Food, 2050 and beyond
Alan Guebert
February 27, 2010
Type the phrase "farmers feeding world" into
Google's search engine and "about 15 million results" pop up in
"0.12 seconds."
Some results may surprise American farmers who, in good old
U-S-of-A modesty, may have thought they had been, were and will be feeding the
world. Not so, suggests the hunter-gatherers at Google.
"Smallest Farmers Key to Feeding World's Poorest,"
claimed a headline in the Feb. 11 edition of Scientific American. "Women
Farmers Feed the World," declared the Yonkers (NY) Tribune last Nov. 28.
"Organic Farmers can feed the world!" shouted a recent newspaper
article from
Americans farmers need not worry; all-well, some anyway-have
a role in filling the global food cart; "U.S. Soybean Farmers Feeding the
World," suggested the Jan. 27 issue of Iowa-Illinois Soybean Review.
Despite this muddy picture on whom and how the world will be
fed, one fact seems clear: In the future, the world will be needed to feed the
world.
And, of course, it will be a more populous world. According
to the latest United Nations estimate, global population will reach 9.07
billion by 2050, or about one-third more than today's 6.8 billion. (Population
will top 7 billion by 2012, says the UN.)
Those numbers will only hold, however, if predicted lower
birth rates hold. If so, world population likely will stabilize around 9
billion and then fall slightly over the following 150 years.
Lower birth rates are crucial to avoid what would be
catastrophic over-population. For example, had the 2005 global birth rate not
changed, "World population would rise to 244 billion in 2150 and 134
trillion by 2300," estimates the Population Coalition.
As crushing as those numbers appear, supporting and feeding
just a fraction of either-and 9 billion is only about 1/29th of 244
billion-less than two generations from now is far from certain. Often-talked
about solutions like GMO seeds or "new" undefined technologies all
fail to address what North Dakota farmer, sustainable ag
expert and good friend Fred Kirschenmann calls
"nature."
Writing in the Winter 2009 Leopold Letter, Kirschenmann, a distinguished fellow at Iowa State
University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, reminds us not to
gloat on past accomplishments because, according to a recent United Nations
report, "...(O)ur specialized monoculture food
system has played a major role in destroying biodiversity and biological health
of our soil, both essential to the restoration of the ecological health of our
ecosystems, the foundation of any productive agriculture."
As if on cue, two news stories-one on the front page of the
Feb. 23 Wall Street Journal, the other in the Great Britain's Feb. 23
Guardian-outline the looming farm and food disasters China and India, the
world's two most populous nations, face in the coming generation if neither
changes current, fertilizer-dependent ag practices.
To that loss of soil health, Kirschenmann
cautions, now add "... the end of cheap energy, declining fresh water
resources, more unstable climates, the loss of both biodiversity and genetic
diversity..." and three billion more people and you've got a world where
new biotech seeds or clever uses of new fertilizer might easily add to food
problems rather than solve them.
Equally worrisome, he writes, is that "Through it all
we have diminished the store of human capital (farmers) that we will need to
address new questions in the decades ahead. In the
If all this sounds like we've balanced the world's food
future on a pinhead, we mostly have. That won't work two generations-let alone
two centuries-from now because Mother Nature isn't a pinhead.
Don't want to think about it? Fine; who should? Your kids? Your grandchildren?
Alan Guebert is a freelance
agricultural journalist
journalstar.com