Hunger, handouts and riots – reality has a way of violently bringing things back into perspective (Photograph by John Stanmeyer via National Geographic)
National Geographic Magazine – NGM.com: “It is the simplest, most natural of acts, akin to breathing and walking upright. We sit down at the dinner table, pick up a fork, and take a juicy bite, obliv ious to the double helping of global ramifications on our plate. Our beef comes from Iowa, fed by Nebraska corn. Our grapes come from Chile, our bananas from Honduras, our olive oil from Sicily, our apple juice—not from Washington State but all the way from China. Modern society has relieved us of the burden of growing, harvesting, even preparing our daily bread, in exchange for the burden of simply paying for it. Only when prices rise do we take notice. And the consequences of our inattention are profound.”
What are the striking facts from the article?
1. FOOD PRICES ARE SKYROCKETING
From 2005-2008, the price of wheat and corn became 3 times higher, rice 5 times higher and what happened?
There were food riots in nearly 24 countries and 75,000,000 (75 million) more people went into poverty.
What’s worse is that it came at a time when farmers actually beat their usual records. Why? The world is eating more food than it is making – simple as that.
“Agricultural productivity growth is only one to two percent a year,” warned Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., at the height of the crisis. “This is too low to meet population growth and increased demand.”
High prices are the ultimate signal that demand is outstripping supply.
2. MAKE MORE FOOD RIGHT?
In the past we used oil to create enough food to boost world population to the levels we see now – 6 billion today. That was the First Green Revolution. Now? Apparently we need to double food production by 2030. Or as they would say, another Green Revolution in half the time.
3. MALTHUS WHO?
Apparently a math guy named Malthus came up with his famous theory that the number of people we’re bringing into the world doubles every 25 years usually. The problem he said was that growing enough food to meet that doubling is a lot slower. And there was no real way around it.
Sure you could spray chemical poisons to kill bugs and pump oil made fertilizer steroids into plants in the end however you just can’t beat reality. So…
4. THE CHINA CASE
China the 2nd largest corn growing nation in the world (gods, corn?) can’t grow enough food to feed all of its pigs. The problem is that pigs eat 5 times more grain food than a human needs. So they have to buy soybean.
So apparently the number of pigs keeps going up because China will have 1,500,000,000 (1.5 billion) people in the next 20 years and an extra 200,000,000 (200 million) pigs to keep up. Do the math – that’s a damned lot of food for pigs.
And this is just China the author tells us. Bloody.
5. MALAWI MIRACLE?
Apparently environmentally friendlier agriculture with less fertilizer can make a difference. In Malawi they turned back to soil soaking rains and got some huge amount of food over the next 2 years. It was dramatic – from being in debt to making a healthy 18% extra.
Hell, even the dreaded World Bank realized that if you give people the means to feed and grow their own food you’d be fighting hunger and poverty.
“In October 2007 the World Bank issued a critical report, concluding that the agency, international donors, and African governments had fallen short in helping Africa’s poor farmers and had neglected investment in agriculture for the previous 15 years. After decades of discouraging public investment in agriculture and calling for market-based solutions that rarely materialized, institutions like the World Bank have reversed course and pumped funds into agriculture over the past two years.”
Apparently the Rockefeller Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Columbia’s Sanchez and Jeffrey Sachs have created a test group of Millenium Villages to fight hunger with food and agriculture. Apparently they’re doing pretty well – being independent and having fresh clean water.
Yet is it enough and can chemicals pull it off again the author asks?
6. SO WAS MALTHUS RIGHT?
Let’s end with the author’s final quote because I think it is truly fitting. You can only have as many people as you can feed. If your food supply is on drugs you better hope it doesn’t crash. Because a drug like oil takes a long time to make and in the mean time you have more babies than you can handle.
“Years ago I was working with a Chinese demographer,” Dyson says. “One day he pointed out to me the two Chinese characters above his office door that spelled the word ‘population.’ You had the character for a person and the character for an open mouth. It really struck me. Ultimately there has to be a balance between population and resources. And this notion that we can continue to grow forever, well it’s ridiculous.”
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