[Scpg] The Global Food Crisis The End of Plenty National Geographic June 2009

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

The Global Food Crisis
The End of Plenty
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/cheap-food/bourne-text/1

By Joel K. Bourne Jr
Photograph by John Stanmeyer
It is the simplest, most natural of acts, akin to 
breathing and walking upright. We sit down at the 
dinner table, pick up a fork, and take a juicy 
bite, oblivious to the double helping of global 
ramifications on our plate. Our beef comes from 
Iowa, fed by Nebraska corn. Our grapes come from 
Chile, our bananas from Honduras, our olive oil 
from Sicily, our apple juice-not from Washington 
State but all the way from China. Modern society 
has relieved us of the burden of growing, 
harvesting, even preparing our daily bread, in 
exchange for the burden of simply paying for it. 
Only when prices rise do we take notice. And the 
consequences of our inattention are profound.

Last year the skyrocketing cost of food was a 
wake-up call for the planet. Between 2005 and the 
summer of 2008, the price of wheat and corn 
tripled, and the price of rice climbed fivefold, 
spurring food riots in nearly two dozen countries 
and pushing 75 million more people into poverty. 
But unlike previous shocks driven by short-term 
food shortages, this price spike came in a year 
when the world's farmers reaped a record grain 
crop. This time, the high prices were a symptom 
of a larger problem tugging at the strands of our 
worldwide food web, one that's not going away 
anytime soon. Simply put: For most of the past 
decade, the world has been consuming more food 
than it has been producing. After years of 
drawing down stockpiles, in 2007 the world saw 
global carryover stocks fall to 61 days of global 
consumption, the second lowest on record.

"Agricultural productivity growth is only one to 
two percent a year," warned Joachim von Braun, 
director general of the International Food Policy 
Research Institute in Washington, D.C., at the 
height of the crisis. "This is too low to meet 
population growth and increased demand."

High prices are the ultimate signal that demand 
is outstripping supply, that there is simply not 
enough food to go around. Such agflation hits the 
poorest billion people on the planet the hardest, 
since they typically spend 50 to 70 percent of 
their income on food. Even though prices have 
fallen with the imploding world economy, they are 
still near record highs, and the underlying 
problems of low stockpiles, rising population, 
and flattening yield growth remain. Climate 
change-with its hotter growing seasons and 
increasing water scarcity-is projected to reduce 
future harvests in much of the world, raising the 
specter of what some scientists are now calling a 
perpetual food crisis.
So what is a hot, crowded, and hungry world to do?

That's the question von Braun and his colleagues 
at the Consultative Group on International 
Agricultural Research are wrestling with right 
now. This is the group of world-renowned 
agricultural research centers that helped more 
than double the world's average yields of corn, 
rice, and wheat between the mid-1950s and the 
mid-1990s, an achievement so staggering it was 
dubbed the green revolution. Yet with world 
population spiraling toward nine billion by 
mid-century, these experts now say we need a 
repeat performance, doubling current food 
production by 2030.
In other words, we need another green revolution. 
And we need it in half the time.

Ever since our ancestors gave up hunting and 
gathering for plowing and planting some 12,000 
years ago, our numbers have marched in lock??step 
with our agricultural prowess. Each advance-the 
domestication of animals, irrigation, wet rice 
production-led to a corresponding jump in human 
population. Every time food supplies plateaued, 
population eventually leveled off. Early Arab and 
Chinese writers noted the relationship between 
population and food resources, but it wasn't 
until the end of the 18th century that a British 
scholar tried to explain the exact mechanism 
linking the two-and became perhaps the most 
vilified social scientist in history.

Thomas Robert Malthus, the namesake of such terms 
as "Malthusian collapse" and "Malthusian curse," 
was a mild-mannered mathematician, a 
clergyman-and, his critics would say, the 
ultimate glass-half-empty kind of guy. When a few 
Enlightenment philosophers, giddy from the 
success of the French Revolution, began 
predicting the continued unfettered improvement 
of the human condition, Malthus cut them off at 
the knees. Human population, he observed, 
increases at a geometric rate, doubling about 
every 25 years if unchecked, while agricultural 
production increases arithmetically-much more 
slowly. Therein lay a biological trap that 
humanity could never escape.

