Solving the food/population equation

Seldom has the world faced an unfolding emergency whose dimensions are as clear as the growing imbalance between food and people. For our generation, the challenge is to reverse the deteriorating food situation and achieve a balance between people and food that is both humane and sustainable. And this, in turn, depends on reversing the deteriorating relationship between ourselves (currently increasing by 90 million per year) and the natural systems and resources on which we depend.

It cannot be argued that resources are not available. Despite the end of the cold war, tire world is still spending close to $700 billion a year for military purposes, much of it designed to deal with threats that have long since disappeared. Meanwhile, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the lead agency in the effort to stabilize world population, has an annual budget of $240 million.

STABILIZING WORLD POPULATION

Elements of a global food and population strategy are, however, beginning to emerge. In April 1994, UNFPA sketched the outlines of a bold effort to stabilize world population at 7.8 billion by the year 2050. This plan is abroad-based one that includes family planning, raising the level of female education and pressing for equal rights for women in all societies.

Implementing the proposed UNFPA Programme of Action requires an estimated $11.4 billion for 1996, gradually rising to $14.4 billion by 2005. Of this total, roughly two-thirds is to be mobilized within developing countries themselves. The complementary resource flows from donor countries would increase to $4.4 billion (1993 dollars) in 2000, rising further to$4.8 billion in 2005.

Achieving the UNFPA'sfertility reduction goals requires substantial increases in female education. Although the education of girls and women contributes simultaneously to economic progress and lower fertility, in many countries, fewer than half the girls of primary-school age are in class. Almost all governments have adopted universal primary education as a goal, but many have seen their educational system overwhelmed by the sheer number of children entering school. The governments of high-fertility societies cannot realistically hope to rein in population growth without broadening access to education and thus providing women with options beyond childbearing.

Fulfilling this social condition for a more rapid fertility decline will require a heavy investment in both school building and teacher training. Providing elementary education for the estimated 130 million school-age children not now in school (70 per cent of whom are female) would cost roughly $6.5 billion per year. Providing literacy training for those men and women who are illiterate and beyond school age would require an additional estimated $4 billion per year.

MASSIVE REFORESTATION

On the food side of the equation, major efforts must be made to protect the soil- and water-resource base and increase investment in agricultural research. At the root of food scarcity in many developing countries is the loss of vegetation from deforestation, overgrazing and overploughing. As vegetation is destroyed, rainfall runoff increases, reducing aquifer recharge, increasing soil erosion and, in turn, lowering the inherent productivity of the ecosystem.

Where firewood is scarce, crop residues are burned for cooking fuel, thus depriving the soil of needed organic matter. Adding trees to the global forest stock is a valuable investment in our economic future, whether the goal is to satisfy the growing firewood needs in the Third World or to stabilize soil and water regimes. Accordingly, we purpose as part of a global food security budget a massive reforestation plan--totalling $5.6 billion a year by the end of the decade.

More than a billion people live in countries that are already experiencing firewood shortages. Unless corrective action is taken, that number will nearly double by the year 2000. An estimated 55 million hectares of tree planting will have to be done to meet the fuelwood demand expected then. In addition, anchoring soils and restoring hydrological stability in thousands of Third World watersheds will require tree planting on some 100 million hectares.

SOIL CONSERVATION

Planting trees to restore watersheds, thereby conserving soil and water, complements the expenditures on soil conservation by farmers. To calculate the cost of a global effort to stabilize soils, data are used from the United States, where it is estimated that roughly $3 billion a year would be necessary to stabilize soils on U.S. cropland.

First, it is assumed that one tenth of the world's cropland cannot sustain cultivation with any economically feasible soil-conserving agricultural practices--roughly the same proportion as in the United States. This would equal some 128 million hectares wordwide. Applying the cost of converting such land to grassland or woodland in the United States, at $125 per hectare as a first approximation, the global cost would be $16 billion per year. If expenditures to conserve topsoil on the remaining erosion-prone cropland--another 100 million hectares are comparable to these, a global programme of conservation practices enacted by 2000 would cost an additional $8 billion annually.

By 2000, when both the cropland conversion programme and the full range of soil-conserving practices are in place, global expenditures to protect the cropland base would total some $24 billion per year. Although this is obviously a large sum, it is less than the U.S. government has paid farmers to support crop prices in some years. As a down-payment on future food supplies for a world expecting at least two million more people, $24 billion is an investment humanity can ill afford not to make.

At a time when the backlog of yield-raising technologies is shrinking, international expenditures on agricultural research are diminishing. The urgency of reversing this trend is obvious. A remarkably successful international network of seventeen agricultural research institutes identifies gaps in global agricultural research and systematically fills them. Despite its widely recognized success, funding of this network has dropped. At a time when every technological advance, however small, is needed to help buy time to slow population growth, investment in these centres should be rising, not falling.

FOOD SECURITY AND POLITICAL STABILITY

In summary, the food security budget we propose, including needed expenditures on both sides of the food/population equation, would start at $24 billion in 1996, increasing rapidly to just over $58 billion in the year 2000 and then grow much more slowly, reaching $61 billion by 2005. Although the budget we propose is described as a food security budget, it is also a political stability budget--an investment in an environmentally sustainable, politically stable future.

Aside from the global food security budget, which involves public expenditures, there are several needs that are best satisfied by reforming economic policies, specifically those that deal with water efficiency and global warming. With water becoming increasingly scarce, future gains in irrigation depend heavily on the more efficient use of irrigation water. The key to this is to remove the subsidies that provide farmers with free water or water at a nominal cost. Only if farmers pay market costs for water will they make the needed investments in irrigation efficiency.

