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ONE OF the apparent successes of the European Community over the past
few years has been the disappearance of its notorious food mountains, the
result of cutting production and giving away surpluses. Other major food
producers have been pursuing similar policies. But a new wave of thought
is beginning to emerge that these policies were wrong, and could be contributing
to a global food shortage that may leave us as vulnerable as the British
army and navy were in 1939, lulled by predictions of peace into scrapping
their armaments.

At the forefront of those putting forward such ideas is Lester Brown,
an agronomist who is head of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington DC.
‘There is a tendency, particularly among non-scientists, to look at the
yield trends of the last 40 years and assume they will go on,’ says Brown.
But increases are, he says, already slowing.

Food yields grew at 3 per cent per year between 1950 and 1984, making
the food available per head increase by a third. But since 1984, Brown points
out, this rate of increase has dropped. The harvest in 1989 was only 1 per
cent larger than in 1988. Meanwhile, the number of mouths to feed is projected
to increase by 1.7 per cent per year this decade, an increase of 940 million
people, versus 850 million during the 1980s.

World famine was a popular prediction of the 1960s, before the Green
Revolution discredited talk about limits to growth. The Worldwatch Institute,
which Brown founded in 1974, has remained concerned – some would say obsessed
– about such trends. Brown continues to preach that ‘everything in biology
follows an S-curve’, in other words, that growth never continues indefinitely.
He is worried that policy makers have forgotten this.

Worldwatch’s State of the World report for 1990, for example, contradicts
the main agricultural and trade policies of Europe and North America. Brown
calculates that food production is not growing as rapidly as the human population
– and that there are good reasons to expect the growth in yields to slacken
still further. Meanwhile, he says, there is no technological fix on the
horizon. Brown suspects that the world’s ecosystems may be approaching their
inherent ecological and technological limits for producing food.

In international negotiations on trade, says Brown, the US assumes that
the world ‘has, and will continue to have, a great deal of surplus (food)
production capa city’. This view is shared by the European Community, which
continues to try to cut subsidies for farmers. There has certainly been
surplus food, at depressed prices, since the early 1970s.

But the capacity to produce that food, says Brown, is not sustainable,
and is already diminishing. It is water and soil that govern the limits
to food production. In 1972, when the Soviet Union began to increase its
imports of grain, prices quadrupled. To meet the demand, says Brown, ‘a
lot of land was ploughed that shouldn’t have been ploughed’, because it
was too likely to erode. Meanwhile, farmers drilled wells for irrigation
to increase their crop yields, taking more water out of the ground than
was flowing back in. Of the world’s total consumption of fresh water, 70
per cent goes to farming.

In the 1970s, says Brown, overploughing and overpumping did lead to
a short-term increase in the world’s yields, but this increase had fallen
off sharply by the late 1980s. Part of the reason was a loss of farmland
in several countries.

In the US, legislation passed in 1985 resulted in 16 million hectares
of eroding farmland being converted to grassland or woodland. That was 11
per cent of the US’s total crop land. The Soviet Union stopped farming 13
per cent of its crop land during the 1980s, because of erosion or attempts
to prevent it. China is losing land for cultivation as well, partly to erosion
and partly because of human settlement.

The same picture emerges for water. The water table under the North
China Plain, which supplies millions of people, is falling by between 1
and 2 metres per year. In the US, 26 per cent of irrigated land is using
more water than is replenished from water tables, drawing them down by as
much as a metre a year. In the Soviet Union, the Aral Sea is drying out
due to overuse of its feedwaters for irrigation.

The 1980s was the first decade in history in which the area of land
farmed did not increase. Also for the first time, says Brown, there was
a fall – of about 8 per cent – in the amount of fresh water used per capita.
He calculates that it will fall by as much again this decade.

In many places, farmers have increased their crop yields through irrigation.
The amount of irrigated land grew in the 1980s, but not as fast as the human
population. There are few sites left that are suitable for new irrigation.
In some places, irrigation will soon have to stop because the water table
has fallen too far, or because the irrigation water has been switched to
drinking water.

Shrinking resources are only one of three factors slowing the growth
in food output, says Brown. A second factor, he says, is the absence of
‘dramatic new technologies like hybrid corn or chemical fertiliser’, which
have underpinned the growth in food output since the 1950s. A third is environmental
degradation.

Brown’s most controversial assertion is possibly the absence of any
technological fix. He argues that the technologies that created the ‘Green
Revolution’ of the 1950s and 1960s could still be applied more widely, for
instance in Africa, but that the scope for their expansion is narrowing.
Already 80 per cent of Indian farmland grows modern, high-yielding varieties
of grain, and the rest of the country is too arid for those techniques.

