AT the beginning of the summer, the National Farmers' Union of Canada put out a press release that included the headline Global food crisis emerging.
The release is scary reading. Based on early predictions by the United States Department of Agriculture on world grain supply and demand for the 2007-08 crop year, the NFU's director of research, Darrin Qualman, broadcasts a dire warning that "we are in the opening phase of an intensifying food shortage."
Qualman means a worldwide shortage.
As the world went into the Northern Hemisphere's summer, total grain supplies were the lowest in the 47 periods for which data exists and were quite possibly at their lowest levels in a century. This crop season would mark the seventh year out of the past eight in which global grain production fell short of demand.
"The world is consistently failing to produce as much grain as it uses," Qualman said.
Despite the so-called "green revolution," the miracle of fertilizers, irrigation techniques, and disease-resistant grains, the world, once again is in danger of not feeding itself. There are all kinds of reasons for this: population growth, climate change, a shift to feeding livestock instead of using grain directly for food, which is a less efficient way of feeding people, and growing demand for ethanol.
There are no easy solutions and there are other potential problems. The collapse of cod supplies is well-known, but many edible fish species are also in danger. Qualman says one-third of ocean fisheries are already in collapse and scientific journals estimate that two-thirds may be in collapse by 2025.
Climate change may exacerbate grain shortages. Global warming has been largely associated with drier conditions in grain-growing areas, but that is far from universal. Some areas in North America have been having unusually wet weather in spring -- ideal conditions for scab, or head blight. Scab hit Nebraska wheat fields this year. The Broad Institute, a research body supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and affiliated hospitals warns that head blight "is becoming a threat to the world's food supply."
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported earlier this year that a new and virulent fungus of wheat-stem rust had spread from East Africa to Yemen. Some 80 per cent of wheat varieties in Africa and Asia are susceptible to the disease.
Crop diseases are nothing new. The Irish potato famine was caused by disease. The Bible is replete with stories of famine and the need to store grains.
Modern techniques have led to disease-resistant strains. Most strains of wheat rust in North America, for example, have been combatted by cultivation of resistant strains. Agriculturists, however, stress the need for cultivation of many varieties of all crops. A single strain is always vulnerable to a new, mutated form of any crop disease. The Irish potato famine was a result of over-reliance on one variety.
The world's food supplies may not be as robust as they were 20 years ago, nonetheless, we are not all about to starve. Famine, for the next little while at least, is going to affect others -- the poorer nations of the Earth -- not us.
It won't come to the West first, but that there's still every reason to be concerned. The warning signs are very real and much like climate change, the potential food shortage is a result of the way we consume and live our lives.
It's also an example of how solving one problem tends to produce another. The production of ethanol reduces dependence on oil, but diverts grains from the food supply, thereby assisting in one shortage but threatening another.
For the world's food supply, it would be better if we all ate less meat and got our proteins in a different way, but we are as used to our diet as we are to driving cars and taking airplanes and we are now using grain to do so. Having had the benefit, in the West, of eating what we want, it is hard now to deny developing countries the same, just as it is difficult to argue against their increasing use of fossil fuels when the West has caused the great majority of the greenhouse-gas effect so far.
The prospect of climate change has now gained widespread acceptance, although the response is less clear. The building danger of food shortages, however, as production plateaus and the world population continues to increase is less well appreciated and almost totally without political action.
Qualman of the NFU is not a scaremonger. He's telling it as it is. So here's a prediction: Food is the next big global news story and just like climate change it will generate huge controversy.
The problem can be ignored, but it won't go away.
Nicholas Hirst is CEO of Winnipeg-based television and film producer
Original Pictures Inc.
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