Ill fares the land �� have we reached the end of a growth era in world food output?

As the world recovered from World War II, hopes for improvement in world agriculture were high. An accumulating backlog of agricultural technologies such as hybrid corn and chemical fertilizers were waiting to be applied on a massive scale. Between 1950 and 1973 world grain production more than doubled, to nearby 1.3 billion tons. Although output expanded more rapidly in some regions than in others, all regions shared in the growth. This rising tide of food production improved nutrition throughout the world, helping to boost life expectancy in the Third World from less than forty-three years in the early 1950s to over fifty-three years in the early 1970s.

This period of broad based gains in nutritional imrpovement came to an end in 1973. After the oil price hike that year the growth in world grain output slowed. Since 1973 world grain production has expanded at less than 2 per cent yearly, barely keeping pace with population. Although the period since the 1979 oil price hike is too short to establish a trend, $30-a-barrel oil may well slow growth further.

In per capita terms world grain output climed from 248 kilograms in 1950 to 326 kilograms in 1973, an impressive gain of 31 per cent. Since then, however, annual grain output per person has remained around 325 kilograms. A global average, this figure embraces countries where yearly grain availability per person averages only 150 kilograms, requiring that it all be consumed directly, as well as countries where it exceeds 700 kilograms and is largely converted into meat, milk, and eggs.

Since 1973 attention has focused on the impact of petroleum prices on food supply, but demand has also been affected. On the supply side, rising oil prices have increased the costs of basic agricultural inputs-- fetilizer, pesticides, and fuel for tillage and irrigation--thus acting as a drag on output. On the demand side of the equation, escalating oil prices combined with ill-conceived national economic policies have contributed to a global economic slowdown so severe since 1979 that it has brought world growth in per capita income to a vittual halt.

Had incomes continued to rise at the same rate 1973 as they did before, prices of food commodities would have been stronger, thus supporting a more vigorous growth in farm investment and output. Agricultura

under-investment and output. Agricultural under-investment in Third World countries has also contributed to the loss of momentum, but the central point is that the rise in oil prices, affecting both food supply and demand, has brought the era of robust growth in world food output to an end.

Oil is not the only resource whose questionable supply is checking the growth in food output. The loss of topsoil through erosion is now acting as a drag on efforts to produce more food. And the scarcity of water is also beginning to affect food production prospects. Since World War ii, the world irrigated area has more than doubled, but the flurry of dam building of the past generation has now subsided. With occasional exceptions, most of the remaining potential projects are more difficult, costly, and capital-intensive.

The worldwide loss of momentum will not be easily restored. Although agricultural mismanagement abounds, it has no worsened appreciably over the years. Nor can the situation be explained by any farmer's loss of skills. The explanation lies in the more difficult circum,stances facing farmers everywhere.

The cheap energy that permitted farmers to oiverride easily the constraints imposed by the scarcity of land, soil nutrients, or water is simply no longer available.

Increasingly, the energy used in agriculture will be in the form of chemica fertilizer. As population grows, cropland per person shrinks and fertilizer requirements climb. And erosion that has robbed soils of nutrients is forcing farmers to use more fertilizers. Even urbanization is raising demand, since as peo ple move to cities it is harder to recycle the nutrients in human and household waste. Yet the combination of rising energy costs and diminishing returns on the use of additional fertilizer raises doubts that adequate food supplies can be produced in the future at prices the world's poor can afford.

The central importance of the population/land/fertilizer relationship is a recent phenomenon. Before 1950 increases in food output came largely from expanding the culltivated area, but with the scarcity oof fertile new land and the advent of cheap chemical fertilzer this changed. Between 1950 and 1983 world fertilizer use climbed from 15 million to 114 million tons, nearly an eightfold increase within a generation. In effect, as fertile land became harder to find, farmers learned to substitute energy in the form of chemical fertilizer for land. Fertilizer factories replaced new land as the principal source of growth in food production.

