Whatever happened to the food crisis?
(The Economist)
At the moment, the world’s population is 6.7 billion and 750m people are born each year. Though the rate of increase is declining, inertia means the total will go on rising until 2050, when the population will reach 9 billion. In Ethiopia, for example, 18m children are born every year, rising to 24m a year by 2040. That will double its headcount from 80m to 160m.
The FAO reckons that, to keep pace, the amount of food available in developing countries will have to double by 2050, equivalent to a 70% rise in world food production. If that does not happen, fears Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC, there could be a return to the food conflicts of 2007-08 which caused riots in more than 60 countries and set off a controversial worldwide land grab—a rush by rich food-importers to buy swathes of Africa and South-East Asia on which to grow food. Even if the rise in output comes about but in the “wrong” way, there could be problems, since water in some areas is growing scarce and increasing food output will make it scarcer.
[...]
Almost all the increase in cereals output in 2008 came from rich countries: the harvest in those nations increased 11%. In developing countries, the rise was a mere 1%; if you exclude China, India and Brazil, grain output in poor countries actually fell. So while the costs of the food crisis bore heavily upon the poor, the benefits accrued more to farmers in industrialised countries. And nowhere were there signs that yields (output per acre) were rising. Harvests increased because farmers took more land under the plough.
The European Union shelved a programme that had obliged farmers to leave 10% of their land fallow; China scrapped a scheme that had allowed marginal arable to return to woodland. Both these actions boosted the amount of farmland. This was not bad in itself, and it was the quickest way to boost output. But it is only a first step. World food production cannot be increased by 70% just by increasing acreage: there is simply not enough unused land to go around.
Airdale på TOD kommenterer:
Corn futures have been dropping like a rock...
Sept corn was way down...this is going to be a very very interesting crop year.
The USDA gave corn reports on acreage that had no corn even planted on it as yet and so the market responded by dropping.
Illinois and Indiana hadn't even planted due to spring rains and the report came out..I think they are making this shit up out of thin air.
Most corn farmers are really pissed now.
Agriculture and Food in Crisis
(Monthly Review)
What are the prospects for the future? Are they really as dire as Lester Brown suggests? As we write this, a severe recession has set in around the world — deep and, perhaps, long lasting. It has already resulted in much more hunger and food insecurity in the United States and many other countries. How much worse can things get? Probably quite a bit, is the unfortunate answer
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