Qlt sounds as if you are saying that food security will ♦ displace military security as the principal preoccupation of governments. A Exactly so. Take a look at the current situation: World grain ♦ reserves may now be at the lowest level since right after World War II. The world’s carryover stocks of grain—the grain in the bin just as the new harvest comes in—now amount to an estimated fifty-four days of consumption. Tha t’s the key food indicator to watch. Several things are contributing to a slowdown in the growth of food production, including the increasing scarcity of land and water resources. There simply is not much good land in the world waiting to be plowed. And in each of the four major food-producing countries— the United States, China, the Soviet Union, and India—pressures on water supplies are intensifying. The cities and the countryside are competing for fresh water, and that is beginning to emerge as a major political issue. In addition, farmable land in the United States, China, and the Soviet Union has declined substantially in recent years. irrigated with the water that was originally intended for the Aral Sea at a rate of about a half a ton per hectare per year. That is beginning to affect the cropland. More importantly, the climate of the region is being affected, as the frost line shifts south, and the cotton-growing area has been reduced by nearly half a million hectares or more. Q . Can the Soviet government do anything about this? A. This presents a very serious problem: They either have to cut back on irrigation—on the amount of water they use for irrigation—to save the Aral Sea, or they have to write off the Aral Sea. Almost all the fish are dead now because it ’s so salty: there are only three species left out of the twenty-six that were in there originally. They have to write off the fishing industry. They have to accept the fact that the climate will become more harsh in both the summer and the winter, making the region less hospitable to agriculture. Northern China already is facing sever water shortages, and water that’s needed to serve urban needs and industrial needs is taken from agriculture. As a result, China’s irrigated area, like that of the United States, also is shrinking. In fact, the irrigated area in both countries peaked in 1978 and has been declining since then. China’s has declined by 2 percent, compared with 7 percent in the United States. I cite these examples of pressures on land and water in the world’s three largest foodproducing countries that account for nearly half of world food output just to give a sense of the resource pressures that are at work on the food, supply. Q But hasn’t the rise of agricul- ♦ ture productivity offset these otner pressures? A. Rapidly raising the productivity of land is an increasingly difficult problem. You can see this most dramatically in Japan where rice yields have increased little since 1970, despite the fact that the rice support price offered to Japanese farmers is four times the world market level. And even with that astronomical price— a price that only the Japanese can afford—nothing’s happening to improve Japanese agriculture. The highest yielding rice varieties available to farmers in Asia today were released in 1966—twenty-three years ago. No one has been able to improve on that. So the rise in rice yields in many Asian countries is slowing. In China and Indonesia, for example, there’s been little or no increase in grain production since 1984. Q. With no increase in the level of production and slowing growth in agricultural productivity, why aren’t policymakers more concerned? A. Agricultural planners at places like the World Bank are deeply concerned. When you combine the Asian situation and the crisis in Africa, it ’s becoming more and more difficult to see how we’re going to grow enough food to satisfy the demand from the annual addition of eighty-six million people to world population. The fragile balance between food and population growth also is illustrated by the loss of topsoil: Each year the world’s farmers are losing about 24 billion tons of topsoil in excess of the new soil being formed through natural processes. That loss almost equals the amount of topsoil on the wheat-growing land of Australia—not an insignificant amount. Against that backdrop, climate change emerges as quite possibly the dominant environmental and economic issue of the 1990s and beyond. This loss of momentum in world grain production that we’ve just been discussing, combined with the North American drought in 1988, has reduced world grain stocks from the equivalent of 101 days of world consumption at the beginning of 1987 to 54 days at the beginning of 1989. This explains why world grain prices are half again higher than they were a year ago. Q . If we have another drought soon, does that mean there won’t be any grain to export? A. The prospect of another drought- reduced harvest is scary. For the first time since North America emerged as the world’s breadbasket some decades ago, it might not have any grain to offer the world. This would lead to a frantic scramble among the hundred or so countries that import Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1989-90 23
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