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What price more food?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826601.600&print=true
11 June 2008
Debora MacKenzie

WHAT do a student in New York, a farmer near Mexico City, a family
in London and a nurse in Bangkok have in common? Increasing trouble
paying their grocery bill. Since 2000, the average price of food
around the world has nearly doubled. In the UK, food prices are
rising at three times the rate of inflation. In the US, the price of
eggs has risen by 40 per cent in the past year alone, while rice in
Thailand and tortillas in Mexico have shot up in price, in some
places trebling. This year the soaring cost of food has triggered
street demonstrations in 30 countries, some of which tipped over
into riots.

For those of us who spend only a fraction of our income on food, the
high prices are troublesome. For the one-third of humanity living on
$2 or less per day they are tragic. The World Bank estimates that
the recent increases could push 100 million people who escaped
poverty in the past decade back into it, and push the poor deeper in
as the cost of bare survival consumes money that might otherwise
have bought extra protein, schooling, farm improvement or medicine.

The immediate forces behind the price hikes are clear. Demand for
grain, the foundation of the human food chain, is rising rapidly. It
is driven not only by a growing population, but also by rising meat
consumption among increasingly prosperous people in developing
countries. Demand for biofuels is adding to the pressure (see "Why
now?"). Production is simply failing to keep up.

The crisis hasn't come out of the blue. Agricultural experts have
been for warning for years that the rich governments, who fund most
of the world's agricultural research and development, have not been
investing enough. Now we are suffering the consequences. And the
problems show no sign of going away. New Scientist can reveal that
the world's biggest computer model of agriculture and climate, at
the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in
Washington DC, predicts that market forces stemming from the growing
gap between demand and supply will keep food prices high for several
years. Worse, when crop stresses due to predicted changes in climate
are factored in, prices stay up for longer, and even increase.

The situation is serious, but it is not hopeless. Rising food prices
are finally focusing political attention and public interest on food
production. Governments will be able to mitigate the crisis, but
only if they invest in the science that can increase yields and the
infrastructure to get the resulting technologies to the farmers who
need them.

We need to act fast. Science takes 15 to 20 years to filter through
to farms and after two decades of neglect there is little in the
pipeline.

Investing in science has saved us before. Two centuries ago, the
English clergyman Thomas Malthus famously warned that the growth of
the human population might outstrip its ability to produce food. But
as the population soared, Malthus's famine was averted as the
application of science and fossil-fuel energy to agriculture allowed
food production in industrialised countries to keep pace. After the
second world war, fear of famine and its political impact led rich
countries to fund similar R&D for the rest of the world in the Green
Revolution, while continuing to boost their own yields. Again, it
worked: increases in yield helped to double food production between
1960 and 1980, faster than the population grew. Food prices fell,
and food stocks soared. By the 1980s, famine had ended in much of
the world - with the glaring exception of Africa - and the rich had
grain mountains.

Times of plenty

Then the rich got complacent. Development aid to poor countries was
diverted away from helping them to grow more food and towards
developing other kinds of industries whose profits could be used to
buy the surpluses being grown on the rich world's farms. Investment
in agricultural R&D was slashed: it grew at 2 per cent per year
through the 1980s, but since 1990 has shrunk by 0.6 per cent per
year. Research also shifted away from increasing yields. "They
stopped work on productivity and focused on environment or
nutrition," says Phil Pardey, director of the International Science
and Technology Practice and Policy Center (INSTEPP) at the
University of Minnesota, St Paul.

Another change was that research was increasingly privatised.
Companies prioritised research that would boost profits, whether or
not it improved yields. For example, they developed hybrid maize,
but not wheat, because the flowering mechanism of maize makes it
easier for companies to exert patent control over its seeds.

These changes meant that the rate of increase in food production
started to slow down. Although the quantity of grain produced on
each hectare of farmland is still rising, the rate of increase has
slowed to the point where it is being outpaced by the increase in
demand. Calculations for New Scientist by INSTEPP economics
researcher Jason Beddow reveal that yields of wheat and rice are
rising at less than 1 per cent per year, and maize is doing little
better. According to this analysis, for the past decade yields of
the top three grains have been growing more slowly than most
agricultural researchers had assumed (see "Yields are falling
behind"). They are no longer keeping pace with rising demand from
the rising human population, never mind the added demands of
livestock and biofuel (see "Demand for grain is growing").

