https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/food-security-your-questions-answered
Food security: your questions
answered
- Food security: your questions
answered
Over the past month, the University of Cambridge has been
profiling research that addresses one of the biggest challenges of the 21st
century – how to guarantee enough food, fairly, for the world’s rapidly
expanding population. As part of this, we asked whether you had a question that
you wanted us to answer, and put them to a panel of academics who specialise in
research to do with food security. Here's what they had to say. Thanks to
everyone who sent questions in!
I would
suggest that the problem is less the number of people, than a particular kind
of political economy that presents some people as a liability to the welfare of
others.
David Nally
Is GM the answer?
How can GM
technologies serve enough food for the human population which is growing rapidly
every year and if we compare with sosiocultural aspect of human, poverty and
planting areas? Maybe we can increase the quality and quantity of food with
genetically modified food, but it can’t compare with population growth. I come
from Indonesia, most people say my country is a high biodiversity country and
we can grow up every vegetable and rice, but it can not serve for Indonesian
(for about 200 million people), there are many malnutrition children cases,
hungeroedema and etc. What do you think about the connection between population
growth, poverty and quantity of foods?
Rikhsan
Kurniatuhadi, Tanjungpura University, Pontianak City, Indonesia
To feed the
growing population we will likely need a whole array of approaches. This will
include, but will not be limited to strategies like traditional breeding,
enhanced breeding strategies (including making use of genetic information that
is not currently residing in the genepool of the crop in question), as well as
improvements in engineering aspects of agriculture, and the supply chain
itself. All of these areas have the potential to be important. Whether any one
part of the process, including genetic modification, is the most important will
only be clear when we look back.
However,
there are traits that one could engineer into crops to improve tolerance to
stresses, including pest and pathogen attack. There are also the approaches
currently being taken to improve nutrition of crops. There is also the
possibility of using natural variation in photosynthesis to increase the
potential yield of crops. There is growing support for the argument that, to
maintain biodiversity, we need to ensure the agricultural land that is in use
is used as efficiently as possible. The hope is that multiple technologies will
be combined and this will contribute to sustainable food production in the
future.
Dr Julian
Hibberd
Should I use GM?
I live in
Manipur, north eastern India. It’s a hilly area. The cropping system is a
traditional terrace system and we sow once a year. We grow rice, some
indigenous pulses, vegetables and fruit. Most of these crops are sown in
the month of June and the rest of the year the land remains dry
and unused. Nowadays cropping lands are reducing due to lack of
water and growing of unwanted plants in the plot. So, I want to ask what
measurement should we take either to adopt GM which we could not afford and is
hardly available or should we focus on traditional recovery?
N G
Ngashangva, Phadang Village Christian Compound, Manipur, India
Dear Mr
Ngashangva, I do not think that there are GM varieties that would be useful to
you – at least at present. However if you had herbicide-resistant crops then
that might allow you to reduce weeds in your plots. It may also allow you to
plant without ploughing or digging up the soil because you could drill holes to
plant your herbicide resistant seed and then kill the weeds by herbicide
application. Drought resistant GM crops are being developed but they are not
available yet.
Professor
Sir David Baulcombe
Can we tackle the financialisation of food?
I would like
to ask what your analysis is of the impact of speculation in the food
derivative markets on food prices. Bodies including the OECD and the G20
agriculture ministers are increasingly recognising the contribution of
speculation in commodity derivative markets to food price spikes, which
obviously has an immediate and negative impact on consumers everywhere, but
especially in developing countries where food security is already a problem. Do
you think we can tackle food security for the poorest people in the world
without also tackling the financialisation of food globally?
Vicki
Lesley, Brighton
The theory
is that food derivatives help farmers to hedge the price risk they face. Demand
for food has grown enormously in recent years, not the least with the
'emergence' of the Indian and Chinese economies. The supply of food has
suffered erratically due to climatic calamities. Food prices have not only
risen but have been volatile. Uncertain prospects of future food prices encourage
farmers to hoard, and volatile prices stifle investments. Derivatives contracts
allow the price risk to be traded so that speculators can take it on, induced
of course by some probable return. A farmer who fears that the price of his
crop will decline as it grows can hedge the price risk by entering into a
futures contract to sell his crop in so many months’ time at a price determined
now. This principle of transferring risk from hedgers to speculators is also
the basis of option contracts which give holders the right to buy or to sell
the commodity at an agreed price on or before a specified future date. If
derivatives markets stayed true to principle, they should help in discovering
price and encourage farmers to invest in the right crops. That is the
theory!
