Can tomorrow’s world feed itself?
John Madeley

There are few more searching and important questions than “will the earth yield enough food for the people who will be alive in the 21st century?”  The world will  have 2.5 billion more people to feed than in 1995, when some 800 million do not hav enough food to live a healthy and productive life.  Can it be done?

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in a major study Agriculture: Toward 2010, expects global food output to rise by 1.8 percent in the next 20 years.  While the FAO expects a lower growth of food out-put, it believes this will outpace population growth, which its estimates is likely to slow down from 1.7 per cent to 1.3 per cent a year.

The study predicts that by 2010, the daily per capita food supplies available to people in the East Asia, the Near East, North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean will increase from, 2,500 today “to at or above the 3,000 calorie mark”.  It expects South Asia to make progress, with the percentage of chronically undernourished people halving to around 12 per cent of populations.  But little progress can be expected in sub-Saharan Africa, it seems.  By 2010, the African continent may have 300 million undernourished people, 32 per cent of its population, against 180 million people are likely to be undernourished in2010, predicts the study, compared with 800 million today.  So according to the FAO the world will not be able to feed 650 million people adequately in 2010 - a slight improvement on today perhaps, but still a humanitarian scandal.

And the FAO study is at the optimistic end of the scale.  Lester Brown and Hal Kane, in Full House: Reassessing the Earth’s Population Carrying Capacity, take the view that constraints are emerging that make it difficult to expand food output.  They point, for example, to the substantial loss of cropland to industrialization and urbanization, to the stagnation of global fish catches, and to the way that demands for water are pressing against hydrological limits.  Apart from environmental pressures, Brown and Kane also say that declining investment in agricultural research is not helping.  They conclude that the world is close to its carrying capacity, and believe that the imbalance between food and people should be addressed by a frontal attack on population growth.  The “optimists” would generally agree that environmental pressures are serious and that more should be spent on agricultural research, not least to ensure that increases in food output can be sustained.  Many current agricultural practices are notoriously unsustainable.  The FAO says that the world is losing 7 million hectares of cultivated land a year due to soil degradation, and that in the next 20 years, 140 million hectares could lose much of its agricultural value.

Yet agriculture has no need to mine the soil.  Intercropping-supports rather than mines the soil.  In China, where intercropping is widespread, food output is growing at 2.8 per cent a year, twice the rate of population growth.

In practice, the optimists and the pessimists have much in common.  Both are playing a numbers game, looking at the past and extrapolating the future in different ways.  The optimist recognizes the constraints, but plays them down, the pessimist sees them as more serious.  It is possible, however, that both are insufficiently grounded in what is happening in communities across the Third World, and place too little emphasis on what people can achieve.

The hope of overcoming hunger and famine is for the numbers game to give way to the people game.

Across the developing world today, people are taking initiatives and developing ways of growing more food.  And the potential is enormous.  Policy-makers need to consider what might happen if the energies of small-scale farmers are released and they have access to the credit and the technology the need.  The possibilities are not only considerable - for many small-scale farmers in developing countries they are practical reality.

One of the main hopes for increasing and sustaining food output is permaculture.  Under this system, farmers use no inputs, such as chemicals, from outside the area where they farm.  They grow a mixutre of food and tree crops, and often keep small livestock, with each part of the system benefiting the other part.  There are few mentions of permaculture in government statements on agriculture.  Yet, this people driven farming method is suitable for both rural and urban areas.

Women grow most of the food in developing countries, but women farmers are often ignored by governments.  They usually cannot obtain credit from the banks to buy the equipment and inputs they need, they often cannot own land and have no incentive to improve the land they farm.  But, credit can make a big difference.

People-led initiatives to grow more food can undoubtedly benefit from constructive support from governments.  Many of the policies needed for lower fertility rates would also help women to increase their food output.  Empowering women and guarding their reproductive health should not only give women more say over how many children they have, it might also make it more likely they quality for credit from banks.  In addition to credit schemes, changes to land tenure laws are encouraging higher and more sustainable food output.

If people-led intiatives around the world are recognized and supported, then there is hope for the next century.  Sustainable farming may then look like a mess, perhaps to the outsider - a complex mix of food and tree crops on small plots of land developed by people in ways that suit them, where productivity is high and yields can be maintained.  The hope is with people.n

John Mandeley is the Editor of International Agricultural Development magazine.  q