"The power of population is indefinitely greater 
than the power in the earth to produce 
subsistence for man," he wrote in his Essay on 
the Principle of Population in 1798. "This 
implies a strong and constantly operating check 
on population from the difficulty of 
subsistence." Malthus thought such checks could 
be voluntary, such as birth control, abstinence, 
or delayed marriage-or involuntary, through the 
scourges of war, famine, and disease. He 
advocated against food relief for all but the 
poorest of people, since he felt such aid 
encouraged more children to be born into misery. 
That tough love earned him a nasty cameo in 
English literature from none other than Charles 
Dickens. When Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to give 
alms for the poor in A Christmas Carol, the 
heartless banker tells the do-gooders that the 
destitute should head for the workhouses or 
prisons. And if they'd rather die than go there, 
"they had better do it, and decrease the surplus 
population."

The industrial revolution and plowing up of the 
English commons dramatically increased the amount 
of food in England, sweeping Malthus into the 
dustbin of the Victorian era. But it was the 
green revolution that truly made the reverend the 
laughingstock of modern economists. From 1950 to 
today the world has experienced the largest 
population growth in human history. After 
Malthus's time, six billion people were added to 
the planet's dinner tables. Yet thanks to 
improved methods of grain production, most of 
those people were fed. We'd finally shed 
Malthusian limits for good.
Or so we thought.
On the 15th night of the ninth month of the 
Chinese lunar calendar, 3,680 villagers, nearly 
all with the surname "He," sat beneath a leaking 
tarp in the square of Yaotian, China, and dived 
into a 13-course meal. The event was a 
traditional banquet in honor of their elders. 
Tureens of steaming soup floated past, followed 
by rapidly dwindling platters of noodles, rice, 
fish, shrimp, steamed vegetables, dim sum, duck, 
chicken, lily root, pigeon, black fungus, and 
pork cooked more ways than I could count.
Even with the global recession, times are still 
relatively good in the southeastern province of 
Guangdong, where Yaotian sits tucked between 
postage-stamp garden plots and block after block 
of new factories that helped make the province 
one of the most prosperous in China. When times 
are good, the Chinese eat pigs. Lots of pigs. Per 
capita pork consumption in the world's most 
populous country went up 45 percent between 1993 
and 2005, from 53 to 77 pounds a year.
An affable businessman in a pink-striped polo 
shirt, pork-industry consultant Shen Guang?rong 
remembers his father raising one pig each year, 
which was slaughtered at the Chinese New Year. It 
would be their only meat for the year. The pigs 
Shen's father raised were pretty low 
maintenance-hardy black-and-white varieties that 
would eat almost anything: food scraps, roots, 
garbage. Not so China's modern pigs. After the 
deadly protests of Tiananmen Square in 1989, 
which topped off a year of political unrest 
exacerbated by high food prices, the government 
started offering tax incentives to large 
industrial farms to meet the growing demand. Shen 
was assigned to work at one of China's first pig 
CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, 
in nearby Shenzhen. Such farms, which have 
proliferated in recent years, depend on breeds 
that are fed high-tech mixtures of corn, soy 
meal, and supplements to keep them growing fast.

That's good news for the average pork-loving 
Chinese-who still eats only about 40 percent as 
much meat as consumers in the U.S. But it's 
worrisome for the world's grain supplies. It's no 
coincidence that as countries like China and 
India prosper and their people move up the food 
ladder, demand for grain has increased. For as 
tasty as that sweet-and-sour pork may be, eating 
meat is an incredibly inefficient way to feed 
oneself. It takes up to five times more grain to 
get the equivalent amount of calories from eating 
pork as from simply eating grain itself-ten times 
if we're talking about grain-fattened U.S. beef. 
As more grain has been diverted to livestock and 
to the production of biofuels for cars, annual 
worldwide consumption of grain has risen from 815 
million metric tons in 1960 to 2.16 billion in 
2008. Since 2005, the mad rush to biofuels alone 
has pushed grain-consumption growth from about 20 
million tons annually to 50 million tons, 
according to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy 
Institute.