But as
markets for food derivatives have grown, large buyers and sellers, attracted by
the potential for speculative gains, have come to dominate the market, and
physical hedgers are of much less significance. Demand and supply are now driven
by speculative investment strategies in which commodities form one asset class
in large portfolios.
Does this
matter? The real price of food rises through changes in real demand and supply.
Speculators never take physical delivery of the good. Can demand for futures
contracts change real demand and their sales change real supply of food?
The markets
for food and for food derivatives are linked of course. Speculators act upon
small events that can potentially create price fluctuations in the real market,
and amplify them in the derivatives market. Momentum traders render prices
volatile. Volatility in turn drives more speculation. Volatile derivative
prices that result can move real food prices when (at least some) farmers take
them as signals of real prices in the future, and change their inventories
accordingly. The risk management and price discovery functions of the
derivatives market are ever at risk of being washed out by speculators. More
often than not, the tail can wag the dog.
Furthermore,
in the globalised world, commodity futures markets in different countries are
linked. Returns and volatility spill over from rich country markets to emerging
and developing country markets. Even in rich countries, futures contracts and
the commodities they represent often do not converge to the same value at
contract settlement. So even farmers and producers who do have access to the
derivatives market cannot hedge efficiently using futures contracts.
The lives of
large proportions of households in poor and developing economies depend on food
prices. I agree with you that the need for the commodities futures market to be
regulated more effectively, backed by careful research, is urgent.
Dr Paul
Kattuman
How can we protect agricultural lands from urban
spread?
I wish to
congratulate you on such an innovative initiative to research into the biggest
global concern - Food Security. Having been exposed to some of the causes of
Global Food Insecurity as a young academic with background training and
experience in Human Settlement Planning, I have come to appreciate that, one
major challenge to ensuring food security is the invasion of prime agricultural
land by residential and other urban land uses. In Ghana for instance, the pace
of invasion is so fast that large tracts of fertile lands have suffered from
urban expansion and population growth particularly in the peri-urban interface.
This has not only resulted in reduced food production but has also taken away
the very sources of livelihood derived by residents of peri-urban areas.
Against this
background, I wish to know what practical strategies could be adopted within
the framework of Spatial Planning to ensure that agricultural lands are
protected as a basic prerequisite to ensuring food security. Secondly, I will
be glad if the group could expound on how a good balance can be achieved
between efforts by national and international communities to reverse
deforestation and the provision of suitable land for food production as well as
the sustenance of rural livelihoods.
Ransford
Antwi Acheampong, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana.
Thank you
for these excellent questions. Although I am not an expert on spatial planning,
my research deals with reconciling conflicting priorities for land, and as part
of that work I spent a year in the forest zone of Ghana in 2006/2007.
Planners
must consider a range of valid objectives (such as requirements for housing,
commercial facilities, transport infrastructure, crop cultivation and
biodiversity conservation) and attempt to find compromises between them to
guide development without being overly prescriptive. To do this, a good place
to start is in establishing very clearly what those objectives are, over an
appropriate time horizon, by involving interested parties in a consultative
process. Local plans need to be coherent with national policies, and national
policies need to take account of local needs and constraints. If a particular
group is excluded, there will be problems. For example, if only the needs of
urban residents and businesses are considered in plans for urban expansion, and
not those of peri-urban farmers (or of those who buy and eat the food they
produce), any spatial plan will be built on a flawed foundation.
There is
also a need for good information to inform decisions about zoning land for
different uses. Here, communication and data-sharing between institutions is
crucial. Which areas of land are most suitable for crop cultivation? Ghana has
a Soils Research Institute which has produced detailed maps of crop
suitability, but when I visited the country these were not accessible to
planners. Which areas of land are most important for biodiversity conservation?
Ghana has tropical forests internationally renowned for their diverse and
endemic species, but while staff of the Forestry Commission might know this,
many of those working within the Ministry of Food and Agriculture may not.
These problems are not unique to Ghana: often here in the UK there is also poor
communication between government departments.
How best to
conserve forests while producing more food? My research in Ghana has persuaded
me that the most promising approach is to grow more food on less land, while
protecting (and in the long term, restoring) forests. Measures to increase food
output while reducing food production can help too, such as reducing the amount
of food that spoils before it can get to market. Increasing yields on existing
farmland, while minimising pollution and other problems, will need the
intensive application of both scientific knowledge and farmers’ knowledge.
There is a role for planners here in synthesising information about the most
appropriate lands for crop production (with good soils, low carbon storage and
low biodiversity value) and directing agricultural development towards those
areas.
