From McGill University A plan to improve crop yields instead of shutting down industrial society as some potential eco terrorists want to do. Norman Borlaug made huge advances in agriculture. He was an American agronomist, humanitarian, and Nobel laureate who has been called “the father of the Green Revolution”. Borlaug was one of only six people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. He was also a recipient of the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian honor. If this plan can do anything close to what Borlaug was able to accomplish, I’m all for it. FYI according to Wikipedia, “Green Revolution” refers to a series of research, development, and technology transfer initiatives, occurring between the 1940s and the late 1970s, that increased agriculture production around the world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s, not to be confused with the counterproductive “deep green resistance”.
Feeding the world while protecting the planet
International team of researchers designs global plan for sustainable agriculture
The problem is stark: One billion people on earth don’t have enough food right now. It’s estimated that by 2050 there will be more than nine billion people living on the planet.
Meanwhile, current agricultural practices are amongst the biggest threats to the global environment. This means that if we don’t develop more sustainable practices, the planet will become even less able to feed its growing population than it is today
But now a team of researchers from Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Germany has come up with a plan to double the world’s food production while reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature.
By combining information gathered from crop records and satellite images from around the world, they have been able to create new models of agricultural systems and their environmental impacts that are truly global in scope.
McGill geography professor Navin Ramankutty, one of the team leaders on the study, credits the collaboration between researchers for achieving such important results. “Lots of other scholars and thinkers have proposed solutions to global food and environmental problems. But they were often fragmented, only looking at one aspect of the problem at one time. And they often lacked the specifics and numbers to back them up. This is the first time that such a wide range of data has been brought together under one common framework, and it has allowed us to see some clear patterns. This makes it easier to develop some concrete solutions for the problems facing us.”
A five-point plan for feeding the world while protecting the planet
The researchers recommend:
- Halting farmland expansion and land clearing for agricultural purposes, particularly in the tropical rainforest. This can be achieved using incentives such as payment for ecosystem services, certification and ecotourism. This change will yield huge environmental benefits without dramatically cutting into agricultural production or economic well-being.
- Improving agricultural yields. Many farming regions in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe are not living up to their potential for producing crops – something known as “yield gaps”. Improved use of existing crop varieties, better management and improved genetics could increase current food production nearly by 60 per cent.
- Supplementing the land more strategically. Current use of water, nutrients and agricultural chemicals suffers from what the research team calls “Goldilocks’ Problem”: too much in some places, too little in others, rarely just right. Strategic reallocation could substantially boost the benefit we get from precious inputs.
- Shifting diets. Growing animal feed or biofuels on prime croplands, no matter how efficiently, is a drain on human food supply. Dedicating croplands to direct human food production could boost calories produced per person by nearly 50 per cent. Even shifting nonfood uses such as animal feed or biofuel production away from prime cropland could make a big difference.
- Reducing waste. One-third of the food produced by farms ends up discarded, spoiled or eaten by pests. Eliminating waste in the path that food takes from farm to mouth could boost food available for consumption another 50 per cent.
The study also outlines approaches to the problem that would help policy-makers reach informed decisions about the agricultural choices facing them. “For the first time, we have shown that it is possible to both feed a hungry world and protect a threatened planet,” said lead author Jonathan Foley, head of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. “It will take serious work. But we can do it.”
The research was funded by NSERC, NASA, NSF
The study Solutions for a Cultivated Planet was published in Nature. To read an abstract: http://www.nature.com/nature/
If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. …These five high-level recommendations are all very well. But they are neither novel nor, in this general form, actionable. The lack of novelty forces us to ask, “why haven’t people done much of this already?” The lack of specificity forces us to ask, “what makes your plan likely to succeed –with breakthrough efficiency and broad acceptance– where so many other plans have not?”
I hope to read the underlying Nature article, which may answer some of my concerns.
Makes USA ethanol production look silly, if not immoral, huh?
*sigh… more government telling you what you can and can’t do with your property.
And what the #$ does this mean?
“using incentives such as payment for ecosystem services”
So.. subsidies and taxes. Archer Daniels Midland makes obscene money off of subsidies for ethanol. Not as obscene as Solyndra and the other solar pig troughs, but through careful management of corruption and production, at least they turn a profit and don’t go belly up as the government keeps shoveling in the cash.