Even China, the second largest corn-growing 
nation on the planet, can't grow enough grain to 
feed all its pigs. Most of the shortfall is made 
up with imported soybeans from the U.S. or 
Brazil, one of the few countries with the 
potential to expand its cropland-often by plowing 
up rain forest. Increasing demand for food, feed, 
and bio?fuels has been a major driver of 
deforestation in the tropics. Between 1980 and 
2000 more than half of new cropland acreage in 
the tropics was carved out of intact rain 
forests; Brazil alone increased its soybean 
acreage in Amazonia 10 percent a year from 1990 
to 2005.
Some of those Brazilian soybeans may end up in 
the troughs of Guangzhou Lizhi Farms, the largest 
CAFO in Guangdong Province. Tucked into a green 
valley just off a four-lane highway that's still 
being built, some 60 white hog houses are 
scattered around large ponds, part of the 
waste-treatment system for 100,000 hogs. The city 
of Guangzhou is also building a brand-new 
meatpacking plant that will slaughter 5,000 head 
a day. By the time China has 1.5 billion people, 
sometime in the next 20 years, some experts 
predict they'll need another 200 million hogs 
just to keep up. And that's just China. World 
meat consumption is expected to double by 2050. 
That means we're going to need a whole lot more 
grain.

This isn't the first time the world has stood at 
the brink of a food crisis-it's only the most 
recent iteration. At 83, Gurcharan Singh Kalkat 
has lived long enough to remember one of the 
worst famines of the 20th century. In 1943 as 
many as four million people died in the 
"Malthusian correction" known as the Bengal 
Famine. For the following two decades, India had 
to import millions of tons of grain to feed its 
people.

Then came the green revolution. In the mid-1960s, 
as India was struggling to feed its people during 
yet another crippling drought, an American plant 
breeder named Norman Borlaug was working with 
Indian researchers to bring his high-yielding 
wheat varieties to Punjab. The new seeds were a 
godsend, says Kal?kat, who was deputy director of 
agriculture for Punjab at the time. By 1970, 
farmers had nearly tripled their production with 
the same amount of work. "We had a big problem 
with what to do with the surplus," says Kalkat. 
"We closed schools one month early to store the 
wheat crop in the buildings."
Borlaug was born in Iowa and saw his mission as 
spreading the high-yield farming methods that had 
turned the American Midwest into the world's 
breadbasket to impoverished places throughout the 
world. His new dwarf wheat varieties, with their 
short, stocky stems supporting full, fat seed 
heads, were a startling breakthrough. They could 
produce grain like no other wheat ever seen-as 
long as there was plenty of water and synthetic 
fertilizer and little competition from weeds or 
insects. To that end, the Indian government 
subsidized canals, fertilizer, and the drilling 
of tube wells for irrigation and gave farmers 
free electricity to pump the water. The new wheat 
varieties quickly spread throughout Asia, 
changing the traditional farming practices of 
millions of farmers, and were soon followed by 
new strains of "miracle" rice. The new crops 
matured faster and enabled farmers to grow two 
crops a year instead of one. Today a double crop 
of wheat, rice, or cotton is the norm in Punjab, 
which, with neighboring Haryana, recently 
supplied more than 90 percent of the wheat needed 
by grain-deficient states in India.
The green revolution Borlaug started had nothing 
to do with the eco-friendly green label in vogue 
today. With its use of synthetic fertilizers and 
pesticides to nurture vast fields of the same 
crop, a practice known as monoculture, this new 
method of industrial farming was the antithesis 
of today's organic trend. Rather, William S. 
Gaud, then administrator of the U.S. Agency for 
International Development, coined the phrase in 
1968 to describe an alternative to Russia's red 
revolution, in which workers, soldiers, and 
hungry peasants had rebelled violently against 
the tsarist government. The more pacifying green 
revolution was such a staggering success that 
Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
Today, though, the miracle of the green 
revolution is over in Punjab: Yield growth has 
essentially flattened since the mid-1990s. 
Overirrigation has led to steep drops in the 
water table, now tapped by 1.3 million tube 
wells, while thousands of hectares of productive 
land have been lost to salinization and 
waterlogged soils. Forty years of intensive 
irrigation, fertilization, and pesticides have 
not been kind to the loamy gray fields of Punjab. 
Nor, in some cases, to the people themselves.

