Wake up, World Bank and FAO.

• Author: Brown, Lester R.
• Position: UN Food and Agriculture Organization - Editorial

Of all the problems confronting the world's beleaguered governments, few have as much long-term importance as the challenge of guaranteeing their peoples an adequate food supply. In the face of growing populations which may not stabilize for decades, many countries are likely to find that challenge increasingly difficult to meet. But no country, rich or poor, can chart an effective food policy without first understanding what levels of crop production the world can reasonably count on - not just 10 or 20 years from now, in the wake of some hoped-for technological breakthrough, but today and next year, under today's and next year's real-life constraints.

Those constraints are well documented: cropland is shrinking in the face of urban sprawl; irrigation water is being diverted in ever greater quantities for industrial and municipal needs; fertilizer use in much of the world has reached a saturation point, beyond which extra doses do not increase the harvest; and the overall protein-producing efficiency of the world agricultural system is declining, as newly prosperous Asian populations shift increasingly from direct grain consumption to meat. Meanwhile, demand continues to rise by nearly 90 million mouths per year.

Yet these and other constraints, such as the effects of soil erosion and air pollution on crop yields, are given little weight in the two most important agricultural forecasts, the global grain production projections by the World Bank and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Governments all over the world depend on these projections to make tough, real-world decisions - on food production, food imports, and a host of other issues. But the economists who do the forecasting rely mostly on an extrapolation of past production trends, and...