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Running on Empty
Technology is
our only hope to meet global food demand, which will at least
double over the next 40 years.
by:
Wes Ishmael |
With one in six
people going hungry, one child dying every six seconds, and 80
percent of Sub-Saharan African countries facing higher food
prices than a year ago, the poor and the hungry are facing one
of the biggest crises in our lifetimes,” said Josette Sheeran,
Executive Director of the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP)
at a meeting of G8 nations in June. The G8 consists of the U.S.,
United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy, France and
Russia.
“It is critical for the world to remember that hunger will have
a permanent impact on children and we may lose a generation
unless they have adequate access to nutrition during this
crisis,” Sheeran warned.
All told, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization
estimates there are 963 million hungry people in the world, most
in developing nations.
It’s not like agricultural production has been a slacker. Even
with roughly 1 billion more people in the world than in 1996,
there’s more than enough food for everyone.
The root cause of so many doing without revolves around poverty,
too many people with too little money and infrastructure to
access the abundance.
Recent tough economic times have made it worse, especially in
developing countries where 1.2 billion people live in poverty
and 780 million suffer from chronic hunger, according to WFP
statistics.
Even in well-heeled developed countries, though, today’s
abundance is not assured as tomorrow’s birthright.
“The world faces the largest humanitarian food challenge in its
history,” says Alex Avery, Director of Research and Education
with the Center for Global Food Issues at Hudson Institute.
“Over the next 40 years world food demand will at least double,
and we have little new farm lands with which to meet that
demand. We really have only more productive farming methods to
use on our existing farm lands.”
Part of that demand growth comes from the burgeoning world
population. But Avery explained at last fall’s Beef Quality
Summit that the global population is expected to peak at 8.5-9.5
billion people by 2050—the current world population is 6.8
billion. Fertility rates are already below population
replacement levels in the developed world.
Much of the explosion in food demand will come from expanding
global wealth, the ability of more people to access more food
and richer diets.
The current global recession, notwithstanding, Avery explains
Chinese meat consumption has doubled in the last 15 years,
though they still consume less than half the animal protein of
consumers in North America.
“All projections indicate Chinese meat consumption will double
again,” Avery says. That’s just China, albeit the most populated
nation in the world. In other advancing nations such as
India—expected to have a larger population than China in several
years—the story is much the same.
Multiple Growth—Limited Options
So, the growing global population and its expanding affluence
will test the limits of modern, high-yield agricultural
production as never before.
“There are only two ways to meet this growing demand. Take more
land from nature or produce more food per acre on existing farm
land,” Avery emphasizes.
To this point in history, modern high-yield agricultural
production has offered an unparalleled example of making more
from less.
According to statistics from the USDA Economic Research Service,
between 1950 and 2000: average corn yield grew from 39 bushels
to 153 bushels per acre; the average amount of milk produced per
cow increased from 5,314 lbs. to 18,201 lbs; each farmer in 2000
produced on average 12 times as much farm output per hour worked
as a farmer did in 1950. Development of new technology was a
primary factor in this progress.
Beef cattle producers know all about adopting new technology to
increase gains more cost efficiently. A few years back,
scientists analyzed the economic, environmental and beef quality
implications of pharmaceutical technologies for 50 years
(through 2004). The researchers were Thomas Elam, President of
Strategic Directions in Carmel, IN and Rodney Preston, Thornton
Professor Emeritus, Texas Tech University. In their insightful
study, Fifty Years of Pharmaceutical Technology and its Impact
on the Beef We Provide to Consumers, they looked at
pharmaceutical technology, as well as technology development in
genetics, nutrition and grain crop yield. Among other things,
Elam and Preston noted:
Without technological improvements, the U.S. cattle herd
required to produce the 2004 beef supply would nearly double to
180 million head, which would have major implications on land
use and animal waste issues
To provide additional pasture and feed grains, that 180 million
head of cattle would require additional land area equal to the
combined acreage of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and
Kansas
U.S. beef production on a per-head basis has increased by more
than 80% making the U.S. the most efficient beef producer in the
world
While decreasing resource use, producers have increased total
beef production from 13.2 billion lbs. to 27 billion lbs.
Consider cattle implants—growth hormones—alone. In a separate
study conducted by Dennis and Alex Avery—Benefits of Growth
Enhancing Pharmaceutical Technologies in Beef Production—the
researchers note that it takes 1.64 acre days to produce a pound
of conventionally produced grain-fed beef, using growth
hormones. It takes 1.99 acre days without growth hormones. It
takes 5.04 days to produce a pound of organic, grass-fed beef.
For perspective, Avery adds, “If we had achieved only the per
acre production of 1960, to meet today’s food demand we would
have had to plow an additional 15-20 million more square miles
of land.”
Meet Norman Borlaug
If you’ve never heard of a man named Norman Borlaug, you need
to. He’s still an active professor emeritus at Texas A&M
University at the age of 95. An Iowa-born plant breeder by
training and education, he spent the better part of five decades
developing and teaching high-yield agricultural production and
conservation methods to people in developing countries. He
received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
In a 1997 Atlantic Monthly article, Greg Easterbrook wrote,
“Perhaps more than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the
fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan
Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the
human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely
predicted—for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine 1975! The
form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a
billion deaths.”