In the dusty farming village of Bhuttiwala, home 
to some 6,000 people in the Muktsar district, 
village elder Jagsir Singh, in flowing beard and 
cobalt turban, adds up the toll: "We've had 49 
deaths due to cancer in the last four years," he 
says. "Most of them were young people. The water 
is not good. It's poisonous, contaminated water. 
Yet people still drink it."
Walking through the narrow dirt lanes past 
pyramids of dried cow dung, Singh introduces 
Amarjeet Kaur, a slender 40-year-old who for 
years drew the family's daily water from a hand 
pump in their brick-hard compound. She was 
diagnosed with breast cancer last year. Tej Kaur, 
50, also has breast cancer. Her surgery, she 
says, wasn't nearly as painful as losing her 
seven-year-old grandson to "blood cancer," or 
leukemia. Jagdev Singh is a sweet-faced 
14-year-old boy whose spine is slowly 
deteriorating. From his wheelchair, he is 
watching SpongeBob SquarePants dubbed in Hindi as 
his father discusses his prognosis. "The doctors 
say he will not live to see 20," says Bhola Singh.
There's no proof these cancers were caused by 
pesticides. But researchers have found pesticides 
in the Punjabi farmers' blood, their water table, 
their vegetables, even their wives' breast milk. 
So many people take the train from the Malwa 
region to the cancer hospital in Bikaner that 
it's now called the Cancer Express. The 
government is concerned enough to spend millions 
on reverse-osmosis water-treatment plants for the 
worst affected villages.
If that weren't worrisome enough, the high cost 
of fertilizers and pesticides has plunged many 
Punjabi farmers into debt. One study found more 
than 1,400 cases of farmer suicides in 93 
villages between 1988 and 2006. Some groups put 
the total for the state as high as 40,000 to 
60,000 suicides over that period. Many drank 
pesticides or hung themselves in their fields.
"The green revolution has brought us only 
downfall," says Jarnail Singh, a retired 
schoolteacher in Jajjal village. "It ruined our 
soil, our environment, our water table. Used to 
be we had fairs in villages where people would 
come together and have fun. Now we gather in 
medical centers. The government has sacrificed 
the people of Punjab for grain."

Others, of course, see it differently. Rattan 
Lal, a noted soil scientist at Ohio State who 
graduated from Punjab Agricultural University in 
1963, believes it was the abuse-not the use-of 
green revolution technologies that caused most of 
the problems. That includes the overuse of 
fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation and the 
removal of all crop residues from the fields, 
essentially strip-mining soil nutrients. "I 
realize the problems of water quality and water 
withdrawal," says Lal. "But it saved hundreds of 
millions of people. We paid a price in water, but 
the choice was to let people die."
In terms of production, the benefits of the green 
revolution are hard to deny. India hasn't 
experienced famine since Borlaug brought his 
seeds to town, while world grain production has 
more than doubled. Some scientists credit 
increased rice yields alone with the existence of 
700 million more people on the planet.

