Food Cliff

By Charles Johnson
The Progressive Farmer Contributing Editor

By now, just about everyone knows the scenario: more than 9 billion people on the planet by 2050, all ready to eat. With dwindling natural resources, changing climate and an already stressed environment, will the world's farmers and ranchers be able to feed them? Can agriculture boost food production by 70% over the next 40 years to satisfy the world's appetite?

It's the most significant challenge of our time. Achieving it won't be easy. Lester Brown, in his book "Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Security," said ag producers, in addition to wrestling with the usual challenges, face three distinctly new problems.

"One, aquifers are being depleted and irrigation wells are starting to go dry in 18 countries that together contain half the world's people. Two, in some of the more agriculturally advanced countries, rice and wheat yield per acre, which have been rising steadily for several decades, are beginning to plateau. And three, the earth's temperature is rising, threatening to disrupt world agriculture in scary ways," Brown writes.

"Food is the weak link in our modern civilization -- just as it was for the Sumerians, Mayans and many other civilizations that have come and gone," he continued. "They could not separate their fate from that of their food supply. Nor can we."

Undoubtedly, the world will look to the U.S. to help stock the global food pantry.

"I don't think you can dream too big for American agriculture," Richard Crowder, Virginia Tech ag economist, told thousands gathered at the American Farm Bureau Federation's convention, as he received the organization's distinguished service award earlier this year. "Your role in past changes will be minor compared to what you'll need to do (to feed the world)," said Crowder, the former U.S. chief agricultural trade negotiator.

Pat Campbell, a dairy producer from Spring Hill, Tenn., puts it succinctly: "As we become more urbanized and industrialized, it puts increased pressure on farmers because the world is going to demand more food. We'll produce it. We have to."

MORE MOUTHS TO FEED

The numbers, however, look daunting.

"The world greets 219,000 new people every day. That's the equivalent of one Britain every year. If we assume most of this new population is from Asia and consuming 1,200 calories a day, then 1 acre feeds 15 people, at 18,350 calories an acre. That means we'll need the equivalent of 14,600 new acres every day," said Louis Elwell, chief executive officer of Bio Soil Enhancers.

Cultivating vast new masses of land isn't likely. Instead, agriculture needs a "greener revolution," to increase productivity in a sustainable way, Liam Condon, chief executive officer of Bayer CropScience, told the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture in Berlin, Germany, in January.

"We need to recognize we are reaching the ecological limits that our planet can bear. We must cultivate new ideas and answers to freeze our environmental footprint and farm better the land we have available," he said.

Larkin Martin grows corn, soybean, cotton and wheat in Courtland, Ala. She thinks technology must provide new answers for sustainable practices and the looming food cliff. "We have to make sure we are using our technology at its best for the capacity the soil has. If we are to produce more on the same footprint, we've got to do something different in genetics or crop-protection techniques. Either that or we have to enlarge our footprint. It's basic physics," she said.

"My hope is that technologies can be developed to help the farmer give plants what is needed when they need it; let's contain inputs to the area we intend. We need to put a lot of scientific effort into agriculture that has very little off-site influence."

WATER WOES

Pressure to produce more will undoubtedly increase even as vital resources become scarcer. However, a rising population will squeeze farmers even tighter as all those people compete for resources. Even with today's population, agriculture consumes more than 80% of U.S. water use annually, according to a paper recently released by USDA researchers Glenn D. Schaible and Marcel P Aillery.

Globally, in the 20th century, water use expanded at more than twice the rate of population increase. About 20% of the world's cropland is now irrigated.

Tom Gleeson, a hydrogeologist at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, released a study last year indicating water demand in major agricultural regions like California's Central Valley, Egypt's Nile Delta and the Upper Ganges in India and Pakistan exceeds capacity for renewal.

"This overuse can lead to decreased groundwater availability for both drinking water and growing food," Gleeson said. Twenty percent of the world's aquifers are overexploited, the study indicated.

In addition, about one-fifth of the world's people -- 1.2 billion -- currently live with water scarcity. By 2025, that number will rise to 1.8 billion, according to figures from the Worldwatch Institute. By then, two-thirds of the world's people will live in water-stressed conditions.

"Water is overtaking oil as the world's scarcest critical natural resource," Steven Solomon wrote in "Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization," published in 2009.

"But water is more than the new oil. Oil, in the end, is substitutable, albeit painfully, by other fuel sources, or in extremis can be done without; but water's uses are pervasive, irreplaceable by any other substance and utterly indispensable."

However, Charles Fishman disparages the notion of a global water crisis. The author of "The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water," published in 2011, said "... all water problems are local, or regional, and their solutions must be local and regional. There is no global water crisis; there are a thousand water crises, each distinct.

"That doesn't relieve us of responsibility for water behavior and water habits; precisely the opposite," he continued. "It means we must take responsibility for our water issues, because no one else on the globe will. No one else can."

Fishman contends agriculture needs a "blue revolution to follow its green revolution -- farmers need to be shown how to make better use of rainwater, how to use irrigation water more effectively, with more precision, and the financial incentives need to be flopped so that instead of water and electricity being so cheap that wasting makes sense, farmers are rewarded financially for learning to grow the same amount of food with less water."

IRRIGATION TECHNOLOGY

Water-efficient irrigation techniques many farmers now consider too costly could become more commonplace as water grows ever more precious.