This substitution of energy for land is graphically evident: In 1950,, when world population totaled 2.51 billion, the harvested area of cereals per person was 0.24 hectares. As growth in population greatly outstripped that of cultivated area, the area per person fell steadily, declining to 0.15 hectares by 1983. While the amount of cropland per person declined by one third, the fertilizer consumption per person quintupled, climbing from just over 5 kilograms in 1950 to 25 kilograms in 1983.

The hybridization of corn and the dwarfing of the wheat and rice varieties that have been at the heart of Third wrld agricultural advances over the last two decades figured prominently, of course, in the growth in world food output. So, too, did the doubling of irrigated area. But the effectiveness of all these practices depends heavily on the use of chemical fertilizer. Without an adequate supply of plant nutrients, high-yielding cereal varieties hold little advantage over traditional ones. Likewise, an increase in irrigation is of little consequence if the nutrients to support the higher yields are lacking.

The response of crops to the use of addtional fertilizer is now diminishing, particularly in agriculturally advanced countries. During the 1950s, the application of another ton of fertilizer on average yielded 11.5 more tons of grain. During the sixties, the fertilizer/grain response ratio was 8.3 to 1. By the 1970s it had fallen to 5.8. Some countries, such as Argentina and India, still apply relatively little fertilizer and so have quite high response ratios. But worldwide the return on the use of additional fertilizer is on the way down.

At some point, biological constraints on crop yields will make the subltitution of fertilizer for cropland increasingly difficult and costly. When this is combined with the projected long-term rise in real cost of the oil and natural gas used to manufacture, distribute, and apply chemical fertilizer, the difficulty in restoring the steady upward trend in per capita grain production of 1950-73 becomes clear.

With grain, as with oil or any other basic resource, excessive world dependence on one geographic region for supplies is risky. As the North American share of world grain exports has increased it has surpassed the Middle Eastern share of oil exports and made the world more dependent on one region for its food than ever before.

This extraordinary dependence on one geographic region for grain supplies is a historically recent phenomenon.

As recently as the late 1930s, Western Europe was the only grain-deficit region and Latin America was the world's leading grain supplier, exporting wome nine million tons per year. North America and Eastern Europe (including the Soviet Union) each exported five million tons of grain annually. Even Asia and Africa has modest exportable surpluses.

By 1950, the shift from regional grain surpluses to deficits was well under way and the outlines of a new world grain trade pattern were beginning to emerge. Today, with North America's unchalenged dominance as a grain supplier, international grain trade bears little resemblance to that of the 1930s.

The restructuring of world grain trade over the last generation has resulted in part from soil erosion problem and in part from differential population growth rates, as a comparison of North America and Latin America shows. During the late 1930s, Latin America had a larger grain export surplus than North America, but the region's more rapid rate of population growth soon changed this. Indeed, if the region's more rapid rate of population growth soon changed this. Indeed, if the regions had grown at the same rate since 1950, North America's population in 1983 would be so large that it would consume the entire grain harvest, leaving little or none for export. And North America, too, would now be struggling to maintain food self-sufficiency.

Today the countries with significant exportable surpluses of grain can be counted on the fingers of one hand--the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and France. Of these, the United States accounts for over half and with Canada covers close to 70 per cent of the total.

This overwhelming dependence on one region, and on the country in particular, brings with it an assortment of risks. To begin with, both the United States and Canada are affected by the same climatic cycles,. A poor harvest in one is often associated with a poor harvest in the other. When reserves are low, even a modest fluctuation in the region's exportable grain surplus can send price tremors through the world food economy.

Countries that rely on North american foods should take heed of the philosohical debate emerging within the United States about the wisdom of mining the nation's soils to meet the over-growing world demand. Both agricultural analyst and environmentalists argue that the country should make whatever adjustments in its agricultural practices are needed to protect the resource base, even though this would reduce the exportable surplus.

Some argue that it makes little sense to sacrifice a resource that has been a source of economic strength since colonial days merely to buy a few billion barrels of oil. And some contend that the current generation of farmers has no right to engage in the agronomic equivalent of deficit financing, mortgaging the future of generations to come.

