TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081991/0819330.000

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                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 48

Will We Run Low On Food?


As the diversity of crops declines and the world's population
explodes, grain supplies become more vulnerable

By EUGENE LINDEN


    Bent Skovmand is not exactly a household name, but he has
more to do with the welfare of the earth's 5 billion people
than many heads of state. As a plant breeder at CIMMYT, the
internationally funded agricultural research station in El
Batan, Mexico, he spends his days in silent battle with threats
to the world's wheat crop. Recently Skovmand discovered a rare
strain of wheat from eastern Turkey that is resistant to the
Russian aphid, an invader that has so far cost American farmers
$300 million. By using the Turkish strain to develop hearty new
hybrid wheats, CIMMYT breeders may help growers outwit the
aphid.

    Unfortunately the strains of crops that seem to have
almost magical qualities are becoming ever harder to find. As
farmers go for the highest possible yields these days, they all
want to use the same kind of seeds. Individual crops share more
genetic material, and local varieties are vanishing. Moreover,
as the explosive growth of the world's population causes more
farmers to turn more forest land into fields, wild species of
plants are getting wiped out. Potentially valuable food sources
are lost -- forever -- before they are even discovered. The
world is losing a marvelous diversity of genetic material that
has enabled the plant kingdom to overcome pests, blights and
droughts throughout the ages.

    Plant breeders have used this genetic diversity to help
fuel the green revolution and keep agricultural production
ahead of population growth. But as the raw material of the
revolution disappears, the food supply becomes more vulnerable
to catastrophe. Skovmand, for one, is not optimistic about the
prospects for the coming decade. "The world has become
complacent about food," he says. "In the 1970s the surprise was
that India could feed itself. In the coming years the surprise
may be that India can no longer feed itself."

    Ever since Thomas Malthus' 1798 Essay on the Principle of
Population proposed that human fertility would outstrip the
ability to produce enough food, human ingenuity has consistently
belied such predictions. Books such as Paul Ehrlich's The
Population Bomb in 1968 and the Club of Rome's 1972 study The
Limits to Growth raised fears that unchecked population growth
might lead to mass starvation. Later in the '70s, Lester Brown
of Washington's Worldwatch Institute argued that the world's
farmers were already pushing the practical limits of what good
land, high-yield crops, irrigation and artificial fertilizers
and pesticides could deliver.

    The Malthusians, however, have consistently underestimated
how much the technological wonders of the green revolution --
along with the ability of farmers to make good money growing
crops -- can spur food production. Ehrlich and Brown have long
predicted that food prices would rise as agricultural production
fell short of demand, and they have been wrong. India, where
1.5 million people died in a 1943 famine, became a grain
exporter by 1977, even as it doubled its population. Farmers
planting short, seed-laden wheats developed by Nobel laureate
Norman Borlaug at CIMMYT had to post guards to protect the
riches in their fields.

    Beginning in the mid-'80s, however, the momentum of the
green revolution slowed dramatically, especially in parts of
India, China and Pakistan. In India's Punjab state, yields of
rice and wheat have begun to flatten despite increasing
reliance on fertilizers and better use of water. Elsewhere in
Asia, rice researchers have failed to raise yields significantly
for more than two decades. Hidden costs of the green revolution
have begun to surface all around the world: the amount of
irrigated land, which produces 35% of the food supply, has been
declining in per capita terms. One reason is that fields become
poisoned with salts left behind when irrigation water
evaporates. Looming in the future are the unknown agricultural
impacts of global changes such as ozone depletion in the upper
atmosphere and the greenhouse effect.

    The short term is not too rosy either. The U.S. corn and
soybean crops are currently suffering from a severe drought in
the Midwest. And, for a variety of reasons, poor harvests are
predicted this year in China, India and the Soviet Union.

    The combination of both immediate and long-range threats
to the food supply has brought back the old alarming questions:
How much longer can the world deliver adequate food to human
numbers relentlessly expanding at the rate of 91 million a
year? Is it possible that the Cassandras will soon be right?

    Many agricultural experts are taking doomsayers more
seriously. A new cause of concern is the steady loss of genetic
diversity, which has made the food supply less stable and
reliable than in the past. With farmers growing similar crops
in similar ways, diseases and droughts have more impact than
they would if planters grew a diverse array of crops. Senator
Albert Gore of Tennessee is convinced that the decline of
diversity is one of the greatest threats facing world
agriculture. "We may see a significant number of crops become
functionally extinct," he says, "enjoying bumper crops until one
day the hammer falls in the form of a blight they cannot
handle."

    According to economist Peter Hazell, who conducted a study
of crop volatility for the International Food Policy Research
Institute, the likelihood of major food shortfalls has doubled
during the past four decades. India, for instance, relies
heavily on one type of fast-growing wheat, called sonalika, that
is susceptible to several diseases. One epidemic in this crop
could wipe out India's entire grain surplus.

    Plant breeders can provide India with wheat strains
resistant to the pests that threaten sonalika, but, says Michael
Strauss of the National Academy of Sciences, "this is not a
battle you win just once." Disease germs and insects continually
evolve, developing resistance to pesticides and seeking out
vulnerabilities that enable them to penetrate crop defenses.

