the 9 billion_people_question
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The 9 billion-people questionA special report on feeding the world l February 26th 2011
Food-26.02.11.indd 1 14/02/2011 13:39
The world’s population will grow from almost 7 billion now to over 9billion in 2050. John Parker asks if there will be enough food to go round
their disposal. Given the same technology,European and American farmers get thesame results.
The wheat bearing 4 or 5 tonnes a hectare is, roughly, like that of the Green Revolution, the transformation of agriculturethat swept the world in the 1970s. It hasbeen treated with herbicides and some fertilisers, but not up to the standard of themost recent agronomic practices, nor is itthe highestyielding semidwarf wheatvariety. This is the crop of the Indian subcontinent and of Argentina.
The extraordinary results in the centreof the �eld are achieved by using the bestplants, fertilisers, fungicides and husbandry. The yield is higher than the national average in Britain, and is as good as it gets.
Seeds of doubtBut the Broadbalk �eld shows somethingelse. Chart 1 on the next page tracks itsyields from the start, showing how thethree di�erent kinds of wheat farming�African, Green Revolution and modern�have diverged, sometimes quite suddenly:in the 1960s with the introduction of newherbicides for Green Revolution wheat,and in the 1980s with new fungicides andsemidwarf varieties. Worryingly, though,in the past 15 years the yields of the mostproductive varieties of wheat in Broadbalk
The Economist February 26th 2011 A special report on feeding the world 1
The 9 billionpeople question
THE 1.6hectare (4acre) Broadbalk �eldlies in the centre of Rothamsted farm,
about 40km (25 miles) north of London. In1847 the farm’s founder, Sir John Lawes, described its soil as a heavy loam resting onchalk and capable of producing goodwheat when well manured. The 2010 harvest did not seem to vindicate his judgment. In the centre of the �eld the wheat isabundant, yielding 10 tonnes a hectare,one of the highest rates in the world for acommercial crop. But at the western end,near the manor house, it produces only 4or 5 tonnes a hectare; other, spindlier,plants yield just 1or 2 tonnes.
Broadbalk is no ordinary �eld. The �rstexperimental crop of winter wheat wassown there in the autumn of 1843, and forthe past 166 years the �eld, part of the Rothamsted Research station, has been the siteof the longestrunning continuous agricultural experiment in the world. Now di�erent parts of the �eld are sown using di�erent practices, making Broadbalk a microcosm of the state of world farming.
The wheat yielding a tonne a hectare islike an African �eld, and for the same reason: this crop has had no fertiliser, pesticide or anything else applied to it. Africanfarmers are sometimes thought to besomehow responsible for their low yields,but the blame lies with the technology at
An audio interview with the author is at
Economist.com/audiovideo/specialreports
A list of sources is at
Economist.com/specialreports
How much is enough?The answer is less straightforward than itseems. Page 3
Plagued by politicsBiofuels are an example of what not to do.Page 4
No easy �xSimply using more of everything to producemore food will not work. Page 6
Waste not, want notFar too much food never reaches the plate.Page 8
Doing more with lessThe only reliable way to produce more food isto use better technology. Page 9
Our daily breadBringing wheat up to scratch. Page 11
Not just caloriesPeople also need the right nutrients. Page 13
A prospect of plentyFor the �rst time in history, the whole ofmankind may get enough to eat. Page 14
Also in this section
AcknowledgmentsThe author is grateful to the many people from theorganisations listed below who gave generously of theirtime and expertise in the preparation of this report. A fulllist of their names is available online.Agmark Kenya, the Alliance for a Green Revolution inAfrica, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,Biodiversity International, the Biotechnology andBiological Sciences Research Council, BrasilAgro, theBrazilian Enterprise for Agricultural Research, theChicago Council on Global A�airs, the Donald DanforthPlant Science Centre, Farm Inputs Promotions�Africa,the Federation of the Industries of the State of São Paulo,the Food and Agriculture Organisation, Global HarvestInitiative, HarvestPlus, the International FinanceCorporation, the International Fund for AgriculturalDevelopment, the International Livestock ResearchInstitute, the International Maize and WheatImprovement Centre, the John Innes Centre, Kraft Foods,Moi University, Eldoret, Monsanto, the Abdul Latif JameelPoverty Action Lab, Nestlé, Rothamsted Research,Syngenta, Western Seed Company, Kenya, the WorldBank, World Resources Institute, the United StatesDepartment of Agriculture.
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have begun to level out or even fall. Thefear is that Broadbalk may prove a microcosm in this respect, too.
At the start of 2011 the food industry isin crisis. World food prices have risenabove the peak they reached in early 2008(see chart 2). That was a time when hundreds of millions of people fell into poverty, food riots were shaking governments indozens of developing countries, exporterswere banning grain sales abroad and �landgrabs� carried out by rich grainimportingnations in poor agricultural ones were raising awkward questions about how best tohelp the poor.
This time, too, there have been exportbans, food riots, panic buying and emergency price controls, just as in 200708.Fears that drought might ruin the currentwheat crop in China, the world’s largest,are sending shock waves through worldmarkets. Discontent over rising breadprices has played a part in the popularuprisings throughout the Middle East.There are di�erences between the periods,but the fact that agriculture has experienced two big price spikes in under fouryears suggests that something serious israttling the world’s food chain.
The food industry has been attractingextra attention of other kinds. For yearssome of the most popular television programmes in Englishspeaking countrieshave been cooking shows. That may pointto a healthy interest in food, but then againit may not. The historian Livy thought theRoman empire started to decay whencooks acquired celebrity status.
At a meeting of the Group of Eight (G8)industrial countries in 2009 the assembledleaders put food alongside the global �nancial crisis on their list of top priorities,
promising to �nd $20 billion for agriculture over three years. This year the currentpresident of the Group of 20 (G20),France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, wants to makefood the top priority. The Gates Foundation, the world’s richest charity, which hadpreviously focused on health and development generally, started to concentratemore on feeding the world. At last month’sWorld Economic Forum, a gathering ofbusinesspeople and policymakers in Davos, 17 global companies launched whatthey described as �a new vision for agriculture�, promising to do more to promotemarkets for smallholders�a sign of risingalarm in the private sector.
Anything for dinner?Some of this public and political attentionhas been sporadic, but it is justi�ed. An eraof cheap food has come to an end. A combination of factors�rising demand in Indiaand China, a dietary shift away from cereals towards meat and vegetables, the increasing use of maize as a fuel, and developments outside agriculture, such as thefall in the dollar�have brought to a close aperiod starting in the early 1970s in whichthe real price of staple crops (rice, wheatand maize) fell year after year.
This has come as a shock. By the 1990smost agricultural problems seemed tohave been solved. Yields were rising, pestsappeared under control and fertiliserswere replenishing tired soil. The excitingareas of research in life sciences were nolonger plants but things like HIV/AIDS.
The end of the era of cheap food has coincided with growing concern about theprospects of feeding the world. Around theturn of 201112 the global population is forecast to rise to 7 billion, stirring Malthusianfears. The price rises have once againplunged into poverty millions of peoplewho spend more than half their income
on food. The numbers of those below thepoverty level of $1.25 a day, which hadbeen falling consistently in the 1990s, rosesharply in 200708. That seems to suggestthat the world cannot even feed its currentpopulation, let alone the 9 billion expectedby 2050. Adding further to the concerns isclimate change, of which agriculture isboth cause and victim. So how will theworld cope in the next four decades?
That question forms the backbone ofthis special report. The answer to it cannotbe a straightforward technical or biologicalone because food is basic to life. In theMaya creation myth, the �rst humans weremade of maize dough. In the slang of Marathi, a language of west central India, theman on the street is known as �friedbread��after the workers’ favourite snack.
Because food is so important, agriculture�more than any other form of economic activity�is expected to achieve a series of competing and overlapping goalsthat change over time and from place toplace. The world looks to farmers to domore than just produce food. Agriculture isalso central to reducing hunger (which isnot quite the same thing) and providesmany people’s main route out of poverty.Food is probably the biggest single in�uence on people’s health, though in radically di�erent ways in poor countries and inrich ones, where the big problem now isobesity. Food is also one of the few pleasures available to the poorest. In the favelas(slums) of São Paulo, the largest city inSouth America, takeaway pizza parloursare proliferating because many families,who often do not have proper kitchens,now order a pizza at home to celebrate special occasions.
