The New Geopolitics of Food (4)

Beyond the changes in the environment that make it ever harder to meet human demand, there is an important intangible factor to consider: over the last half century or so, we have come to take agricultural progress for granted. Decade after decade, advancing technology underpinned steady gains in raising land productivity. World grain yeald per acre has tripled since 1950. But now thay era is coming to an end in some of the more agriculturally advanced countries, where farmers are already using all available technologies to raise yields. In effect, the farmers have caught up with the scientists. After climbing for a century, rice yield per acre in Japan has not risen at all for 16 years. In China, yields may level off soon. Just those two countries alone account for 1/3 of the world's  rice harvest.
The rich country - poor country divide could grow even more pronounced. This January, a new stage in the scramble among the importing countries to secure food began to unfold  when South korea, which imports 70% of its grain, announced that it was creating a new public-private entity that will be responsible for acquiring part of its grain. With an initial office in Chicago, the plan is to bypass the large international trading firms by buying grain directly from U.S. farmers. As the Korean acquire their own grain  elevators, they may well sing multiyear delivery contracts with farmers, agreeing to buy specified quantities of wheat, corn, or soybeans ata fixed price.
Other importers will not stand idly by as South Korea tries to tie up a portion of  the U.S. grain harvest even before it gets to market. The enterprising Koreans may soon be joined by China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and other leading importers. Although South Korea's initial focus is the U.S., far and away the world's largest grain exporter, it may later consider brokering  deals with Canada, Australia, Argentina, and other major exporters. This is happening just as China may be on the verge of entering the U.S. market as a potentially massive importer of grain. With China's 1.4 billion increasingly affluent consumers starting to competewith U.S. consumers for the U.S. grain harvest, cheap food, seen by many as an American birthright, may be coming to an end.
No one knows where this intensifying competition for food supplies will go, but the world seems to be moving away from the international cooperation that evolved over several decades following World War II to an every-country-for-itself philosophy. Food nationalism may help secure food supplies for individual affuent countries, but it does little to enhance world food security. The low-income countries that host land grabs or import grain will likely see their food situation deteriorate.

The New Geopolitics of Food (3)

While temperatures are rising, water tables are falling as farmers overpump for irrigation. This artificially inflates food production in the short run, creating a food bubble that bursts when aquifers are depleted and pumping is necessarily rediced to the rate of recharge. In aris Saudi Arabia, irrigation had surprisingly enabled the country to be eslf-sufficient in wheat for more than 20 years. Now, wheat production is collapsing because the nonreplenishable aquifer the country uses for irrigation is largely depleted. The Saudis soon will be importing all the grain.
Saudi Arabia is only one of some 18 countries with water-based food bibbles. All together, more than half of the world's people live in countries where water tables are falling. The politically troubled Arab Middle East is the first geographic region where grain production has peacked and begun to decline because of water shortages, even as populations continue to grow. Grain production is already going down is Syria and Iraq and may soon decline in Yemen. But the largest food bibbles are in India and China. In India, where farmers have drilled some 20 million irrigation wells, water tables are falling and the wells are starting to go dry. The World Bank reports that 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced by overpumping. In China, overpumping is concentrated in the North China Plain, which produces half of China's wheat and a third of its corn. An estimated 130 million Chinese are currently fed by overpumping. The question is: how will these countries make up for the inevitable shortfalls when the aquifers are depleted?
Even as we are running our wells dry, we are also mismanaging our soils, creating new deserts. Soil erosion as a result of overplowing and land mismanagementis undermining the productivity of 1/3 of the world's cropland. How severe is it? Look at satellite imagesshowing two huge new dust bowls: one stretching across northen and western China and western Mongolia, the other across central Africa. Wang Tao, a leading Chinese desert scholar, reports that each year some 1 400 square miles of land in northern China turn to desert. In Mongolia and Lesotho, grain harvests have shrunk by half or more over the last few decades. North Korea and Haiti are also suffering from heavy soil losses; both countries face famine if they lose international food aid. Civilisation can survive the loss of its soil reserves, but it cannot survive the loss of its soil reserves.

The New Geopolitics of Food (2)

The doubling of world grain prices since early 2007 has been driven primarily by two factors: accelerating growth in demand and the increasing difficulty of rapidly expanding production. The result is a world that looks different from the bountiful global grain economy of the last century. On the demand side, farmers nowfear clear sources of increasing pressure. The first is population growth. Every year the world's farmers must feed 80 million additional people, nearly all of them in developing countries. The world's population has nearly doubled since 1970 and is headed toward 9 billion by midcentury. Some 3 billion people are also trying to move up the food chain, consuming more meat, milk and eggs. As more families in China and elsewhere enter the middle class, they expect to eat better.
Everything from falling water tables to eroding soils and the consequences of global warming means that the worls's food supply is unlikely to keep up with our collectively  growing appetites. Take climate change: the rule of thumb among crop ecologists is that fore every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the growing season optimumm farmers can expect a 10% decline in grain yields. The relationship was borne out all too dramatically during the 2010 heat wave in Russia, which reduced the country's grain harvest by nearly 40%.