INTRODUCTION
Chapter 7. Feeding Everyone Well
Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth
(W.W. Norton & Co., NY: 2001).
In November 1965, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture
Orville Freeman asked if I would draft a plan to get India's agriculture
moving. The monsoon had failed that summer, leaving India to face
a potential famine of historic proportions. India had been neglecting
its agriculture in favor of industrial development and had no grain
reserves. As one official in New Delhi put it, "Our reserves are
in the grain elevators in Kansas."
President Lyndon Johnson was concerned, because he knew that the
United States could not feed India's growing population over the
long term. He wanted a plan for India to develop its agriculture
and an agreement that India would implement the plan promptly in
exchange for massive food relief. Since I was working as an Asian
agricultural analyst in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was
familiar with India, having spent part of 1956 living in villages
there, I was chosen to draft the plan.
The key steps for India to take were straightforward. The first
was to shift from an urban-oriented policy of ceiling prices for
grain that discouraged investment in agriculture to a rural-oriented
policy of support prices that would encourage farmers to invest
in improving their land and other output-expanding measures. The
second step was to move the fertilizer industry out of the government
sector, where it took up to nine years to build a fertilizer plant,
into the private sector, where plants could be built in two years.
The third was to harness the abundant underground water resources
for irrigation. The fourth was to disseminate quickly the high-yielding
wheats that had already been tested and approved for use in India.
During the year following signature of the agreement, the United
States shipped a fifth of its wheat crop to India to offset the
poor harvest. Two ships left U.S. ports each day laden with grain
for Indiapart
of the largest movement of grain between two countries in history.
Between 1965 and 1973, India doubled its wheat harvest, a record
gain for a major country. The agricultural plan succeeded beyond
our hopes as India became self-sufficient in grain.1
The plan I drafted in November 1965 was not difficult. Any number
of people could have come up with such a scheme because the needed
steps were so obvious. Today, however, with its population projected
to grow by 563 million by 2050, India is facing a far more complex
challenge. Achieving a humane balance between food and people may
now depend more on the success of family planners in accelerating
the shift to smaller families than on farmers. In India, as in the
world as a whole, soil erosion, aquifer depletion, and climate change
are the principal threats to the sustainability of agriculture,
to building the food sector of an eco-economy.2
Expanding food production to feed the world's growing numbers will
be far more difficult during this half-century than it was over
the last. During the last half of the twentieth century, the world's
farmers nearly tripled grain production, boosting it from 631 million
tons in 1950 to 1,835 million tons in 2000. This half-century gain
was nearly double that from the beginning of agriculture, some 11,000
years ago, until 1950.3
Impressive though this achievement was, most of the progress was
cancelled by population growth. Today, 1.1 billion of the world's
6.1 billion people are still undernourished and underweight. Hunger
and the fear of starvation quite literally shape their lives.4
Eradicating the hunger that exists today and feeding those to be
added tomorrow is a worthy challenge, one made all the more difficult
because two of the world's three food systemsrangelands
and oceanic fisheriesare
already being pushed to or even beyond their sustainable yields.
The output of croplands has not yet reached its limit, but the rise
in cropland productivity has slowed over the last decade.
In its most basic form, hunger is a productivity problem. Typically
people are hungry because they do not produce enough food to meet
their needs or because they do not earn enough money to buy it.
The only lasting solution is to raise their productivitya
task complicated by the ongoing shrinkage in both the cropland area
and irrigation water per person in developing countries.
ENDNOTES:
1. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Production, Supply, and
Distribution, electronic database, Washington, DC, updated May 2001.
2. Medium population projection from United Nations, World Population
Prospects: The 2000 Revision (New York: February 2001).
3. Grain production from USDA, op. cit. note 1.
4. Figure of 1.1 billion hungry is a Worldwatch Institute estimate
from United Nations Administrative Committee on Coordination, Sub-Committee
on Nutrition (UN ACC/SCN) in collaboration with International Food
Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Fourth Report on the World Nutrition
Situation (Geneva: January 2000), and from Rafael Flores, Research
Fellow, IFPRI, Washington, DC, e-mail to Brian Halweil, Worldwatch
Institute, 5 November 1999, and discussion with Gary Gardner, Worldwatch
Institute, 3 February 2000, found in Gary Gardner and Brian Halweil,
Underfed and Overfed: The Global Epidemic of Malnutrition, Worldwatch
Paper 150 (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute, March 2000); U.N.
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), The State of Food Insecurity
in the World (Rome: 1999), p. 6.
Copyright
© 2001 Earth Policy Institute
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