India News and Features Alliance (INFA) - Future Challenges: Food, Poverty: WORLD ON COLLISSION COURSE,by Dhurjati Mukherjee, 2 June 2008

On 5 June humankind celebrated World Environment Day. But underlining the merrymaking were issues of grave environmental concern. Which are going to challenge our future, specially food shortage, poverty and environment degradation.

The Green Revolution in agriculture finds itself trumped by the Green Evolution because of changing climatic developments. Years of world-wide concerns about global warming needing urgent corrective action expressed by scientists and environmentalists to prevent a catastrophe has led to new enthusiasm for bio-fuels, an ideal solution to bring down pollution levels and curb CO2 emissions.

Many developed countries, especially US, have turned swathes of agricultural land to grow crops that could be processed with ethanol, a less polluting fuel than petrol or diesel while in the developing countries land is being diverted for industrial and urbanization usages. However, this has resulted in land previously used to grow grains for human consumption now being devoted to crops for vehicles. The effect over the last 2-3 years has led to a crisis situation in food, which might get accentuated in future, leading to escalating food prices because of shortages.

Though the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) has predicted an increase in global rice production of 12 million tonnes (2 % this year), demand would outstrip supply as Australia, a major wheat producer-exporter is facing drought. Observed outgoing Italian Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, “something must be done to ensure that both the US and Europe stop producing fuel in competition with food. People can no longer be allowed to starve to death in Africa simply because some people in the US or EU consider that the votes of farmers or landowners are worth more than the survival of millions of men and women.”

Prodi was echoing what the Union of Scientists expressed in 1993: “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and the animal kingdom, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know”.

Man’s fight against hunger has taken a new turn and Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug’s prediction in 1970, that “the green revolution can provide food for sustenance during the next three decades”, rings true today. The green revolution has run its course and is facing environmental consequences of intense industrial, soil salinity due to high degree of chemicals and pesticides and water shortages.

Besides, nearly 30 per cent of the world’s population suffers malnutrition, some 850 million are undernourished, 2.8 million children and 300,000 women die annually in developing countries on this account. The UN mid-year update of the World Economic Situation & Prospects estimates that almost 3 billion or about half of the world’s population is food insecure. Meanwhile, the wheat price has risen nearly 130% over last year and the rice price in Asia has almost doubled in the first quarter of 2008. According to the Asian Development Bank Director General, a billion Asians have been hit by these surging prices, including 600 million who live under a-dollar-a-day resulting in more malnutrition, suicides and starvation deaths.

Unless the food crisis is tackled effectively, we would face riots, terrorism, political instability and more failed States. Already, food riots have broken out in over 12 countries in Africa and Asia. Namely, Egypt, Haiti, Cameroon, Bangladesh and Indonesia due to food shortage, record oil costs, severe droughts, diversion of corn for ethanol use and rapidly growing demand. The World Bank President has warned that around 30 nations are at risk of social unrest.

Worse, by 2012, the population will be 7 billion. India will add 500 million totalling 1.6 billion and Africa’s 960 million will grow by one billion. According to the Earth Policy Institute just to feed the additional people would require 640sq miles of good farmland, roughly Los Angeles’s size or 18 million football fields every year. More. With forests chopped for timber and farmland in the Amazon, Indonesia, Congo etc, the land available for agriculture has shrunk due to desertification and soil pollution. Also, with the Third World, including India, converting farmland to develop townships or industrial projects, where returns are higher, has led to displacement and migration of the rural population to cities resulting in the farm yield declining to 1.2% during the last decade..

However, experts believe that the situation is retrievable and the current food crisis would lead to an ever-green revolution, designed to improve productivity with associated ecological harm. The climate change problem may turn into a blessing in certain parts of the world through reorientation of agricultural research and development strategies based on the principles of ecology, economics, food and energy security and sustainable growth. Such a revolution would be through organic farming and/or green agriculture and is based on integrated pest and nutrient management, crop livestock integration, use of productive genetic stains, adoption of dryland farming and low water-use techniques.

Another view is that increasing productivity this way might be insufficient to meet the increasing demand of an exploding population in the coming years. True, in India the average crop yield has roughly doubled in 2006 to 3.12 tonnes per hectare from what the farmers were getting in the 1960s. But this pales in comparison with China where the yield was 6.26 tonnes per hectare in 2006 and the Asian average of 4.17 tonnes per hectare, almost 25 per cent better than that ours.

Sadly, in India there is little synergy between researchers and farmers notwithstanding talks of lab-to-land approach. There is a huge gap between what is produced in research stations and demonstration fields and the average actual production. This gap is nearly 200% in many cases. Further, the benefits of research have not percolated uniformly to guide the farmers. While the north and west regions are quite productive the east and north-east are not. The potential for increasing yields exists provided recommended practices and good extension systems are followed.

According to Dr M. S. Swaminathan, the conversion of farmland to SEZs should be stopped and these be set up on barren lands if the country has to ensure food security and prevent increasing poverty. Clearly, high GDP sans a decrease in poverty and upgradation of the lives of the rural poor does not mean real development. Further, to maintain social peace we need work on the rural sector and ensure that the basic necessities of the people are met. It is necessary to maintain demographic equilibrium as economic growth alone cannot tackle the problem. The demand on resources and the consequent effects on nature would become a critical problem if population growth is not restrained.

An expert aptly pointed: “The size of the human population is inextricably woven with global warming; yet seldom will ‘population’ be found on the agendas of global economic and sustainability forums”. Observed James Lovelock: “We have grown in number to the point where our presence is perceptibly disabling the planet like a disease.” --- INFA