Outgrowing the Earth Part 1

OUTGROWING THE EARTH

THE FOOD SECURITY CHALLENGE IN AN AGE OF FALLING WATER TABLES AND RISING TEMPERATURES

LESTER BROWN

EARTHSCAN          2005

PART I

About the author

Lester R. Brown is President of the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit, interdisciplinary research organization based in Washington, D.C., which he founded in May 2001. The purpose of the Earth Policy Institute is to provide a vision of an environmentally sustainable economy – an eco-economy – along with a roadmap of how to get from here to there and an ongoing assessment of its progress. Founder and former President of the Worldwatch Institute, the Washington Post called Lester Brown ‘one of the world’s most influential thinkers.’

Front cover

Historically, food security was the responsibility of ministries of agriculture but today that has changed: decisions made in the ministries of energy may instead have the greatest effect on the food situation. Recent research reporting that a one degree Celcius rise in temperature can reduce grain yields by 10% means that energy policy is now directly affecting crop production. Agriculture is a water-intensive activity and, while public attention has focused on oil depletion, it is aquifer depletion that poses the more serious threat. There are substitutes for oil, but none for water and the link between our fossil addiction, climate change and food security is now clear.

While population growth has slowed over the past three decades, we are still adding 76 million people per year. In a world where the historical rise in land productivity has slowed by half since 1990, eradicating hunger may depend as much on family planners as on farmers. The bottom line is that future food security depends not only on efforts within agriculture but also on energy policies that stabilize climate, a worldwide effort to raise water productivity, the evolution of land-efficient transport systems, and population policies that seek a humane balance between population and food. Outgrowing the Earth advances our thinking on food security issues that the world will be wrestling with for years to come.

Preface by Lester R. Brown, October 2004

• Assessing the world food prospect was once rather straightforward, largely a matter of extrapolating, with minor adjustments, historically recent agricultural supply and demand trends.
• Now suddenly that is all changing. It is no longer just a matter of trends slowing or accelerating; in some cases they are reversing direction.
• Grain harvests that were once rising everywhere are now falling in some countries. Fish catches that were once rising are now falling.
• Irrigated area, once expanding almost everywhere, is now shrinking in some key food-producing regions.
• Beyond this, some of the measures that are used to expand food production today, such as over-pumping aquifers, almost guarantee a decline in food production tomorrow when the aquifers are depleted and the wells go dry.
• The same can be said for over-plowing and over-grazing. We have entered an era of discontinuity on the food front, an era where making reliable projections is ever more difficult.
• New research shows that a 1°C rise in temperature leads to a decline in wheat, rice, and corn yields of 10%. In a century where temperatures could rise by several degrees Celsius, harvests could be devastated.
• Perhaps the biggest agricultural reversal in recent times has been the precipitous decline in China’s grain production since 1998. Ten years ago, in Who Will Feed China?, I projected that China’s grain production would soon peak and begin to decline.
• But I did not anticipate that it would drop by 50 million tons between 1998 and 2004. Since 1998 China has covered this decline by drawing down its once massive stocks of grain.
• Now stocks are largely depleted and China is turning to the world market. Its purchase of 8 million tons of wheat to import in 2004 could signal the beginning of a shift from a world food economy dominated by surpluses to one dominated by scarcity.
• Overnight, China has become the world’s largest wheat importer.
• At the other end of the spectrum is Brazil, the only country with the potential to expand world cropland area measurably. But what will the environmental consequences be of continuing to clear and plow Brazil’s vast interior?
• Will the soils sustain cultivation over the longer term? Will the deforestation in the Amazon disrupt the recycling of rainfall from the Atlantic Ocean to the country’s interior?
• How many plant and animal species will Brazil sacrifice to expand its exports of soybeans?
• Future food security now depends on the combined efforts of the ministries of agriculture, energy, transportation, health and family planning, and water resources.
• It also depends on strong leadership that is far better informed on the complex set of interacting forces affecting food security than most political leaders are today.

 

Chapter 1: Pushing Beyond the Earth’s Limits

• In 1950, there were 2.5 billion people in the world. By 2000, there were 6 billion. There has been more growth in world population since 1950 than during the preceding 4 million years.
• During the last half of the 20^th century, the world economy expanded sevenfold. The growth in the world economy during the single year of 2000 exceeded that of the entire 19^th century.
• While the world economy multiplied sevenfold in just 50 years, the earth’s natural life-support systems remained essentially the same.
• Water use tripled, but the capacity of the hydrological system to produce fresh water through evaporation changed little.
• The demand for seafood increased fivefold, but the sustainable yield of oceanic fisheries was unchanged.
• Fossil fuel burning raised carbon dioxide emissions fourfold, but the capacity of nature to absorb CO2 changed little, leading to a rise in the earth’s temperature.
• As human demands surpass the earth’s natural capacities, expanding food production becomes more difficult.

 

Losing agricultural momentum

• World grain production is a basic indicator of dietary adequacy at the individual level and of overall food security at the global level.
• After nearly tripling from 1950 to 1996, the grain harvest stayed flat for seven years in a row, through 2003, showing no increase at all.
• The shortfalls of nearly 100 million tons in 2002 and again in 2003 were the largest on record.
• World grain stocks dropped to the lowest level in 30 years. The last time stocks were this low, in 1972-74, wheat and rice prices doubled.
• In 2004 a combination of stronger grain prices at planting time and the best weather in a decade yielded a substantially larger harvest for the first time in eight years
• Yet even with a harvest that was up 124 million tons from that in 2003, the world still consumed all the grain it produced, leaving none to rebuild stocks. If stocks cannot be rebuilt in a year of exceptional weather, when can they?
• From 1950 to 1984 world grain production expanded faster than population, raising the grain produced per person from 250 kilograms to the historical peak of 339 kilograms, an increase of 34%.
• Since 1984 grain harvest growth has fallen behind that of population, dropping the amount of grain produced per person to 308 kilograms in 2004, down 9% from its historic high point.
• Part of the global decline was offset by the increasing efficiency with which feedgrains are converted into animal protein, thanks to the growing use of soybean meal as a protein supplement. The deterioration in nutrition has not been as great as the bare numbers would suggest.
• The one region where the decline in grain produced per person is unusually steep and where it is taking a heavy human toll is Africa. From 1980 through 2001 grain production per person fluctuated between 120 and 140 kilograms.
• In two of the last three years, it has been below 120 kilograms – dropping to a level that leaves millions of Africans on the edge of starvation.
• Several long-standing trends are contributing to the global loss of agricultural momentum: soil erosion; desertification; and the accelerating conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses.
• Now two newer environmental trends – falling water tables and rising temperatures – are slowing the growth in world food production.
• The high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, and corn that were developed a generation or so ago are now widely used in industrial and developing countries alike.
• The use of fertilizer has now plateaued or even declined slightly in key food-producing counties.
• The rapid growth in irrigation that characterized much of the last half-century has also slowed. Indeed, in some countries the irrigated area is shrinking.
• The bottom line is that it is now more difficult for farmers to keep up with the growing demand for grain.
• The rise in grainland productivity, which averaged over 2% a year from 1950 to 1990, fell to scarcely 1% a year from 1990 to 2000. This will likely drop further in the years immediately ahead.

 

Growth: The environmental fallout