Lester R. Brown, president of Worldwatch Institute underestimates by a wide margin the capacity of farmers in China and worldwide to respond to higher prices with more production. His forecast of world grain output, which assumes ruinously high prices by 2030, projects only a modest average increase of half a percent annually in production. That is less than one-third the 1.6 percent annual increase projected by FAO, far less than half the 1.3 percent annual increase projected by the World Bank, and less than one-fifth the 2.6 percent annual increase actually registered between 1961 and 1990.
Why is Brown such a pessimist? He points to the 1970s, when world grain prices suddenly doubled, mainly due to high income growth rates and inflationary monetary policies throughout the industrial world. Prices for all commodities -- including oil, copper, bauxite, and tin -- increased sharply between 1972 and 1974 because of the same macroeconomic effects. Farmers everywhere responded by planting larger areas, using more water and fertilizer, switching to new varieties of seeds, and buying better equipment, all of which greatly boosted production.
While some grain fields in China are being converted to more productive use, such as fruit and vegetable production, industry, transport, or services, in Africa vast areas of cropland and grazing land are being lost through degradation. On the southern edge of the Sahara, some 250,000 square miles of once-productive land, an area the size of Somalia, have become desert over the past 50 years. As yields have failed to increase on existing croplands, Africa’s farmers have been forced to cut down forests or move onto even more fragile lands to expand production. Africa loses roughly 12 million acres of forest every year, primarily as a result of clearance for agriculture.
Africa has little to show for this abuse; the sacrifice of the rural environment has led neither to economic growth nor to the reduction of poverty. Between 1970 and 1990 poverty among rural Kenyans increased to 47 percent from 40 percent; in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, the number of malnourished increased to 204 million from 96 million. Over the same period in China, poverty among rural Chinese declined to just 11 percent, from 39 percent. While rapidly industrializing China enjoys a $38 billion trade surplus with the United States and is thus more than able to afford larger grain imports, impoverished Africa must try to finance food imports through foreign aid. This will grow ever more difficult in the years ahead.
Read more here.
No comments:
Post a Comment