Global food supply near the breaking point

The world is now eating more food than farmers grow, pushing global grain stocks to their lowest level in 30 years. Rising population, water shortages, climate change and the growing costs of fossil fuel-based fertilizers point to a calamitous shortfall in the world's grain supplies in the near future, according to Canada's National Farmers Union (NFU). Thirty years ago, the oceans were teeming with fish, but today more people rely on farmers to produce their food than ever before, says Stewart Wells, NFU's president. In five of the last six years, the global population ate significantly more grains than farmers produced. And with the world's farmers unable to increase food production, policymakers must address the "massive challenges to the ability of humanity to continue to feed its growing numbers," Wells said in a statement. There isn't much land left on the planet that can be converted into new food-producing areas, notes Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington-based non-governmental organization. And what is left is of generally poor quality or likely to turn into dust bowls if heavily exploited, Brown told IPS. Unlike the Green Revolution in the 1960s, when improved strains of wheat, rice, corn and other cereals dramatically boosted global food production, there are no technological magic bullets waiting in the wings. "Biotechnology has made little difference so far," he said. Even if the long-promised biotech advances in drought, cold, and disease-resistance come about in the next decade, they will boost yields little more than five percent globally, Brown said. "There's not nearly enough discussion about how people will be fed 20 years from now," he said. Hunger is already a stark and painful reality for more than 850 million people, including 300 million children. How can the number of hungry not explode when one, two and possibly three billion more people are added to the global population? The global food system needs fixing and fast, says Darrin Qualman, NFU's research director. "Many Canadian and US farmers are going out of business because crop prices are at their lowest in nearly 100 years," Qualman said in an interview. "Farmers are told overproduction is to blame for the low prices they've been forced to accept in recent years." However, most North American agribusiness corporations posted record profits in 2004. With only five major companies controlling the global grain market, there is a massive imbalance of power, he said. "The food production system is designed to generate profits, not produce food or nutrition for people," Qualman told IPS. He says there are enormous amounts of food stored in central Canada's farming heartland, but thousands of people there, including some farm families, are forced to rely on food banks. "It's a system that's perfectly happy to leave hundreds of millions of people unfed," he said. Inequity and poverty are at the heart of the hunger problem, according to experts, including the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Economic inequity is becoming more widespread, with hunger and malnutrition a chronic problem for the poor in both the South and the North, says Brown.