Given these con�icting aims, it is notsurprising that the food crisis has produced contradictory accounts of the mainproblem and radically di�erent proposals
6070 90 10 30 50 70 902000
1Fertile ground
Source:Rothamsted Research
*With too little nitrogen †For maximumyield ‡Plus spring nitrogen
Broadbalk average wheat yieldsTonnes per hectare
0
2
4
6
8
10
1855 80 1900 20 40 60 80 2005
unmanured
inorganic fertilisers*
organic manure only
Continuous wheat:
best inorganicfertilisers †
best organicmanures ‡
1st wheat in rotation:
2Peaky
Source: The Economist *2005=100
The Economist commodity-price index, food*
2006 07 08 09 10 1180
100
120
140
160
180
200
220
240
Sugar
3Meat on the menu
Source: Food and Agriculture Organisation
Global food demand, 1961=100
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
1961 70 80 90 2000 10 20 30 40 50
CerealsStarchyroots
MeatDairy
F O R E C A S T
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for solving it. One group is concernedmainly about feeding the world’s growingpopulation. It argues that high and volatileprices will make the job harder and thatmore needs to be done to boost suppliesthrough the spread of modern farming,plant research and food processing in poorcountries. For those in this group�foodcompanies, plant breeders and international development agencies�the GreenRevolution was a stunning success andneeds to be followed by a second one now.
The alternative view is sceptical of, oreven downright hostile to, the modernfood business. This group, in�uentialamong nongovernmental organisationsand some consumers, concentrates more
on the food problems of richer countries,such as concerns about animal welfareand obesity. It argues that modern agriculture produces food that is tasteless, nutritionally inadequate and environmentallydisastrous. It thinks the Green Revolutionhas been a failure, or at least that it hasdone more environmental damage andbrought fewer bene�ts than anyone expected. An in�uential book espousing thisview, Michael Pollan’s �The Omnivore’sDilemma�, starts by asking: �What shouldwe have for dinner?� By contrast, thoseworried about food supplies wonder:�Will there be anything for dinner?�
This special report concentrates on theproblems of feeding the 9 billion. It there
fore gives greater weight to the �rst group.It argues that many of their claims are justi�ed: feeding the world in 2050 will behard, and business as usual will not do it.The report looks at ways to boost yields ofthe main crops, considers the constraintsof land and water and the use of fertiliserand pesticide, assesses biofuel policies, explains why technology matters so muchand examines the impact of recent pricerises. It points out that although the concerns of the critics of modern agriculturemay be understandable, the reactionagainst intensive farming is a luxury of therich. Traditional and organic farming couldfeed Europeans and Americans well. Itcannot feed the world. 7
IN HIS 1981 essay, �Poverty and Famines�,Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, ar
gued that the 1943 Bengal famine, in which3m people died, was not caused by any exceptional fall in the harvest and pointedout that food was still being exported fromthe state while millions perished. He concluded that the main reason for famines isnot a shortage of basic food. Other factors�wages, distribution, even democracy�matter more.
In 1996 the United Nations’ Food andAgriculture Organisation (FAO) estimatedthat the world was producing enough foodto provide every man, woman and childwith 2,700 calories a day, several hundredmore than most adults are thought to need(around 2,100 a day). The Lancet, a medicaljournal, reckons people need no morethan 90 grammes of meat a day. On average they eat more than that now. As AbhijitBanerjee of the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology says, �we live in a world that iscapable of feeding every person that liveson the planet.�
Indeed, the world produces more thanjust enough to go round. Allowing for allthe food that could be eaten but is turnedinto biofuels, and the staggering amountswasted on the way, farmers are alreadyproducing much more than is required�more than twice the minimum nutritionalneeds by some measures. If there is a foodproblem, it does not look like a technical orbiological one.
So why worry about producing more
food? Part of the answer is prices. If outputfalls below demand, prices will tend torise, even if �excess� calories are being produced. That happened in 200708, and ishappening again now. Over the past fouryears prices have been more volatile thanthey have been for decades. This is bad forfarmers (who are left not knowing howand where to invest) and worse for consumers, especially the poor, who risk suddenly being unable to a�ord basic food.
Another part of the answer is that it ishard to improve distribution and reducepoverty. The world may indeed be growing masses of calories. But the food is notwhere it needs to be, and biofuel policy ishard to shift (see box, next page). Pushingup supplies may be easier than solving thedistribution problems.
But it will still be a daunting task. Onone reckoning, in order to keep up withpopulation growth farmers will have to
How much is enough?
The answer is less straightforward than it seems
Hooked on meat
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�THIS is the craziest thing we’re doing,� says Peter Brabeck, the chair
man of Nestlé. He is talking about government biofuels targets which require acertain proportion of national energyneeds to be met from renewable fuels,most of them biofuels (ie, ethyl alcoholmade from crops, usually maize or sugar).
The targets are ambitious. Brazil, Japan,Indonesia and the European Union all saybiofuels must supply 10% of energy demand for transport by 2020. China’s targetfor that date is 5%. America aspires to meet30% of such needs from biofuels by 2030.
Because the energy market is worthvastly more than the market for food, evenrelatively small targets translate into hugedemand for crops. Ethanol currently accounts for just 8% of America’s fuel for vehicles, but it consumes almost 40% ofAmerica’s enormous maize crop. Worldethanol production increased �vefold between 2000 and 2010 but would have torise a lot further to meet all the targets. TheFAO reckons that, if this were to happen(which seems unlikely), it would divert atenth of the world’s cereal output fromfood to fuels. Alternatively, if foodcropproduction were to remain stable, a hugeamount of extra land would be needed
for the fuels, or food prices would rise byanything from 1540%, which would havedreadful consequences.
Not all ethanols are the same. Brazil,the world’s secondlargest producer,makes its fuel mainly from sugar. Processing plants can go back and forth betweenethanol and crystallised sugar at the �ickof a switch, depending on prices. Brazilgets eight units of energy for every unitthat goes into making it, so the process isrelatively e�cient and environmentallyfriendly. In contrast, American ethanolproduces only 1.5 units of energy outputper unit of input, but its ine�ciency is underwritten by government subsidies andhigh tari� walls. American farmers saythat government demand for ethanol isstarting to abate, so the impact on maizesupplies and prices is more modest now.
All the same, one of the simplest stepsto help ensure that the world has enoughto eat in 2050 would be to scrap every biofuel target. If all the American maize thatgoes into ethanol were instead used asfood, global edible maize supplies wouldincrease by 14%.
But that is not going to happen. Biofuels have not only diverted crops to fuelbut have also diverted public subsidies to
farmers without provoking too many objections. Governments are unlikely toabandon biofuels merely because theyare ine�cient and damaging. �We can’tproduce biofuels and feed the world’s increased population,� says Mr Brabeck. Butfor the moment we will have to.
Biofuels are an example of what not to doPlagued by politics
The wrong shade of green
grow more wheat and maize over the next40 years than was grown in the previous500. The balance between what is consumed and what farmers produce mattersa great deal.
So how do you keep that balance? Startwith consumption, the side of the equation that can be forecast with some accuracy. The forecast rise in world’s population,from just under 7 billion at the start of 2011to just over 9 billion in 2050, is the equivalent of two extra Indias. If you include the 1billion people who are now going hungry,the additional mouths to feed over thenext 40 years add up to three extra Indias.
It is not an impossible task. The increasein world population by 2050 will bearound 30%, less than in the 40 years to2010, when it rose by over 80%. Consumption of wheat, rice and maize roughlytracks population growth but at a higherlevel, so demand for them will add about a
billion tonnes to the 2 billion produced in200507. That is much less than during theprevious 40 years, when cereal productionrose by 250%.
True, the headline numbers somewhatunderestimate the problem. Families havebeen getting smaller for decades, so thereare proportionately fewer children in developing countries than there used to be.Many of those countries are bene�tingfrom a �demographic dividend�: anunusually large proportion of youngadults in the population, who work hardbut eat more than children or older people.