Many crop scientists and farmers believe the 
solution to our current food crisis lies in a 
second green revolution, based largely on our 
newfound knowledge of the gene. Plant breeders 
now know the sequence of nearly all of the 50,000 
or so genes in corn and soybean plants and are 
using that knowledge in ways that were 
unimaginable only four or five years ago, says 
Robert Fraley, chief technology officer for the 
agricultural giant Monsanto. Fraley is convinced 
that genetic modification, which allows breeders 
to bolster crops with beneficial traits from 
other species, will lead to new varie?ties with 
higher yields, reduced fertilizer needs, and 
drought tolerance-the holy grail for the past 
decade. He believes biotech will make it possible 
to double yields of Monsanto's core crops of 
corn, cotton, and soybeans by 2030. "We're now 
poised to see probably the greatest period of 
fundamental scientific advance in the history of 
agriculture."

Africa is the continent where Homo sapiens was 
born, and with its worn-out soils, fitful rain, 
and rising population, it could very well offer a 
glimpse of our species' future. For numerous 
reasons-lack of infrastructure, corruption, 
inaccessible markets-the green revolution never 
made it here. Agricultural production per capita 
actually declined in sub-Saharan Africa between 
1970 and 2000, while the population soared, 
leaving an average ten-million-ton annual food 
deficit. It's now home to more than a quarter of 
the world's hungriest people.
Tiny, landlocked Malawi, dubbed the "warm heart 
of Africa" by a hopeful tourism industry, is also 
in the hungry heart of Africa, a poster child for 
the continent's agricultural ills. Living in one 
of the poorest and most densely populated 
countries in Africa, the majority of Malawians 
are corn farmers who eke out a living on less 
than two dollars a day. In 2005 the rains failed 
once again in Malawi, and more than a third of 
its population of 13 million required food aid to 
survive. Malawi's President Bingu wa Mutharika 
declared he did not get elected to rule a nation 
of beggars. After initially failing to persuade 
the World Bank and other donors to help subsidize 
green revolution inputs, Bingu, as he's known 
here, decided to spend $58 million from the 
country's own coffers to get hybrid seeds and 
fertilizers into the hands of poor farmers. The 
World Bank eventually got on board and persuaded 
Bingu to target the subsidy to the poorest 
farmers. About 1.3 million farm families received 
coupons that allowed them to buy three kilograms 
of hybrid corn seed and two 50-kilogram bags of 
fertilizer at a third of the market price.

What happened next has been called the Malawi 
Miracle. Good seed and a little fertilizer-and 
the return of soil-soaking rains-helped farmers 
reap bumper crops for the next two years. (Last 
year's harvests, however, were slightly down.) 
The 2007 harvest was estimated to be 3.44 million 
metric tons, a national record. "They went from a 
44 percent deficit to an 18 percent surplus, 
doubling their production," says Pedro Sanchez, 
the director of the Tropical Agriculture Program 
at Columbia University who advised the Malawi 
government on the program. "The next year they 
had a 53 percent surplus and exported maize to 
Zimbabwe. It was a dramatic change."

So dramatic, in fact, that it has led to an 
increasing awareness of the importance of 
agricultural investment in reducing poverty and 
hunger in places like Malawi. In October 2007 the 
World Bank issued a critical report, concluding 
that the agency, international donors, and 
African governments had fallen short in helping 
Africa's poor farmers and had neglected 
investment in agriculture for the previous 15 
years. After decades of discouraging public 
investment in agriculture and calling for 
market-based solutions that rarely materialized, 
institutions like the World Bank have reversed 
course and pumped funds into agriculture over the 
past two years.