In addition
to targeting agricultural development towards existing croplands with the most
potential, reducing deforestation will require zoning of land where further
agricultural development is inappropriate. In Ghana, this might include all of
the remaining high forests, many wetland areas, plus areas with potential for
restoration, such as land dominated by shaded cocoa farms. Careful screening
and regulation of any large-scale land acquisitions, particularly for biofuel
crop cultivation, will be needed to ensure that they deliver real benefits for
the nation and for local people, without damaging areas of high conservation
value. Oil palm companies in Ghana have adopted a set of Principles and
Criteria for responsible palm oil cultivation. Similar principles could be used
to ensure that development of other crops, too, adheres to strict environmental
and social safeguards.
Dr Ben
Phalan
Should we instead address global overpopulation?
Thomas
Malthus wrote. "Must it not then be acknowledged by an attentive examiner
of the histories of mankind, that in every age and in every State in which man
has existed, or does now exist, that the increase of population is necessarily
limited by the means of subsistence, that population does invariably increase
when the means of subsistence increase, and, that the superior power of
population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of
subsistence, by misery and vice." While not
suggesting we do nothing and thereby cause misery and vice, by working to
produce more food for a growing population, are we not just compounding the
problem because it will enable the population to grow even bigger, requiring
even more food, and at the same time having an even greater negative impact on
our planet? Why not address the root of the problem, ie global overpopulation,
by better education, financial incentives from government, and other means to
encourage people to have less children and therefore reduce the population back
to a level that is naturally sustainable on Earth?
Jacqueline
Garget, Cambridge
The term
‘overpopulation’ makes a normative claim about population size, so we might
begin to answer your question by first positing another one: what constitutes
an ‘ideal’ or ‘naturally sustainable’ population? A few
statistics might help us frame this discussion. According to the United
Nations, Somalia, Sudan, and Mozambique, three African countries severely
affected by hunger and malnutrition, have between 14 to 29 inhabitants per sq
km. These figures contrast sharply with 400 people per sq km for the
Netherlands, 351 for Belgium, and 255 for the UK. Ghana, which is twice the
size of the UK, has nearly a third of the population of the latter. Yet, we are
unaccustomed to thinking of the UK or Belgium as ‘overpopulated.’ Why? Well,
clearly the long-term carry-capacity of an area, rather than the overall
population density, is what matters most. But that point aside, I do not think
that one needs to delve too deeply to see that the tendency to single out the
developing world for attention expresses a deep and abiding fear of the other.
We all know that we would need several additional planet Earths if everyone
adopted the consumption patterns of the average America; and yet that knowledge
does not tend to diminish the perception that it is ‘their’ prolificacy that
threatens ‘our’ existence. Historian David Arnold puts this very well when he
writes that ‘too many people’ usually means ‘too many of the wrong sorts of
people.’ Of course,
Malthus’s own account of the population problem was saturated in this kind of
moral reasoning. The poor, especially the non-European poor, were creatures of
nature that bred without any consideration of the consequences. Malthus
believed that in the ‘southern climates’, where virtue was absent and the
inhabitants lived in a ‘degraded state’, the perennial threat of war,
pestilence and famine was necessary to sharpen faculties, force improvements,
and prevent additional population increases. The ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’
were thus seen as a ‘positive check’ on human improvidence – a last resort to
discipline the intractable and restore balance in the human and natural world.
The latent
racism of Malthus’ worldview is frequently ignored. Instead arguments tend to
concentrate on his more general point that famines are caused by a decline in
food availability brought on by an increase in human numbers. We might ask,
then, if this is a helpful way to think about the aetiology of subsistence
crises?
Unfortunately,
measuring aggregate food supply against population totals – as Malthus did – is
profoundly misleading, because it gives little consideration to the ways in
which resources are unequally apportioned. This is one of the major
contributions of Amartya Sen’s classic work on famines as ‘entitlement
failures’ (Sen’s book, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and
Deprivation, was first published in 1981). According to Sen, people starve when
either their ‘endowments’ (by which he means their resources) or their
‘entitlement set’ (by which Sen means the bundle of goods and services that a
person can legally utilise) change to such a degree that they can no longer
obtain adequate sustenance.
Sen offers
many examples to think about how shifts in resources and entitlements can lead
to starvation. For example, a farmer and his family may starve because they
find themselves unable to pay rent and are forced of the land. Alternatively
they may starve or undergo severe hardship because the cost of labour or price
of inputs (for, say, seeds and fertilisers) increases to such a degree that
they are unable to undertake the usual cultivation the land. The point is that
people ‘command’ food through a variety of mechanisms, and thus analysing the
‘entitlement set’ is much broader than looking only at, say, income or
indeed food supply, as the determining factor in precipitating a subsistence
crisis.
