Food production is not the problem

According to World Food Programme’s ‘hunger statistics’, one out of nine people in the world remain malnourished

Given the exponential growth in the productive capacity of humanity as a whole, it is nothing short of ludicrous that we have not yet been able to end world hunger. The World Bank has recently estimated that there is need to grow 50 per cent more food by 2050 to feed the growing global population. However, it seems that merely focusing on increasing agricultural production may not provide a sustainable solution to the lingering problem of world hunger.

According to the World Food Programme’s ‘hunger statistics’, one out of nine people living in the world today remain malnourished. Since the vast majority of these people live in developing countries, around 13.5 per cent of the population of such countries is undernourished. The situation seems even more disturbing considering estimates by researchers at the University of California that we are already growing enough food for 10 billion people.

Rather than agricultural production, it is a combination of storage losses after harvest, overconsumption and waste that are held responsible for the hunger problem. While overconsumption and waste mainly affect agriculture in the developed world, the storage losses are challenges for developing countries in particular. Across large parts of Africa and South Asia, for example, post-harvest food losses are colossal. In recent years, frequent flooding has become another major cause for immense food crop damage.

Capital-intensive farming, over the past few decades, has enabled increasing food production due to mechanised farming, increasing use of pesticides, and the now growing use of genetically modified organisms in agriculture. Yet the environmental toll from this productivity boom has also become glaringly evident. Over a third of cropland across the world is degraded. Waterlogging and salinity have wreaked havoc across vast agricultural areas. Nitrogen-based fertilisers compound greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and their runoff pollutes fresh water bodies. Multitudes of agricultural workers are suffering from pesticide toxicity.

A transformative change is needed in a manner that allows agricultural production to take place to deal with the simultaneous challenges of food insecurity and climate change. There is an urgent need for finding ways to not only make agricultural production more efficient and more resilient to climate change, but also to use it to reverse the environmental degradation commercial farming has caused for the past many decades.

Specialised agencies and civil society groups working with poorer farmers in the developing world have been pointing out that it is these small farmers who should be central to the new agricultural agenda. Small-scale farmers and pastoralists currently cultivate 60 per cent of agricultural land and produce 50 per cent of the planet’s food. Yet current agricultural research and policymaking is not really guided by their needs and priorities.

The kind of support smaller farmers need includes greater access to water, advice on soil management and testing, reliable climate forecasts, and help in development of their own seed and livestock breeding processes. Instead, the advice they often get emphasises the use of unaffordable chemical fertilisers and pesticides; and their ability to exchange and sell locally adapted crop seeds is constantly being threatened by agro-corporate interests. The role of women in farming is largely ignored, and agricultural extension programmes also pay them little heed. For small farmers to become more efficient farmers, they also need secure land tenure. Instead, commercial farming and the effort to give agricultural land to foreign agricultural firms is on the rise. Such trends are further dispossessing smaller farmers.

It is about time that international development agencies like the World Bank begin focusing on small-scale farmers under the rubric of the newly labeled ‘climate-smart agricultural strategies’. They ought to move away from encouraging further liberalisation of agricultural development and capital-intensive approaches for boosting agricultural yield and productivity, and focus more on helping small-scale farmers. It is only by empowering small-scale farmers to develop climate resilient agriculture, such as conservation agriculture, agro-forestry and integrated pest management that it will be possible to eliminate extreme hunger from our world.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 14^th,  2015.

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