Food

The capacity of farmers to feed the world's future population is also in jeopardy, especially as higher incomes boost the per capita demand for meat, fish and other foods that require intensive use of natural resources to cultivate.  

The food of the future will be produced almost entirely on today's farmland, and much of that farmland is deteriorating. Already, the world loses about 27.5 billion tons of topsoil through erosion each year,1 and an area of land the size of the United States and Mexico has already lost much of its productive potential due to human activities.2 The area of farmland worldwide is now expanding only one eighth as fast as population.3 In order to feed more people, farmers must work each acre much more intensively, raising the risk of further soil degradation.

Farmers produce enough food today to feed everyone in the world. But since many people cannot afford to buy this food, an estimated 800 million human beings are chronically malnourished. This is a distribution problem for which no easy solutions are evident. Even if it could be resolved, however, in two or three decades farmers might need to produce 50 percent more food than they do now,4 without increasing their use of land and water, just to keep up with population and economic growth. Given current trends in natural resource availability, they will not be able to use more land and fresh water to accomplish this task.

Technological advances have done much to enable farmers to keep pace with population growth. But this progress has stagnated in the past decade, and in recent years grain prices have risen while reserves have plummeted. Indeed, over the past few decades, advances in crop yields have come mostly through increasing the number of plants per acre and the food to non-food material in each plant. Advances in livestock production have come largely from raising the proportion of animal feed that is devoted to the production of usable animal products. "There are severe physiological constraints," notes agricultural economist Vernon W. Ruttan, "to continued improvement along these conventional paths."5

It may be too much to expect that yields of all major crops will rise by half or more from their current levels. This is especially true given the dependence of farmers on sufficient fresh water and decent weather for growing crops. Today, water for agriculture is rapidly becoming more scarce and the global climate may be changing in unpredictable ways.

These arguments are anything but academic. In most African countries and in Jordan, Mexico, Afghanistan and the Philippines, increases in food production are lagging those of population. Struggling to feed their families, many farmers clear land of trees or misuse pesticides and fertilizers. Often the increases in harvests gained through such methods are short-lived, because the new land is unsuitable for long term farming and the fertilizers and pesticides themselves threaten human health and the environment. The immediate reasons for world hunger today may be income disparities and the inequitable distribution of food. Food insecurity also stems in part from inappropriate agricultural policies and the poverty of many of today's farmers. Rapid population growth tends to make such problems even more intractable. By increasing the human demands on food production and distribution, population growth increases the chance that many countries will become dependent on food imports.

As the world's leading food exporter, the United States could benefit economically from this trend‹assuming importing countries have healthy economies and can purchase the food their people need. The benefit might not last, however. Rising global demand could at some point outstrip farmers' capacity to boost their production‹especially when extreme weather robs harvests of their full potential, as has occurred in recent years. Food is a global commodity, so such imbalances in the world's largest food-producing country inevitably raise food prices everywhere. When this occurs, Americans, in effect, are bidding against the citizens of other countries for the food we cultivate at home.6

This is an environmental as well as an economic issue for Americans. At a time when concerns are rising about the health effects of widely used synthetic compounds, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that U.S. farmers applied record amounts of pesticides in 1994 and 1995, not because they require a greater volume of pesticides per acre‹the reverse is true‹but because they cultivated many more acres in those two years. Among the reasons for this increase in land under cultivation and corresponding boost in pesticide use, was the need to satisfy growing international demand for U.S. crops.7 It is U.S. soil, water, wildlife and farmers themselves (and their families) that suffer the environmental and health impacts of our growing importance as the world¹s breadbasket.

The likelihood that many countries will be unable to pay for the food their people need raises the risk of dependence on food aid. The United States provides more of this assistance than any country in the world, but will it be able to continue to do so indefinitely, especially if food prices keep rising? Such questions point to the need to work in international partnerships to sustainably increase food production in poorer countries. They also point to the need to stabilize population.