Feeding the Ten Billion Part 15

FEEDING THE TEN BILLION

PLANTS AND POPULATION GROWTH

L.T. EVANS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS                  1998

PART XV

12.8 What chance a brown revolution?

The ‘Green Revolution’ has particularly benefited crop production in areas with irrigation or a sufficient and reliable enough rainfall to guarantee returns on inputs such as fertilizers. The spread of modern varieties into drier areas has been much slower and their impact on yields much less.

• Can there be a ‘brown revolution’ within these and other restraints?

There are several strong reasons for investing in research, and donor agencies have been persistent in putting them forward:

1. Many people already live in and depend on marginal environments. More than 700 M live in the semi-arid tropics alone, many of them in south Asia, but occupying more land in Africa. To these must be added those living in the temperate dry areas of the Near East and North Africa. The total number of people living in severely water-stressed environments, e.g. where yields are less than 40% of potential, is not easy to estimate, but Falkenmark projects 3 billion of them by AD 2025.
2. Many of those who live in marginal environments are among the poorest in the world.
3. Many marginal environments are susceptible to erosion and degradation, and require sustained and skilful management if they are to retain their productivity.

While these are all persuasive arguments in favour of focusing more research on marginal environments, they are compelling only if there is evidence that real progress can be made, or deterioration halted, within the confines of existing agricultural systems, or if viable new systems can be devised.

• Conventional agricultural research has had relatively little impact on marginal environments.

Robert Chambers has argued that agricultural scientists need to get away from ‘whatever is capital-intensive, mechanical, chemical, and quantifiable’ to whatever is labour-intensive, powered by animals or people, organic and difficult to quantify’ i.e. the resources of the rural poor, and to do this in consultation with ‘those who are most powerless, most scattered, most unable to articulate their needs, most unable to make demands on the system’.

• Seedbed preparation and the control of soil erosion and weeds might be improved in the light of modern knowledge, and water conservation enhanced.
• The range of crops might be expanded and farming systems modified, particularly to make more effective use of the N-fixation by legumes and other methods of maintaining or increasing the amount of organic matter in the soil, including agroforestry systems.
• In their book New Seeds for the Poor, Lipton and Longhurst have tried to identify useful targets for plant breeding programmes.

The arguments in favor of research towards a brown revolution are strong, but until we can see a way ahead, the rapidly growing population of marginal environments will have to depend increasingly on food from elsewhere or on migration elsewhere. Nevertheless, there remains a real need for the development of more sustainable farming systems for these less-favoured areas.

12.9 Alternatives in agriculture

The high input agriculture on which the world now depends for its food supply has many critics, across a wide spectrum of dissatisfaction. Some hanker for the old self-reliant family farms. Some are apprehensive about the long-term effects of pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics and fertilizers on human health; others about the effects of erosion, both of soil and of genes, on environmental health and biodiversity. Yet others seek a sustainable or even a self-sustaining agriculture with a long-term future. All these dissatisfactions are gathered under the rubric of ‘alternative agriculture’, a term I prefer to avoid for several reasons: for clarity because it covers so wide a spectrum of variations; for understanding because it implies practices not used in conventional modern agriculture; and for greater hope of progress, because it tends to be confrontational whereas it is beneficial for alternative and mainstream agriculturists to exchange views.

• Traditional agricultures are still practiced in many parts of the world and, with some evolution, are likely to remain so particularly in adverse environments where they are often stable, reliable and subtly adapted.
• If the world population were only three billion, a largely self-sufficient traditional agriculture would be possible. But the population is already twice that and intensification is unavoidable.
• Subsistence farming is not sustainable in the long-term, and often harmful to the environment in the short term.
• The movement away from industrial inputs in agriculture began with the recognition that pesticide residues could be harmful to wildlife, ecosystems and people, following the publication of Silent Spring.
• Biological control, resistant varieties and integrated pest management techniques made it feasible to reduce or even eliminate the application of pesticides to many crops. Control of weeds remains a problem.
• Of much greater significance is the shift in modern agriculture towards more sparing, more efficient and more informed use of industrial inputs.
• The use of crop rotations, to take advantage of biological N-fixation by legumes and to control soil-borne pests and diseases, is also likely to ‘ecologize’ modern crop production.
• The ecological ideal of a wholly self-sustaining agriculture is unlikely to be possible when there are ten billion people to be fed.
• A better form of intensification is now under way, namely the more intensive application of our understanding of exactly when and where and how these inputs contribute to greater yields.

