Bitter Truth
The twin terrors
THE prospect is horrifying. Barren fields, dried up wells, and hunger on a scale never before known by humanity are now a reality. That is what Lester Brown, president of the World Watch Institute in Washington predicted (in early 2000) for 2050, when the earth's population will have doubled to nearly 10 billion and the capacity of science to devise methods for coaxing more food out of the soil will, in his view, be greatly diminished.
The situation may be as alarming as Brown calculates, with specific mention of the dire economic situation in some countries of the Asian region, especially Bangladesh, India and even China. By 2030, India will need to import 44 million tons of grain annually to help feed its 1.5 billion people.
By the same year, an increasingly prosperous and industrialised China will need to purchase 200 million tons of grain from abroad for its 1.6 billion people -- as much as is exported by all the countries in the world. The result will be a spike in food prices that will trigger wholesale social disintegration and chaos in Africa, Latin America and poorer countries in the Asian region.
"China's scarcity will become the world's scarcity," Brown predicts. The world is now getting increasingly concerned at the prospect of declining food supply in consequence of rapid urbanisation, deforestation, loss of bio-diversity due to global warming, and pest attack, coupled with drought like situation and excessive flooding.
Unfortunately, with farmers racing for the highest possible yields these days, and all trying to use the same kind of seeds, productivity has fallen. Most disappointingly, strains of crops that seem to have magical qualities are becoming harder to find. As the explosive growth of the world's population causes more farmers to turn more forest into fields, wild species of plants are getting wiped out. Potentially valuable food sources are lost forever -- before they are even discovered. In consequence, the world is losing a marvellous diversity of genetic material that has enabled the plant kingdom to overcome pests, blights, and droughts throughout the ages.
It's common knowledge that plant breeders have used genetic diversity to help fuel a green revolution and kept agricultural production ahead of population growth. But as the raw material of the revolution disappears, the food supply becomes more vulnerable.
Despite Thomas Malthus's prediction in the last decade of the 17th century that human fertility would outstrip the ability to produce enough food, human ingenuity has consistently belied such prediction. But in 1968, Paul Ehlrich in his study, "The Limits to Growth," raised fears that unchecked population growth might lead to mass starvation. In the early part of the 1970s Lester Brown argued that the world's farmers were already pushing the practical limits of what good lands, high-yield crops, irrigation, and artificial fertilisers and pesticides could deliver.
Strikingly evident, beginning with the mid 1980s, the momentum of the green revolution slowed dramatically, especially in Bangladesh and some other Asian countries. The fact is that, during the last five years of alliance rule, stalwarts in the administration did not take note of the looming crisis, in spite of the fact that the country has about 60 percent work force in farming.
It is perhaps a serious structural crisis that none in the administration in the past days had taken note of. The country only woke up to this when food prices started rising. The much-touted green revolution of the mid-1990s has definitely gone brown. The reason for this crisis is that there have been no breakthroughs or investment in seed technology to improve farm yields. We are currently witnessing the worst decade in Bangladesh agriculture since independence.
Agriculture faces a crisis of land as the spread of cultivable land for food grains has remained stagnant at 2 crore 21 lakh acres. The profitability from this land has not increased either, as land holdings have become smaller and investment is negligible.
The sector is also reeling due to a shortage of water, as it remains heavily dependent on monsoons, which is now turning worse because of the global warming phenomenon. There is a disincentive amongst the rural people to get involved in agriculture, which appears to promise only an uncertain livelihood and crippling debt.
Moreover, in most parts of Asia, rice researchers have failed to raise yields significantly for more than two decades. Hidden costs of the green revolution have begun to surface all around the world -- the amount of irrigated land which produces 85 percent of the food supply has been declining steadily. The reason: fields become poisoned with salts left behind when irrigation water evaporates. Looming ahead are the impacts of changes such as ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere.
The combination of both immediate and long range threats to the food supply has brought back the old question: How much longer can the world deliver adequate food to a population relentlessly expanding at the rate of 91 million people a year. At the current rate of growth, India's population reached 1.1 billion mark in the past years and it might have 1.5 billion people by 2035, almost challenging China. So the prospect of Bangladesh getting grain supply from Asian countries like China or India would be lesser still.
The situation in Bangladesh is somewhat paradoxical. Although the government claims that the population growth in the country stands at 2.1%, that figure does not hold true for the vast areas of rural Bangladesh. Unhappily, economic reforms have not taken root in the country despite all the rhetoric indulged in by the past governments, and the argument advanced by the planners and economists that people would have fewer children once they became prosperous seems a distant dream.
That "development is the best contraceptive thesis," as the experts call it, faces an uphill test in the dirt-poor countryside, where birth rates are among the highest and children are viewed as a source of family wealth.
Against the backdrop of such a dismaying situation, many agricultural experts are taking doomsayers more seriously. Even the optimists admit that putting an adequate amount of nutrition into 5 billion extra mouths almost 30 years from now poses a mammoth challenge. But, at the same time, they recall the success of the green revolution, which, in the short span commencing in the early 1970s, quadrupled crop yields in parts of the developing world and greatly reduced the frequency of famines in Asia and Africa.
Seventeen food research institutes, funded in part by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Bank, plus dozens of plant science operations run by governments, universities, and private companies did achieve a miraculous result. But, unfortunately, the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre that launched the green revolution was forced to abandon years of work on a strain of nutritionally enhanced corn because it ran short of funds.
"I'm pretty confident that science and technology can produce enough to meet the needs of a doubled population," says Mark Cantley, head of bio-technology unit at the OECD in Paris. "But the question is whether utilisation, distribution and politics will hold things back," he adds.
Despite all the constraints, plant breeders and molecular biologists around the world are at work on technologies for bolstering pest, disease and drought- resistant grains, and improving the nutritional value of various foods. Only in the recent past the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines developed a breakthrough "super-rice" with yields 25 percent higher than current varieties.
In Bangladesh also, several high yielding and salt resistant varieties of rice have come out of the lab, and these are being put into fields with spectacular success. But, disappointingly, agriculture still remains very much neglected in Bangladesh. This dismal state of agriculture calls for a questioning of preconceived notions, and tough decisions.
But even if we do not agree with Malthus's dire prediction, because of the advances we have made in science and technology, we cannot afford to forget that the highest priority remains population control.
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