Malawi's subsidy program is part of a larger 
movement to bring the green revolution, at long 
last, to Africa. Since 2006 the Rockefeller 
Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates 
Foundation have ponied up nearly half a billion 
dollars to fund the Alliance for a Green 
Revolution in Africa, focused primarily on 
bringing plant-breeding programs to African 
universities and enough fertilizer to farmers' 
fields. Columbia's Sanchez, along with 
über-economist and poverty warrior Jeffrey Sachs, 
is providing concrete examples of the benefits of 
such investment in 80 small villages clustered 
into about a dozen "Millennium Villages" 
scattered in hunger hot spots throughout Africa. 
With the help of a few rock stars and A-list 
actors, Sanchez and Sachs are spending $300,000 a 
year on each small village. That's one-third as 
much per person as Malawi's per capita GDP, 
leading many in the development community to 
wonder if such a program can be sustained over 
the long haul.
Phelire Nkhoma, a small whipcord of a woman, is 
the agricultural extension officer for one of 
Malawi's two Millennium Villages-actually seven 
villages with a total of 35,000 people. She 
describes the program as we ride in a new UN 
pickup from her office in Zomba District through 
fire-blackened fields dotted with the violet 
flush of jacaranda trees. Villagers get hybrid 
seeds and fertilizers for free-as long as they 
donate three bags of corn at harvesttime to a 
school feeding program. They get bed nets and 
antimalarial drugs. They get a clinic staffed 
with health workers, a gra?nary to store their 
harvests, and safe-drinking-water wells within a 
kilometer of each household. Good primary 
schools, improved road systems, and connection to 
the power grid and the Internet are on the way in 
these villages, and in the "Madonna" village, 
which is farther north.

"The Madonna?" I asked.
"Yes. I hear she's divorcing her latest husband. Is that true?"

Good times are apparent in the Millennium 
Village, where Nkhoma shows me new brick houses 
topped with shiny corrugated-steel roofs, a grain 
bank full of seed and fertilizer, and beneath a 
shade tree, a hundred or more villagers patiently 
listening to a banker explaining how they can 
apply for an agricultural loan. Several are 
queued up at the teller window of an armored 
truck from Opportunity International Bank of 
Malawi. Cosmas Chimwara, a 30-year-old cabbage 
seller, is one of them. "The cabbage business is 
going well," he says. "I have three bikes, a TV 
and mobile phone, and a better house."

Such stories warm the heart of Faison Tipoti, the 
village leader who was instrumental in bringing 
the famous project here. "When Jeff Sachs came 
and asked, 'What do you want?' we said not money, 
not flour, but give us fertilizer and hybrid 
seed, and he will do a good thing," says Tipoti 
in a deep voice. No longer do villagers spend 
their days walking the road begging others for 
food to feed children with swollen bellies and 
sickness. He gazes over to where several children 
are frolicking as they wash clothes and gather 
water at the new village well. "With the coming 
of the project, everywhere is clear, fresh 
water," Tipoti says.
But is a reprise of the green revolution-with the 
traditional package of synthetic fertilizers, 
pesticides, and irrigation, supercharged by 
genetically engineered seeds-really the answer to 
the world's food crisis?

  Last year a massive study called the 
"International Assessment of Agricultural 
Knowledge, Science and Technology for 
Development" concluded that the immense 
production increases brought about by science and 
technology in the past 30 years have failed to 
improve food access for many of the world's poor. 
The six-year study, initiated by the World Bank 
and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization 
and involving some 400 agricultural experts from 
around the globe, called for a paradigm shift in 
agriculture toward more sustainable and 
ecologically friendly practices that would 
benefit the world's 900 million small farmers, 
not just agribusiness.

The green revolution's legacy of tainted soil and 
depleted aquifers is one reason to look for new 
strategies. So is what author and University of 
California, Berkeley, professor Michael Pollan 
calls the Achilles heel of current green 
revolution methods: a dependence on fossil fuels. 
Natural gas, for example, is a raw material for 
nitrogen fertilizers. "The only way you can have 
one farmer feed 140 Americans is with 
monocultures. And monocultures need lots of 
fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and lots of 
fossil-fuel-based pesticides," Pollan says. "That 
only works in an era of cheap fossil fuels, and 
that era is coming to an end. Moving anyone to a 
dependence on fossil fuels seems the height of 
irresponsibility."

So far, genetic breakthroughs that would free 
green revolution crops from their heavy 
dependence on irrigation and fertilizer have 
proved elusive. Engineering plants that can fix 
their own nitrogen or are resistant to drought 
"has proven a lot harder than they thought," says 
Pollan. Monsanto's Fraley predicts his company 
will have drought-tolerant corn in the U.S. 
market by 2012. But the increased yields promised 
during drought years are only 6 to 10 percent 
above those of standard drought-hammered crops.