Given all this, it doesn't take a crop scientist to work out that
what the world needs is more food. The question is where, and how?
While there is still a little spare land that could be turned over
to crops, urban sprawl is fast eating it up. So the bulk of the
increases will have to come from increasing yields: growing more
grain on every hectare that is farmed.

New Scientist has asked the world's leading agricultural experts
what it will take to boost yields. They are unanimous: we need
research, and support for farmers so that they can make the most of
its results.

Specifically, what is needed is research into higher-yielding crop
varieties - by conventional breeding or genetic modification - and
better ways to grow them. Yet this is exactly the kind of research
that went out of fashion amid the grain mountains. "In the mid-1990s
you couldn't even mention increased yield in a research proposal and
expect to get it funded," says Hans-Joachim Braun, head of wheat at
the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in
Mexico - one of the labs that makes up the Consultative Group for
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

It was the same story with other crops. "In 1992 we told an external
review panel that we were starting to see slower growth in rice
yield," says Bob Zeigler, head of CGIAR's International Rice
Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. "We said 10 years and
$50 million would fix it, that it was critically important." They
didn't get the money. Maize researchers had similar problems.
"Donors say they want drought tolerance, but not more yield
potential," says Marianne Banziger, head of maize at CIMMYT.

In the short term, the most effective way to boost world food
production would be to increase yields in Africa and parts of south
Asia. Agricultural development there has been neglected, so big
improvements are within reach even without new R&D. Getting existing
high-yielding varieties to farmers, and giving them access to the
fertiliser, water and pesticides they need, would make a huge
difference. "Off-the-shelf technology exists to triple yields in
that region," says agronomist Kenneth Cassman of the University of
Nebraska at Lincoln. (See "Growing less maize than they could").

There is also huge potential in Africa for conservation agriculture,
where farmers plough the land perhaps only once every five years and
leave crop residues behind to build soil nutrients and retain water.
Research at CIMMYT has shown that if a farmer can persevere with
such a system for five years as the weed seeds that accumulate in
ploughed soils grow out, yields can jump to 30 per cent higher than
in a similar ploughed field. Such a scheme would require some
financial and technical support for farmers within the first few
years, but should ultimately stand alone. The strategy has already
proved successful in parts of South America.

Yielding results

In the longer term, though, these regions, like rich countries
today, will need the fruits of new R&D to keep yields rising ahead
of demand. There is no shortage of proposals. The IRRI gene bank,
for example, holds the world's biggest collection of rice varieties.
"I would love to hire a scientist just to grow them out and screen
them for useful characteristics," says Zeigler. Traits such as
resistance to brown leafhopper would be a boon in south-east Asia,
where it has become a resurgent pest. Further down the road, IRRI
scientists dream of investing rice plants with the more efficient
method of photosynthesis, called C[4], found in plants such as
maize. This could double rice yields and slash the plants' need for
nitrogen and water.

CIMMYT is working with agricultural multinationals Monsanto and BASF
on drought-tolerant maize, including one GM variety that is nearing
release. CIMMYT researchers are also dissecting the mechanisms wheat
uses to survive dry spells. They have found that high levels of stem
carbohydrates and deeper roots are important. Finding genetic
markers for these characteristics could help efforts to breed
drought tolerant varieties.

Making crops more resistant to disease would also help. The world's
wheat breeders are frantically trying to produce varieties that can
fend off Ug99, a new strain of black stem rust fungus to which
virtually no existing commercial breeds are resistant.

