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| Reference Material |
| Can We Still Feed the World?
By Henrylito D. Tacio Can we feed a population, still increasing by 75 million yearly, without wrecking the only planet we have? That question, asked by environment correspondent Alex Kirby in one of the segments of the six-part "Planet Under Pressure" series of the British Broadcasting Corporation, needs to be answered. Now and before it's too late! Despite the bumper crop of grains and increasing meat production, more and more people are going to sleep at night without eating at all. Worldwide, nearly two billion people suffer from hunger and chronic nutrient deficiencies, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization points out. "An empty stomach is not a good political adviser," Albert Einstein once said. "No man can be a patriot on an empty stomach," William Cowper agreed. "No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses," Nikolai Lenin added. "Undoubtedly, the desire for food has been, and still is, one of the main causes of great political events," Bertrand Russell declared. The reason: "A hungry man is not a free man," said Adlai Stevenson. "Seventy percent of the world's hunger live in rural areas, where agriculture either puts food in stomachs directly or, through employment in flourishing agricultural and food processing sector, puts money to buy food into people's pockets," said the Rome-based FAO in a statement. Where people cannot afford to buy enough food, timeless problems like water shortages continue to be the main causes of hunger. Around the globe, 434 million people face water scarcity, and by 2025 between 2.6 billion and 3.1 billion people will be living in either water-stressed or water-scarce conditions, warns the UN Population Fund. Currently, agriculture uses about 70 percent of all the water extracted from Earth's rivers, lakes, and underground aquifers. "As water for agriculture becomes less available, nations become more dependent on expensive food imports," notes the Worldwatch Institute in Washington , D.C. More than 80 percent of arable land worldwide has lost productivity because of soil degradation. Thanks to erosion. "The loss of topsoil reduces the inherent productivity of land, both through the loss of nutrients and degradation of the physical structure," explained Lester R. Brown and Edward C. Wolf, the men behind 'Soil Erosion: Quiet Crisis in the World Economy.' "It also increases the costs of food production." The two authors explained: "When farmers lose topsoil, they may increase land productivity by substituting energy in the form of fertilizer. Hence, farmers losing topsoil may experience either a loss in land productivity or a rise in costs of agricultural inputs. And if productivity drops too low or agricultural costs rise too high, farmers are forced to abandon their land." Harold R. Watson, recipient of the 1985 Ramon Magsaysay Award for international understanding, once deplored: "Soil erosion is an enemy to any nation far worse than any outside enemy coming into a country and conquering it because it is an enemy you cannot see vividly. It's a slow creeping enemy that soon possesses the land." FAO estimates 25 billion tons of soil being washed into the rivers each year. In drier countries, topsoil is being blown away. In the Philippines , abut 200,000 hectares of one-meter deep topsoil are lost yearly due to erosion. All in all, the world is losing an equivalent of five to seven million hectares of farmland each year (equivalent to the land area of Belgium and the Netherlands combined). "The alternative," if the problem is not corrected, "is famine," FAO said. Reasons abound why topsoil is going down. "Although the processes are different, there is a common factor in all man-made soil erosion the absence of vegetation to hold and cover the soil," explained FAO's F.J. Dent. In simpler term: deforestation. In thickly-populated Asia , the forest area declined by over 10 million hectares each year during the 1990s. Nine countries saw a loss of more than one percent over the decade. The Philippines is a case in point: In 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan first sighted the country, forest covered about 90 percent of the total land area. Today, only about 7 percent of the original lowland forest remains. "The situation today is the direct result of the non-implementation of (government) policies and the corruption of former administrations," noted the 'Decline of the Philippine Forest,' published by the Environmental Science for Social Change, Inc. "Deforestation did not just happen," the book added. "It came about as a result of choices made by government, choices that in effect turned control of the forests over to a small group of people and sustained the marginalization of millions of people." When he was still alive, Dr Dioscoro L. Umali lamented: "We subsidized developed countries with cheap timber. Rough estimates indicate that exports reached to over US$6 billion. Much of that income was salted abroad. It never benefited those who live in forest communities." 'The State of the World 2006' reports that half or more of the land in nearly one third of 106 primary watersheds around the world has been converted to agriculture or urban-industrial uses. An estimated 25-50 percent of the world's original wetlands area has been drained for agriculture or other purposes. One of the targets of the first Millennium Development Goal is to reduce hunger and extreme poverty by half by 2015. This is easier said than done. "A better-fed world still finds that hunger and malnutrition extinguish one life every five seconds," bemoans veteran journalist Juan Mercado. "The daily head count for hunger victims is 25,000. Yearly, that adds up to more than two Singapores ." In 1966, politicians from all over the world committed themselves to promote public and private investments in agriculture as a contribution to the goal of reducing hunger. But despite the need, world agriculture is struggling, starved of much-needed investment. "Over the past 20 years, (foreign aid foreign aid for agriculture and rural development) has fallen dramatically from over US$9 billion per year in the early 1980s to less than US$5 billion in the late 1990s," FAO reports. "And yet, an estimated 854 million people around the world remain undernourished." According to FAO, only investment in agriculture together with support for education and health will turn this situation around. "Agriculture may have become a minor player in many industrialized economies, but it must play a starring role on the world stage if we are to bring down the curtain on hunger," it said. Many studies have shown how agricultural growth reduces poverty and hunger. For example, the only group of countries to reduce hunger during the 1990s was the group in which the agriculture sector grew. FAO, looking back at the figures for the last 30 years, found that "those countries that have invested and continue to invest most in agriculture now experience the lowest levels of undernourishment." Worldwatch's Brian Halweil contends: "Most people go hungry not because of a global shortage of food but because they are too poor to buy food or to get the land, water, and other resources needed to produce it. Hunger now kills more than five million children each year roughly one child every five seconds." That's a tragedy. "It is a lot easier emotionally to handle the fact that millions of people are starving if we don't see them as individuals," Stan Mooneyham once commented. -- ### |