And so a shift has already begun to small, 
underfunded projects scattered across Africa and 
Asia. Some call it agroecology, others 
sustainable agriculture, but the underlying idea 
is revolutionary: that we must stop focusing on 
simply maximizing grain yields at any cost and 
consider the environmental and social impacts of 
food production. Vandana Shiva is a nuclear 
physicist turned agroecologist who is India's 
harshest critic of the green revolution. "I call 
it monocultures of the mind," she says. "They 
just look at yields of wheat and rice, but 
overall the food basket is going down. There were 
250 kinds of crops in Punjab before the green 
revolution." Shiva argues that small-scale, 
biologically diverse farms can produce more food 
with fewer petroleum-based inputs. Her research 
has shown that using compost instead of 
natural-gas-derived fertilizer increases organic 
matter in the soil, sequestering carbon and 
holding moisture-two key advantages for farmers 
facing climate change. "If you are talking about 
solving the food crisis, these are the methods 
you need," adds Shiva.
In northern Malawi one project is getting many of 
the same results as the Millennium Villages 
project, at a fraction of the cost. There are no 
hybrid corn seeds, free fertilizers, or new roads 
here in the village of Ekwendeni. Instead the 
Soils, Food and Healthy Communities (SFHC) 
project distributes legume seeds, recipes, and 
technical advice for growing nutritious crops 
like peanuts, pigeon peas, and soybeans, which 
enrich the soil by fixing nitrogen while also 
enriching children's diets. The program began in 
2000 at Ekwendeni Hospital, where the staff was 
seeing high rates of malnutrition. Research 
suggested the culprit was the corn monoculture 
that had left small farmers with poor yields due 
to depleted soils and the high price of 
fertilizer.

The project's old pickup needs a push to get it 
going, but soon Boyd Zimba, the project's 
assistant coordinator, and Zacharia Nkhonya, its 
food-security supervisor, are rattling down the 
road, talking about what they see as the downside 
of the Malawi Miracle. "First, the fertilizer 
subsidy cannot last long," says Nkhonya, a 
compact man with a quick smile. "Second, it 
doesn't go to everyone. And third, it only comes 
once a year, while legumes are long-term-soils 
get improved every year, unlike with fertilizers."

At the small village of Encongolweni, a group of 
two dozen SFHC farmers greet us with a song about 
the dishes they make from soybeans and pigeon 
peas. We sit in their meetinghouse as if at an 
old-time tent revival, as they testify about how 
planting legumes has changed their lives. Ackim 
Mhone's story is typical. By incorporating 
legumes into his rotation, he's doubled his corn 
yield on his small plot of land while cutting his 
fertilizer use in half. "That was enough to 
change the life of my family," Mhone says, and to 
enable him to improve his house and buy 
livestock. Later, Alice Sumphi, a 67-year-old 
farmer with a mischievous smile, dances in her 
plot of young knee-high tomatoes, proudly 
pointing out that they bested those of the 
younger men. Canadian researchers found that 
after eight years, the children of more than 
7,000 families involved in the project showed 
significant weight increases, making a pretty 
good case that soil health and community health 
are connected in Malawi.