Brown says he sees no new ‘quantum jumps’ in yields such as those that
resulted from chemical fertilisers and high-yielding varieties on the horizon.
Biotechnology, he says, has been particularly disappointing. ‘Very little
work is being done on staple crops,’ he says. ‘What work is being done is
aimed at limiting inputs, not increasing output.’ Most of today’s work through
developments such as nitrogen-fixing cereals or herbicide-resistant crops,
is motivated by a need to cut the costs of farming, rather than increase
yields from crops. This is a response to the food surpluses and low prices
of the 1980s when farmers needed to cut costs to make a profit.

Brown believes that the apparent limitations of technology are a sign
that ‘we’re pushing against photosynthetic limits with some crops in some
parts of the world’. In other words, certain ecosystems are already transforming
as much solar energy into food as they can, given the constraints of soil
and water. ‘Unless someone redesigns that basic process (of photosynthesis),
that limit will always be there’ .

If the last of Brown’s three causes for diminishing yields is considered,
the trend towards food shortage can only continue. Almost all the major
forms of environmental degradation cut food production, says Brown. He lists
soil erosion, desertification, the loss of ozone from the stratosphere and
its increase in the troposphere, acid rain and the decrease in biological
diversity. There is no monitoring system for observing the impact of environmental
pollution on yields, says Brown. If there were, it would enable scientists
to make quantitative prediction, he says.

In what he calls ‘a crude ledger analysis’, researchers at Worldwatch
attempted to develop such a monitoring system. They compared factors that
increase yields – greater use of fertilisers and irrigation, and new high-yielding
varieties – with factors that diminish them, such as the loss of organic
matter in soils, air pollution, and flooding caused by deforestation. The
increases added up to an extra 29 million tonnes of grain per year, an increase
in food output of 2 per cent per year. The losses, insofar as they could
be quantified using existing studies, amounted to 14 million tonnes. They
cut increases elsewhere in half, for a net increase of one per cent per
year.

To check the calculations, Brown looked at rice yields in Japan. Japan
started increasing its grain yields using modern technology in 1880, while
Europe and the US did not begin until 1940. ‘The world today is, on average,
where Japan was in 1970,’ says Brown. China’s yields last year were equal
to Japan’s in 1970. Japanese farmers are ‘well educated, scientifically
oriented, are paid a rice support price that is four times the world price,
and have access to the world’s cheapest capital,’ he says. If anyone has
an incentive to increase yields, said Brown, it is Japan.

Since 1970, Japanese farmers have increased rice yields by an average
of 0.9 per cent per year. The closeness of this figure to the 1 per cent
per year that Brown estimated to be the rate of increase in grains worldwide
in the next decade, says Brown, ‘is one of the scariest things I’ve come
across’. The Japanese cannot produce more, he says, because ‘agronomically,
they don’t know what else to do’.

The environmental analysis can be done another way, says Brown. If,
in the US, the food produced on the 16 million hectares that have been taken
out of production due to erosion plus the amount of food produced with water
that is running out, is subtracted from current US food production, it falls
‘well below current consumption’. On a world scale, this means there is
a ‘substantial deficit between current consumption and sustainable production’.

In a few years, the problem of agricultural subsidies which is now causing
so much political friction could become academic. Grain prices are already
rising. They would be increasing more quickly, says Brown, if the Baltic
and Black Sea ports of the Soviet Union, the world’s largest grain importer,
were not backed up because of the breakdown in the internal transport system.

After bad harvests in the US in 1988, and India in 1987, world grain
stocks are down to 60 days’ supply. They are not being built up quickly,
partly because of policies that are still aimed at cutting agricultural
surpluses. ‘If the harvest in 1989 had been as bad as 1988,’ says Brown,
‘world grain prices would have increased by two to three times.’ He believes
that the resulting shock waves would dwarf the oil shock of 1973.

The forecast, even without making predictions based on increases in
greenhouse gases, is for more frequent droughts in the world’s breadbaskets.
We may be headed for the grain shock of 1992, says Brown. ‘If the grain
price increases to the point where it is threatening the lives of a lot
of people,’ he says, ‘political stability will be threatened.’

The Middle East would be among the worst hit; Egypt, for example, subsists
largely on cheap imports of grain. Even Eastern Europe, the sink down which
the European Community has poured the last of its food mountains, will be
in trouble. Brown says that ‘the only reserves left will be the grain we
feed livestock.’ This amounts to 600 million tonnes, more than a third of
world production.

‘We are,’ concludes Brown, ‘in trouble on the food front.’ The food
mountains of the 1980s, he says, were a temporary aberration due to an unsustainable
overuse of land and water, which will soon run out. ‘The world is not really
prepared for what lies ahead,’ he says.