New varieties and growing techniques are one thing, but according to
Papa Seck, head of the CGIAR's Africa Rice Center (WARDA) in Benin,
the most pressing need in Africa is for infrastructure to get new
and existing technologies to the farmers. "We need research, but to
make an impact we must make that technology available," he says.
Seck's lab has developed a new kind of hybrid rice, called Nerica,
with double the yield of the Asian varieties currently grown in
Africa. Africa imports 40 per cent of its rice, and has been hit
hard by the huge increase in prices this year. Yet though dozens of
Nerica varieties are available, Seck says they account for only a
small part of the crop because local companies cannot produce enough
seed and farmers are not being trained in how to use it.

IRRI has run up against similar logistical problems. It has
developed cheap sealed bags and a moisture meter for use when drying
grain that together could cut the massive losses poor rice farmers
suffer after harvest. Yet it has had trouble getting them to the
people who need them. During the debt crisis of the 1990s, poor
countries had to dismantle government "extension" agencies that
distributed such technology, and they still can't afford to rebuild
them.

Farmers, especially in Africa, also need infrastructure to sell any
surplus crops. Without it, they remain caught in a vicious circle:
with no surpluses markets have not developed, and without markets
farmers can't profit from surpluses. If they invest in producing
extra maize, for example, but can't get it to where there is demand,
local prices plummet and the surplus won't earn enough to pay for
the fertiliser that produced it.

All that could change with better roads, transport, storage
facilities and, most of all, information. One major reason farmers
do not sell outside their local area is the risk that they might pay
to haul a crop to a buyer, only to find the buyer has cut the price
or disappeared. Ethiopia is trying to fix that. In April, it opened
Africa's first commodities exchange, which sends buyers' offers
electronically to 20 major market towns, and stores deliveries.
"When farmers can sell their crops on the open market and get a fair
price, they will have much more incentive to be productive," says
Eleni Zaude Gabre-Mahdin, who designed and now heads the exchange.

There are other fixes in the works. Dennis Garrity, head of the
CGIAR's World Agroforestry Centre in Kenya, says that
nitrogen-fixing "fertiliser trees" can be grown amid rows of maize
to improve degraded soils and provide nutrients, cutting the need
for industrially produced, oil-hungry fertilisers.

Small-scale techniques such as soil depressions that accumulate
moisture and mulches that keep it from escaping could also make an
impact in drought-prone areas, according to Johan Rockström,
director of the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden. The bulk
of the precipitation available in these areas normally quickly
evaporates from leaves and soil, never making it into the streams or
irrigation ditches. So traditional efforts which focus on managing
water in streams and ditches may be missing the point, says
Rockström. Experiments in Malawi with techniques that cut
evaporation losses have led to bumper harvests in years when other
farms succumbed to dry spells.

While raising yields in Africa and parts of Asia may be the fastest
and most obvious road to more food, there will be pressure
everywhere to grow more. And to do that in richer nations where most
of the low hanging fruit has been picked will take a massive
research effort to boost yields. That might include breeding new
crops, but a major focus, Cassman says, should be on reducing the
"yield gap" between what a crop variety and management system can
produce in tests, and what farmers actually get. This will mean
micro-management of fields, so each patch gets exactly the water,
fertiliser and other treatments it needs. This will be increasingly
important as spiralling oil prices push up the price of nitrogen
fertiliser and deposits of phosphate are exhausted. Farmers can no
longer simply apply an excess of fertiliser to ensure plants get
enough.

The new Green Revolution will need to deliver increased yields in a
world in which energy and fertiliser are more expensive and water
and soil resources have been degraded. On top of that there's
climate change, which is already replacing familiar weather patterns
with unpredictable droughts and deluges.

In short, feeding everyone will require much more investment in
research. Regrettably, that's a message that has yet to be heard in
some of the places it matters most. The US, for example, is
threatening to cancel funding for the CGIAR next year, putting in
jeopardy vital work that helps the world's poorest countries. Both
the research and getting its results into farmers' fields will take
a huge effort by all governments, rich and poor - starting with the
recognition that a few decades of plenty were not enough to defeat
the ancient scourge of famine. It is perhaps the most urgent message
of our time.

Why now?

For the past eight years, global demand for grain has been
increasing faster than supply.