Rise of the carnivoresMoreover, an increasing proportion of thepopulation is living in cities, and dollar fordollar citydwellers eat more food and especially more processed foods than theircountry cousins. They also tend to be richer and able to a�ord pricier food, such as
meat. So meat demand will rise strongly. In2000, 56% of all the calories consumed indeveloping countries were provided by cereals and 20% by meat, dairy and vegetableoils. By 2050, the FAO thinks, the contribution of cereals will have dropped to 46%and that of meat, dairy and fats will haverisen to 29%. To match that soaring demand, meat production will need to increase to 470m tonnes by 2050, almostdouble its current level. Output of soyabeans (most of which are fed to animals)will more than double, to 515m tonnes.
Overall, the FAO reckons, total demandfor food will rise about 70% in the 44 yearsfrom 2006 to 2050, more than twice asmuch as demand for cereals. But that is stillless than half as much as the rise in foodproduction in the 44 years from 1962 to2006. So according to the FAO’s Kostas Stamoulis, producing enough food to feed theworld in the next four decades should be
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easier than in the previous four.Should be, but probably won’t be. In
creasing food supplies by 70% in the next40 years may prove harder than it was toraise them by 150% in the previous 40. Themain reason: problems with yields.
Yield�tonnes per hectare, bushels peracre or whatever�is the traditional gaugeof agriculture’s performance. And thegrowth in yields has been slowing down,from about 3% a year for staple crops in the1960s to around 1% now.
Yield curbThe earlier period was that of the GreenRevolution, an exceptional time. ThomasLumpkin, the head of CIMMYT, the UN’sinternational wheat and maize researchorganisation, thinks that farmers in developing countries could often double theirharvest by switching to Green Revolutionseeds (many of which were developed atCIMMYT by the organisation’s most eminent plant breeder, Norman Borlaug).Now, Mr Lumpkin reckons, the best current technologies could perhaps increaseyields by 50%�still a lot, but not as spectacular as the earlier improvements. The lowhanging fruit has been plucked and eaten.
The Green Revolution threw resourcesat plantbreeding, which worked brilliantly. The new seeds enabled grains to absorbmore fertiliser and water. But now there isnot a lot more water to spare, and fertiliserusage in some places has already passedsaturation point (see the next section), so anew Green Revolution will have to makeeven more e�cient use of existing resources. The next 40 years will also have todeal with the potentially profound damage to farming from climate change, whichin some parts of the world could reduceyields by onethird.
And disturbingly, for the �rst time sincethe Green Revolution, crop yields are
growing more slowly than population (seechart 4). To be more exact: growth in population and demand for food have bothslowed down, but crop yields have slowedmore. Between 1961 and 1990 wheat yieldswere rising at nearly 3% a year. During thatperiod the world’s population was growing by an average of 1.8% a year. Between1990 and 2007 population growth sloweddown to 1.4%, but the rise in annual wheatyields slackened to 0.5%. The growth in riceyields between the two periods halved.Yields of mankind’s two most importantcrops are now almost �at.
Some argue that these �gures are not asworrying as they seem. After all, population growth is slowing and yields of somecrops, notably maize, are still rising at asteady pace. And the growth in yields mayhave slowed not because agricultural technology has hit a wall but because farmersare cutting inputs for environmental reasons, or because they are focusing on qual
ity more than quantity. Indeed, in Americafarm output is rising but the use of fertilisers and other inputs has been cut back.Breeders have lately been working onwheat for extra protein, not just yield.
If this is the correct explanation, farmers’ overall productivity is still increasing,since they are using fewer inputs to get thesame output. And that is what some researchers �nd. Keith Fuglie of the UnitedStates Department of Agriculture reckonsthat total factor productivity in world agriculture�a measure which includes capital,labour and other inputs�is still rising at ahealthy 1.4% a year. This re�ects a more e�cient use of resources. And if farmers arechoosing to reduce yields now, they couldalso push them back up again later.
Other researchers, however, think global productivity is indeed slowing down,especially outside China. According to astudy using di�erent de�nitions from MrFuglie’s, growth in land productivity fell byover onethird between 196190 and 19902005, and growth in labour productivityfell by twothirds. And as Mr Fuglie says,even if productivity is rising, it needs to risemore, from an annual gain of 1.4% to 1.75%,he thinks�a big leap. And though farmersmight choose to increase yields later, theirchoice would depend partly on food pricesrising more than prices of inputs such asfertilisers, which they may not (in 200708fertiliser prices rose much more than foodprices). So even if productivity is increasing�and that is not clear�on its own it isnot enough.
And what if the slower rise in yields re�ects something more fundamental, theapproach of some sort of biological limitin plants? The worry is not that yields are�attening out in farmers’ �elds, whereagronomic practices or the weather or anynumber of things may be responsible. It isthat there may be a problem in breeders’�elds where the potential of plants is tested. This possibility is controversial andmany breeders reject it. But the idea shouldnot be dismissed out of hand.
The Green Revolution had little to dowith making plants bigger: rather, it produced higher yields by persuading moreplants to grow in the same space and bygetting them to put less e�ort into growingstalks and leaves and more into seedpods,the part people eat. The nagging fear is thatboth trends may be reaching a limit.
The number of maize plants in a hectare has risen from roughly 40,000 to90,000 in the past halfcentury. Theremust come a point where plants can nolonger be sardined any closer together,
A fancier kind of maize
4Struggling to keep up
Sources: Alston, Beddow and Pardey; Food and Agriculture Organisation, UN Population Division
Global yield growth, annual average % Annual average growth rates, %
0 1 2 3
Wheat
Maize
Rice
Soya
1961-1990 1990-2007
0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
1970 75 80 85 90 95 2000 05
Rice yield
World population
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JOSE TOLEDO PISA looks out over theCremaq farm in remote northeasternBrazil. Thirtytonne trucks have �nished
spreading lime fertiliser to reduce the acidity of the soil. He is about to start plantingsoya beans �rst developed by the Brazilianagriculturalresearch institution, Embrapa,that are suited to the sweltering climate(soyabeans were originally a temperateplant and did not grow well in the tropics).The computer in the farmhouse is checking the temperature, the water and the level of organic material in the soil. Five yearsago much of this farm was scrubland. Thisspring Mr Pisa will reap around 3 tonnes ofsoyabeans per hectare.
Land, water, fertiliser: three basic components of farming. At Cremaq, Mr Pisahas harnessed new supplies of them togrow abundant crops. But is that the rule orthe exception?
Try making deserts bloomIf crop yields are to match the rise in population, then some of them will have to goup dramatically. The world’s population isgrowing at just over 1% a year, so�allowingsomething extra to feed animals becauseof rising demand for meat�staple yieldswill have to rise by around 1.5% a year. Thismay not sound much, but it is a great dealmore than current growth rates. CIMMYT
reckons that, to keep prices stable, thegrowth in rice yields will have to increaseby about half, from just under 1% a year to1.5%; maize yields will have to rise by thesame amount; and wheat yields will haveto more than double, to 2.3% a year.
Since the 1960s the traditional way ofgrowing more food�by ploughing moreland�has been out of favour. That is partlyfor environmental reasons�much irre
placeable Amazon jungle has already beenlost�and partly because many countrieshave used up all their available farmland.So though the population has soared, thesupply of land has not.
However, the potential is not exhausted yet. The biggest agricultural successstory of the past two decades has been Brazil, largely because it was able to increaseits usable acreage by making its vast cerrado (savannahlike grassland) bloom. Byreducing the acidity of the soil (as at Cremaq), Brazil has turned the cerrado intoone of the world’s great soyabean baskets.
A new study by the World Bank saysthe world has half a billion hectares ofland with fewer than 25 people per hectareliving on them (this excludes land onwhich farming would be impossible, suchas deserts, rainforests or the Antarctic). Thearea currently under cultivation is 1.5 billion hectares, so if all that extra land couldbe used it would represent an increase ofonethird. In fact a lot of it either should beleft alone for environmental reasons orwould be too expensive to farm. But thatwould still leave plenty that could be useful for farming.
Most of it is concentrated in a few countries in Latin America, including Brazil andArgentina, and in Africa in the socalled�Guinea belt�, a vast loop of land thatstretches round the continent from westAfrica to Mozambique. In 11 countries lessthan half the usable land is farmed. Thesecountries could presumably boost foodoutput by taking in some new land.
But estimates of land availability arecontentious. Some put available virginland at only 1012% of the current total, notover 30%. The di�erence depends on costand politics, not just the physical charac
teristics of the soil. The cerrado itself wasonce deemed useless for farming.