    A mix of strains minimizes this damage. But more and more
of the world's basic crops now share genetic material. Most
high-yielding wheats and rices derive their short, sturdy
stature from just a few ancestors. While these genes may be
tough, the genes transferred with them may contain a hidden
vulnerability that could allow pests to lay waste to huge areas.
Observes plant breeder Garrison Wilkes of the University of
Massachusetts at Boston: "Imagine what a burglar could do if he
got past the front door of a building and found that all the
apartments shared the same key."

    One promising solution to this problem is for breeders to
draw genetic material from a wide variety of sources so that
bugs and blights are forced to breach many types of defenses.
The new tools of biotechnology allow scientists to identify
particular genes and thus predict which strains will exhibit
such desirable characteristics as disease resistance or drought
tolerance. Crossing many varieties can then create the best
possible mix of traits. Entomologist John Mihm and CIMMYT
geneticist David Jewell are combating a corn borer that costs
tropical farmers as much as 50% of their crop. The two
scientists hope one day to create hybrid corn with resistance
from a maize local to Antigua as well as the phenomenal defenses
of Tripsacum, a wild grass that is related to corn.

    Although plant scientists rely on traditional
crossbreeding, they are experimenting with actual genetic
engineering. Eventually they hope to take individual genes from
one strain and put them into the cells of another. Researchers
expect to isolate genes from plants that have found ways to cope
with ultraviolet radiation, drought, salty soils and other
changes future crops may face as a result of mankind's meddling
with the earth and atmosphere.

    But such techniques will gradually have poorer results if
the genetic catalog scientists work with is shrinking. When so
many farmers switch to the most popular strains, their wild
ancestors and traditional crops that have become adapted to
local conditions for centuries (called land races) can easily
disappear. Urban development paves over traditional crops and
good soil, because cities have usually grown up near the richest
land. Calvin Sperling, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's
chief plant explorer, believes coastal development along the
Mediterranean may have already caused the disappearance of many
land races of beets. And war almost always takes a toll. One
casualty of the recent conflict with Iraq may be the loss of
rare breeds of wheat as farmers forced from their fields eat
their seeds to survive.

    Agriculture's main defense against the loss of diversity
has been the establishment of seed banks, which collect and
preserve crop strains. International agencies have helped set
up a worldwide network of eight banks that hold myriad varieties
of seeds for 25 important food crops. These international
centers serve as vital backstops for national seed collections,
which are sometimes carelessly maintained.

    No one contends that these seed banks can completely halt
the diversity drain. While impressive collections have been
built for such major crops as wheat, corn and rice, efforts to
accumulate samples of vegetables and lesser-known cereals have
been much more spotty. During times of unrest, people have
raided and eaten seed collections. The director of a research
station in Aleppo, Syria, was so concerned with the threat of
war last year that he shipped precious wheat seeds to CIMMYT
before allied action began against Iraq.

    Another strategy for preserving diversity is to encourage
farmers to maintain a variety of traditional crops. But the
global movement of people into cities creates tremendous
pressures on farmers to grow uniform, easily transportable
crops. This situation will only get worse. By 2000 there will
be about 400 cities with more than 1 million inhabitants each,
containing one-sixth of the world's population.

    The rise of megacities in the developing world also
thwarts agricultural policies that would stimulate food
production in the countryside. Mindful that governments get
overthrown by city dwellers and not farmers, many Third World
regimes artificially lower crop prices to placate their urban
populations. In Egypt, livestock growers find it cheaper to feed
their animals subsidized bread than to produce the grain
themselves. This absurdity is unlikely to change, because a past
attempt to hike the price of bread produced riots in Cairo.

    Such unrest may become more frequent in the coming years.
Donald Winkelmann, CIMMYT's director general, notes that a
decade ago, India's farmers could thrive even as wheat prices
dropped, because production costs fell faster. Now it is harder
to lower costs and, Winkelmann says, "India may not be able to
count on cheap food as it has in the past as an element of
industrialization." He expects crop prices to rise after
mid-decade, as demand increases faster than supply.

    Lester Brown has renewed his earlier predictions that
world population is reaching the limit of what the planet's land
can support. Per capita food production is already declining,
he points out, in Africa and South America. Ethiopia has
suffered its tragic famines, Brown contends, partly because the
country's population has outstripped the productive capacity of
its fields. But World Bank analysts disagree, arguing that
Ethiopia's agricultural failures stem more from the policies of
the recently ousted Mengistu regime, which paid farmers
rock-bottom prices and created no incentive to conserve
resources.

    Just Faaland, the director general of the International
Food Policy Research Institute, maintains that what Brown sees
as limits are really only impediments: "It's true that
fertilizer yields have stopped growing, that crops are more
vulnerable to pests, and it has become more difficult to find
arable land and water, but we can move these limits. It is not
reasonable to project a logical and necessary catastrophe."
Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis goes
further in his new study Global Food Progress 1991. He argues
that financial investment, not fertile soil, is now the limiting
factor in food production. Idle and underutilized cropland in
the U.S. and Argentina alone, he says, could feed an extra 1.4
billion people.

    When it comes to predicting food prices and supplies, the
optimists so far have a much better track record than the
pessimists. But few experts would deny that as the human
population grows, threats to the food supply become ever more
dangerous. And mankind is losing the weapons to fight those
threats, as it allows the irreplaceable diversity of the plant
kingdom to disappear.