grain from the United States for meager exportable supplies from Argentina, Australia, and France. And that would be it. We would see price rises unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. They would dwarf those of 1972-73, when world grain prices doubled. No one knows how much they would go up—they could triple, even quadruple. Such a rise would send a shock wave through the world economy. That would make the oil price increases of the '70s appear modest, by comparison. Historically, we have not had severe back-to-back droughts in the United States. But we’ve had three drought-reduced harvests during the 1980s—’80, ’83, and ’88. Q DO you see this as part of the ♦ global warming trend? A. Those three droughts happen to coincide with the five warmest years in the past century—all in the 1980s! That could be a coincidence? Possibly, but probably not. We may have seen in 1988 a glimpse of the future in terms of what climate change could mean to world food production, and therefore to the world economy. We have no precedent by which to judge, or even to estimate very intelligently, the impact of the global warming on the global economy. I’ve been talking about U.S. agriculture as an example of how things could change as the earth’s average temperature rises. There’s a tendency to describe climate change in averages and to say by the time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels double by the year 2030 or 2050—whenever it comes—the average global temperature will increase by somewhere between 3 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit. But those averages mask the real dramatic changes. There won’t be much rise in temperature in the equatorial regions of the planet. Most of the increase will come in the higher latitudes in the Northern and Southern hemispheres —the grain-growing regions. The average number also conceals the fact that the temperature increases over land will be subs tan t ia lly greater than over the oceans. When you put those two together, then you can begin to see the kinds of temperature increases that might be in prospect for agricultural regions of North America or the Soviet Union. This is by way of saying we’re moving into uncharted territory with climate and with its effect on world food supplies. Consequently, the Bush Administration needs to rethink these problems and to move vigorously to establish U.S. leadership in a global effort to reestablish a carbon balance between the earth and the atmosphere and thus head off as much of the global warming trend as possible. World grain reserves may now be at the lowest level since right after World War IL Q . That’s a big order. What does it entail? A. It means moving away from fossil fuels. It means putting the brakes on population growth. And it means planting trees as though the future depended on it. Q . And it does. A. We’ve a long way to go. I’m aware of only two national governments in the world that have begun even to talk about devising climate-sensitive energy policies: Norway and Canada. The foreign ministers of those two countries, at a conference in the summer of ’88, urged the world to begin thinking about reducing the use of fossil fuels in order to try to reduce the global warming. The risk is that if we do not act soon enough, environmental deterioration will lead to political instability and social disintegration, and these forces will begin to feed on each other. Governments will very quickly become so preoccupied with the short-term crises—food shortages and the price increases associated with climate change— that there will be little time or energy to devote to the longer term questions of how to reverse the process. Q . Isn’t that what happened during the oil crises of the 1970s?The immediate problem of scarcity and soaring prices diverted attention from a longer-term solution to the oil and energy problems. A. The evidence leads me to believe that we have only a matter of years to get some of these environmental trends turned around—not decades. Things are happening too fast. One sees it with climate change, ozone depletion, deforestation, soil erosion, and the accelerating loss of plant and animal species all over the world. I also see the evidence that the rising tide of economic progress that was raising almost all nations during this century’s third quarter is no longer working. Q . Do you see that third-quarter century after World War II as an aberration, a kind of golden era? A. It was. And I think it will be seen as such, because even before the ’70s were over, living conditions began turning downward. The evidence was abundantly clear first in Africa; both Africa and Latin America will end the decade of the '80s with lower living standards than those with which they began. The 1989 annual report by UNICEF begins by saying that for 900 million people in the world, the march of progress has been replaced by a broad-based retreat. Something like a f if th of humanity—most of Africa, most of Latin America—is experiencing a decline in living standards. The risk now is that the Indian subcontinent will be the next region to follow, and that’s because of the rate of deforestation, soil erosion, and land degradation. Q But wasn’t it just a decade or * two ago that we were proclaiming the green revolution in India that enabled even India to export grain? A. The green revolution bought time to get the brakes on population growth, for example. But that time was mostly wasted. China and India both had green revolutions. China used the time to put the brakes on population growth. India did not. As a result, India is adding some 15million people a year and its resource base is deteriorating very rapidly—its soil, the vegetation, not only trees, but grass and forage. There are a lot of cattle starving to death in India because there is no vegetation left to keep them alive. India now has cattle relief camps, just like the food relief camps for people in Africa and India. Cattle on the verge of starvation are brought into feed lots where local governments try to provide them fodder. So, the real risk is that the Indian subcontinent of a billion people will experience a deterioration in the ’90s, joining Africa and Latin America in decline. Q . And is Indian population growth still continuing at high rates? A. India has brought its population growth rate down somewhat from maybe 2.8 percent to 2.2 percent per year, compared with China's 1.2 percent. That’s a fairly big difference. In contrast, Bangladesh and Pakistan are both growing at nearly 3 percent a year. And Kenya’s people are growing at nearly 4 percent per year. It’s not possible to grow much faster! People don’t realize that a 3 percent annual rate of population growth, compounded, leads to a twenty-fold increase