And some of this extra land is o�set bysoil erosion. Africa has some of the mostexhausted soils in the world, with lessthan 1% of organic matter in them, half thelevel required for good fertility. For centuries African farmers allowed for this by letting the land lie fallow for eight or nineyears after a harvest. But with more peopleto feed they have to squeeze in more harvests, and the soil is no longer recovering.
The chemistry of the soil�the presencein it of phosphorus, nitrogen and so on�isbeing degraded. That at least can be corrected by fertilisers. But the biology of thesoil is also being damaged by the loss of or
No easy �x
Simply using more of everything to produce more food will not work
Limits to growth
stalk crushed against stalk. Similarly, atsome point it may no longer be possible topersuade plants to put ever more energyinto seeds. In animals biological limits arealready clear: turkeys are so bloated thatthey can no longer walk; chickens grow soquickly that they su�er stress fractures.Racehorse speeds have levelled out.
The evidence on whether plants arereaching similar limits is mixed. On theone hand, maize yields in rich countries
are continuing to rise, thanks to huge investments by seed companies. A recentAustralian study found cereal yields in India, Britain, and Australia are increasing byabout 1% a year. Britain’s government forecast in 2009 that wheat yields there wouldrise from 7.7 tonnes per hectare to 11.4tonnes in 2025 and 13 tonnes in 2050.
On the other hand, trials at CIMMYT’sprincipal wheatbreeding station at Obregon in Mexico indicate a slowdown in po
tential yield growth to only 0.4% a year. It isalso notable that the latest research intoplants is focused not on redistributinggrowth towards seeds but on making thewhole plant bigger.
Yields may still be growing, but moreslowly, and even that slower growth canno longer be taken for granted. The question is, how much do they need to grow tokeep abreast of the growth in the world’spopulation of about 1.2% a year? 7
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ganic matter, which can take �ve to tenyears to recover. Worst of all, the physicalstructure changes if the top soil erodes,making it harder for the land to retain water or fertiliser. Top soil can take hundredsof years to replace.
And the more land is turned over to agriculture, the greater the loss of biodiversity. Threequarters of all the world’s plantgenetic material may have gone already,mostly by habitat destruction, says Pasquale Steduto of the FAO, and more is going every day. This is a worry becausesome of the most desirable characteristicsof plants are in the wild gene pool andmight be needed again one day.
According to the World Bank, �landgrabs� (deals in which capitalrich food importers buy up supposedly spare land inpoor countries, farm it and ship the produce back home) have had much more impact than expected. Only three years afterthe �rst deals, says the bank, they alreadyrun to 65m hectares�an eighth of thebank’s own estimate of total availableland (and a third of the more modest estimates). So a lot of virgin land is alreadycoming under the plough.
On balance, concludes the FAO’s ParvizKoohafkan, land is not a decisive problemfor world agriculture. But nor, except in afew countries, will it allow big increases inproduction.
Drink sparinglyWater, on the other hand, is crucial. At themoment it is probably agriculture’s criticallimiting factor.
According to Nestlé’s Peter Brabeck,roughly 4,200 cubic kilometres of watercould be used each year without depletingoverall supplies. Consumption is higher, atabout 4,500 cubic kilometres a year, ofwhich agriculture takes about 70%. As a result, water tables are plummeting. The onein Punjab has fallen from a couple of metres below the surface to, in parts, hundreds of metres down. The rivers that water some of the world’s breadbaskets, suchas the Colorado, MurrayDarling and Indus, no longer reach the sea.
By 2030, on most estimates, farmerswill need 45% more water. They won’t getit. Cities are the secondlargest users of water, and those in the emerging world aregrowing exponentially. They already account for half the world’s population, ashare that will rise to 70% by 2050. In anydispute between cities and farmers, governments are likely to side with cities. Agriculture’s share of the world’s water used tobe 90%, so it has already fallen a long way.
It will surely decline further. The reason water matters so much is
that irrigated farming is so productive. Itoccupies only one�fth of the world’sfarmland but contributes two�fths of theworld’s food output. Rice, the world’s mostimportant crop in terms of calories, ismostly irrigated, and is especially sensitiveto shortage of water, stopping growth atthe �rst sign of getting dry.
Water problems will worsen both because irrigated areas will su�er disproportionately from the e�ects of climate changeand because diets are shifting towardsmeat, which is �thirsty�. Arjen Hoekstra, ofthe University of Twente, says it takes 1,1502,000 litres of water to produce 1kg ofwheat, but about 16,000 litres of water for1kg of beef. As more people eat more meat,rising demand by farmers will collide withcontracting water supplies.
There are things farmers can do.Roughly a third of the water used in �eldswith ordinary gravityfed irrigation is reckoned to be wasted (more accurately, it recharges the aquifers without being takenup by plants, which is not quite the samething). Switching to dripfeed irrigation
means that watering becomes more precise, cutting consumption per unit of output. Jain Irrigation, the largest dripfeedcompany in India, has shown the technology can work for smallholders, cuttingtheir water usage by about 40%. Dripfeedirrigation also boosts overall yields because the plants are watered at the righttime and get the right amounts.
Overall e�ciency gains in the use ofwater could be large. Israel wastes onlyabout a tenth of its water, and if everyonewere equally e�cient, the world’s waterproblem would be much less pressing. Israel makes widespread use of lowvolumeirrigation such as dripfeed and microsprinklers, which is expensive. The FAO
reckons that over the next 40 years irrigation will require cumulative investment ofalmost $1trillion. That may be forthcomingeventually, but it won’t be soon.
Notill agriculture, an agronomic practice in which farmers do not plough up theland but leave part of the previous year’scrop on it, also preserves water. The residue acts like a blanket, lowering the soiltemperature by a degree or so in the tropics(and thus helping to combat the e�ects ofglobal warming). It also prevents waterruno� and reduces evaporation by3040%, reckons Patrick Wall of CIMMYT.As a bonus, adds Shivaji Pandey of theFAO, notill and lowtill farming sequesterabout 200kg of carbon per hectare peryear. In parts of India, the time saved bynot ploughing after harvest also makes itpossible to grow an extra crop.
So why hasn’t this miracle cure beenadopted universally? Because of weeds.They like to grow in the mat as much ascrops do. It helps to have plants that are genetically engineered to resist weedkillers,but Europe has banned those. This hasmeant that notill was used on only 6% offarmland in developing countries and
5Not much left
Source: World Bank*High agro-ecological potential andpopulation density <25 persons/km2
Uncultivated land*, latest estimate, hectares, m
0 50 100 150 200Sub-SaharanAfrica
Latin America &Caribbean
Eastern Europe &Central Asia
East & South Asia
Middle East &North Africa
Rest of world
Share of spare land with travel time to market <6 hours, %
47
76
83
23
87
48
Scarce and precious
8 A special report on feeding the world The Economist February 26th 2011
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hardly at all in Europe in 2008. Agriculture’s third basic input is nitro
gen. Historically, lack of nitrogen, not lackof land or water, has been its biggest constraint. The invention of a process to synthesise nitrogen cheaply into ammonium,a fertiliser, paved the way for the huge increase in food production in the 20th century. Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg argues that this process,rather than the transistor or computer, wasthe century’s most important invention,and that 2.5 billion people would not bealive without it.
African farmers use an average of 10kgof fertiliser per hectare. Indians use 180kg.India is richer than Africa, but not hugelyso. IFAD’s Mr Nwanza thinks Africanscould double yields by doubling their fertiliser use.
Don’t overdoseBut there are limits, as China’s exampleshows. Since 1990 Chinese grain production has been roughly stable but the use offertiliser�which is heavily subsidised�has risen by about 40%. China could cutfertiliser use by at least a third without ille�ects. In fact, it would be a blessing. At themoment excess gunk runs o� into rivers,gathers in lakes and produces toxic bloomsof algae. Likewise, the �dead zone� of thenorthern Gulf of Mexico is caused largelyby overuse of fertiliser in the AmericanMidwest that is making its way down theMississippi.
So increased fertiliser use would boostyields in some countries and be counterproductive in others. But globally there islittle prospect of a big rise because of theexpense. Fertiliser prices spiked even moredramatically than food prices in 200708.Phosphorus prices soared and have stayedhigh, re�ecting fears that the stu� may berunning out. Making fertiliser is energyintensive, so unless oil prices fall, increasingfood production by slathering ever morefertiliser on the land would be ine�cient.