Alabama's Martin agreed. "Drip irrigation technology offers a huge opportunity if pricing gets to the point it is not so very expensive. With a perfectly metered drip system, a whole lot of water is saved. These all require farmers to spend money. The returns have to be there to justify it."

For some farmers, switching to less thirsty crops could be the answer. "We're seeing some farmers in areas with aquifer problems who switched to corn several years ago now switching back to sorghum because of the water situation," said Terry Swanson, Walsh, Colo., farmer and president of National Sorghum Producers. "In dry regions, sorghum is the smart choice."

Still, corn's importance for use as food and feed has plant breeders busy developing drought-tolerant corn and hybrids that utilize water more efficiently. The industry's first drought-tolerant hybrids were released last year.

Linda Davis knows firsthand how devastating long-term drought can be. For the past 14 years, the big family-owned CS Ranch at Cimarron, N.M., averaged just 5 1/2 inches of annual rainfall.

Her family used to run 2,500 cow/calf pairs on the 130,000-acre ranch. Drought squeezed capacity down to 700 pairs. For the well-traveled and keenly observant Davis, it's a lesson in just how fragile agricultural production can be, not just on her northern New Mexico land but around the world.

"Water is going to be the major challenge over the next century. We're going to have to learn all sorts of new tricks in order to utilize the water we have and use it wisely," she said.

"I'm optimistic. As a people, we've eliminated things like smallpox and polio. Now we need to put our focus on things that need to be solved if life continues as it should. It might be genetics with crops and grasses, or the answer might come from something else."

HUNGER GAMES

Finding answers to food security problems is no more crucial than in Africa. Think world hunger, and Africa immediately comes to mind.

There's little question the small-holder farmers there will need to improve their production capacities to help meet the continent's food needs. But Africa's problems could grow worse before they get better. Population is expected to jump from today's 900 million to as many as 2.2 billion by 2050, at current growth rates.

With a labyrinth of production and political hurdles, is it conceivable for Africa to feed that many people?

After studying the food production quandary since 2007 in Lesotho, the nation encircled by South Africa, University of Tennessee soil scientists Neal Eash and Forbes Walker say it could happen.

Lesotho now imports 85% of its food. Corn yield averages 7 bushels per acre. Cultural barriers are huge, but so is the potential.

Their corn plots in Lesotho, using a combination of no-till and cover crops like wheat, oats and vetch for weed control, along with the open-pollinated varieties already grown there, can produce 170 bushels per acre.

"We're not taking Tennessee agriculture to Africa," Walker said. "What we're using is simple technology: early planting, better plant populations, cover crops for weeds, judicious use of fertilizer. By doing that, yields go up twenty- to thirtyfold."

Alabama's Martin used the 2012 Eisenhower Foundation fellowship she received to study agriculture in Kenya and Turkey. Her three weeks in Kenya left her troubled about Africa's future. "When you look at what is inhibiting agricultural production there, it's pretty overwhelming," she said. Problems range from inadequate markets to terrible roads, entrenched traditions and questionable government policies. Kenya's problems, Martin concluded, are big -- the solutions not simple.

No one knows how quickly agriculture will find food solutions for Kenya and the rest of the world. The industry already has a steep hill to climb when you consider an estimated 1 billion people today experience chronic hunger, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. That number will likely get worse as the population grows.

Yet, Jorgen Randers, professor of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, suggests agriculture is better prepared to meet world food demand than many project. In his 2012 book, "2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years," Randers predicts population will peak at 8.1 billion in the early 2040s and then decline by 1% yearly because of the push toward smaller families and higher standards of living. By 2075, population will be back to the current 7 billion.

Perhaps we fret too much about feeding the growing population, Randers said, noting that "food production has grown spectacularly over the past 40 years" and should continue on that pace for the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, an anxious world will be watching to see if agriculture can scale the food cliff or, instead, falls off the ledge.

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Landlocked

By Charles Johnson

The Progressive Farmer Contributing Editor

Could the answer to the world's food supply problems be as simple as bringing more land into production? Not likely.

Only 10.43% of the Earth's surface is currently used for food production, according to Central Intelligence Agency analysis. That number has declined 22% since 1950 due to soil degradation, said the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, noting that takes as much as 16% of the world's arable land out of the food-production picture.

That still leaves 6.6 billion acres, now unused, with some sort of potential for agriculture. Virtually all that land lies in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, notes a report by Future Directions International (FDI), an Australian nonprofit research institute, with little hope of it being put to good use due to intense population growth and increased soil degradation.

"The alternative to creating more arable land is to improve the yield and productivity of land currently being cultivated," the report concludes.

FDI released a report in May predicting the looming global land and water crisis will result in numerous conflicts over the next 40 years. "The result will be demand exceeding supply due to competing interests, including environmental pressures, poor governance, pre- and post-harvest losses and inadequate research," the report said. "All these factors will put upward pressure on the price of food. Unfortunately, those most affected are the least able to afford price increases."

Much of the conflict FDI foresees will be over water sources, noting that water supply must double in order to meet demand.

"Despite more than an adequate supply of arable land to meet future demand, land availability will continue to be a major factor in meeting future food security concerns, because of the need to find a balance between competing interests and uses, and finite resources," the report said.

(ES/BAS)

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