Brown may sound at first blush like a neo-Malthusian predicting the inevitable collapse of human civilization, but he makes important points that I've never heard policymakers grapple with seriously.
Take the question of irrigation water. As I and others
have
pointed out before, India has essentially tapped dry the
water table in its main agricultural regions since embracing
industrial agriculture in the 1970s. Brown hastens to add
that India, the globe's second-most-populous nation, is
hardly alone in facing an irrigation crisis. In China, he
claims, 130 million people owe their sustenance to "grain
produced by overpumping groundwater."
Overall, Brown depicts a global food system characterized by
severe fragility. With global grain reserves returning to
the all-time lows reached in 2008, "the world is only one
poor harvest away from chaos in world grain markets," as he
writes. Indeed, the main reason for the current upswing in
prices, he states, is the heat wave that gripped Russia this
past summer, which caused a 40 percent drop in that nation's
grain crop. Brown warns that a similar weather event in the
U.S. corn belt (which produces several times more grain than
Russian) would be calamitous -- it would "likely result in
unprecedented food price inflation and food riots in scores
of countries, toppling weaker governments."
Brown delivered his presentation on the food crisis at a
teleconference Wednesday, and I listened in. After he
finished, he opened the floor for questions, and I piped up.
U.S. policy elites in both parties, when they can be
bothered to comment on the global food situation, revert to
biotech-industry talking points: In order to "feed the
world," we'll need to convert as much food production as
possible to patent-protected genetically modified seeds.
What does he think of high-tech seeds' chances of staving
off the crisis? I asked.
Not much, he replied. Brown pointed out that that
current-generation transgenic seeds have not increased
yields; and that next-generation ones -- like corn
engineered to tolerate drought, or use nitrogen more
efficiently -- will likely increase yields "only
marginally." (The hype around nitrogen-efficient GMO
technology is pretty overblown, as I
showed last year.) Such technologies might have
"important contributions to make," Brown said, but will
likely not be "nearly enough" to feed our growing
population.
Coming from a man who's been studying agricultural productivity since the 1960s, and who was in fact a booster of the original "Green Revolution" -- the push by U.S. policymakers and foundations to prod farmers in the global south to use "modern" agriculture technologies such as hybrid seeds, industrial fertilizers and pesticides, and heavy irrigation -- this is a significant statement.
Brown is no wild-eyed critic of the biotech industry. He
is making a cold, informed assessment: its products are a
distraction from, not a solution to, the task of averting a
global food disaster. And if he's right, our policymakers
aren't taking the problems he describes nearly seriously
enough -- and that's chilling. (Here,
for example, is USDA chief Tom Vilsack babbling about the
wonders of biotech for feeding an expanding global
population. Nina Fedoroff, Hillary Clinton's chief science
adviser,
toes an even more rigid GMO-centric line. Then there's
the man in charge of directing USDA research, the
GMO-fixated
Roger Beachy.)
But there's no reason to plunge into Malthusian anguish
about a coming global food crash. A lot people across the
world are thinking hard about how to grow sufficient food
without sucking dry the global water supplies or burning
through fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow. For a bit of
hope after imbibing a dose of Brown's bitter truth, check
out WorldWatch's
State of the
World 2011 report, which surveys interesting
sustainable-agriculture projects across the globe.