Similar considerations apply to dealingwith pests and diseases. At the best oftimes, farmers face the curse of the RedQueen in �Alice Through the LookingGlass�(�A slow sort of country! Now, here,you see, it takes all the running you can do,to keep in the same place.�). Predatorswage a constant war on plants, and if farmers do nothing the output of a new seedwill decline by a percentage point or so every year. This is why new seeds are neededall the time.
There are signs that the burden of disease may be increasing. Rothamsted Re
search, home to the Broadbalk experiment, has been tracking aphid infestationsfor 50 years. In 2000 no aphids had a particular resistance mechanism called mace.Now 7080% do. The aphid that causes potato blight now appears a month earlierthan it used to, so it feeds on the plant at amore vulnerable point in its life.
The greater incidence of disease may becaused by many things: more insects sur
viving winter; the banning of dangerouspesticides; cuts in the budgets of institutions that conducted research into diseases; even globalisation. The cornborermoth, native to Central and North America, �rst appeared in Europe in 1999 in Kosovo, presumably on the boots of Americanpeacekeepers. It has since spread in concentric circles each year and is now eatinginto maize crops in Germany and Italy.
MANCUR OLSON, an American economist, talked about $100 bills lying
on the sidewalk to express the idea ofeasy gains. The amount of food that iswasted represents a gigantic stack of $100bills. Both in rich countries and poor, astaggering 3050% of all food producedrots away uneaten. According to JosefSchmidhuber of the FAO, in Africa thepostharvest waste largely explains whymany smallholders are net purchasers offood even though they grow enough fortheir families to eat.
In poor countries most food is wastedon or near the farm. Rats, mice and locustseat the crops in the �eld or in storage. Milkand vegetables spoil in transit. Thesemight be considered losses rather thanwaste. Kanayo Nwanze, the head of theInternational Fund for Agricultural Development, reckons that such lossescould be reduced by half. That would bethe equivalent of a rise in output of1525%, which would go a long way to providing the extra food needed by 2050.
Unlike in rich countries, much of thewaste in poor ones is a matter of money,not behaviour. Grain is often heaped onthe ground and covered with a sheet: nowonder the rats get at it. Losses could bereduced by building new silos and betterroads and providing more refrigeration,but those things are expensive. The African Development Bank is �nancing a sevenyear programme to reduce waste by3% a year. Given the scale of the losses,says Divine Njie of the FAO, who workedon the scheme, �we were surprised athow modest the targets were.� But 3% ayear adds up to a 20% reduction in wasteover seven years, a good start.
There is likely to be more of this sort of
investment in future. To meet demand inthe emerging megacities, more processedfood is being sold in supermarkets andless raw food in markets. Nutritionistsworry about the resulting loss of quality,but there are big gains in quantity. Foodprocessors and retailers use modern silos,proper trucks and refrigeration�the verythings the rural poor lack.
Rich pickingsRich countries waste about the sameamount of food as poor ones, up to halfof what is produced, but in quite di�erentways. Studies in America and Britain �ndthat a quarter of food from shops goesstraight into the rubbish bin or is thrownaway by shops and restaurants. Top of thelist come salads, about half of which arechucked away. A third of all bread, a quarter of fruit and a �fth of vegetables�all arethrown out uneaten. In America thisamounted to 43m tonnes of food in 1997;in Britain to 4m tonnes in 2006.
If all rich countries waste food at thesame rate as Britain and America, veryroughly 100kg per person per year, the total waste adds up to 100m tonnes of fooda year, equivalent to onethird of the entire world’s supply of meat�an astonishing quantity. If Western waste could behalved and the food distributed to thosewho need it, the problem of feeding 9 billion people would vanish.
But it can’t. Western spoilage is a resultof personal habit and law. Education orexhortation might make a di�erence, butthe extent of waste is partly a re�ection ofprices: food is cheap enough for consumers not to worry about chucking it out,and prices seem unlikely to rise byenough to change that attitude.
Far too much food never reaches the plate
Waste not, want not
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These problems are onerous, but mostare probably tractable. Climate change isnot. Global warming upsets the world’swater cycle, increases the burden of pests,desiccates soil and reduces yields. In 2010the world got an unpleasant taste of whatclimate change might bring. During thesummer the jet stream (air currents at7,00012,000m above sea level which affect the winds and weather) changed itscourse. That seems to have been linked tothe catastrophic �oods in Pakistan andhuge forest �res in Russia which help explain the big foodprice rises in the secondhalf of last year.
Agriculture is itself a big contributor toclimate change. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, farming directly accounts for 13.5% of greenhousegas emissions, and landusechanges (often cutting down jungle for�elds) are responsible for a further 17.4%.That adds up to almost onethird.
Agriculture is responsible for betweenhalf and twothirds of emissions of two especially toxic greenhouse gases, methaneand nitrous oxide. These stay in the atmosphere for years, absorb a lot of radiationand, weight for weight, have many timesthe impact of carbon dioxide. So even ifnothing else were happening, farmerswould be under pressure to cut emissions.
But a lot else is happening. An increaseof 2°C in global temperatures, says HansJoachim Braun, the head of CIMMYT’swheat programme, could cause a 20% fallin wheat yields. This would exceed anypossible gains from warming in areas currently too cold to grow crops and would
also o�set the bene�ts of rising carbondioxide concentrations. Plants eat CO2, so ifthere is more of it in the atmosphere, photosynthesis should increase and yieldsrise. But no one knows by how much.
Climate change also a�ects the rhythmof the seasons. Winters arrive later orspring earlier. Rainy seasons become shorter, milder or more intense. All livingthings depend on the heartbeat of seasonal change. In spring, caterpillars time theiremergence to coincide with the bud burstof trees; birds start nesting when they canfeed those newly emerged caterpillars to
their �edglings. Any disruption to the seasonal rhythm tugs at the web of life. For example, in parts of Mozambique where villagers cultivate maize on the �ood plain ofthe Zambezi river, the rainy season nowbegins later, so the crop is sown later, shortening its growing period.
Out of synchIn 2009 Oxfam, a British charity, askedthousands of farmers in a dozen countrieswhat worried them most about climatechange. Their biggest concern was nothigher temperatures but disruptions to thenatural cycle. �I know I am supposed tosow by a certain time or date,� said Mohammed Iliasuddin, a farmer in Bangladesh. �That is what my forefathers havebeen doing. But then for several years thetemperature and weather just does notseem right for what we have been doingtraditionally. I do not know how to copewith the problems.�
When the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) tried to work outthe impacts of climate change on the maincereal crops, almost all its results suggestedthat yields in 2050 are likely to be lowerthan they were in 2000, sometimes muchlower. Almost half the forecasts showedyield reductions of 918% by 2050. Onecame up with a drop in rainfedmaizeyields of 30%. The most vulnerable cropturned out to be wheat, with the largestlosses forecast in developing countries.The IndoGangetic plain, home to a seventh of mankind and purveyor of a �fth ofthe world’s wheat, is likely to be especiallyhard hit. 7
The day of the locust
IT IS 7am at Kabiyet Dairies in the emeraldhills of western Kenya. The dairy is �ve
miles down an almost impassable track,and you would think milk would turn tobutter long before it arrives. Yet the place isheaving with farmers waiting for their produce to be tested, carrying it in pails ontrucks, on the backs of motorbikes or ontheir heads. The dairy opened only 18months ago and may seem basic, yet it hasjust struck a deal to sell milk to an international processing plant in Nairobi. Farmersget 26 shillings a litre, more than twicewhat they were paid before the dairy
opened its doors.Laban Talam, a 30yearold villager, has
a smile on his face. He farms just under ahectare on a hillside overlooking the dairy.Two years ago he was scratching a living,supplementing his earnings from one cow,a native longhorn, with odd jobs outsidefarming. Now he has �ve cows, three ofthem Holsteins who give twice as muchmilk as the native breed. He rents extraland from his neighbour, has rebuilt hishouse, grows pineapples for export andhas installed a biomass pump. His childrengo to a private school.