According to Greenpeace and other groups, millions have been starving since the ’60s. Every year it gets worse. Yet the population – even in the worst places for starvation, like the Sudan, Yemen – are experiencing rapid population growths that will … cause starvation. Starvation, I thought, lead to death which lead to … less people.
Like the AIDS epidemic that was going to kill of 1/3 of Africa but didn’t show up in a negative population growth, this starvation issue has me perplexed. How can a people without enough to eat per capita increase at an alarming rate the capita they can’t feed?
The fundamentals are somehow wrong. Not enough to eat for good development, perhaps, but more than enough for more people.
Is this another regional statistic gone globally bad, like warm weather and drought in Texas?
4. Shifting diets. Growing animal feed or biofuels on prime croplands, no matter how efficiently, is a drain on human food supply. Dedicating croplands to direct human food production could boost calories produced per person by nearly 50 per cent. Even shifting nonfood uses such as animal feed or biofuel production away from prime cropland could make a big difference.
I agree with the eliminating the bio fuel production but taking away my steak? No thank you.
7. Ban ethanol.
The problem with this statement is that it is logically a non sequitur. The number of people on Earth who lack food has precisely nothing to do with agriculture and everything to do with politics. Feeding 9,000,000,000 people by 2050 won’t be a problem because of a lack of agriculture or land.
Looks all very sensible to me. I especially like that they mention biofuels in #4. That madness has to be stopped immediately. Note that it’s all connected: when European car owners think they are helping the environment by tanking ethanol, they’re in reality encouraging the conversion of Brazil’s pastures into sugar cane fields. So beef production moves to new pastures – which are replacing the rain forest…
Sounds like the one-world guvmint types are picking winners and losers again. College professors and bureaucrats telling farmers how to farm, that’ll work, right.
Biofuel production bad, okay, Animal feed production bad, wrong-o. You can have my bbq brisket when you pry it from my cold dead fingers, or something like that.
Those billion starving people would be just fine if they didn’t have repressive governments like Zimbabwe’s. (Yes, I’m still on the golden rice, gm bandwagon.)
@Stark
Quite right. The mention 1 billion with not enough food, but not a couple of billion (at least) with way too much food. Is the assumption that we will continue to have 50% of food produced in Africa to be eaten by pests? Will forests of unharvested fruit and nut continue to rot?
The problem is not a lack of food, but lack of a willingness to built a just society.
Nothing really magical here, just the same advice every Agricultural Extension Service has been giving for many decades.
Most of the recommendations will be halted by insanely Green governments or by existing Mafia-style profit centers.
Green gov’ts won’t allow better water allocations because that might require building a dam. Green gov’ts (and NGOs) won’t allow GM crops. Old-style mafias will continue to offer more money for illicit crops than for food crops. The Wall Street Mafia will continue to push biofuel. Speculators will interfere with any effort to stop waste and increase storage, because speculators profit most when farmers are at the mercy of raw Nature every season.
Oh to get paid for spouting the Liberal line! Life would be delicious.
But nice to see a jab at biofuels.
So we have another group of dutter heads that want to control the planet….
….they want to dictate and standardize farming now
It’s the diversity in farming that makes it…some will fail, but some will succeed
they didn’t show a thing. they do use the subjunctive tense a lot.
(heh- i’d love to see any one of them working in a field. )
they claim to have discovered common sense, eh? seems they forgot about all the subsidies.that have warped the market, but they propose more…
nope – they aren’t the wizards they claim. they aren’t farmers, either.
in a garden fertilized by liberal application of stolen wealth, they plant fear. they harvest funding.
Doug Proctor says:
October 13, 2011 at 8:46 am
Good point! During the second world war, captured British women prisoners of the Japanese went quite hungary & malnourished, so much so that many stopped mestruating & ovulating, leading to the suggestion that a woman in such a condition would be unlikely to fall pregnant! Any ideas fro you expert out there?
As Oman noted, these things are being done to the extent feasible already. Unless you want to pump more government money into pament for “ecosystem services.” Hey, maybe we could have more subsidized tree planting offsets that result in large green profiteers moving people off of land in Africa and killing them when they won’t.
I have no problem with this. And if packaging good agricultural policies as “green” improves their likelihood of implementation and focuses the greens on something actually useful it seems like a win-win to me.