I spend some
time discussing Sen’s Nobel Prize winning research because it demonstrates how
the ‘famine question’ involves so much more than the ‘population question’. Or
as Sen has put it himself, ‘the most important denial made by the entitlement
approach is ... the simple analysis in terms of ‘too many people, too little
food.’ The Malthusian ‘food availability decline’ model, as Sen calls it,
presupposes that starvation deaths result from a severe interruption in the
supply of food (caused by an environmental catastrophe, like a drought, or
arising from the effects of overpopulation), whereas the ‘entitlement’ approach
focuses attention on the allocation of resources within a market-based economy.
I find the
latter approach to be a more helpful method to analyse the problem of global
hunger. It is a well-established fact that there is enough food to feed the
world’s present population – indeed by some estimates there is 20% more food
than the world currently needs. Yet hunger persists and future famines seem
very likely. I would suggest that the problem is less the number of people,
than a particular kind of political economy that places food in some hands and
not others.
Dr David
Nally
How do we reclaim nutrients from water?
How long
have we got to develop massive systems of nutrient reclamation from the world's
sewers (before phosphate or potassium, or perhaps boron becomes limiting) and
how much energy might such a system, require - energy that has to be added to
our energy budget for the future? Agriculture exports nutrients to the cities
of the world with every tonne of food supplied. Until mankind finds ways of
returning those nutrients to the cropland (instead of flushing them out to sea)
no system of farming can be described as sustainable. There is an added
challenge here: we need those nutrients returned, but without the pollution
that the cities inevitably mix with them - particularly heavy metal
contamination.
Bruce
Danckwerts, Choma, Zambia
Many of the
world's larger communities are exploring the option of nutrient recovery,
although often in the context of recovering the energy content of the organic
matter in sewerage. For example the city of San Diego in California is
producing such as system, in part in response to recovering energy content and
in part to recover the water. Nutrient recovery has tended to be a side benefit. You are,
however, correct that nutrient recovery will become increasingly important in
the future, not only because the raw materials of nutrients are being depleted,
but because the energy required to make these into useful materials such as
fertilisers is quite large, and so contributes to the greenhouse gas emissions
of nations.
Dr Douglas
Crawford-Brown
Can we afford the energy input? Do we have adequate
water resources?
Someone once
said that modern agriculture is the conversion of fossil fuel calories into
edible calories, due to the reliance on mechanisation. If oil prices continue
to rise as predicted, the cost of farming will increase markedly, as will the
cost of the food produced. Since it seems we can no longer control oil prices
in a sustainable fashion, except by recession, it would appear that permanent
food price rises are now a reality. How can we give people access to affordable
food when we rely so heavily on expensive fossil fuel to produce it? Also, we
know that water tables in the Middle East, China and Australia are already severely
depleted, mainly due to the demands of agriculture. If this issue turns out to
be more widespread, how on earth can we expand agriculture further?
Tristan
Collier, Cambridge
Your
comments are right on the mark. In fact, the Foreseer Project we are involved
in aims to study the physical linkages between energy, agriculture and water
resources to inform discussions like this on a local, regional and global
level. The aim of the project is to develop an online visualisation tool to
help the policy makers, industry and the general public understand the
importance of future resources such as energy, land and water.
The major
physical linkages between food production and energy occur through the
production and use of fertiliser (which uses about 2% of world energy
production) and the use of fossil fuels for mechanisation of food production
and transportation of food. Decreasing this physical reliance might make food
prices less linked to energy prices. One possible strategy to do this would be
to avoid the use of excess fertilisers.
Agricultural
yields in developing countries could potentially increase without adding much
mechanisation, fertilisation and irrigation. Yields and productivity can be
improved by better informing the local farmers about the use of new practices,
such as agro-forestry and soil moisture conservation practices, including
minimum tillage, depending on local conditions.
Water
scarcity is probably the biggest limitation to expansion of agricultural
production, as you correctly point out. There is some room for improvement,
such as better irrigation technologies, rainwater harvesting and increase use
of wastewater in agriculture production. However we agree that agricultural
production cannot be expanded infinitely. Using desalinated water is also
an option, though today it is still much too expensive to be used for
irrigation – and it comes at energy price. One of the main goals of The
Foreseer tool is to include this kind of energy, water and land interactions
into the analysis.
Grant Kopec,
Bojana Bajzelj and Liz Curmi
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