 

12.10 Dilemmas for agriculturists, young and old

• Many agricultural scientists have agonized on the horns of several dilemmas:
• The Malthusian dilemma: the tendency for populations to increase towards the limit of subsistence.
• The demographic transition dilemma: high to low birth and death rates and family size.
• The environmental adversity dilemma: the slow and uncertain research for the rural poor who live on the less favoured lands with poor infrastructure, little access to inputs and advice, and degraded land.
• The scale-positive dilemma: innovations favor the larger-scale farmers.
• The sustainability dilemma: the need for greater food production/the need to conserve what is left of nature.
• The advancing or maintaining dilemma: research into new procedure to feed the ten billion/ the need to preserve and protect the gains from earlier advances.
• The optimist/pessimist dilemma: pessimism wins the headlines and book contracts, but is often misleading and can lead to indifference or distrust of ‘expert’ opinions. Optimism can mobilize hopes and more positive approaches. I am, like René Dubois, a ‘despairing optimist’.
• There is much to be said for J.D. Bernal’s recommendation that we should, like feudal peasants, plough the lord’s land for half the time and our own for the remainder. Frits Went’s ploughing of his own land led to the herbicides which have resulted in zero tillage on that of the lord.

 

12.11 Food, health, education and work for how many?

• How many people can the earth support? In his book with that title the demographer Joel Cohen details 64 of these estimates, which range from one billion to one thousand billion.
• The range reflects specifications: what standard of living; what kind of diet; how evenly distributed both within and between societies; at what cost to the environment; for how long into the future.
• We can be reasonably sure of producing enough food for ten billion by 2050. If we could ensure an even distribution of food with less waste and a greatly reduced use of grain for animal feed, we could almost feed the ten billion now.

The United Nations Hot Springs Conference in 1943 proclaimed: ‘The first cause of hunger and malnutrition is poverty.’ And the first cause of poverty is lack of work, hence Gandhi’s statement: ‘To the poor man God dare not appear except in the form of bread and the promise of work.’ In turn, the ability to work requires one to be sufficiently fed, healthy and educated to perform adequately. Although the proportion of the world population which is malnourished is slowly decreasing, the absolute number remains unacceptably high. Even when food availability increases and hunger decreases, malnutrition may not do so because of poor access to sanitation, clean water, health care and education. Women and children are frequently disadvantaged in these ways, particularly through lack of elementary education, despite the high rates of social return on public investment in rural education.

The many interlocking facets of poverty, of which food supply is only one of several ‘basic needs’, are now well recognized. Increasing global food production will not solve the problems of poverty and malnutrition, but agricultural development in regions where poverty is predominantly rural will help, as will the continuing reduction in the real price of grain for the urban poor. However, the further raising of crop yields to match further population growth without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs will require all the understanding, inventiveness and interaction of farmers, industrialists, agricultural scientists, educators, environmentalists, health care workers and policy makers that have brought us to where we are, and which have been sampled in this book.

Epilogue

We have seen that Robert Malthus’ innovation-pull and Ester Boserup’s population-push views of the relation between agricultural development and population growth are complementary rather than mutually exclusive, as Malthus himself recognized. Although framed in a context of subsistence agriculture, both views are still relevant. The falling food production per head in many parts of Africa highlights Malthusian concerns, while the efforts of agricultural scientists to raise yields in response to increasing population pressure in developing countries exemplify Boserup.

However, in regions which have already passed through their demographic transition, such as Europe and North America, other forces are at work in raising crop productivity. Although Malthus recognized the key role to be played by increase in yield per crop, he could hardly be expected to have foreseen the transforming effects of off-farm industrial inputs of fertilizer, energy and agrichemicals on yield levels and on the commercial impetus to intensification. Nor to foresee other consequences of yields well beyond the farmers’ own requirements, which allowed them to look better education and other prospects for their children, and a lower birth rate rather than the higher one anticipated by Malthus. One consequence of this transformation is that although Malthus knew of ‘no instance where a permanent increase of agriculture has not effected a permanent increase of population’, Europe now provides a striking example.

• The world population has long since passed the point where reliance on self-sufficient agriculture is possible. Reaching three billion was the turning point.
• At every stage in the history of agriculture, farmers have had to weigh the requirements for food production against those for the long-term sustainability of agriculture and the environment. Trade-offs have been the inevitable companion of growing populations.
• Throughout recorded history changes in climate have caused deterioration or forced the abandonment of agriculture, but now we face a global rather than a regional change in climate, the agricultural consequences of which are difficult to assess, but which will almost certainly fall most heavily on the less developed countries at low latitudes.
• Two other limitations on the global capacity to produce more food also begin to loom: the sheer scale of the resources that will be needed on a sustainable basis to feed twice as many people and the need for most food production to be more or less local, or at least within country; the other is that the genetic potentials of our staple crops may be approaching their limits unless their capacity for photosynthesis and growth can be substantially improved.
• What we don’t yet understand may be our greatest resource for the future, provided that research to deepen our understanding is sustained.

Feeding the ten billion can be done, but to do so sustainably in the face of climatic change, equitably in the face of social and regional inequalities, and in time when few seem concerned, remains one of humanity’s greatest challenges.