Asia is losing ground.

AuthorGardner, Gary
PositionDevelopment boom is reducing Asia's farmlands

The development boom is eating away at Asia's cropland. Unless the trend is reversed, the continent's leaders may find themselves facing a new national security problem: food.

In 1994, the government of Taiwan decided to break a social rule that is probably as old as civilization. Eager to maximize industrial output, but hindered by labor shortages and lack of space for factory expansions, political leaders ordered the conversion of 18 percent of the country's farmland to factories and housing over 10 years. They also decided to transfer 75 percent of Taiwanese farm laborers into industrial jobs. Taiwan is probably the first society in history to make the shrinking of its agricultural base a matter of policy.

That decision would be less remarkable if the country's farmers were awash in surpluses. But Taiwan already imports more than 80 percent of its grain. Nor is the farm labor pool oversupplied: Taiwan's farmers are aging, and few young people choose a career in agriculture. But rather than preserving all its remaining farms, Taiwan is gambling that it can import all the grain it needs - indefinitely.

Yet in an Asian context, Taiwan is unusual only because it is deliberately stripping away its agriculture. All across the continent, feverish industrialization is devouring cropland. And as the farms disappear, dependence on imported food is growing - a trend that worries many Asian leaders. The other two Asian countries already high on the growth curve - South Korea and Japan - are roughly as land-poor as Taiwan, and import more than 70 percent of their grain. Countries newer to the game -Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Thailand, and India - have slightly larger cropland bases, reckoned in per capita terms, but their farmland is also shrinking fast. Throughout the continent, cropland loss is one of the most pervasive and least noticed costs of industrialization.

While that cost may seem acceptable now, it is not likely to remain so. The world may be entering an era of agricultural scarcity, in which our demand for grain - humanity's basic food - begins to edge ahead of our ability to produce it. Over the past several years, population growth and sagging production have virtually eliminated the global grain surpluses that have shaped agricultural markets since the 1950s. The world's surplus grain stocks dropped in seven of the past nine years; in 1995 reserves reached their lowest levels on record. And food demand will soar in the next 25 years, as world population surges, and as rising incomes in many developing countries allow growing numbers of people to move to richer diets.

Food problems in Asia could mean a brisk business for major grain exporting nations, and it may offer them some important diplomatic leverage. But it would also saddle them with serious responsibilities: political stability in importing nations could rest in part on exporters' ability to keep the grain pipeline open. In a leaner world, such a commitment may be difficult to keep. Suppliers will face tricky ethical questions as they weigh the demands of Asian nations - many of them major trading partners - against the grain needs of other, less wealthy countries. And as tighter grain markets tend to push food prices up everywhere, suppliers will have to decide whether to let this inflationary pressure into their own economies, or to try to reduce it through grain export restrictions. Importing and exporting nations alike have an interest in preventing more Asian cropland from being whittled away.

Ancient Trend, Modern Threat

Loss of cropland is as old as agriculture itself - and many societies have prospered in the face of it. But on the eve of the 21st century, several converging realities are about to magnify this ancient problem greatly. First, the world is on the brink of the largest increase in food demand in history. Global population is expected to grow by some 2 billion people over the next 25 years, with most of the increase coming in developing countries. Many of these countries are also growing wealthier: as their incomes increase, hundreds of millions of people will be able to diversify their diets by eating more meat, eggs, milk, cheese, butter, and other foods that require large amounts of grain to produce. (Using grain in livestock feeds is much less efficient than consuming it directly.) Increasing demand for fruits, vegetables, and cooking oil - made from land-intensive oilseeds - will cut further into grain production.

In its effort to meet this unprecedented need for food, however, agriculture will be handicapped by a second trend: it is running out of space. In earlier eras, cropland loss could be offset by cultivating virgin land, but today nearly all of the world's good arable land is already in use. It is true that tropical forests are still being cut and burned in the quest for cropland - at terrible ecological cost - but the cleared land is usually too poor to support crops for more than a couple of years, without extensive following. In much of the rest of the world, lack of water or extreme temperatures prevent farmers from bringing more land under the plow. After 10,000 years of global expansion, grain area peaked in 1981, and has fallen more than 5 percent since then. Together with population growth, cropland loss is pushing down an important agricultural index: the amount of cropland available for each of the world's 5.2 billion people. Today, global per capita grain area stands at only 0.12 hectares, about one sixth of a soccer field, and roughly half its 1950 level.

Agriculture is losing steam on another front as well. Over the past several decades, annual growth in yield - in the amount of grain that can be harvested from an area of cropland - had come to seem as inevitable as the spring rains. Farmers have used several methods to increase their harvests; they have applied more fertilizer, for example, expanded irrigation, and planted new "miracle" crop strains such as those introduced during the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. These techniques...

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