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February 14, 2001-1
Copyright © 2001 Earth Policy Institute
Paving the Planet:
Cars and Crops Competing for Land
Lester R. Brown
As the new century begins, the competition between
cars and crops for cropland is intensifying. Until now, the paving
over of cropland has occurred largely in industrial countries, home
to four fifths of the world’s 520 million automobiles. But
now, more and more farmland is being sacrificed in developing countries
with hungry populations, calling into question the future role of
the car.
Millions of hectares of cropland in the industrial
world have been paved over for roads and parking lots. Each U.S.
car, for example, requires on average 0.07 hectares (0.18 acres)
of paved land for roads and parking space. For every five cars added
to the U.S. fleet, an area the size of a football field is covered
with asphalt. More often than not, cropland is paved simply because
the flat, well-drained soils that are well suited for farming are
also ideal for building roads. Once paved, land is not easily reclaimed.
As environmentalist Rupert Cutler once noted, “Asphalt is the
land’s last crop.”
The United States, with its 214 million motor
vehicles, has paved 6.3 million kilometers (3.9 million miles) of
roads, enough to circle the Earth at the equator 157 times. In addition
to roads, cars require parking space. Imagine a parking lot for
214 million cars and trucks. If that is too difficult, try visualizing
a parking lot for 1,000 cars and then imagine what 214,000 of these
would look like.
However we visualize it, the U.S. area devoted
to roads and parking lots covers an estimated 16 million hectares
(61,000 square miles), an expanse approaching the size of the 21
million hectares that U.S. farmers planted in wheat last year. But
this paving of land in industrial countries is slowing as countries
approach automobile saturation. In the United States, there are
three vehicles for every four people. In Western Europe and Japan,
there is typically one for every two people.
In developing countries, however, where automobile
fleets are still small and where cropland is in short supply, the
paving is just getting underway. More and more of the 11 million
cars added annually to the world’s vehicle fleet of 520 million
are found in the developing world. This means that the war between
cars and crops is being waged over wheat fields and rice paddies
in countries where hunger is common. The outcome of this conflict
in China and India, two countries that together contain 38 percent
of the world’s people, will affect food security everywhere.
Car-centered industrial societies that are densely
populated, such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan, have
paved an average of 0.02 hectares per vehicle. And they have lost
some of their most productive cropland in the process. Similarly,
China and India also face acute pressure on their cropland base
from industrialization. Although China covers roughly the same area
as the United States, its 1.3 billion people are concentrated in
just one third of the country—a thousand-mile strip on the
eastern and southern coast where the cropland is located.
If China were one day to achieve the Japanese
automobile ownership rate of one car for every two people, it would
have a fleet of 640 million, compared with only 13 million today.
While the idea of such an enormous fleet may seem farfetched, we
need only remind ourselves that China has already overtaken the
United States in steel production, fertilizer use, and red meat
production. It is a huge economy and, since 1980, also the world’s
fastest growing economy.
Assuming 0.02 hectares of paved land per vehicle
in China, as in Europe and Japan, a fleet of 640 million cars would
require paving nearly 13 million hectares of land, most of which
would likely be cropland. This figure is over one half of China’s
23 million hectares of rice land, part of which it double crops
to produce 135 million tons of rice, the principal food staple.
When farmers in southern China lose a hectare of double-cropped
riceland to the automobile, their rice production takes a double
hit. Even one car for every four people, half the Japanese ownership
rate, would consume a substantial area of cropland.
The situation in India is similar. While India
is geographically only a third the size of China, it too has more
than 1 billion people, and it now has 8 million motor vehicles.
Its fast-growing villages and cities are already encroaching on
its cropland. Add to this the land paved for the automobile, and
India, too, will be facing a heavy loss of cropland. A country projected
to add 515 million more people by 2050 cannot afford to cover valuable
cropland with asphalt for roads and parking lots.
There is not enough land in China, India, and
other densely populated countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan,
Iran, Egypt, and Mexico to support automobile-centered transportation
systems and to feed their people. The competition between cars and
crops for land is becoming a competition between the rich and the
poor, between those who can afford automobiles and those who struggle
to buy enough food.
Governments that subsidize an automobile infrastructure
with revenues collected from the entire population are, in effect,
collecting money from the poor to support the cars of the wealthy.
In subsidizing the development of an auto-centered transport system,
governments are also inevitably subsidizing the paving of cropland.
If, as now seems likely, automobile ownership never goes beyond
the affluent minority in developing countries, this becomes an ongoing
and largely invisible transfer of income from the poor to the rich.
In a land-hungry world, the time has come to
reassess the future of the automobile, to design transportation
systems that provide mobility for entire populations, not just affluent
minorities, and that do this without threatening food security.
When Beijing announced in 1994 that it planned to make the auto
industry one of the growth sectors for the next few decades, a group
of eminent scientists—many of them members of the National
Academy of Sciences—produced a white paper challenging this
decision. They identified several reasons why China should not develop
a car-centered transport system, but the first was that the country
did not have enough cropland both to feed its people and to provide
land for the automobile.
The team of scientists recommended that instead
of building an automobile infrastructure of roads and parking lots,
China should concentrate on developing state-of-the-art light rail
systems augmented by buses and bicycles. This would not only provide
mobility for far more people than a congested auto-centered system,
but it would also protect cropland.
There are many reasons to question the goal of
building automobile-centered transportation systems everywhere,
including climate change, air pollution, and traffic congestion.
But the loss of cropland alone is sufficient. Nearly all of the
3 billion people to be added to the current world population of
6 billion by mid-century will be born in developing countries where
there is not enough land to feed everyone and to accommodate the
automobile. Future food security now depends on restructuring transportation
budgets—investing less in highway infrastructure and more in
rail and bicycle infrastructure.
World
Automobile Production and Fleet, 1950–2000 (36k, approx.
9 sec at 33.6 speed)
(40k, approx. 10 sec at 33.6 speed)
Copyright
© 2001 Earth Policy Institute
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FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
From Worldwatch Institute
Gary Gardner, ”Grain Area Shrinks Again,”
in Lester R. Brown, et al., Vital Signs 2000: The Environmental
Trends that are Shaping Our Future (New York: W.W. Norton &
Co., 2000).
Molly O’Meara, “Reinventing Cities for People and the
Planet,” Worldwatch Paper 147 (Washington, DC: Worldwatch
Institute, June 1999).
Molly O’Meara Sheehan, “Making Better Transportation Choices,”
in Lester R. Brown, et al., State of the World 2001 (New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001).
Michael Renner, “Vehicle Production Increases,” in Lester
R. Brown, et al., Vital Signs 2000: The Environmental Trends
that are Shaping Our Future (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000).
From Other Sources
Ding Guangwei and Li Shishun, “Analysis of
Impetuses to Change of Agricultural Land Resources in China,”
Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, vol. 13, n.
1.
Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation (New York: Crown Publishers,
1997).
Todd Litman, Transportation Land Valuation (Victoria, British
Columbia: Victoria Transport Policy Institute, 13 November 2000).
Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy, Sustainability and Cities:
Overcoming Automobile Dependence (Washington, DC: Island Press,
1999).
United States Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration,
Highway Statistics 1999 (Washington, DC: 2001).
LINKS
American Farmland Trust
http:/www.farmland.org
American Public Transport Association
http:/www.apta.com
Surface Transportation Policy Project
http:/www.transact.org
United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Inventory
http:/www.wi.nrcs.usda.gov/
technical/nri/
United States Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration
http:/www.fhwa.dot.gov
Victoria Transport Policy Institute http:/www.vtpi.org
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