in a century. No society can stay on that track for long. Q . How did the Chinese slow things down? A. They began looking ahead to see where population growth would take them. They made some fairly simple demographic assumptions. They considered their country’s future, if each couple had two children. Running their demographic model with that assumption implied that population would grow by several hundred million. In time, they would add another India to their existing population. The Chinese next looked at their cropland, fresh water, and energy supplies. They looked at job creation and the demand for social services. They realized that even if they had only two children per couple, that would lead to a future of deteriorating living conditions, increasing poverty and malnutrition, a loss of all the advances they’d struggled for a generation to make. So they made the politically difficult decision to prevent that future. The only way they could avoid it was to push for one-child families. The difference between China and many other Third World countries is not that China is in more dire straits than the other countries; the difference is that the Chinese have had the courage to look ahead and respond to what they've seen. Q . What about their reforestation programs? A. They’ve certainly been fighting deforestation. But even with one of the most ambitious reforestation programs in the world, they’re still losing ground. One result of China’s rising affluence is the growing demand for housing. That generates an enormous appetite for lumber. They have planned to increase their forested area from 12.7 percent of the country in 1970 to at least 20 percent by the end of the century. It now looks as though they could end the century with even less than 12.7 percent’ in forests. If you don’t begin soon enough, even an ambitious tree planting program can be overwhelmed by growing population. Q . This conversation reminds me of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) that argued how population would press against the food supply and result in misery. A. Malthus was right: Population growth still is checked from time to time by famine. Some would have us believe that food shortages and famines are ancient history. But they’re not. They still occur with devastating results in Asia and Africa. As a matter of fact, within the half century after Malthus wrote his famous treatise, Ireland lost a third of its population in the famous potato famine. In another sense he was wrong because we have achieved dramatic increases in world food output. For example, between 1950 and 1984, world grain output increased 2.6 times. Never before, within the span of a generation or so, have we seen increases of that magnitude. Unfortunately, we’ll probably never again see gains so spectacular. Q . Why do you say that? A. Look at technological change in agriculture. Each of four major technologies led to a quantum jump in world food output in the past generation: on’e was hybrid corn; the second was enormous growth in use of chemical fertilizer from 14 million tons in 1950 to close to 130 million tons in 1984; a near tripling of world irrigated area in 1950 to 1980; and most recently, the rapid spread of high- yielding dwarf fruits and rices in the developing countries. Now we realize that some of those technologies largely have run their course in some countries. For example, in the United States, if we were to double fertilizer use in 1989,1don’t think it would have much effect on food production at a l l! We’ve reached the point of diminishing returns on additional fertilizer use. Indeed, fertilizer use in the United States is less now than it was six years ago. Q . This is really a classic textbook example of productivity change that teachers use in the classroom. A. Yes, it clearly illustrates the law of diminishing returns. In the 1950s, for example, if one applied another ton of fertilizer to corn in the Midwest, you would get 15or 20 additional tons of corn per acre. Increasing fertilizer use was certainly a very profitable thing to do. Not so today. Dinimishing returns are haunting us in many parts of the world. A recent study in Indonesia pointed out that a decade ago, another ton of fertilizer on rice there would get you 12 to 15 additional tons of rice; today it may be 6 tons. Besides, the cost differential is such that it just doesn’t pay to'use much more fertilizer on rice in Indonesia today. Irrigation is another example. There just aren’t that many opportunities to expand irrigation, and most are rather costly to develop. The easy investments in irrigation have already been made. So we don’t anticipate an enormous growth in irrigation. As a result, the world’s cultivated area may not increase much at The administration is clearly far behind public opinion on environmental issues. all in the ’90s; just as it hasn’t increased much during the ’80s. So, it ’s not clear where we’re going to get any dramatic additional jumps in world food output. QWhat about improved yields ♦ from new varieties of plants? A. There are no new plant technologies on the horizon that promise the potential output gains that came from hybrid corn, or the nine-fold increase in fertilizer use since 1950. Certainly there are little things here and there. Argentina and India could s t i l l make s ign if ican t advances. Argentina has an export tax on its agriculture commodities that discourages the use of modern inputs and maximum use of a rather good piece of agricultural real estate. India’s grain yields are still less than half those of Japan, whereas China’s grain yields are now about four-fifths of those of Japan. But it ’s not clear to me that the Soviet Union will make any dramatic progress in expanding farm output, even with economic reforms. What we forget is that the Soviet Union is like Canada, not like the United States. It doesn’t have a corn belt; all of its grains are small grains —wheat, barley, oats, rye—which do not have the yield potential that corn does. In the United States, our corn yields are three times as high as our wheat yields. It is not that our corn farmers are three times better than wheat farmers. Instead, we have the right combination of soil, water, and temperature for growing corn and we get tremendous yields. The Soviet Union doesn’t have a corn belt; it is handicapped with severe weather and little water. Maybe the USSR can do better with reforms, but I wouldn’t expect dramatic gains on the scale achieved by China. China has the advantage of a lot of water and much of its agriculture is irrigated. China has more irrigated area than any country in the world; India is second; the United States, third. 24 Clinton St. Quarterly-Mn tW , 1989-90
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