The current trend is fraught with risks, both for those whose livelihoods depend on sustained l and productivity and for those in countries dependent on food imports that eventually will dry up if the mining of soil continues. Even for the importers, reduced supplies in the short term and less pressure on North American soils would be better than losing the region's export capacity over the long term.

one of the most useful indicators of the world food situation is the food security index, which incorporates both grain carryover stocks and the grain equivalent of idled cropland. This combines the world's two basic reserves of food and expresses them as days of coinsumption, a concept readily undersstood by policymakers everywhere.

The two component of the index differ in important ways. Carry-over stocks, the grain in storage when the new crop begins to come in, are readily accesseble and require only time for shipping arrangements to be made and for transport. Idled cropland, on the other hand, can take a year or more to be converted into food by farmers.

The food security index measures the adequacy of food supplies at the global level and thus the broad potential for responding to national shortages, but it says nothing about conditions within individual countries. Here the best indicator, of course, is the nutritional state of a country's population.

Assessing nutritional adequacy requires some knowledge of how the national food supply is distributed. But a lack of data on distribution makes it very difficult to estimate the extent of malnutrition, thus leaving the subject open to continuing debate.

The only time a decline in nutrition shows up officially is when it is severe enough to affect mortality. When this happens a country is facing famine, the most obvious and severe manifestation of food insecurity. Using this criterion, inadequate though it is, developments over the past decade have not been encouraging.

From the postwar recovery years until the early 1970, famine virtually disappeared from the world. Except in China, which now admits to a massive famine in 1960-61, when it was largely isolated, the world enjoyed a remarkable respite from famine for a quarter of a century. Whenever famine did threaten, the United States intervened with food aid, even when it required nearly one-fifth of the U.S. wheat crop two years in a row, as it did following monsoon failures in India in 1964 and 1965.

By the early, however, food deficits were widening and famine was underfolding in several African countries and in the Indian subcontinent. Several famines claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, providing a grim reminder of the fragility of food securtiy even in an age of advanced technology. Most were the product of drought and a failure of international food rel ief mechanisms.

During the late 1970s world reserves were rebuilt and, except for strife-torn Kampuchea, famines subsided--only to return in 1983, a year of widespread climatic anomalies. The capacity of poor countries with falling per capita food production and deteriorating soils to withstand drought and floods has lessened. As a result, more countries than ever before face the possibility of faine in early 1984.

Among the threatened countries are Bolivia and Peru in Latin America, and over a score of countries in Africa. An FAO team of agronomists assessing the food sitution in Africa in late 1983 identified 22 countries where crisis seemed imminent-- Angola, Benin, Botswana, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Lesotho, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Somalia, Swaziland, the United Republic of Tanzania, Togo, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The team of experts concluded that four million tons of emergency grain supplies would be needed to avoid starvation among the 145 million people living in these countries.

There is no simple explanation of why efforts to eradicate hunger have lost momentum or why food supplies for some segment of humanity are less secure than they were, say, 15 years age. Decline in ffod security involve the continuos interaction of environmental, economic, demographic, and political variables.

Some analyst see the food problem almos exclusively as a population issue, noting that wherever population growth rates are low, food supplies are generally adequate. Other view it as problem of resources--soil, waters, and energy. Many economists see it more as a failure to bring forth new technologies on the needed scale. Still others see it as a distribution problem. To some degree it is all of these.

The issue is not whether the world can produce more food. Indeed, it would be difficult to put any forseeable limits on the amount the world's farmers can produce. The question is at what price they will be able to produce it and how this relates to the purchasing power of the poorer segments of humanity. The environmental, demographic, and economic trends of the 1970s and early 1980s indicate that widespread improvement in human nutrition will require major course corrections. Nothing less than a wholesale re-examination and re-ordering of social and economic priorities--giving agriculture and family planning the emphasis they deserve--will get the world back on an economic and demographic path that will reduce hunger rather than increase it.

COPYRIGHT 1984 UNESCO
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