Facing food scarcity.

• Author: Brown, Lester R.
• Position: Cover Story

In a world of continuing population growth and declining grain stocks, humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.

At 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, September 12, a small group of high-ranking agricultural economists, meteorologists, and remote-sensing satellite experts entered a corridor on the fifth floor of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's massive "South Building" in Washington, D.C. Behind them, an armed guard closed a heavy steel door, which was then locked. Inside, the blinds were drawn down on all windows, the stairwells and elevators were locked, and the telephones switched off.

Through the night, the group pored over the data they had brought - information on grain crop supply and demand that had been compiled from more than 100 agricultural countries and confirmed by a sophisticated array of satellite observations and weather analyses. At 5 a.m., the group - known as the World Agricultural Outlook Board - assembled around a table in a conference room inside the locked area, and began a final review of their findings.

Around dawn, a score of international wire service reporters - all with security clearances - began converging on the building, and at 7 o'clock they were admitted to a guarded room inside the locked area. Under heavy surveillance, they were given computer discs and secured phone lines, and permitted to begin looking at what the Board had found. At exactly 8:30, the "lockup" ended: the reporters' phone lines were switched on, the blinds were raised to the morning sun, and the steel door was opened. Simultaneously, the Board's report went out over the Internet.

At first glance, what the various tables that had been compiled through the night revealed was that the world's stocks of rice, wheat, corn, and other grains had fallen to their lowest level in two decades. But a mile away at the Worldwatch Institute, we aggregated the crop totals and linked them to global population data, with an even more disturbing result. Measured in days of global consumption, the world's estimated carryover stocks of grain for 1996 had fallen to 49 days - the lowest level ever.

The Outlook Board's report, which is released each month, is little known to the public but of incalculable value to commodities traders and agribusinesses - some of whom stand to gain or lose fortunes on the information it contains. But on this occasion, the data had even more meaning: in a world of rapidly expanding human population, carryover grain stocks are the key indicator of the world's capacity to meet that population's growing demand for food. Grain is the planet's largest source not only of food for direct consumption, but of feed for livestock and poultry products, and farm-raised fish - of the major protein sources on which humans depend.

The Outlook Board reported that crop-withering heat waves had lowered grain harvests in the northern tier of industrial countries, including the United States, Canada, parts of Europe, and Russia. In many farming regions, the summer of 1995 was the hottest ever recorded. Thus, many of the world's farmers found themselves contending not only with the usual vagaries of weather but with temperatures higher than they have ever known - much as global climate models had projected would result from the planet's rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As that trend continues, shrunken harvests could become the price of our addiction to fossil fuels.

The scarcity, implicit in the reported trends and the higher food prices that would result was bad news for the world's low-income consumers. Already spending nearly all their meager incomes on food just to survive, many will not make it to the next harvest. In the global race between food and people, they would be among the early losers.

For decades, grain stocks have remained more or less adequate; as population has surged, so has food production. Boosted by new crop varieties, fertilizer, and irrigation, yields improved dramatically. But in recent years, farmers have faltered, and much of the optimism engendered by those ever-rising yields is evaporating. Since the bumper crop of 1990, there has been no growth in global grain production at all - while population has grown by some 440 million people, or the equivalent of 40 New York Cities.

In 1995, a small amount of cropland was held out of production under commodity set-aside programs, including some 7.5 percent of U.S. cornland and 12 percent of the grainland in Europe. But even if all this land had been in production, the additional 34 million tons or so of grain that it would have produced would not be enough to offset the year's 49-million-ton drop in global stocks. In fact, world stocks have now been drawn down for three consecutive years, helping to cushion the lack of growth in world production. But now that they are down to 49 days (little more than pipeline supplies), the cushion is nearly gone.

In effect, the world's food economy may be shifting from a long-accustomed period of overall abundance to one of scarcity. Of course, the abundance of the past half-century hasn't eliminated hunger, as the episodes of starvation in Ethiopia and Somalia attest - not to mention the less publicized deprivation of many of the world's billion "absolute poor." But that deprivation has been largely a result of poverty, not of overall supply. In the coming era, the supply itself will be limited, and the effects of shortages will be felt everywhere. Already, the 90 million being added to the global population each year are being fed only by reducing the consumption of those already here.

If the September World Outlook report came as coveted business intelligence for shrewd commodities traders, it did not come as any great surprise to those who have been studying the earth's carrying capacity. Environmentalists and scientists have long argued that the environmental trends of the past few decades could not continue. We could be heading for unimaginable trouble, they said, if we continue to strip the planet of its forest cover, to erode its cropland, overgraze its rangelands, overpump its aquifers, deplete its oceans, pollute its air, pump excessive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and destroy the habitats of our fellow creatures.

Some thought the crisis might come in the form of an epidemic of pollution-induced illnesses and rising death rates. Others thought the effects might first show up in the collapse of local ecosystems. Indeed, such perturbations have become increasingly visible at the regional level - in the surging death rates of Russians, or the desertification of once productive land in Africa. But globally, it is food scarcity that may soon become the principal manifestation of continuing population growth and environmental mismanagement. If so, the first economic indicator of environmental stress will be rising food prices.

THE SHRINKING LAND

One reason the world's opinion-makers find it hard to believe there will be any problem with food is that they have lived in a period of unbroken abundance, with much of that abundance concentrated in the same regions where the most influential news media are concentrated. Tragedies like the starvations in Ethiopia and Somalia are thus seen as isolated aberrations. But perhaps the most compelling reason for thinking there's no problem is the assumption that if it really comes to the crunch, farmers can always bring more land into cultivation. After all, on every continent, there are vast areas of unpopulated, uncultivated territory.

That assumption is unwarranted. Food cannot be grown just anywhere; it can't be grown in places where the land is too cold, too dry, too steep, or too barren. It also can't be grown where there is no water or where the soil has been degraded by erosion. Of the land that is still free of all these constraints, nearly all is already in cultivation. Moreover, some of the most erodible land is slowly losing its productivity.

All over the world, farmers have begun pulling back, abandoning much of the marginal land they first plowed in the mid-1970s. That land had been pressed into service after the Soviet Union's surprise decision, in 1972, to import massive quantities of wheat after a poor harvest. The decision had caused world grain prices to double, and gave farmers a strong incentive to raise output. But today, with much of that land being depleted still further by erosion, it is no longer worth filling. In the former Soviet Union, the harvested grain area has shrunk from its peak of 123 million hectares in 1977 to 94 million in 1994. In the United States, the Conservation Reserve Program established in 1985 retired much of the highly erodible land that was plowed in the late 1970s, paying farmers to return it to grass before it became wasteland.

While the United States, Russia, and Ukraine are abandoning or retiring marginal grainland, some of the more densely populated countries are losing prime cropland to nonfarm uses. As Asia industrializes, the construction of thousands of factories, roads, parking lots, and new cities is wiping once-productive crop land off the map. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, the Asian countries that industrialized first and can serve as models of what may happen elsewhere, have collectively lost...