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 VITAL SIGNS Enough To Eat? An average adult needs 2,200 calories a day to avoid malnutrition. The food supplies in most countries exceed that minimum.
*Daily Calories Per Person |
Farmers could theoretically put more land under cultivation, but that too is in shorter supply, as urbanization fills open spaces with housing, shopping malls and parking lots. In China during the early 1990s, some 3,000 industrial parks gobbled 1,215,000 hectares of farm land, and at least 40 golf courses occupy what used to be productive fields and paddies in Guangdong province, says Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington. Much of the fertile land not yet swallowed by urban sprawl faces a variety of other assaults, from overgrazing by livestock to wind and water erosion brought on by the chopping down of surrounding forests that once protected the fields. Brown, a prominent longtime pessimist in the food debate, argues that the world is fast running out of usable land. "We are now in a transition from a half-century dominated by food surpluses to a future dominated by food scarcity," he declares, foreseeing higher agricultural prices ahead--and more hunger among people who cannot afford those prices. While taking Brown's concerns seriously, experts at the United Nations Environment Program and the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization are more optimistic. They forecast that greater demand for food will spur agricultural innovation, as it always has in the past, and that increasingly valuable land will be converted from less profitable uses and put under the plow. In fact the U.N. predicts that farmers will somehow increase the area of land under cultivation by 27% over the next 18 years. But even in this rosy analysis, not every part of the world will be self-sufficient. Heavily populated Asia is expected to run out of arable land by the year 2020 and will avoid food shortages only by bringing in grain from surplus countries like the U.S. and Canada. U.N. officials would be the first to admit that their forecasts are at the mercy of unpredictable variables, and perhaps the most unforeseeable of them all is the impact of climate on world agriculture. Scientists are convinced the accumulation in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is heating up the earth, but they can't say exactly how much warming will occur or how it will affect food production. A rise in average temperature could move the farm belt northward, turning previously barren parts of Russia, Scandinavia and Canada into important grain-producing regions. In the lower latitudes, meanwhile, global warming is likely to produce much more erratic weather. Some areas might be hit by droughts, while others could suffer more frequent and violent storms. That would spell trouble for developing economies. "Many of the world's poorest people are most at risk, especially those living in semi-arid and arid regions," says Rene Gommes, coordinator of fao's agro- group. In these areas the harshness and unreliability of the climate already puts crops in jeopardy. The planet's providers need new tactics to cope with climate change, water scarcity and land degradation. And just in time, two promising trends are appearing--one based on ancient wisdom and the other on modern wizardry. The first employs traditional--and sometimes forgotten--farming techniques to practice what is called "sustainable agriculture," which means growing enough food without exhausting the land. The second strategy uses genetic manipulation and other feats of biotechnology to create more bountiful crops that are better able to withstand rough weather and nasty pests. Together the two trends could spur a second Green Revolution--one that would be far less destructive than the first. BACK TO tHE TRIED AND TRUE There is no great secret to sustainable agriculture; farmers merely have to relearn methods too often abandoned in the pursuit of bigger crops through heavy use of chemicals. These time-tested approaches include rotating different crops, planting legumes like clover and rye to replenish a field's nitrogen supply rather than relying on artificial fertilizer, as well as building up soil with manure and compost, which recycle organic material. This approach not only preserves the soil but also prevents the pollution that occurs when chemical fertilizers are washed from fields into rivers and streams. In India millions of small farmers have joined cooperatives that shun the Green Revolution, with its expensive chemicals, in favor of organic farming. To their delight most of them are achieving both lower costs and higher production. In 1991 Baba Gouda Patil, a farmer in the southern state of Karnataka, spent $125 a hectare for fertilizer and pesticides to raise 1,000 kg of sorghum or groundnuts on each of his 10 hectares. Since he went organic at a fraction of the cost, his productivity has almost doubled, generating an income that is 117% higher than when he depended on chemicals. "The other farmers in my village and in the neighboring areas were skeptical at first," says Gouda, president of an association of one million Karnataka growers who don't use chemicals, "but now organic farming has become very attractive. " |
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