That brand of agriculture embodies the Green Revolution—using
technology to increase cereal crop yields on a sustainable
basis—that Borlaug helped precipitate. He was the pioneering
director of the International Maize and Wheat Center in Mexico
founded in 1943. At the time, Mexico was trying to figure out
how to feed its growing population. Rather than merely teach
Mexican farmers new methods—the original intent of the project
funded by the Rockefeller Foundation—Borlaug and his crew
innovated. One of his key achievements during this time,
according to the Easterbrook article, was perfecting spring
dwarf wheat. When the project began, Mexico imported half its
wheat—a dietary staple. By 1956 it was self-sufficient; a few
years later it was a wheat exporter.
This is the kind of thing Borlaug repeated by teaching
high-yield agricultural production and conservation techniques
to developing countries.
In a 2001 speech at Tuskegee University, Borlaug explained, “It
took some 10,000 years to expand food production to the current
level of about 5 billion gross tons per year. By 2025, we will
have to nearly double this amount again. This cannot be done
unless farmers across the world have access to current
high-yielding crop-production methods as well as new
biotechnological breakthroughs that can increase the yields,
dependability, and nutritional quality of our basic food crops.”
During that speech, Borlaug credited Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch
for what many consider the primary enabler of such dramatic
increases in crop yields. They demonstrated and developed the
industrial synthesis of nitrogen from its elements.
“It is only since WWII that fertilizer use, and especially the
application of low-cost nitrogen derived from synthetic ammonia,
has become an indispensable component of modern agricultural
production,” Borlaug explained. “Distinguished University of
Manitoba Professor Vaclav Smil has estimated that 40% of today’s
6 billion people are alive, thanks to the Haber-Bosch process of
synthesizing ammonia.”
Despite endemic poverty in the developing world, Borlaug and
others of his ilk proved that technology can increase
agricultural yield and feed more people with the same amount of
land on a sustainable basis. Looking the opposite direction they
proved how much land can be conserved.
“By increasing yields on the lands best suited to agriculture,
world farmers have been able to leave untouched vast areas of
land for other purposes,” Borlaug said. “For example, had the
global cereal yields of 1950 still prevailed in 1999, instead of
the 600 million hectares that were used for production, we would
have needed nearly 1.8 billion hectares of land of the same
quality to produce the current global harvest. Obviously, such a
surplus of land was not available, and certainly not in populous
Asia, where the population has increased from 1.2 to 3.8 billion
over this time period.”
In his Tuskegee speech, Borlaug said, “Agricultural researchers
and farmers worldwide face the challenge during the next 25
years of developing and applying technology that can increase
the global cereal yields by 50-75 percent, and to do so in ways
that are economically and environmentally sustainable. Much of
the yield gains will come from applying technology already on
the shelf but yet to be fully utilized.
“Notwithstanding the problems of intensive agriculture, I often
ask the critics of modern agriculture what the world would have
been like without the technological advances that have occurred,
largely during the past 40 years. In particular, we must also
realize that world population has grown from 2.8 to 6 billion
people over the past 50 years.”
Advanced Culture’s Unrealistic Views
“When environmental activists are demanding that we increase the
fuel efficiency of our automobiles, why are they also advocating
a reduction in the land use efficiency of our farming systems
(organic), especially when you consider no other human activity
has as great an impact on our environment as agriculture?”
wonders Avery. “Those are the tough questions environmental
activists don’t want us to ask.”
The study cited earlier, comparing conventionally produced
grain-fed beef to organic grass-fed beef serves as a crystalline
example. Avery explains traditional full-fed grain-feeding
systems reduce the amount of land needed to produce a pound of
beef by 67%. Moreover, compared to organic, grass-fed beef
production, the conventional grain-fed system reduces greenhouse
gas emissions by 40%.
“Organic grain-fed beef produces 40% more CO2 equivalent
greenhouse gases per pound of beef than conventional grain-fed
beef programs, primarily due to methane,” Avery explains.
“Organic grain-fed beef produces about twice as much enteric
methane and methane is about 23 times more powerful than CO2.”
Plus, Avery points out, “If we had to go all organic, we would
need the additional manure from 6-8 billion head more cattle to
replace the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers with organic ones.
The global cattle population is currently about 1.2 billion
head.”
So, with the use of growth hormones (implants)—proven safe by
reams of scientific research—the conventional grain-fed cattle
feeding system provides more beef from less land with less
pollution. And that’s merely the impact of one technology used
only in beef production.
“…While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra
low-risk positions toward new advances in agricultural science
and technology, and pay more for food produced by the so-called
organic methods, the 1 billion chronically undernourished people
of the low-income, food-deficit nations cannot,” Borlaug said.
“With low-cost food supplies and urban bias, is it any wonder
that affluent consumers don’t understand the complexities of
reproducing the world food supply each year in its entirety, and
expanding it further for the nearly 80 million additional mouths
that are born into this world each year?
“It is imperative that this serious educational gap in
industrialized nations be addressed. One way to do so, I
believe, is to make it compulsory in secondary schools and
universities for students to take courses on biology and food
and agricultural technology.”
Ironically, the U.S. at least, is doing just the opposite. The
number of producers is dwindling. Funding for agricultural
research and extension is flagging. Interest in activist
environmental and animal rights movements is growing, as
measured by fund raising efforts (see Moneyed Momentum, page
34).
“I said that the Green Revolution had won a temporary success in
man’s war against hunger, which if fully implemented, could
provide sufficient food for humankind through the end of the
20th century...” Borlaug said. “…I now think that the world has
the technology, either available or well advanced in the
research pipeline, to feed on a sustainable basis a population
of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is
whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use it.”
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