In the New York Times, As Prices Rise, Farmers Spurn Conservation Program:
Thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate. They are spurning guaranteed annual payments for a chance to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybeans, corn and other crops. Last fall, they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
Environmental and hunting groups are warning that years of progress could soon be lost, particularly with the native prairie in the Upper Midwest. But a broad coalition of baking, poultry, snack food, ethanol and livestock groups say bigger harvests are a more important priority than habitats for waterfowl and other wildlife. They want the government to ease restrictions on the preserved land, which would encourage many more farmers to think beyond conservation.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/16/glaciers.climatechange
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The scale of the problem so alarms Lester Brown, a leading environmental thinker, that he fears huge populations dependent on glacier-fed rivers in Asia - 360 million on the Ganges in India and 388 million on the Yangtze in China alone - will not be able to feed themselves, with devastating effect on already rising global food prices.
‘These populations are larger than the populations of any other country in the world,’ said Brown. ‘We know from models there will be shifts in rainfall, crop yields reducing, but these are theoretical. Here there’s a degree of certainty we’ve not seen before in terms of an historically negative effect on food security.’
The global food crisis we see at present is likely to be repeated, it is simply a matter of when, and whether we have the reserves to meet it. Agricultural production is unpredictable.
If we were so unfortunate as to suffer similar harvest failure and pressures as those which resulted in the present crisis in two or three successive years, the resulting problems would utterly dwarf the present situation. AND this is by no means an impossibility.
AND this is before we consider the possible implications of climate change in the future…
Europe’s intervention stores could feed her for a few weeks!
While the green revolution, subsidy and low fuel costs have allowed huge yield increases over the previous half century, many agro-ecologists believe that this growth is not sustainable, as can be seen by the shrinking gap between global food production and per capita consumption. The situation is exacerbated by rising demand from developing economies in countries such as China, and India.
We are rapidly approaching a point where we will not have surplus food, but a defecit instead, and cannot rely on agronomical/technological developments to provide.
Projections which envisage us feeding an increased population in coming decades are majoritively based upon continuing yield increases based upon past (unsustainable) trends.
95% of agricultural genetic diversity has been lost since the 1980’s; this was man’s common inheritance. It has been stolen by global corporations. Instead of hundreds (or thousands) of locally adapted crop varieties being grown, we rely on a handful (dozen or so) strains developed by seed companies.
If a pest or disease wins the arms race between resistance and susceptibility, huge losses can occur; and this has happened. Where there were many variants, total annihilation was very unlikely.
When water shortage, limited land resources, and increasing reliance on chemical and capital inputs to retain productivity of depleted soils are viewed against the backdrop of peak oil and the potential of climate change, the outlook is very bleak.
Speculation in agricultural commodities has recently become increasingly popular, and adds undesirable volatility to an unpredicatable market already fraught with risk.
In this light, national food security ought still to be a relevant concern.