The following is of interest, as Buffett points out that you can’t solve the “Africa” problem (or yield issues elsewhere ) just by throwing money at it via: (Improved use of existing crop varieties, better management and improved genetics ). Much of the land that is a poor producer, is due to no biological activity – the soil is dead. No amount of fertilizer, “better” management, or bio engineered crop varieties will bring it back to life.
Quote: In a keynote speech before about 1,400 people at the World Food Prize Borlaug Dialogue, Buffett said that making 500 million to 700 million small-scale farmers in Africa more self-sufficient needs to start with improving soil fertility and not distributing new hybrids or seeds with biotech traits. Further, farmers simply can’t improve the soil by piling on chemically based fertilizers, he said.
These small-scale farmers buy seeds from unknown sources and can’t afford fertilizers. They don’t know how much fertilizer to apply or the fertility of their ground, he said.
“That is why we have such as challenge in front of us and this is unlikely to change anytime soon,” Buffett said.
Buffett built on his case made at last year’s World Food Prize when he said African agriculture needs a “brown revolution” to rebuild soil fertility. At this year’s speech, however, several presidents and CEOs of major agribusinesses were in the front row to hear Buffett’s perspective that the perennial struggles of farming in Africa simply can’t be solved by giving African farmers biotech corn and fertilizer. http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/dtnag/common/link.do;jsessionid=C942B8DD297C8609FA67CEC6A26DD85C.agfreejvm2?symbolicName=/free/news/template1&paneContentId=5&paneParentId=70104&product=/ag/news/topstories&vendorReference=0f4971e5-73db-4414-a3b8-39bac7e6ddf6
Most of the points the plan are pretty obvious, but difficult to put into practice, otherwise they would have been done already. Exactly how do you equalize “water, nutrients and agricultural chemicals”? Equalizing water means pumping water vast distances. Equalizing nutrients means moving soil. Equalizing agricultural chemicals means taking fertilizer away from farmers that purchased too much and giving to those that don’t have enough. I don’t see any of these as viable.
Similarly, eliminating waste is a brain-dead simple solution, but difficult to implement. Nobody wants to waste food, but it happens. If it were cost effective to reduce waste, people would have done it already.
Payment for ecosystems services is a tough sell, and contrary to what the article states, it would have a detrimental economic impact. Industries that currently consume ecosystems services without paying for them will pass those costs on to consumers if they do have to pay for them.
Sorry, I don’t buy it.
As people grow more wealthy, they invariably want more meat in their diets. Central planning and attempts to enforce a vegetarian diet will be as futile and counterproductive as all central planning.
Dr. Borlaug’s earlier works were successful because they were market solutions. Farmers were willing to spend their own money on his seeds and learning his methods. This latest proposal reads entirely anti-market:
Subsidizing “eco tourism” and other follies since the free market price for such land use is far below the price of crops that could be produced
Violent intervention in the marketplace in order to forbid the creation of new farmland (and new wealth for impoverished farmers). Forget private property rights.
How will “yield gaps” be addressed? Why do they exist? What makes the writers believe that they know more about farming in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe than the local farmers? To the extent that they really can offer improvements, why haven’t they done so already? Given the rest of the proposals, its reasonable to infer that this point will also require a liberal application of government violence.
Will “Supplementing the land more strategically” also require new laws, inspectors, rationing, fines, etc? Why would a rational farmer not apply the best combination of inputs for his conditions? Perhaps he has reasons and motivations (such as maximum profit, rather than maximum calories) that the central planners do not share.
The atrocious, immoral burning of food for biofuels using generous tax subsidies and laws interfering with fuel economy and safety should never have started, and stopping it would be a blessing. That can be done simply by getting government out of the way: remove the subsidies, repeal the laws and regulations, and the biofuel plants will be broken for scrap in short order.
Forcing people away from delicious meat is another matter entirely, and would require a police force of unprecedented size, scope, and brutality. The corruptions that would inevitably arise will sadly not be unprecedented.
Eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” is the mantra of every political hack on the planet. Talk is cheap, reducing waste is hard. No one wants to waste food or lose it to pests and vermin. Where is the evidence that the present system isn’t already allocating scarce resources efficiently so as to produce an adequate supply of food? If we were to spend 10x as much money securing crops in silos and transports, and thereby reduce waste by 5%, would that be worth it? Do we really want central planners making these decisions, or will we trust the markets to find the best solutions?
