continuing to grow; the reasons vary but the tide is strong: no country of any significance has gone against this trend. Literally scores of countries have become major food importers, but not one has emerged as an important new exporter over the past quarter century. This rate of ever-growing dependence on North America by the rest of the world cannot continue for much longer. North America has doubled its grain exports within the past decade but the world should not count on a repeat performance during the next decade. Even at current levels of dependence, the United States and Canada find themselves restricting exports. Unless recent dependence trends are reversed, the need to restrict exports of grain from North America could become commonplace. In mid-July the Candian Wheat Board banned further exports of wheat until the 1975 harvest was in. Political pressures have forced the United States to limit exports of grain to the Soviet

30

Long Range Planning Vol. 10

February 1977

Union in the late summer of 1975. This pattern is beginning to repeat itself-first in 1972, then in 1974 and again in 1975-3 out of the past 4 years. It occurred in the latter two years despite the return of 50 million acres of idled cropland in the U.S. to production. In many ways the situation is analogous to a militarv one in which a general, seeing the”tide of battle going against him, decides to commit his fresh reserves in an e$ort to turn the tide. But, having done so, he discovers that the tide is still running against him. U.S. reserves of idled cropland have been thrown into the fray but are insuflicient to rebuild depleted world food stocks. The seriousness of the situation iscompounded by the increasingly formidable ecological and resource restraints on agricultural expansion. ,

I

Resource

Restraints

The most poignant aspect of the current agricultural situation is that all the basic resources needed to expand food production are in short supply. This contrasts sharply with most of the postwar period, during which energy was cheap, and there was more land than was needed to satisfy commercial demand for food. Water supplies were relatively abundant, and new irrigation projects were continually being launched. Fertilizer was cheap and during much of this period its real price-and the price of fuel as well-was declining. Unhappily, this situation no longer prevails; the basic resources used to produce food-land, water, energy, and fertilizer-are neither cheap nor abundant. From the prehistoric beginnings of agriculture until about 1950 the world growth in food output came largely from bringing new land under cultivation. The near doubling of production that has occurred since then has come principally from intensifying cultivation on the existing land area. Most of the good farm land is already under the plow. In fact, some parts of the world are actually losing existing cropland, either because of the claims of population growth and modernization-homes, schools, factories, roads, airports, and golf courses-or because land is being lost to soil erosion and desertification. The fact is, there is very little good land that can quickly and cheaply be brought into cultivation. In the future, the lack of fresh water may be an even greater constraint on efforts to increase food production than the scarcity of good land. The shortage of fresh water is already hampering efforts to expand the acrea e planted to high-yielding grain varieties in areas as fgar apart as Mexico and Afghanistan. The shortage of fresh water is also impeding Soviet efforts to expand production space with the growth in demand. Between 1950 and 1970 the world irrigated area expanded by nearly 3 per cent annually, a virtual explosion by historical standards. This growth is expected to drop to scarcely 1 per cent per year during the remainder of this century because there are no easy ways to continue to expand supplies of fresh water.

By 1970 most of the easy irrigation sites had been exploited. With few exceptions, those sites remaining will be far more complex and costly to develop. Any increase in cost or decline in availability of energy, the third basic food-producing resource, does not bode well for food-production prospects. The two principal, available techniques for expanding food production, the use of fertilizer and irrigation, are energy intensive. Expansion of irrigation is most often dependent on the pumping and lifting of enormous tonnages of water. Nitrogen fertilizer, a petroleum product, has escalated in price. Phosphate, another important fertilizer component, is exported principally by Morocco, which has quadrupled its selling price. Fertilizer exports from the industrial countries have been restricted in order to meet the needs of farmers at home. Farmers in the developing countries have not been able to obtain sufficient fertilizer supplies, producing a curious twist of affairs. In the sixties, technical assistance agencies worked hard to convince Third World farmers of the benefits of fertilizer. Now that those farmers are convinced, they cannot obtain the fertilizer supply that they were encouraged to expect. Because the cost of fertilizer is closely tied to the cost of energy, we cannot expect a return to cheap fertilizer. There seems little prospect of a return to cheap energy in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, in the industrial countries, diminishing returns on key agricultural inputs such as fertilizer and energy may severely constrain efforts to rapidly expand food output. In the early &&es, each additional pound of fertilizer in the American corn belt raised corn yields by 15-20 lb. Today an additional pound of fertilizer applied to the same corn field may yield only an additional 5 lb. The use of chemical fertilizer may be approaching saturation in some industrial countries.

