The rapid growth in farm output and productivity that we came to expect in the latter half of the twentieth century is now failing to keep up with the demand for food.

Population increases, rising affluence in once-poor countries and changing weather patterns are to blame. As The New York Times noted in their June 4, 2011 story, “A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself,” consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories — wheat, rice, corn and soybeans — has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels.

Since 2007, increased demand and speculation in the commodities markets, combined with fluctuations in supply, have created two huge spikes in international grain prices, with some grains more than doubling in cost. When prices increase, tens of millions of people starve. Food riots broke out in more than 30 countries.

Large amounts of American grain are now diverted to ethanol production, driven by financial incentives and government policy. Thanks to Washington, four of every ten ears of corn grown in America — the source of 40 percent of the world’s production — are shunted into ethanol. Congress adds a 45-cents-a-gallon subsidy to artificially reduce the cost of ethanol ($6 billion a year) and to keep foreign competition out of the market where, in countries like Brazil, ethanol is produced less expensively from sugar cane, it imposes a tariff on imported ethanol of 54-cents-a-gallon.

While tangential to our food crisis, because of the subsidy, ethanol became cheaper than gasoline, and so we sent 397 million gallons of ethanol overseas last year. America is simultaneously importing costly foreign oil and subsidizing the export of its equivalent.

Outside the United States, in developing countries, meat consumption is a sign of affluence. Meat is one of the most inefficient ways to provide protein and nutrients to hungry people.

The New York Times reported that: “recent price spikes have helped cause the largest increases in world hunger in decades. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated the number of hungry people at 925 million last year, and the number is expected to be higher when a fresh estimate is completed this year. The World Bank says the figure could be as high as 940 million.”

Skyrocketing food prices are especially destabilizing in poor, import-dependent countries such as those in Africa, where households spend up to 80 percent of their income on food. In Egypt, the world’s leading wheat importer, a 70 percent rise in wheat prices helped trigger the recent wave of protests that swept the country.

This challenging landscape will now be impacted by global climate change. Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University and Michael J. Roberts of North Carolina State University, both economists, have pioneered ways to determine the impact of natural temperature variability on crop production. The same New York Times story notes that:

“Their work shows that when crops are subjected to temperatures above a certain threshold — about 84 degrees for corn and 86 degrees for soybeans — yields fall sharply. This line of research suggests that in the type of climate predicted for the United States by the end of the century, with more scorching days in the growing season, yields of today’s crop varieties could fall by 30 percent or more.”

 

“Oxfam, the international relief group, projected recently that food prices would more than double by 2030 from today’s high levels, with climate change responsible for perhaps half the increase. As worries like that proliferate, some scientists are ready to go back to the drawing board regarding agriculture and climate change.”

For a complete analysis of solutions to our food crisis, check out “State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet,” available at www.NourishingthePlanet.org.