Which is why the project's research coordinator, 
Rachel Bezner Kerr, is alarmed that big-money 
foundations are pushing for a new green 
revolution in Africa. "I find it deeply 
disturbing," she says. "It's getting farmers to 
rely on expensive inputs produced from afar that 
are making money for big companies rather than on 
agroecological methods for using local resources 
and skills. I don't think that's the solution."
Regardless of which model prevails-agriculture as 
a diverse ecological art, as a high-tech 
industry, or some combination of the two-the 
challenge of putting enough food in nine billion 
mouths by 2050 is daunting. Two billion people 
already live in the driest parts of the globe, 
and climate change is projected to slash yields 
in these regions even further. No matter how 
great their yield potential, plants still need 
water to grow. And in the not too distant future, 
every year could be a drought year for much of 
the globe.
New climate studies show that extreme heat waves, 
such as the one that withered crops and killed 
thousands in western Europe in 2003, are very 
likely to become common in the tropics and 
subtropics by century's end. Himalayan glaciers 
that now provide water for hundreds of millions 
of people, livestock, and farmland in China and 
India are melting faster and could vanish 
completely by 2035. In the worst-case scenario, 
yields for some grains could decline by 10 to 15 
percent in South Asia by 2030. Projections for 
southern Africa are even more dire. In a region 
already racked by water scarcity and food 
insecurity, the all-important corn harvest could 
drop by 30 percent-47 percent in the worst-case 
scenario. All the while the population clock 
keeps ticking, with a net of 2.5 more mouths to 
feed born every second. That amounts to 4,500 
more mouths in the time it takes you to read this 
article.
Which leads us, inevitably, back to Malthus.

On a brisk fall day that has put color into the 
cheeks of the most die-hard Londoners, I visit 
the British Library and check out the first 
edition of the book that still generates such 
heated debate. Malthus's Essay on the Principle 
of Population looks like an eighth-grade science 
primer. From its strong, clear prose comes the 
voice of a humble parish priest who hoped, as 
much as anything, to be proved wrong.

"People who say Malthus is wrong usually haven't 
read him," says Tim Dyson, a professor of 
population studies at the London School of 
Economics. "He was not taking a view any 
different than what Adam Smith took in the first 
volume of The Wealth of Nations. No one in their 
right mind doubts the idea that populations have 
to live within their resource base. And that the 
capacity of society to increase resources from 
that base is ultimately limited."
Though his essays emphasized "positive checks" on 
population from famine, disease, and war, his 
"preventative checks" may have been more 
important. A growing workforce, Malthus 
explained, depresses wages, which tends to make 
people delay marriage until they can better 
support a family. Delaying marriage reduces 
fertility rates, creating an equally powerful 
check on populations. It has now been shown that 
this is the basic mechanism that regulated 
population growth in western Europe for some 300 
years before the industrial revolution-a pretty 
good record for any social scientist, says Dyson.

Yet when Britain recently issued a new 20-pound 
note, it put Adam Smith on the back, not T. R. 
Malthus. He doesn't fit the ethos of the moment. 
We don't want to think about limits. But as we 
approach nine billion people on the planet, all 
clamoring for the same opportunities, the same 
lifestyles, the same hamburgers, we ignore them 
at our risk.
None of the great classical economists saw the 
industrial revolution coming, or the 
transformation of economies and agriculture that 
it would bring about. The cheap, readily 
available energy contained in coal-and later in 
other fossil fuels-unleashed the greatest 
increase in food, personal wealth, and people the 
world has ever seen, enabling Earth's population 
to increase sevenfold since Malthus's day. And 
yet hunger, famine, and malnutrition are with us 
still, just as Malthus said they would be.

"Years ago I was working with a Chinese 
demographer," Dyson says. "One day he pointed out 
to me the two Chinese characters above his office 
door that spelled the word 'population.' You had 
the character for a person and the character for 
an open mouth. It really struck me. Ultimately 
there has to be a balance between population and 
resources. And this notion that we can continue 
to grow forever, well it's ridiculous."
Perhaps somewhere deep in his crypt in Bath 
Abbey, Malthus is quietly wagging a bony finger 
and saying, "Told you so."?



  Egypt
Stung by soaring food prices, angry Egyptians 
throng a kiosk selling government-subsidized 
bread near the Great Pyramid at Giza. Across the 
globe, rising demand and flat supplies have 
rekindled the old debate over whether production 
can keep up with population.


Our Fragile Food Web
The challenge today is not to deal with a 
short-term rise in grain prices, but to find ways 
to avoid a perpetual food crisis.


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