Capital and Technology As it becomes more difficult to raise productivity through the further use of fertilizer, it is not altogether certain how farmers will attempt to raise yields. Further mechanization in developed countries seems to be out of the question: studies already show that more energy is expended planting and harvesting crops than is yielded in food energy. The diminishing returns on these key inputs also indicate that additional capital invested in agriculture to increase output will yield steadily diminishing returns. The returns on the heavy investment in Soviet agriculture over the past decade have been much lower than leadership had hoped. A basic question which must be examined is whether the returns on investment in agricultural research might not now be dimini&ng. Investment in this area, like any other, must eventually confront the law of dimiiishing returns. The question is not whether but when. When the prospect of these diminishing returns is combined with the problems of future capital formation, the hope for rapid production increase dims measurably. A study by the Securities and Exchange

The World Food Prospect Commission in the United States indicates a cumulative capital shortage between 1975 and 1985 in the United States of $500 billion. Capital formation problems in the developing countries will be even more acute. During the span from 1940 to 1970 not only were many new farm technologies developed-in plant genetics, animal nutrition, soil fertility, and equipment engineering-but they were quickly commercialized, contributing to dramatic production gains. Cows were bred to produce 50 quarts of milk daily; broiler chickens to produce a pound of weight for every two pounds of feed. Dwarf wheats capable of doubling yields were bred by Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug. But the pace of technical breakthroughs has slackened. U.S. soybean yields per acre have gone up scarcely 1 per cent per year, despite great efforts in that sector. Beef cows still produce only one calf per year, the same as when the first cattle were domesticated several thousand years ago. Efforts to raise productivity on arid and semi-arid lands have been disappointing. Corn yields attained on Midwestern experimental stations have been essentially static for roughly a decade. During this period the average yields attained by farmers have increased, steadily approaching the level attained on the experimental plots and reducing the gap in unused technology. In looking ahead to 1985 it is dif%cult to see any technological advances on the drawin board which will lead to quantum jumps in world I!ood output comparable to those associated with the h bridization of corn, the postwar increase in the use o Irchemical fertilizer or the high-yield grains of the Green Revolution. Agriculture can no longer look to the technological quick fix to ensure continued progress in food production.

Ecological Restraints There are two important ways in which agriculture affects the earth’s ecosystem. One is through the use of agricultural chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers. This relationship was dealt with very effectively by Rachel Carson in her book, Silent Spring. The second way in which agriculture affects the environment is through physical itresses, including over-grazing, deforestati&, soil erosion and abandonment, and the silting: of irrigation systems. These new and rapidly expar&ng phenomena are outlined in vivid detail in Losing Ground, a forthcoming book by my colleague at the Worldwatch Institute, Erik Eckholm. In many parts of the world, efforts to expand food output are beginning to put more pressure on food producing systems than they can withstand. The result is that food producing systems are actually being underminded by the pressures of growing demand. Some of the most graphic examples are to be found in oceanic fisheries. The cod catch in the North Atlantic, for example, reached nearly 2 million tons in 1968 and