Kabiyet Dairies is only one agriculturalsuccess story among many. Brazil, by investing heavily in research, has turned itself into the �rst tropical farm giant, joiningthe ranks of the temperatefood superpowers such as America, Europe and Canada. It did so in a single generation, thanksmainly to big commercial farms. Vietnam,through policy changes (especially freeingup smallscale private agriculture), turneditself from one of the world’s largest importers of rice into the world’s secondlargest exporter.
So it is possible to grow more food,
Doing more with less
The only reliable way to produce more food is to use better technology
10 A special report on feeding the world The Economist February 26th 2011
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more e�ciently, on both a regional and anational scale. But can it be done on a global scale, which is what is needed to feed 9billion people? If so, how?
Because of the constraints described inthe previous section, there will not be biggains in food production from taking innew land, using more irrigation or puttingmore fertiliser on existing �elds. Cuttingwaste could make a di�erence (see box inprevious section), but there are limits. Themain gains will have to come in threeways: from narrowing the gap betweenthe worst and best producers; from spreading the socalled �livestock revolution�;and�above all�from taking advantage ofnew plant technologies.
The huge gap between the best andworst producers in roughly comparablefarming areas shows the scope for improvements. Both eastern and western Europe are good for growing wheat. Yet westEuropean farmers achieve yields of up to 9tonnes per hectare, whereas east Europeanones get just 24 tonnes. The discrepancy ismuch wider than di�erences in incomes orsoil quality might suggest.
Or take the example of maize seed. According to Pioneer, a big seed company,central Ghana has some of the best maizeland in the world, yet only 3% of the country’s seed is the hybrid kind that can takefull advantage of it. In contrast, Brazilianland is less good, but 90% of its seeds arehybrid ones. The country is now theworld’s thirdlargest exporter. If Ghanabought more hybrid seeds, it could presumably achieve something closer to Brazilian yields.
Why don’t the laggards catch up? Agood place to look for an answer is Africa,the part of the world that has most conspicuously failed to feed itself over the past50 years. Five years ago, says Joe deVries,
head of crop research at the Alliance for aGreen Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the bigproblems in Africa were prices and investment. Farmers were getting too little fortheir produce and no one was doing anyresearch into �African crops� such as sorghum and cassava. Now prices are higher�a bene�t to producers, at least�and the�African crop� problem is being solved.New semidwarf sorghum has three timesthe previous yield, and genetic researchhas shown how to control cassava’s greatscourge, viral disease.
The problem now is to get those improved seeds to the farmers. Around Kabiyet, Western Seed Company, a small out�tthat develops its own varieties of maize forsmallholders, doubled production in 2010and still sold out two months early. It is oneof 45 seed companies set up with AGRA’sbacking, and Mr deVries reckons they willneed 100 to meet prospective demand. Atpresent only 10% of Kenya’s farmers are using new seeds, but Mr deVries hopes thatby 2015 the �gure will have risen to half.
When India began its Green Revolutionin the 1960s, it had 388km of paved roadsper 1,000 sq km of land, and only about aquarter of its farmland was irrigated. Ethiopia now has just 39km of roads per 1,000sq km, and less than 4% of its land is irrigated. So the remaining problems in Africaare vast. Moreover, says Don Larson of theWorld Bank, farming in that continent is intrinsically harder to change than in eastAsia because it is more varied. In east Asia,if you invent an improved rice variety, every farmer for hundreds of miles aroundcan use it because the land and climate aremuch the same. In Africa, soil and climaticconditions are much more diverse andfarmers a few hundred yards apart mayneed di�erent seeds.
But better technology is removing
some of the barriers. Since 2008 Africanfood production per person has been rising for the �rst time in decades. Rwandaand Malawi have begun to export food(admittedly in Malawi’s case thanks tomassive and una�ordable fertiliser subsidies). For now Africa is still a net food importer, but a recent Harvard study for thepresidents of East African countries argued that it could feed itself in a generation. Even if that proves optimistic, Africacould surely increase food production bymore than 1.5% a year. �We didn’t knowhow the Green Revolution would come toAfrica,� says Mr deVries. �Now we do.�
The second main source of growth willconsist of spreading a tried and tested success: the �livestock revolution�. This consists of switching from traditional, openair methods of animal husbandry, inwhich chickens and pigs scratch and rootaround the farm, eating insects, scraps andall sorts of organic waste, to closed �battery� systems, in which animals are con�ned to cages and have their diet, healthand movement rigorously controlled. Thisentails huge losses in animal welfare, andEuropean consumers are reacting againstthe system. But there are also gains in productivity and sometimes even in welfare,by reducing losses from diseases and predators that in traditional systems can be distressingly high.
Animal spiritsImproving livestock farming is importantbecause of meat’s growing share in theworld’s diet. Meat consumption in Chinamore than doubled in 19802005, to 50kg ayear per person. Between now and 2050,meat’s share of calories will rise from 7% to9%, says the FAO; the share of dairy produce and eggs will rise more.
Livestock matters for many reasons. Itprovides �nancial security in poor countries, where herds are often a family’s savings. It can a�ect people’s health: new infectious diseases are appearing at the rateof three or four a year, and threequartersof them can be traced to animals, domesticand wild. Avian �u is just one example.Livestock also plays a part in global warming. Much of the methane in the atmosphere�one of the worst greenhouse gases�comes from cattle belching.
Since the 1980s livestock productionhas far outstripped that of cereals. Worldmeat output more than doubled between1980 and 2007. Production of eggs rosefrom 27m tonnes to 68m over the sameperiod. Some countries have done betterstill. India has the world’s largest dairy
Time for an e�ciency drive
The Economist February 26th 2011 A special report on feeding the world 11
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herd. Its milk production trebled, to 103mtonnes, over a period when global milkoutput increased by half. Brazil increasedits production of chickens �vefold in 19872007 to become the world’s largest exporter. Most spectacularly, China raised it output of both eggs and milk tenfold.
For sheer e�ciency, there is little question that battery systems do a better jobthan traditional methods. A freerange henscratching around might lay one or twoeggs a week. Feeding her costs nothing, giving a net gain of 50100 eggs a year. A battery chicken will lay six eggs a week. Shemight cost the equivalent of 150 eggs to
feed, producing an annual net gain of 150eggs. And selective breeding has made hermore economic to keep. Battery chickensused to need 4kg of feed for 1kg of eggs;now they need only 2kg.
Moreover, it is almost impossible toscale up a farmyard operation: there areonly so many insects to eat, and so manyhens one family can look after. And tobreed the most productive hens whichconvert their feed most e�ciently into eggsand are most resistant to disease, you needlarge �ocks.
So there are two reasons for thinkingthat the livestock revolution will continue.
One is that some countries still lag behind.An example, surprisingly, is Brazil, whichhas just one head of cattle per hectare�anunusually low number even for a countrywith so much land. Roberto Giannetti daFonseca, of the São Paulo industry federation, says Brazil should be able at least todouble that number�which could meaneither doubling beef production or usinghalf the area to produce the same amount.
Carlos Sere of the International Livestock Research Institute thinks traditionalsystems could borrow some of the methods of closed batteryfarm systems�notably better feeding (giving a small amount
FOR the past decade maize has been theseed companies’ favoured crop. Re
search spending on it runs at $1.5 billion ayear, four times that for wheat. And itshows. Maize yields in 19902008 rose by1.8% a year, close to their longterm average; wheat yields increased by less thanhalf that, half their historic average.
Wheat needs more research. It is themost nutrientrich of the world’s cerealsand the most widely planted crop. It isalso the staple most vulnerable to climatechange. A few thousand commercial species are carefully grown and preserved.But hundreds of thousands of older varieties and wild relatives are left to the vagaries of landuse change, global warmingand chance. This is a worry because someof the most desirable characteristics ofplants�taste, drought and pestresistance�originally came from the wild genepool, which will be needed again one day.
Wheat is physiologically di�erentfrom maize in two main ways, making biggenetic improvements harder to achieve.First, its genes are arranged in pairs ofthree, not single pairs, as with humans.That makes the wheat genome enormous,far larger than that for maize (or people).Second, the reproductive parts of thewheat plant are close together, so wheattends to selfpollinate. In contrast, themale tassels of maize are a foot or moreaway from the female cob and are easilyblown by the wind to other plants. Somaize readily produces hybrids, whichtend to be more vigorous. It is possible to
produce wheat hybrids, but it takes moretrouble and expense.