In a related area,much progress has been made in recent years in reducing fertilizer subsidies, a practice that often led to excessive fertilizer use and damaging levels of nutrient runoff into rivers and lakes.

The other area needing major reform is the tax system, which should be restructured so that those who burn fossil fuels pay the full costs of their use. As it now stands, a utility company that burns coal pays only for the costs associated with extracting and burning it, while others are left to bear the indirect costs of air pollution--health-care costs, crop losses and the damage from acid rain to forests and freshwater lakes. The motorist driving down the road never pays for the crop damage in the adjoining fields caused by pollution from the automobile.

Similarly, those who burn fossil fuels are not paying the costs of global warming and overall climate instability. Accordingly we recommend a restructuring of the tax system to partially replace income taxes with taxes on fossil fuels. This would help offset the inability of the market to fully incorporate costs, steering the evolution of the global energy economy in an environmentally sustainable direction.

RELATED ARTICLE: THE SPACE SHUTTLE'S EYE IN THE SKY

In April 1994 a space radar laboratory developed by the United States, Germany and Italy was sent up on the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour to study the earth's environment. It sent back images of more than 69 million square km of the planet's surface, including such environmentally-delicate areas as rain forests in Bolivia and Brazil, and the Sahara Desert. The radar can penetrate beneath the tree-tops, making it possible to map variations in vegetation, wetlands and flooding under the forest canopy. The system should also make it possible to detect patches of crude oil dumped at sea by ships and even to discover new archaeological sites.

THE DESERTIFICATION CONVENTION

An International Convention to Combat Desertification was signed at Unesco Headquarters in Paris on 14 and 15 October 1994. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that the lives of 900,000 million people in over 100 countries are threatened because their land could be transformed into desert. More than a quarter of the earth's surface is concerned. According to UNEP, 69% of the world's 5.2 billion hectares of cultivated dry land have deteriorated and are in the process of becoming desert. The figures are 73% for Africa and 70% for Asia. In the arid zones, i.e. 35% of the earth's surface, 500,000 hectares of irrigated land become desert each year because of mineral salts in the water which leave deposits after evaporation. The poor countries are anxious. In 1980 an action programme promised them $2.4 billion, but they only received $600 million. UNEP currently estimates that between $ 10 billion and $22.4 billion will be needed annually for the next 20 years to restore fertility to the drylands. The Convention will come into force when it has been ratified by 50 states. For further information contact Earth Action (a network of 1,000 citizen organizations in 126 countries) 9 White Lion Street, London NI 9PD, United Kingdom. Tel.: (44 71) 865 90 09; Fax: (44 71)278 030 45.

THE BEST COFFEE IS PREDIGESTED!

CERES, the journal of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has revealed a disturbing piece of news. The best coffee grains are not picked from the bush but picked up from the ground in the droppings of the luwak (Viverra musanga), a small cousin of the civet cat that lives on the coffee plantations of Indonesia, the world's third largest coffee-producing nation. Luwaks choose the ripest, most perfectly formed berries and eat the sweet husk. But they cannot digest the beans, which pass through their alimentary canals almost intact, undergoing a slight processing that actually improves their taste. Thirty years ago, the production of the precious beans was from 1,000 to 2,000 kg per day. By 1990, however, one company that specializes in luwak coffee was only able to buy about 20 tons a year, partly because plantation workers had taken to hunting luwaks for food. Which should come first, a good roast or a good cup of coffee?

FROM SWORD TO PLOUGHSHARE

In a swords-into-ploughshares operation following the end of the Cold War an American military reconnaissance plane has been converted into an environmental research aircraft. It will be used by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Roulder, Colorado. The twin-engine jet can fly at any altitude from sea level to 20 km in the lower stratosphere end will study in particular the 12to 18km zone, a region not adequately covered by other research aircraft. The aircraft will mainly be studying atmospheric chemistry and climate questions.

AIR POLLUTION: THE PRICE OF PROGRESS?

Steelworks in the Chinese city of Benxi employ 140,000 people and turn out excellent products, but they also cause heavy air pollution. The city is located in a windless valley and releases 540 tons of pollutants into the atmosphere each year. Whereas the World Health Organization has set a recommended limit of particles in the air at 90 [mu]g/[m.sup.3]3, in Benxi the level reaches 740! Respiratory diseases and lung cancer affect a third of the population, a far higher figure than the national average. Air pollution, made even worse by growing auto mobile traffic, is the most frequent cause of death in China today. Is this the price of development?

LINGUA FRANCA

French-speaking environmentalists often complain that almost all reference works are in English. Now, as a result of an initiative by the French Minister of the Environment a remarkable new book has just appeared. Entitled La planete Terre entre nos mains ("Planet Earth in Our Hands"), it presents the implementation of the Agenda 21 programme set by the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 and contains a mass of rarely compiled information and useful addresses, including a list of video cassettes and organizations that distribute them.

Contact La Documentation francaise, 29-31, Quai Voltaire, 75344 Paris Cedex 07. Tel.:(33 1)40 157000; Fax:(33 1)40 15 72 30.

LESTER BROWN, of the United States, is President of the Worldwatch Institute, a private, nonprofit environmental research Organization in Washington, D.C.

This article has been extracted from his book Full House, Reassessing the Earth's Population Carrying Capacity, written with Hal Kane and published by Norton & Company New York and London, 1994.

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