31

has dropped to scarcely 1 million tons in the midseventies. The haddock catch peaked in 1965 and is now only a fraction of that level. The Peruvian anchovy catch peaked at just under 13 millions tons in 1970. For the last few years it has averaged only 5 million tons. The world fish catch has declined during the early seventies, being 8 per cent less in 1973 than in 1970. Food producing systems in much of Africa are under extreme stress. The doubling of human and livestock populations over the past 35 years has resulted in extensive over-grazing and deforestation in the Sahelian Zone on the southern fringe of the Sahara. The result is that the desert is moving southward, in some places at a rate of 30-miles per year. Although famine conditions in the Sahelian Zone countries are focusing attention on the southward movement of the Sahara, the desert is expanding northward as well, slowly pushing North African populations toward the Mediterranean. The Government of Algeria, recognizing the threat this poses to the country’s future, has mobilized its army in a multi-year effort to plant an East-West tree belt about 10 miles wide across the country just ahead of the desert, hopefully arresting its northward progress. The relationship between efforts to expand food and the ecological health of the food producing systems themselves are equally serious in the mountainous regions ofEast Africa, particularly in Ethiopia and Kenya. Again drought has brought the seriousness of the situation into sharp focus. By the time outside food relief reached severely affected areas in Ethiopia, a quarter of a million Ethiopians had died of starvation. Oceanic fisheries and African agriculture are not the only food systems experiencing severe ecological stress. I spent the latter part of 1956 living in villages in India. Since then I have been back perhaps a dozen times. To me, as an agriculturist, one of the most disturbing things I have seen during these repeated visits has been the progressive and accelerating deforestation of the Indian subcontinent. Anyone who has had even a basic agronomy course knows that given the topography of the subcontinent, deforestation will lead inevitably to an increase in the frequency and severity of flooding. During the late summer of 1973 we read of the worst flood in Pakistan’s history. In late August and early September of 1974, Eastern India and Bangladesh were affected by serious flooding. Crops were entirely destroyed in many locales. Given the trends in deforestation, particularly in Nepal and other Himalayan areas where most major rivers of the Indian subcontinent originate, we can expect that flooding will become an even more serious threat to food production prospects in the subcontinent than it has been to date. The net effect is that the capacity of a major food producing system, which now struggles to support 750 million people, will be impaired.

32

Long Range Planning Vol. 10

February 1977

One could go on at length describing the ecological deterioration of food systems in various other parts of the world, importantly Southeast Asia and Latin America. The situation is certain to get far worse before it begins to improve. The ecological undermining of food systems is now reaching the point where it is affecting world food supplies, prices and trade patterns. The available data on fishery yields indicates with some precision what can happen to food producing systems when the pressures of growing demand are excessive. Overall food production in some countries may parallel the situation in oceanic fisheries as the negative forces of over-grazing, deforestation, soil erosion, and silting of irrigation systems gain in scale and momentum. Efforts to expand food production may simply be overwhelmed by the ecological deterioration of local food systems in some countries, leading to a downward trend in overall food output. Given the lack of data, it is simply not possible to know in which countries and exactly when this might occur. Available evidence, such as it is, suggests some of the countries that must be closely watched for possible downturns in food production. Among these are El Salvador, Chad, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, and Indonesia. Whether or not such trends will develop we cannot say with certainty. We can say that the world is not prepared for this eventuality.

A Disturbing

Reversal

One of the most disturbing trends in the world food economy during the seventies has been the downturn in grain output per hectare (see Figure 3). This new trend shows up in data recently published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture which includes all grains, except rice, for which reliable worldwide yield data are not readily available. If the average world grain yield during the period from 1960 to 1975 is plotted as a 3 year sliding average in order to smooth out the fluctuations associated with weather, a disturbing trend emerges. From 1960 until 1972 this 3 year average increased each year but then in 1973 it turned downward, dropping further in 1974, and still further in 1975. The crucial question is why did this occur. Aside from weather, which may or may not have been a major factor, there are at least five factors which may have contributed to this downturn in world grain yields per acre. They are as follows: (1) The release for production of the SO million acres of idled cropland in the United States; most of it below average fertility. Addition of this marginal land to the global cropland base would almost certainly reduce the average yield; (2) The high cost and tight supply of energy; (3) The high cost and tight supply of fertilizer; (4) As population pressures build in countries where slash-and-burn agriculture is practised, including Nigeria, Zaire, Indonesia, Brazil and other tropical countries, the cycle is being shortened to the point that soils do not have time to regenerate fully, and (5) As population pressure

I

Source:USDA

Figure 3. builds in developing countries to the point where firewood needs exceed the regenerative capacity of local forests, more and more animal dung is being used for fuel, depriving soils of an essential source of nutrients. These are five factors that appear to have contributed to the downturn in world grain yields during the seventies. There may well be others. Among these five it is impossible to measure their individual contribution or indeed even rank them in order of importance. The critical question now is when will the upward trend resume and how vigorous will it be.