However, wheat is now the new frontier of plant technology. Graham Mooreof the John Innes Centre in Norwich is targeting part of a chromosome called Ph1which ensures wheat genes pair up correctly. Ph1 gives wheat’s genome its stability but has to be switched o� to make iteasier to slot in new genes. It then has tobe switched back on again, otherwise theplant will mutate unpredictably. MrMoore has found that bathing the geneticmaterial with a substance called okadaicacid (a toxin that occurs in mussels) enables Ph1to be switched on and o�.
Builtin GrowmoreAt the same time Mr Moore’s colleague,Giles Oldroyd, is investigating how someplants, such as legumes (peas and beans),make their own fertiliser, in the hope oftransferring this trait to cereals. Bacteria inthe nodules of leguminous plants’ rootsconvert soil nitrogen into ammonia, thefeedstock of nitrogen fertiliser. The plantsshelter the bacteria and use the ammoniathey make in ways that are encoded intheir genes, so in principle the genes couldbe transferred to other plants. Since fertilisers represent a third of the input costs ofwheat, enabling it to make its own nitrogen would o�er dramatic savings, thoughMr Oldroyd concedes that this may be a30 or 40year project.
Meanwhile, scientists at the WheatYield Consortium are trying to produce
bigger wheat plants by speeding up therate of photosynthesis. This is the processplants use to convert carbon dioxide intoorganic materials, using a catalyst calledrubisco. Rubisco is unusual. Its catalyticrate is exceptionally slow and it is notgood at distinguishing between CO2 andoxygen. So instead of using CO2 to buildsugars and getting rid of oxygen, which iswhat happens in photosynthesis, it sometimes uses oxygen, does not build up thesugars and gets rid of CO2 (a process calledphotorespiration). If rubisco could be persuaded not to catalyse photorespiration,plants would grow more vigorously.
There are three ways to do that. One isto use more and better rubisco. A secondway is to tinker with the proteins that in�uence rubisco, such as rubisco activase,which has produced promising results intobacco plants. Third, it might be possibleto manipulate the environment inside theleaves of the plant so rubisco catalysesphotosynthesis more reliably. Someplants, such as maize and sugar cane, havespecial cells in which to capture CO2. TheGates Foundation is �nancing research totry to breed those characteristics into ricewhich, like wheat, lacks this extra cell.
It is a long shot, but by 2050 wheatplants could be making their own fertiliser, as well as having acquired desirablegenetic characteristics from other plantsand being larger and more productive.Whether that is enough to overcomemany people’s horror of genetic engineering remains to be seen.
Bringing wheat up to scratchOur daily bread
12 A special report on feeding the world The Economist February 26th 2011
2 of animal feed makes a big di�erence tothe weight of rangeland cattle) and the introduction of new breeds for better yields(as Kabiyet did by switching from longhorn to Holstein cattle).
The second reason for expecting furthergains is that recent genetic analysis couldimprove breeding dramatically. About athird of the livestock revolution has comeabout through selecting and breeding thebest animals. Another third comes fromimproved feeding and the remainder frombetter disease control. In the 1940s and1950s breeding relied on the careful recording of every animal in the herd or �ock; inthe 1970s on arti�cial insemination by thebest sires; and in the 1980s on embryotransfers from the best females into ordinary breeding animals.
New genetic analysis now promises tobring in another stage, says the FAO’s Henning Steinfeld. It allows breeders to selecttraits more precisely and thus speeds upbreeding by reducing generational intervals: if you know which genetic traits ananimal has, there is no need to wait severalgenerations to see how things turn out.
This will not happen everywhere.Europeans and�to some extent�Americans are increasingly in�uenced by welfare concerns. They jib at con�ning animals. The European Union has bannedcertain kinds of cages, and California is following suit. But, so far, people in emergingmarkets, where demand for meat and animal products is growing fast, are less concerned about such things, so the next stageof the livestock revolution will mainly beconcentrated there.
GM and afterThis will make some di�erence but thechange likely to generate the biggest yieldgains in the food business�perhaps 1.52%a year�is the development of �markerassisted breeding��in other words, geneticmarking and selection in plants, which includes genetically modifying them butalso involves a range of other techniques.This is the third and most important sourceof growth.
�Until recently we knew little abouthow plants function, how they perceiveheat and cold, how they �ower, and so on,�says Caroline Dean of Britain’s John InnesCentre. That is changing, thanks to greaterunderstanding of plant genetics as well asto a dramatic fall in the costs of gatheringgenetic information.
Ms Dean has worked out, for example,how plants �remember� the length of timewinter has been going on and do not there
fore mistake a mild spell in January forspring. The answer, it seems, is by turningo� a gene after a certain period of coldweather. This process is �nely adjusted, soin Sweden the plant switches o� the genelater than one of the same species in southern England.
At the same time the price tag on gathering genetic data is now much lower than itused to be. Gary Atlin, a maize breeder atCIMMYT, reckons that whereas a coupleof years ago the cost of identifying a singlegene in a single plant was $2, now it isabout 15 cents. That is still too high formany breeding operations, but work nowbeing done jointly by CIMMYT and Cornell University should cut this to $30 permillion genes. �This is Moore’s law forplants,� says Mr Atlin, referring to therough rule that computing power doublesevery two years for the same price. Thecost of genetic identi�cation will soon stopbeing a serious constraint.
The public debate on plant genetics focuses almost entirely on the pros and cons(mostly cons) of genetic modi�cation�putting a gene from one species into another. A gene from a soil bacterium, Bacillusthuringiensis, for example, when splicedinto maize, makes the plant resistant to herbicides; this enables farmers to plantmaize, spray the crop with a weedkillerand end up with a �eld of nothing butmaize. In Europe it is illegal to plant suchmaize. The biggest advantage of genetic selection, however, is probably not that itmakes it possible to grow transgenic crops
(�Frankenfoods�), but that it allows fasterand more precise breeding.
Imagine the genetic material of plantsas a vast library, with billions of books.This library has no catalogue, and none ofthe books has an index or table of contents.It is still possible to discover what is in thelibrary by reading every volume. That isroughly what plant breeders have done inthe past, painstakingly planting hundredsof varieties of a single species and discovering traits by breeding numerous generations from them.
Genetic marking is the equivalent ofgiving every book a title, table of contentsand index�and with much greater speedand accuracy than any librarian couldmanage. Monsanto has a �corn chipper�which takes a small amount of genetic material and generates a DNA pro�le of hundreds of maize seeds simultaneously inseconds. It leaves the seed alive, so breeders, having mined the computer data fromthis and every other seed in Monsanto’svast library, can go back to a seed they likeand breed from it. It is possible literally to�nd one plant in a billion.
Such gains are likely to snowball. In1997 Monsanto introduced a variety ofcorn resistant to various pests. It fully controlled four of 15 common �aboveground�corn pests like corn borers, cutworms andstinkbugs, and partially suppressed threemore. In 2004 the company introduced asuccessor that controlled nine of the 15aboveground pests and seven of the eightthat lived in the soil. The 2010 version controlled nine aboveground pests and sevenin the soil, and suppressed three more.
At the moment the genetic evolution isjust beginning. The genomes of most important crops have been sequenced onlyfairly recently, and that of wheat is onlypartly done. There are only a handful of genetically modi�ed crops. Commercial�rms have concentrated most of their efforts on only one or two traits controlledby individual genes, such as disease resistance. But the future, argues Giles Oldroydof the John Innes Centre, lies in traits controlled by multiple genes and genetic�pathways�, that is, interactions betweengroups of genes.
The most important of these is yield.Over the next 40 years yields need to riseby around 1.5% a year to feed mankind adequately. Maize, which has had by far themost genetic research, is the only cropwhose yield is growing by more than that.If genetic selection can be extended towheat, rice and soyabeans, that should goa long way to feeding the world by 2050. 7
Cheap, cheap
The Economist February 26th 2011 A special report on feeding the world 13
�PROVIDING the quantity of caloriesis manageable,� says Joachim von
Braun of the University of Bonn. �The bigissue is nutrition.� In the past 30 or 40years diets have improved. There are nowproportionately fewer malnourished people in the world than there used to be(though the absolute number is high andrising). Fewer people fail to grow to theirproper height and weight because of poorchildhood diets. India is a peculiar exception to this rule: for reasons no one understands, Indians of all income levels noweat less food, and of a lower quality, thanthey used to, and than you would expect.