It’s certain that there are hungry people. The evidence is that food is not distributed well, which is not the same as saying there isn’t enough food. If the US would cease burning a substantial fraction of the world’s corn crop, poor people across the planet would have access to more, cheaper food.
Citing Norman Borlaug’s ‘Green Revolution’ is troubling. Among the unintended consequences of Dr. Borlaug’s ‘revolution’: family farming in places like Mexico is being displaced by industrial-scale farming, requiring accelerated use of fossil fuels, costly patented hybrids, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, increased water use and groundwater pollution. Mechanization is also displacing farm workers, driving rural-to-urban migration and sending Latinos northward into the US. Similar impacts are occurring in India, Africa and South America. Increasing crop production without regard to these effects simpy destabilizes rural areas as it enables further population growth.
Meanwhile, America keeps burning food for biofuels, driving up food costs around the world. Judging by past performance, I’d be extremely cautious about bright new ideas from NASA and NSF.
Alan the Brit says:
October 13, 2011 at 9:02 am
Female body-builders know about that too. When a woman’s body-fat percentage drops below (IIRC) 6[the % would be spurious, as I’m discussing percentages already] she’ll likely stop menstruating. As I also seem to recall, a lot of them consider this a benefit of bodybuilding.
I think it is pretty clear what these researchers are trying to say!
1) Save the Rain Forest!
2) Farm better
3) Centrally control what crops farmers plant
4) Force people to become vegetarian and/or do not use biofuels anymore. That fad is over with fellows. Or possibly shift beef production somewhere else out of sight.
5) Distribute food better so it does not get bad spots or eaten by little vermin.
Did they honestly have to waste money on these conclusions? You know, it might have made a little more sense to actually find out why people are starving? Look at number five….over half the food is lost to pests or rots! Seriously, that is your issue! We obviously have enough food, the problem is distribution. And they did not even tackle that part of food distribution that is the problem!
I kind of wonder how liberal wonders like this expect us to take them seriously when their ideas are either common sense or just politically bent. Number four pays lip service to “becoming vegetarian”. Seriously? Do these people realize how many poor people in Africa are vegetarian? Why don’t we ask them if they want some meat and see what happens. But that might involve real science and might make them have to leave their cushy officers where they can pontificate like said.
If there is one thing that is wrong with our society, it is professors and so-called experts who think their solutions are going to be applied at all and that their political idealogies actually work. Instead of wasting time on fruitless thinking that socialistic ideas can work, why not look at strategies that go to the actual problems of the world? And use solutions that do not requires “central Government control.”
If you really want to feed the people of the world, work on feeding them through the food we throw away first. Once that is done and finished, we can worry about more later. Until then, I for one am going to enjoy my steaks and am going to think these people have issues if their solutions to food distribution is some lofty “distribute it better.”
Listened to a related interview on NPR yesterday. All nice in theory and seemingly written by geeks with PhD’s. I wonder if they interviewed any farmers. There is no consideration for economics or politics: what pays and what doesn’t. Instead they are trying to come up with a general, global solution for many local problems. Zimbabwe could be a kick-ass farm exporter if it wasn’t for a mad dicktatorship regime. Another comment about eating less meat and poultry seems to be appropriate on a large scale, but is totally misguided on a small scale. Chickens, sheep, pigs, etc represent a tremendous extension of local resources when utilized on a small scale. They eat the waste, fertilize the ground, keep bugs down and provide a concentrated source of protein. I have a sense that these researchers have done their research with some preconceived notions in place.
As someone who actually met Norman Borlaug (if only very briefly), this doesn’t count as Borlaug 2.0. This (as a number of other people have noted) is a plea for world government and has little or no room for any technological improvement. Even the increases in productivity they refer to are those which should already be going on (using existing technology) – Africa has not seen any increase in yields for 20 years or so.
The rest is mandating what crops people can grow where – ring any bells? This is why “Many farming regions in … Eastern Europe are not living up to their potential for producing crops”. The legacy of communism is still being felt in the poor productivity in the former soviet states. The only reason China is not a massive basket-case anymore is because they let farmers grow what they want.