Climate

and Food

There is a pervasive tendency to attribute the decline in world food reserves during the seventies to bad weather but in fact weather is probably a rather minor factor since, at the global level, weather extremes tend to average out. There is also a strong tendency, particularly early in the crop year, to expect good crops throughout the world. In fact this is rarely the case. There are very few years in which there is not a poor crop in some major food producing area of the world. The Soviet Union averages a poor crop every 3rd or 4th year. India experiences a weak monsoon every 5 years or so, and sometimes two monsoon failures come in succession as during the summers of 1965 and 1966. China, too, has poor crops from time to time. The record of the past century shows that North American agriculture is subject to recurrent clusters of drought years. Poor crops and even crop failures in some parts of the world should be considered part of the landscape, something to be allowed for. There is a great deal of discussion and disagreement on whether or not global weather climatic patterns are changing, and particularly of whether the monsoon

The World belt is shifting southward. But on one thing there is a near consensus emerging, namely that the period from the mid-fifties until the early seventies was a period of uncommonly favorable weather for agriculture in North America. It is the only such period on record and it is not likely to be repeated. Rather what seems more likely is that weather will again fluctuate widely as it did during the late 19th and throughout the first half of the 20th century.

A G)obal Food Strategy: Guidelines for the Future The preceding pages chart some of the basic changes food economy-the new occurring in the world sources of global food insecurity, the growing dependence on North American food supplies, the scarcity of agricultural resources, the ecological deterioration of major food systems and the increasing difficulty of getting rapid increases in food output at reasonable the character of the world food prices. In addition, economy has been profoundly altered in recent years. Today national food economies are highly integrated and interdependent; it no longer makes sense to view food and agricultural policies in exclusively national terms. Decisions made within a given country may send shock waves through the entire food system. The quadrupling of phosphate rock prices by Morocco, the world’s leading source of that critically important fertilizer raw material, affects the cost of food production everywhere. Brazil’s failure to check population growth makes it a net grain importer rather than exporter, a drain on the world food economy. Soviet political leaders decide to offset crop shortfalls by importing rather than by reducing consumption, triggering price tremors which are felt around the world. OPEC hikes the price of petroleum and farmers everywhere pay the costs. The United States imposes an unannounced export embargo on soybeans, causing near panic in importing countries, like Japan. The integrated nature of the world food economy today derives in large part from the dependence of all countries on a few common sources of fertilizer, raw materials and energy fuels, and on common fisheries. In a world of deepening interdependencies, the sum of national food policies may not add up to anything approaching a rational global policy. If the total anticipated needs of all importing countries greatly exceed available export supplies, economic and political stresses will obviously follow. Short-term efforts by individual countries to expand food output through over-grazing or overfishing may result in long-term declines in food output. Overfishing increases the amount of protein available to a particular country in the short run, but, over the long run, it may completely destroy that source of protein for everyone. Thus the deepening interdependence of our world compels us to formulate a global food strategy.

Food Prospect

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objectives of such a strategy would be the restoration of some semblance of stability and security to the world food economy, the moderation of food price inflation and the improvement of nutrition and health of all mankind, ovemourished as well as undernourished. Stated positively, the objective would be to provide wholesome, reasonably priced food to all people regardless of where they live. The broad

