So here I am thinking my IdeaFestival blogger gig is one of the slackiest of slacker positions to be had in the online world when Wayne Hall emails a request that I, as a blogger on food issues, identify the causes of the world food crisis.
In a single post? I’m not sure that’s possible. And I’m certain it wouldn’t be readable. There’s so much being written about this phenomenon, and so many competing causes being identified, how could I possibly sift through and identify the most likely culprits?
With the help of two of any writer’s best friends, of course: simplifying anecdote, and the New York Times.
First, the anecdote.
I live in a rural county in the middle of a rural state, so you’d think my local farmers' market would offer a cornucopia of fresh-off-the-farm products from right nearby. But you’d be wrong.
It’s an enviable venue--the old Victorian-style Lawrenceburg train station. The county paid to have it trucked from its original location downtown by the courthouse to a plot on the town’s bypass. Other, much more thriving farmers' markets would love to have such prominent and permanent housing.
But it’s a sad place, shuttered from mid-October to mid-April, and sputtering even during the growing and harvest seasons. The managers have admitted to me they sometimes accept produce--even in high summer--from a terminal in Louisville that takes in food products from all over the south. And by the time they reach Lawrenceburg they’re often a lot less than fresh.
So why, with all these factors seemingly in its favor, does my local market struggle?
Economics and Policy.
There’s lots of farmland in Anderson County, Kentucky, but not many farmers, and not much of the land is under real agricultural production anymore. Produce farming never did pay the bills all that well, so back when agriculture was king in this county the farmers mostly cultivated price-supported tobacco or the Big Two federally subsidized commodity crops--corn and soybeans--or livestock.
Now, agriculture here has been supplanted by manufacturing and service jobs, and many who once farmed now work off the farm. Few are left to till the soil, fewer yet who can make it pay.
So in a place that still exhibits all sorts of picturesque rural farm landscapes, you can’t detect much farm bounty, except in those few summer weeks when everyone’s gardens are pumping out more tomatoes and corn than they and families can consume. Beyond that, there’s hardly any sustained supply of fresh local farm products, because the local economy as well as state and federal policies are not designed to make local food production a priority. Instead, the global marketplace is meant to fill that need.
But what if it neglects to do that?
The New York Times, in a current series on the global food crisis, suggests we’re in this spell of rising food costs and tight supplies not just because the fuel required to produce and deliver much of our food has gotten much more expensive, and not just because a changing world climate is playing havoc in some previously fertile areas of the world, and not just because prosperity in some pockets of the world is giving rise to middle class societies filled with people who want--and can now afford--to eat higher on the hog.
It’s also because many policy makers appear to have lost interest in continuing to expand the world food supply. They seem to have concluded, the Times writes, that the struggle to feed the earth’s billions had already been won, and subsequently shuttered key research agencies and mothballed studies into new agricultural methods and crop varieties.
The unavoidable conclusion, across the globe and right here in Anderson County, is that, in our headlong push to develop more sophisticated economies we seem to have forgotten the most basic of certainties: people have to eat, and expanding economies mean more people who have to eat.
The United Nations has convened an emergency food summit to address shrinking world food supplies.
And some corporations are taking advantage of the media attention focused on the summit to announce big plans for solving shortages. Monsanto, for example, just released a statement that its planned new series of (patented) corn, soybean and cotton seeds can double production yields by 2030, and require a lot less water and energy inputs along the way. Some experts aren't so sure about that.
But it sounds like food production research is back on the menu in a big way.
David
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