But although most people get enoughcalories, they still su�er huge de�ciencies,especially in four nutrients: iron, zinc, iodine and vitamin A. Iron de�ciency makesover 1.5 billion people anaemic, includinghalf of all women of childbearing age inpoor countries. Lack of vitamin A causesup to half a million children to go blindeach year, of whom half die within a year.Zinc de�ciency is thought to be responsible for about 400,000 deaths a year.
Such de�ciencies have longterm consequences for the whole society. In Tanzania, children whose mothers were giveniodine capsules when pregnant stayed atschool for four months longer than theirsiblings born when the mother did not getthose capsules. Children su�ering fromnutrient de�ciencies cannot concentrateand have lower scores in tests for cognitiveability. And there seems to be a link between nutrition in childhood and earningsin later life. In Kenya children who weregiven nutritionimproving dewormingpills for two years earned about $3,000more over their lifetime than those whogot them for only one year. Malnourishedboys also do worse in the marriage market.
Drowning in a sea of foodOn the face of it, the obesity epidemic inrich countries presents exactly the opposite problem. For the �rst time in history,more calories do not mean better health.The epidemic is spreading to less wello�places: Mexico has the secondlargestshare of obese people after America; Guatemala’s obesity rate has quadrupled in 30years. The overweight are obviously not
troubled by a shortage of food. But a largegroup of people in rich countries does suffer from nutritional de�ciencies: the elderly. They need more calcium and vitaminswith advancing age, and many do not getthem. Half of those over 75 in hospital arereckoned to be nutrientde�cient, as aremany obese people.
Nutrient de�ciency is not easy to cure.In poor countries, vitamin supplements�a common expedient�reach less thanhalf of those who most need them, the rural poor. And programmes to hand out vitamin A supplements in massive doses toreduce child mortality have brought littlediscernible improvement. MichaelLatham of Cornell University, reviewingthe history of such handouts, speaks of�the great vitaminA �asco�.
Cultural norms are a constant obstacle.Abhijit Banerjee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology quotes George Orwell’s �Road to Wigan Pier� on the Britishworking class:
The basis of their diet is white bread andmargarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes�an appalling diet. Would it not bebetter if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemealbread, or if they ð ate their carrots raw? Yes it
would, but the point is, no ordinary humanbeing is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starvethan live on brown bread and raw carrots.And the peculiar evil is this, that the lessmoney you have, the less inclined you feel tospend it on wholesome food. A millionairemay enjoy breakfasting o� orange juice andRyvita biscuits; an unemployed mandoesn’t.
Better nutrition, in short, is not a matterof handing out diet sheets and expectingeveryone to eat happily ever after. Rather,you have to try a range of things: education; supplements; fortifying processedfoods with extra vitamins; breeding cropswith extra nutrients in them. But the nutrients have to be in things people want toeat. Kraft, an American food manufacturer,made Biskuat, an �energy biscuit� withlots of extra vitamins and minerals, into abestseller in Indonesia by charging theequivalent of just 5 cents a packet. It alsodid well in Latin America with Tang, asweet powdered drink with added nutrients, marketing it to children for the tasteand mothers for its nutritional value.
It is also possible to breed plants thatcontain more nutrients. An organisationcalled HarvestPlus recently introduced anorange sweet potato, containing more vitamin A than the native sort, in Uganda andMozambique. It caught on and now commands a 10% price premium over the ordinary white variety. The local population’s vitamin intake has soared.
HarvestPlus has a pipeline of �bioforti�ed� crops: cassava with vitamin A due tobe released in Nigeria this year; pearl milletwith extra iron and zinc, to be launched inIndia in 2012; beans with extra iron, also in2012; rice with zinc, due for release in 2013.But again there are limits: it is hard to breedthe full recommended daily dose of nutrients into plants this way.
John Hoddinott of IFPRI says the lessonof previous failures is that you have to select your targets: focus on the main de�ciencies and on those for whom you cando most good, especially infants. Feedingthe world is not just about calories but nutrients, too; and it is not about scatteringthem far and wide but pinpointing thegroups who can and will eat them. 7
Not just calories
People also need the right nutrients
The fat of the land
14 A special report on feeding the world The Economist February 26th 2011
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FOR 10,000 years farmers have producedfood for mankind. That has been the ba
sis of life. �When tillage begins,� wroteDaniel Webster, �other arts follow. Thefarmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilisation.�
This special report has argued that overthe next 40 years farmers will �nd it harderto produce enough for everyone becauseof constraints on land, water and fertilisers. There is some room for expansion ontovirgin land, but not much. There is less water because of competition from fastgrowing cities. Returns on fertiliser use are diminishing. And government policies thatboost biofuels and restrict trade will get inthe way.
But though not easy, it should be perfectly possible to feed 9 billion people by2050. A start has been made to boostingyields and reducing harvest losses in countries that lag behind, notably in Africa. The�livestock revolution� can be furthered bygenetic improvements. Above all, advances in plant genetics should enablebreeders to push up the annual growth inyields of staple crops from 0.51.0% to 1.5%�which would produce enough for everyone. By 2050 the growth in the world’spopulation will have slowed almost tozero, changes in food demand will comemainly from changing diets and the biggest foodsupply problem will be dealingwith the e�ects of climate change.
It would be a huge relief if those 9 billion could be fed without large disruptionsof supplies or price spikes. Food is theworld’s secret stabiliser�or destabiliser. AsGeorge Marshall said in 1947, it �is the verybasis of all reconstruction; hunger and insecurity are the worst enemies of peace.�But there will be winners and losers. Andthe strain is likely to set o� con�icts alongthe way: over water and land; over policies; between farmers who want higherprices and consumers who don’t; and between countries or groups of countries.
In 200708 and again in 201011, relatively small changes in food markets triggeredsharp rises in prices. That might have beenunderstandable as a response to, say, asurge in demand from China and India.But, as Shenggen Fan of IFPRI points out,these giants do not import much food. In
stead, prices spiked in reponse to temporary factors, such as the fall in the dollar, export bans and panic buying.
Higher prices provide farmers with incentives to produce more, making it easierto feed the world. But they also imposecosts on consumers, increasing povertyand discontent. If passing fancies like tradebans can almost double world food pricestwice in four years, imagine what a stumble in e�orts to boost yields might do.
Climate change will add to the strains,and not only by disrupting the weather. Ifthere were a real carbon price, farmerswould think of their �elds in terms of thecarbon embodied in crops and soil. That inturn would in�uence what they grow (elephant grass, perhaps, rather than wheat).And they would have to decide not justwhich crops to plant but whether to usethem for food, carbon capture or thingslike bioindustrial raw materials. Competition for crops is already a problem, andlikely to get worse.
Given these strains, and the politicalrami�cations of food, e�orts to feed the 9billion will sharpen geopolitical con�ictsand speed up shifts that are happeninganyway. Some of the most successful foodproducers over the past 20 years have beenthe BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, Indiaand China). Catherine Bertini of the Chicago Council on Global A�airs, a thinktank,
points out that the biggest contributors tothe World Food Programme, which playsan important part in humanitarian crises,are all BRICs; and that when secretiveNorth Korea began to engage in talks overnuclear disarmament, the �rst countries itspoke to were big grain exporters.
The BRICs’ in�uence on food marketswill rise as Europe’s declines. The old continent’s decision to turn its back on geneticmodi�cation and the livestock revolutionmay be understandable�but given theneed for higher yields, Europe is in dangerof marginalising itself. America is likely toretain its place as the world’s largest foodexporter, but its position is no longer unchallenged.
Worth a detourThere are plenty of reasons to worry aboutfood: uncertain politics, volatile prices,hunger amid plenty. Yet when all is saidand done, the world is at the start of a newagricultural revolution that could, for the�rst time ever, feed all mankind adequately. The genomes of most major crops havebeen sequenced and the bene�ts of thatare starting to appear. Countries from Brazil to Vietnam have shown that, given theright technology, sensible policies and a bitof luck, they can transform themselvesfrom basket cases to bread baskets. That,surely, is cause for optimism. 7
A prospect of plenty
For the �rst time in history, the whole of mankind may get enough to eat