Once agreement is reached on the broad objective, then the principal components of the strategy flow from it. My own policy recommendations are of course influenced by the analysis outlined in the preceding pages. In my opinion, the backbone of a global strategy should be worldwide effort to slow the growth in food demand. Without this slowdown, I fear that nothing can prevent recurring and increasingly unmanageable food crises. A global strategy to slow the growth of demand must include an all-out effort both to slow population growth, as some countries, industrial and developing, have already done, and to reduce overconsumption among all the world’s more affluent people. World population growth has begun to slow during the seventies, declining from 2 per cent annually in 1970 to an estimated 1.7 per cent in 1975. Most of the decline has come from declining birth rates but some of it reflects rising death rates in those low-income countries experiencing severe nutritional stress. Unless the world can move steadily toward a 1 per cent rate of population growth by 1985 it may be very difficult to achieve a satisfactory balance between food and people. Those countries with population growth rates of 3 per cent or more, such as Mexico, Nigeria and Algeria, should seek to halve their population growth rate by 1985, giving population policy a priority comparable to that accorded it by China. In terms of production, the most important component of a global strategy is agricultural reform in countries where agricultural output is lagging. The principal weakness of countries with poorly performing agricultural sectors is a tenuous or missing link between effort and reward for those actually working the land. This faulty structure, which exists in both industrial and developing countries, and which is found at both ends of the ideological spectrum, destroys incentive, weakens effort, and discourages the innovation that is the lifeblood of agricultural progress. Large state collective farms like those in Eastern Europe or feudal land distribution patterns like those in Latin America have the same effect. Both deaden initiative and retard progress. In .a11 too many countries, food-price policies are designed to pacify the more vocal urban constituencies, emphasizing ceiling prices rather than the floor prices needed to provide the producer with incentives to get agriculture moving. Catering to the short-term interest of urban groups may temporarily keep the political lid on, but it exerts further pressure on North American food supplies in the long run. In a world of

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February 1977

bounty and surfeit, such policies were tolerable, but in a world of more or less chronic scarcity, they only serve to inflate food prices the world over. Agricultural mismanagement, wherever it occurs, has become a luxury which the world can no longer afford. Food trends of the past few years suggest strongly that both the canital and technical manpower going into agriculture Bre inadequate. As industrial countries experience diminishing returns on expanded use of agricultural inputs such as fertilizer, and as developing countries are forced to use less fertile, less productive land, the resources allocated to agriculture must be increased accordingly. At a time when capital is scarce and capital formation increasingly stymied, mankind faces a Herculean challenge, A modest beginning has been made in this direction with the U.S. decision to step up its agricultural assistance and by the decision of the Rome Food Conference to establish an international investment fund. I

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Another cornerstone of a global food strategy is the creation of an international system of food reserves, one which will prevent wide fluctuations in food and feed prices, and the associated disruptive effects of recent years. Throughout most of the postwar period, food reserves were more than adequate and were largely the by-product of excess productive capacity. But today, with global food reserves measured in days of consumption rather than months, even a weather news bulletin can send price reverberations throughout the world food economy. Food assistance was once a major factor in international food trade, most of it coming from the United States. But U.S. aid levels have dropped from some 15 million

tons annually, during the late sixties, to 4 million tons in fiscal year 1975. Canadian initiatives at the food conference in Rome last November have put Canada in a leadership position and spurred other countries to do more, including the United States. The United States supported the resolution passed at Rome to raise total food assistance to 10 million tons. To this end the United States is planning to provide 6 million tons in fiscal year 1976. Food assistance can play a useful role in establishing a workable world order. It can be used both to cope with food emergency situations, thus avoiding extreme hardship and instabilities, and to transfer resources. Care must be exercised, however, that food aid does not become a substitute for agricultural reform and that it does not depress food prices below the incentive level within the recipient country. One way of avoiding this is to use the food as payment in public works projects that use otherwise unemployed people to construct farm-to-market roads, irrigation canals and ditches and to participate in land conservation projects, such as reforestation and terracing. In sum, it is clear that we are in a position of having to come to terms with negative trends-falling fish catch, falling grain yields, falling food reserves, the loss of cropland, increasingly expensive fuel and fertilizer-at the very same time that the causes of those negative trends remain unchecked. Unless population growth, overconsumption, overfishing and ecological deterioration are arrested, it will not be possible to maintain even the present quality of life. A very great deal more effort will be needed if decent living standards are to be extended to all the earth’s people.