New missions for the military.

• Author: Ayres, Ed

In late October, on a Russian steppe near the Kazakhstan border, a 10-year-old girl named Rakhmat Zukieva talked to a reporter about the extreme difficulty her family was having either growing or buying food. The girl was by then subsisting on a single slice of bread each day, along with a bowl of water mixed with a little sour milk, and little else. She said her mother had told her that this winter, when the temperatures in that region drop to nearly 40 degrees F. below zero, "we will die."

The problem was, and is, that Russia's grain harvest fell to just over 49 million tons in 1998 - a precipitous plunge from the more than 110 million it had produced just eight years earlier. (During the same eight years, production in the former Soviet Union as a whole dropped from 207 million tons to 121 million, so there was little hope for Russia to get what it needed from Kazakhstan or Ukraine, as it might have in the past.)

For a while, the shortfall of food in Russia didn't seem too serious. Large shipments were coming from the United States through commercial trade. In mid-1998, 70 percent of the meat and dairy products in the Moscow area were imported. But in August, when the ruble collapsed, the U.S. imports stopped. U.S. officials later said some grain shipments to Russia could resume as emergency aid. But by then it was apparent that Russia might have to get in line. Families in North Korea have been in desperate straits for at least as long as the Zukieva family has - as have populations in parts of Sudan, Yugoslavia, and the Tarahumara region of Mexico. In Bangladesh, massive flooding last summer wiped out more than half of the country's rice crop. In China, the Yangtze River floods destroyed enough rice to have fed tens of millions this winter. In Indonesia, the collapsed economy has led to street riots over the lack of cooking oil, rice, and other food staples.

In short, the prospect Lester R. Brown described in several WORLD WATCH articles over the past five years - that food export supplies will fall short of import needs - may already be coming to roost in some regions. Brown's projections of future global shortages took into account critical variables (including extensive paving-over of arabic land, shortages of irrigation water, and increases in meat consumption) that had been generally disregarded by the projections of the World Bank and the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Other Worldwatch Institute researchers...