Let’s stop big corporations from playing hunger games with our food production.
As summer fades into true autumn this month, World Food Day (October 16) celebrates sustainable strategies of food production while drawing attention to the global hunger that remains. Fifty years after Norman Borlaug helped launched the modern era of high-yield, input-reliant agriculture that has saved millions of lives—known as the Green Revolution—we confront the stark reality that 8,000 children worldwide still die each day because they don’t have enough to eat. Nearly 1 billion of the world’s inhabitants are hungry, and another 2 billion are poorly nourished.
Sadly, much of the world’s hunger is focused in one already troubled region. In sub-Saharan Africa, the rate of chronic hunger is 1 in 4—double the worldwide average. Even more worrisome is the fact that half of the world’s anticipated population growth over the next three decades, from 7 billion to more than 9 billion people, is expected to take place in Africa.
There are many causes for the persistence of hunger. Most are obvious: drought, conflict, natural disasters. Some are less so: market speculation, corruption, crop and food waste, and policies that sacrifice food security for export profit-chasing.
Looking toward agricultural production that will be able to meet the needs of the future, current policy remains heavily influenced by ag-industry and biotech solutions. This is especially true in the United States, which retains an outsized influence on policies in the developing world where most of the hungry live. One example is the growth of crops genetically modified to tolerate pesticide dousing.
The Obama administration has been active in promoting food security in a world challenged by the agricultural effects of climate change. But a test of the sincerity and efficacy of programs like the administration’s “Feed the Future” will be how well their counsel to developing world agriculturalists is based on local interests and listening in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, and how much is dictated out of the home offices of agricultural conglomerates in the American Midwest. Powerful U.S. ag-industry forces are attempting to migrate the Green Revolution to Africa, but is re-creating America’s biotech system the best (or the only) option for Africa? Market reforms and direct assistance to the world’s subsistence farmers, who still do most of the heavy lifting in local food production, are just as important as exporting high-yield crop strains.
The church maintains that biotech strategies, like genetically modified crops, have a necessary role in resolving the scandal of hunger in a world of abundance. But that does not mean that ag-science need be limited to inquiry that by some coincidence most serves for-profit interests in the United States. Farmers of the future will need the help of scientists in finding new food sources to domesticate, especially as climate change may mean dramatic changes in the growing conditions in the world’s breadbasket regions.
Thousands of different plant species have been used for human food in history; now only about 150 are cultivated and a mere three supply almost 60 percent of the calories and protein derived from plants. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reports that since the beginning of the 20th century, about 75 percent of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost. In a recent article in Wired magazine, Hilary Rosen notes that although there are as many as 18,000 species of legumes—“packed with protein”—growing around the world, “people have domesticated fewer than 50, and commonly eat only half that many.”
We have a world of neglected and undomesticated food options lying at our feet, but food production remains the captured domain of industry technocrats and suppliers because of their unyielding power. This has to change. Biodiversity and ingenuity, not GMO uniformity, will be the crucial components of a rational and sustainable 21st-century agriculture that can feed the world.
This article appeared in the October 2014 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 79, No. 10, page 39).
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