Feed The World

Agribusiness abound with dire warnings about unsustainable population growth and looming resource constraints. How can we produce enough food to feed this growing population?

“Between now and 2050, we need to double the food supply,” said Dr. Robert Fraley, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Monsanto, “That's probably the greatest challenge facing mankind.” But offering policies and practices that have changed little. That is in part because they are the old tried-and-failed solution of increasing commodity food production. For companies like Monsanto that sell agricultural inputs, producing more is indeed the solution to just about everything; after all, that lets them sell more seeds and chemicals. It is not surprising that Monsanto and other agribusiness firms might overstate the situation. Increasing the global supply of agricultural commodities might bring food prices down for a while, but it won’t feed the hungry.

The claims about the need to double food production are unfounded, according to ActionAid’s report, “Rising to the Challenge: Changing Course to Feed the World in 2050.” Solutions to the world's food insecurity lie not in the rush to increase industrial food production but in supporting sustainable and productive farming practices among small-scale farmers – particularly women – in developing countries while while halting the diversion of food to biofuels and reducing the obscene levels of waste and spoilage that keep one-third of the world’s food from nourishing anyone. Reliable international projections from the United Nations suggest the need to increase global agricultural production – not food production – by 60 percent, not 100 percent, to feed a population of 9.3 billion by 2050. What’s more, they estimate that, with important caveats, we are on track to do just that with yield improvements and land use changes.

The hungry are not hungry because the world lacks food. We grow enough food right now to feed about 10 billion people, yet according to the U.N. nearly one billion of today’s seven billion people are chronically undernourished and well over one billion suffer from significant malnutrition, in a world of plenty. They are hungry because they are poor. Seventy percent of the hungry live in rural areas and rely primarily on agriculture for their livelihoods. A U.N. report confirmed the consensus that the best area to invest in agriculture is small-scale farming, where the “yield gaps” are the largest and where hunger in the most prevalent.

Yet policymakers and multinational firms continue to promote large-scale industrial agricultural projects – some denounced as “land grabs” – such as those encouraged by the G8 countries’ New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. Many displace small-scale farmers without their consent to grow export crops that offer few jobs and contribute nothing to local food security.

There is no question that socialism will we need to continue to develop appropriate technologies to enhance productivity, reduce environmental damage (including greenhouse gas emissions), and adapt to climate change if we’re going to achieve the goal of zero hunger. It can be done by increasing the availability of land and food by reducing biofuel production, getting more of the food we grow to the table by reducing food waste, and helping the most important food producers in the world: small-scale and family farmers. It is time to stop the Malthusian fear-mongering. We can feed the world in 2050 if we change the system at its roots.

Adapted from here