While grain yields are increasing at 1.1 per cent per year, the
world's population is growing slightly faster at 1.2 per cent per
year - but that's just the start. Growing prosperity and increasing
urbanisation, especially in India and China, are driving up demand
for animal-based food, putting further pressure on grain supplies.
It takes 2 to 6 kilograms of grain fed to a cow, pig or chicken to
make 1 kilogram of meat, milk or eggs. Together with increasing
population, increasing prosperity is pushing the annual growth in
demand to 1.6 per cent.

Biofuels are playing a part too. Since 2000, some government
subsidies have encouraged farmers to divert food grain into biofuel
production. According to the International Food Policy Research
Institute in Washington DC this accounts for 30 per cent of current
increases in the price of grain. IFPRI calculates that removing
these subsidies could slash prices by 20 per cent overnight. If
demand for biofuel continues on its current course, however, demand
for grain will increase by 2.5 per cent per year between now and
2020.

Other factors have compounded the problem. Australia, a major wheat
exporter, has had six years of drought. Oil prices are hitting
all-time highs, making it more expensive to run tractors, transport
food and make nitrogen-based fertilisers. To add to it all, sources
of phosphate fertiliser are running out, leading to a trebling of
prices in the past year.

Meanwhile, speculators are moving in. Some are small-time traders
who are hoarding rice, for example, in the expectation that prices
will continue to rise. Vast amounts of speculative money is also
coming from investors fleeing the US real-estate market, who have
poured billions of dollars into commodities futures. This has led to
price rises that are not necessarily linked to real consumer demand,
says Joachim von Braun, head of the IFPRI. The price of rice rose
from $200 to $300 per tonne on supply and demand issues, he says,
but because of speculators has hit peaks of $1000 in recent months.

Finally, some governments, notably India and China, have responded
to the looming shortages by restricting grain exports to make sure
their own people get fed. With less grain on international markets,
the world price is more prone to sudden fluctuations. This has
particularly hurt net food importers such as Bangladesh, Indonesia
and most African countries. The US and European Union have
deliberately run down the grain stockpiles they built up in past
decades, so there is no easy way to release surplus stocks to
temporarily push down grain prices.

Let them eat grain

On average, people around the world get 1055 calories per day from
eating grain directly - that's 45 per cent of their total intake. A
lot of the rest comes from meat, milk and eggs from animals that
themselves were fed grain. No other food source can make up for a
shortage of grain. Here are just a few of the ways we could increase
yields in the three main crops.

RICE Calories per person per day: 456

Problems: Two billion people depend on rice, which is more than any
other single crop. That number is growing with the global population
and as more people in Africa eat rice. Yet rice yields are growing
more slowly than those of any other crop, averaging 0.84 per cent
per year since 1996.

Solutions:

Wider adoption of higher-yielding hybrid varieties
Improve drought tolerance and resistance to common pests
Reduce spoilage by protecting rice stores

WHEAT Calories per person per day: 440

Problems: The world's main wheat-growing areas, Europe and North
America, produced substantial surpluses, which led to low prices in
the 1980s and 1990s. This put a brake on R&D to boost wheat
productivity, and yields have grown only 0.93 per cent per year
since 1996. The scaling back of research also slowed the response to
a virulent new fungal disease called Ug99.

Solutions:

Breed Ug99-resistant varieties into high-yielding ones
Breed drought-resistant plants
Cross wheat with wild relatives to boost its genetic repertoire
and its ability to resist diseases

MAIZE Calories per person per day: 159

Problems: Africans depend on maize more than any other grain.
However, most maize is fed to livestock and there is a growing
demand for meat, milk and eggs in developing countries. It is also
the chief source of biofuel. That means people, livestock and cars
are competing for the same crop.

Solutions:

Develop drought-tolerant varieties to increase yields in Africa
Roll out newly developed varieties that resist grain weevils to
reduce post-harvest losses
Introduce no-till farming to improve soil, drought resistance
and yields, and cut CO[2] emissions

(Data from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization)

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Weblinks

International Food Policy Research Institute
http://www.ifpri.org/
International Rice Research Institute
http://www.irri.org/
International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center
http://www.cimmyt.org/
UN Food and Agriculture Organization
http://www.fao.org/