The world is rapidly moving towards disaster, whether you call it doomsday or apocalypse. But this is not the global financial crisis or the risk of financial problems in Greece and other European countries that may drag the rest of the world down with them. No, this is the global food situation. We face a global food shortage, the like of which the world has never seen.
How do I know that? I have read books, articles and blogs that tell me so. They bear titles such as Agricultural Apocalypse 2010, The End of Food, Food Wars, Fearing Food and In Defence of Food. They, and many others, try to bring back to life Thomas Malthus, the philosopher who more than 200 years ago said the world's population would increase faster than food supply, thus resulting in mass starvation.
One could argue that these publications are written by authors aware that exaggeration and sensationalism get people's attention. Books predicting the end of the world is nigh do sell. But even serious scientists and international organisations are talking about the ''perfect storm'' of global food shortages.
When global food prices increased rapidly during 2007 and the beginning of 2008, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation reported large increases in the number of undernourished people. Its estimates of 100 million to 170 million additional hungry people were quoted by newspapers worldwide. Its admission that these estimates were rough and subject to large errors was lost in the frenzy to quote them.
When food prices fell dramatically during the last half of 2008, one might have expected a fall in the number of undernourished people. That did not seem to happen. At least it was not reported. Good news does not seem to be newsworthy.
Is the world really headed towards a global food apocalypse? No, not really.
Large groups of people do not have access to sufficient food to meet their needs. Hunger and malnutrition contribute to the deaths of about 5 million preschool children a year. For them, the apocalypse is real. Many more survive but suffer from malnutrition and associated poverty and poor health.
But there is plenty of underused productive capacity to feed the present, and expected future, global population. The key questions are whether the natural resources that make up this capacity will be managed sustainably, whether food prices are high enough to cover the costs of expanding food production, whether the millions of poor people will get access to enough food and whether governments and international organisations will prioritise sustainable food production for all.
More than two-thirds of African farmers are net buyers of food; they cannot produce enough food to meet their needs. Not because they are lazy and the productive capacity is absent, but because they do not have access to credit, fertilisers and high-yielding seeds that are resistant to insects and are drought-tolerant. They do not have access to markets where they can sell their products at prices that cover production costs. Their crop yields could be doubled or tripled. It has been done in places where these problems have been solved.
Poor farmers damage the environment. They mine their soils for plant nutrients because they cannot get access to reasonably priced fertilisers. For them, feeding their families now is more important than protecting the land for the future. Poor farmers expand agricultural production into lands unsuited for agriculture and at high risk of degradation because they cannot increase yields on the better land.
But these problems can be solved with enlightened policies and investments. The necessary interventions will vary among countries and places, but two are likely to be very important in most settings: improved rural infrastructure (roads, irrigation facilities, institutions) and agricultural research to expand yields, reduce unit costs of production and assure sustainable use of natural resources.
Triple wins, such as reduced soil degradation, increased food production and an escape from poverty, are waiting to be realised. Access to fertilisers will reduce soil mining, increase yields and help poor farmers out of poverty - but only if the farmer has access to credit, and the infrastructure gives him access to markets without excessive transactions costs.
Without efforts to expand food production in a sustainable manner, the doomsday prophets will be right. Many more millions of children will die, natural resources will be destroyed and the world will face real food shortages.
Will policy makers respond in time? The global food crisis that gave ammunition to the predictors of a food apocalypse was a warning of what may happen when the food sector is ignored by policy makers. Unwarranted complacency is the doomsday prophet's best friend.
This is an edited extract of the Sydney Ideas address on Thursday by Per Pinstrup-Andersen, professor of food nutrition and public policy at Cornell University, New York.
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