The spiralling food security crisis

“The spiralling food security crisis” (Celebrities raise awareness of world agricultural crisis” Jessica Leeder, Globe and Mail, March 16, 2011) may be puzzling policy-makers and governments, but not researchers. Sixteen years have passed since Lester Brown, an agricultural economist, published “Who will feed China?” In it, he showed that agricultural production could not rise in the future nearly as much as it had in the previous 50 years because the easy gains from irrigation and mass production of fertilizer had already been realized, there is no more good agricultural land, and no more water. He showed that fish production in the world’s oceans had peaked at about 100 millions tonnes. And he predicted that, with global food production nearly stagnating and population continuing to rise exponentially, the per capita food production would surely decline.

These predictions have come true. The wild seafood supply per person peaked at 17 kg in 1988 and now stands at 14 kg. The amount of cropland per person in 1950 was 0.23 ha, but in 2007 was 0.10 ha. Fish and shellfish farms have partially offset some of the losses in wild ocean fish production, but at tremendous cost to coastal fisheries and agriculture. Corn and soy crops have increased in Brazil, but at tremendous cost to tropical forest ecosystems and biodiversity. Moreover, much of the increased production is going to feed cars (via ethanol) instead of hungry people. Meanwhile, in 2007 people in 22 countries from Bangladesh to Yemen rioted in the streets because of food price increases. Since 2004, governments of five African countries of re-allocated (sold outright or leased in long-term contracts) 2,492,684 ha of land (excluding allocations below 1000 ha) away from smallholders to big business, many of them foreign. They include governments or businesses in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar, India, Britain, South Korea, and China. The rate of farmland reallocation to foreigners increased dramatically after the 2007–2008 food crisis as countries seek to increase their own food security. The government of Madagascar fell in 2009 because of a popular uprising against the government’s 99 year leases of almost 1.8 million ha of farmland to South Korean and Indian companies. The 2011 riots that started “Arab Spring” were but a continuation of this crisis, the roots of which are (a) global population increases, and (b) the failure of developed countries including Canada to focus international policies where it matters: in the stomachs of poor people.